When it comes to Donald Trump, the world is continuously on fire. People are regularly expressing their anger, frustration and scorn directed toward the president of the United States. There is never a shortage of people who are not furious about at least one of his activities, whether it is his twitter posts, or speeches, or decisions that somehow affect both the USA and the world in general. Michael Wolff’s new book has poured gasoline on an already raging fire.
Wolff is known as a gossip columnist with writings appearing in the New York Magazine and Vanity Fair. Usually, he is not the type of writer to be taken seriously. But his recent book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” has sparked a furious debate all over the world. The book focuses on the behaviour of Donald Trump during his 2016 election campaign and his early days inside the White House. It presents an unflattering description of Trump’s behaviour, chaotic interactions between the White House officials, and derogatory comments about the Trump family by former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon.
Basically, the book revolves around the idea that Trump is unfit to continue as a president and all the people around him seem to think the same. Within only ten days of publication, the book emerged as the number one bestseller in print, e-book and audiobook on Amazon.com and the Apple i-Books Store. Excerpts of it had been released on January 3 and its publication date had been moved up to January 5 from January 9 by the publisher Henry Holt and Company due to the immense demand for the book. And by January 8, almost one million copies had been sold.
Thousands of books are published around the world every year but few of them get noticed, and fewer still become bestsellers. But when a book does place itself in the latter category, there has to be something uniquely relatable or interesting about it. The book we are talking about is something like that. For example, in one chapter, Wolff writes that “Trump and his campaign team didn’t actually want to win the election.” It goes on saying, “On election night, Melania(Trump’s wife) wept with despair. ‘Now I’ll have to stay with the creep for another four years,’ she sobbed.”
Besides, Wolff has also disclosed the division that lies inside Trump’s family. While talking about Ivanka Trump, Wolff said that “Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, sought to become the first woman president of the United States- a plan that she concocted with her husband Jared Kushner.”
Michael Wolff interviewed almost 200 White House employees before writing the book, and it seems the most interesting and revealing of them has been the one with former Chief Strategist of the White House, Steve Bannon, who openly criticised the president’s children. For the most part, the book is a funny read with sentences like “the president eats cheeseburgers while watching three TV’s tuned to cartoon channels at once.”
While talking about the book, Wolff has claimed that his bombshell book would bring the US president down. He also said his belief that the brash millionaire is not fit to be a president is becoming a widely held view among the American public. According to him, “I think one of the interesting effects of the book so far is a very clear emperor-has-no-cloth effect. I have gotten to a truth no one else has found out yet. And it is that everyone around Trump thinks he(Trump) is a charlatan, a fool, an idiot and someone ultimately not capable of functioning in this job.” Wolff went on to say that the president is “deeply unpredictable, irrational, at times bordering on incoherent, self-obsessed in a disconcerting way.”
In response, Trump has termed Wolff as illiterate and the book as a work of fiction. In an early morning twitter blast right after the publication of the book, Trump called the writer a moron while depicting himself as a genius with great mental stability and smartness. Trump also called Wolff a complete loser and mentally deranged.According to him, “Michael Wolff has made up stories to sell this really boring and untruthful book.”
Meanwhile, the writer has already declared that his book has become an international political event. Bloomberg News has also reported that the book is going to earn Wolff a sum of USD 7.4 million. But here’s a twist to this story.
When someone looks over the curriculum vitae of the writer, he/she finds himself/herself confused thinking whether to take him seriously or just as an entertainment. And when the same person looks over that of Trump the President, he/she starts thinking that the things that were described in the book can be related to only this person, and no one else. It seems to be one of those twists that make you more inquisitive eventually, both about the subject of a book and the writer of the book itself.