Wolff, blithely unselfconscious, possesses the same duplicity. Wolff tartly comments on the “semi-ironic and nakedly opportunistic motives” of Steve Bannon, who helped create Trump and then helped Wolff to destroy him by acting as a behind-the-scenes informant, after which Bannon slithered back into favour and obtained a presidential pardon for his alleged fraud. Sadist and masochist are so intertwined that they merge in a sickly coital embrace Hence, without him, you might not exist.” Quite so – and neither would Wolff have been contracted to complete his trilogy of cataclysmic tattle. Wolff is exasperated by the determination of the Democrats to impeach Trump all over again after 6 January, even though they knew that a conviction would be voted down in the Senate he concludes that they did so because “everybody existed, still, in a relationship to Donald Trump. Populism is oxygenated by tabloids and trash-talking cable channels, and at a loftier level Trump’s liberal critics are his inadvertent enablers, because they keep him lodged in our overwrought brains. Although Fox News was “the foundation of the Trump movement”, Rupert Murdoch considers Trump to be “a fucking idiot” and on election night the network took its revenge by prematurely declaring that Biden had won the crucial state of Arizona. The Murdochs and Trump, he says, were locked in a marriage that was “quite sadomasochistic”, and Wolff is just as dependent on the man he so entertainingly and lucratively abuses. Wolff’s jocular irresponsibility causes him one or two remorseful twinges. Wolff even validates Trump’s preening sense of his own beautified or beatified aura by suggesting that he has “charisma in the Christian sense”. He never had a plan for his term of office, and in the absence of intention how can he be accountable for the consequences of his blundering actions and bloviating words? As a self-contradicting agent of chaos, he is – as Wolff shockingly declares – “an innocent”. Contentedly watching the insurrection of 6 January on television, he marvelled at the horned, kilted, war-painted crazies running amok in the Capitol and said “It’s like Let’s Make a Deal”, a gameshow in which the audience dresses in zany costumes to catch the host’s eye.Īs Wolff sees it, Trump’s sheer cluelessness absolves him of blame. Trump presided at meetings in the Oval Office as if he were Jeremy Kyle with access to nuclear weapons, fomenting conflict between his advisers and sitting back to smirk as they duked it out. Despite this nihilistic frivolity, Wolff’s attitude matches that of his subject. Wolff shrugs that Trump is “nutso” and regards his calamitous administration as a “shitshow”. Wolff is exasperated by the determination of the Democrats to impeach Trump all over again after 6 January He sees Trump not as a political phenomenon but as the monstrous spawn of showbiz and PR – an exhibitionistic performer whose only talent is for self-advertisement and who, like many other celebrities, has made a career out of behaving badly. For Wolff, who began his career on the Hollywood Reporter, not the Washington Post, such liberal qualms are secondary. Other Trump chroniclers worry about his glowering autocratic menace or his haphazard approach to governance. Landslide is Wolff’s third book in as many years on a man he despises but whose absurd antics he can’t help enjoying. P rohibited from tweeting, Trump still has Michael Wolff as his megaphone.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |