“Fire and Fury” confirms the dysfunction at the heart of the presidency

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. By Michael Wolff. Henry Holt; 336 pages; $14.99. Little, Brown; £20.

TO THE many ironies of Donald Trump’s presidency can be added the fact that a man who does not read books has helped cause a publishing sensation. Four days after “Fire and Fury” went on sale on January 5th, despite Mr Trump having denounced Michael Wolff’s caustic account of his administration as fiction and threatened both the author and the publisher with legal action, Henry Holt had received orders for a million copies of the book. Several hundred thousand e-books had also been sold, and readers as far away as Kenya claimed to be illegally circulating an electronic PDF version of Mr Wolff’s tale of eye-watering haplessness and bloodletting. Not since Harry Potter has a new book caught fire in this way. No wonder Mr Wolff, who based his account on more than 200 interviews, including with Mr Trump and members of his inner circle, after he took up a “semi-permanent seat on a couch in the West Wing”, revelled in the free publicity. “Thank you, Mr President,” he tweeted.

The book’s political impact is as dramatic. Just as Mr Trump was enjoying better relations with his party’s congressional leaders, following the passage of tax cuts last month, they and much of the rest of Washington have spent a week gossiping over Mr Wolff’s portrayal of the 45th president as an irascible, “semi-literate” man-child, with “no ability to plan and organise and pay attention and switch focus”. Mr Trump’s feuding advisers, the author claims, were united in nothing except a conviction that he was incapable of being president. Some suspected he was losing his mind, Mr Wolff writes, which has in turn ignited a partisan yet halfway serious debate about Mr Trump’s mental health. (In response, the president has claimed to be a “very stable genius”.) Meanwhile, Mr Wolff’s chief source, Mr Trump’s bomb-throwing former chief strategist Stephen Bannon, has been denounced by the president, deserted by his benefactors and removed from the helm of the conservative website Breitbart News.

That Mr Wolff is responsible for this furore might also seem surprising. A purveyor of celebrity gossip and hatchet jobs, he has a reputation for being less than punctilious with the truth. And sure enough, some of his claims are tenuous or worse. He did not interview any member of Mr Trump’s cabinet, so it is inconceivable that he should know, as he purports to, Attorney-General Jeff Sessions’s precise reasons for recusing himself from the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign and Russia. His description of Stephen Miller, a White House policy adviser, as an unlettered lightweight is inaccurate and mean. More errors may well emerge: where Mr Wolff heard conflicting accounts of the same event, he more or less admits to having picked his preferred version. Yet “Fire and Fury” gets too much right to be dismissed out of hand because of the mistakes it contains. It is indeed a significant achievement, which deserves much of the attention it has received.

Mr Wolff offers some valuable new snippets, including an on-the-record admission from Mr Bannon that a meeting between some senior members of the Trump campaign and Russian operatives was reckless, substantial and conceivably “treasonous”. Mr Bannon has since claimed his criticism was aimed only at one person who attended the meeting, Paul Manafort, Mr Trump’s then campaign chief, not at two others: the president’s son, Donald Trump junior, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. But even if that made sense as anything other than a fruitless effort to placate Mr Trump, it would not alter Mr Bannon’s damning characterisation of a meeting that the Trump team has sought to dismiss as a “nothingburger”.

More often, the chaos Mr Wolff describes had already been exposed by journalists—testament to the eagerness of Mr Trump’s feuding advisers to brief against one another. Yet the torrent of scandal stories this led to has tended to lessen their individual impact and, by extension, discredited those reporting them. By weaving the whole sorry tale into a single pacey narrative, Mr Wolff has reversed that. The effect of this panoramic exposure of the dysfunction at the heart of the administration is cumulative, not diminishing.

Mr Wolff’s muckraking skills, cattiness, cynicism and feel for human weakness, especially among the rich and famous, make him well-qualified for the job. His depiction of the jealousies between Mr Trump’s advisers is merciless. His understanding of Mr Trump’s needy relationship with the media, whose praise and attention he craves even as he rages against them, is acute. He conveys throughout an appropriate sense of disdain for Mr Trump’s efforts, leavened by the fascination the president always elicits. Forget the tycoon’s supposed populism, Mr Wolff suggests this “was the radical and transformational nature of the Trump presidency: it held everybody’s attention”. The same can be said for this book. It is not a great political chronicle. But it is the sort of treatment the Trump administration deserves.