Trump Has Moved a Step Closer to Implosion

Amazon emailed me to confirm that I will receive my copy of "Fire & Fury" tomorrow, just in time for take it to Richmond as the husband and I head to Richmond for the inauguration of the Democrat slate that won in November and symbolize the rejection of Donald Trump and Trumpism by a majority of Virginians. As a political junkie and blogger, I may find fewer surprises in the book than some, but nonetheless, it should make for some entertaining reading provided that one can put aside the frightening reality that, in my opinion, a madman inhabits the White House. As a piece in New York Magazine notes, the book may not trigger Trump's downfall, but the expose it comprises has heightened the realization of more Americans that he is unfit for office even as he attacks the free press and libel laws that make public figures open to being the target of editorials and the like unless demonstrably factually false (if Trump doesn't want to be the target of many in the media, he should ceased his self-promotion years ago and never run for public office).  Most importantly, the book may push Trump towards thinking twice before a 2020 run.  Here are highlights:

Is there a chance in hell that this book will at long last be the catalyst for Trump’s demise? After all the other turning points that failed to fell Trump, from his ridicule of John McCain’s war record to the Access Hollywood tape to his pat on the head for neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, it would be foolhardy to say it will. But it may be a not-insignificant step on this president’s path to implosion.

First, it’s important to know what Fire and Fury will not accomplish.

It is not going to shake the loyalty of a single member of the Trump base, which, like it or not, accounts for roughly a third of Americans and the overwhelming majority of one of the nation’s two major political parties. Nor is it going to spur a revolt among Republicans in Congress. . . . It remains a liberal wet dream that a GOP-controlled Congress would impeach Trump, or that members of his Cabinet would invoke the 25th Amendment to yank him out of the White House. (The notion of Ben Carson standing in judgment on anyone’s mental health may be clinically insane in its own right.)

The only way Trump leaves office absent a Democratic sweep in the 2018 midterms is if he does so of his own volition: poisoning himself with his binges of Big Macs and Diet Coke; making a deal to head off pending indictments of himself, his son, or son-in-law; or breaking down mentally to the point where he is so unhappy, angry, and unmoored that he’d rather declare victory and take his marbles home to Mar-a-Lago. Fire and Fury has moved the latter process along. . . . it suggests that Wolff has quite successfully gaslighted him.

Let me add one other point I never thought I’d make: a modest defense of Michael Wolff. I am one of many journalists who have been the target of insults and scurrilous speculation in a Wolff piece at some point or another. It’s entirely consistent with his career that he’s gotten some things wrong in this book. But not that many things wrong, and not the big things; the book confirms what many others have reported about this White House . . .

Wolff’s re-creations of scenes are no more or less plausible than Woodward’s, and Wolff should not be faulted for favoring direct editorialization over Woodward’s technique of encoding his judgments in subtext. People are reading and buying Fire and Fury because the story rings true. It would also be highly entertaining, as pure and utter farce, if only the fate of America and perhaps the world were not at stake.

The sudden fall of Steve Bannon has been entertaining in its own way, but in terms of the political equation in America right now it will have zero effect. Bannon didn’t create the angry Trump base and its signature cause of white nationalism. It grew out of Sarah Palin’s incendiary campaign on the 2008 GOP ticket and the tea-party insurrection, violent reactions to the prospect and then the reality of America’s first African-American president.

No sooner had Bannon stepped down, after all, than Joe Arpaio, as grotesque a representative of Trumpism as Roy Moore, announced his candidacy for the Senate seat being vacated by the retiring anti-Trump conservative Jeff Flake, in Arizona. Arpaio and his followers could care less about Bannon or who is running Breitbart.

If anything, Bannon’s absence may leave Trump more vulnerable to the rages of his base. As long as the two were seemingly in touch — as they continued to be after Bannon was ousted from the White House — the crazies could assume they were being heard in the Oval Office. No more. . . . . Be assured the base’s abuse of the White House’s so-called “liberal Dems” (an interesting way to categorize a list of names transparently scapegoated for their Jewishness, not their liberalism) has only just begun.

 One can only hope that the circular firing squad in the White House intensifies.

