If press reports are to be believed, Michael Wolff’s ballyhooed new book won’t tell us anything we didn’t already know about the Trump White House.
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You can call such things “fake news” — as the president himself often does. But even a normal citizen can follow Trump’s Twitter feed or listen to him speak and see that he is, by any conventional standard, obsessed with TV coverage. We’ve known for years — and the White House has never denied — that the only print-news clips the president regularly reads are the curated stories about himself.
Similarly, if you’ve watched or read virtually any interview with the president — never mind listened to him at a rally — you’ve observed how the president struggles to complete a line of thought without being distracted. Diagramming his sentences often requires a grammatical Rube Goldberg machine to connect verbs and nouns, subjects and predicates.
In short, even discounting for hearsay and exaggeration, the Trump in Fire and Fury seems utterly plausible save for those who have chosen not to believe their own lying eyes.
Trump has benefitted from a tendency among both his biggest fans and his biggest foes to see more than meets the eye. For the true believers, there must be a method behind the madness. The Trump we see on Twitter and TV conceals a strategic thinker who keeps his enemies off balance by “controlling the narrative” or some such treacle.
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And yet, not once in hundreds of speeches and interviews has the president ever slipped and actually talked expertly for more than a minute on any public policy without the benefit of a teleprompter. For a president not known to avoid showing off, it’s a remarkable accomplishment to keep his policy chops so well hidden.
Trump’s biggest enemies have something of a mirror-image delusion. In order to justify perpetual “resistance,” they must believe that the president has some long-term evil scheme in mind for overthrowing the democratic order. It’s a cartoonish exaggeration of the hysteria some on the left once had with regard to George W. Bush. They simultaneously believed he was a criminal mastermind and a dunce. When you want to dedicate your life to opposing some villain, it’s only human to want to believe the villain is worth the effort.
The truth may not be as horrifying as Wolff and others describe, nor as terrifying as “the resistance” fears. All it takes is a willingness to see the obvious: The president is a man out of his depth, propped up by a staff and a party that needs to believe more than what the facts will support.
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The only excuse for being shocked by Wolff allegations is if you weren’t paying attention. https://t.co/5bKoNDCH4c
— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahNRO) January 5, 2018
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