The Increasing Unfitness of Donald Trump

I hope that in the minds of some readers I am not beating a dead horse, but to me the increasing danger that Donald Trump - I never give him the title of "president' because (i) he literally sickens me, and (ii) had the Electoral College performed its duty as envisioned by the Founders, he would not have been certified as "winner" - poses to America and the world requires constant calls for resistance.  I have at times compared Trump to the Roman Emperor Caligula (who ruled for 3 years and 10 months before being assassinated by members of the the Praetorian Guard), but as a piece in the New Yorker that bears the headline “The Lost Emperor.” in the January 15, 2018, print issue, points out, perhaps a better comparison, is the Emperor Nero.  Like Caligula, Nero died in office while facing several military revolts and having been declared a public enemy by the Roman Senate (Nero could not bring himself to take his own life but instead he forced his private secretary to perform the task for him).  As will likely happen when Trump leaves office regardless of the means, the vast majority of Romans gave a huge sigh of relief when both Caligula and Nero breathed their last.  Here are article highlights:

What made the Emperor Nero tick, Suetonius writes in “Lives of the Caesars,” was “a longing for immortality and undying fame, though it was ill-regulated.” Many Romans were convinced that Nero was mentally unbalanced and that he had burned much of the imperial capital to the ground just to make room for the construction of the Domus Aurea, a gold-leaf-and-marble palace that stretched from the Palatine to the Esquiline Hill. At enormous venues around the city, he is said to have sung, danced, and played the water organ for many hours—but not before ordering the gates locked to insure that the house would remain full until after the final encore. Driven half mad by Nero’s antics, Romans feigned death or shimmied over the walls with ropes to escape.

Chaotic, corrupt, incurious, infantile, grandiose, and obsessed with gaudy real estate, Donald Trump is of a Neronic temperament. He has always craved attention. Now the whole world is his audience. In earlier times, Trump cultivated, among others, the proprietors and editors of the New York tabloids, Fox News, TMZ, and the National Enquirer. Now Twitter is his principal outlet, with no mediation necessary.

Future scholars will sift through Trump’s digital proclamations the way we now read the chroniclers of Nero’s Rome—to understand how an unhinged emperor can make a mockery of republican institutions, undo the collective nervous system of a country, and degrade the whole of public life.

During the 2016 Presidential campaign, and then in the first days of the Administration, some commentators counselled their colleagues to ignore the early-morning salvos about small hands or large crowds. “Stop Being Trump’s Twitter Fool,” Jack Shafer, of Politico, advised, just after the election. Trump’s volleys were merely a shrewd diversion from serious matters. . . . . Sean Spicer, the President’s first press secretary, insisted otherwise. Trump, he pointed out, “is the President of the United States,” and so his tweets are “considered official statements by the President of the United States.”

Spicer was right: a pronouncement by the President is a Presidential pronouncement. But Trump’s tweets are most valuable as a record of his inner life: his obsessions, his rages, his guilty conscience. No bile goes unexpectorated. Trump, who does not care for government work, is more invested in his reputation as a creative writer, declaring more than once that “somebody said” that he is “the Hemingway of a hundred and forty characters.”

Last week, when Trump returned to Washington from Mar-a-Lago, he set a White House record with a sixteen-tweet day. He behaved less like a President than like a teen-ager locked in his room with an ounce of Purple Skunk, three Happy Meals, and a cell phone.

Though he lauded Iranian demonstrators for standing up for their “rights,” he continued to offer respect bordering on servility to the likes of Vladimir Putin. One of his signature phrases—“fake news”—has been adopted by autocrats from Bashar al-Assad, of Syria, to Nicolás Maduro, of Venezuela. To the astonishment of our traditional allies, Trump humiliates and weakens a country he pretends to lead.

A new book by Michael Wolff, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” amplifies, in lurid anecdote and quotation, what we have been learning elsewhere every day for the past year: Trump believed that he would lose the election, but would multiply his fame, his fortune, and his standing in American life. To near-universal shock, however, he won. And the consequences followed. Trump has no comprehension of policy and cares about it less. He surrounds himself with aides who are either wildly incompetent or utterly defeated in their attempts to domesticate the mulish and bizarre object of their attention. There are no lingering illusions about the President’s capacities . . . . . Wolff’s book, which leans heavily on interviews with Steve Bannon, makes it plain that pretty much everyone in the President’s circle agrees that he is, in terms of character and intellect, fantastically limited. There is no loyalty or deliberation in the White House, only a savage “Lord of the Flies” sort of chaos. Each day is at once preposterous, poisonous, and dangerous.

Predictably, Trump has reacted to Wolff’s book in the manner of a wounded despot—by declaring that Bannon, once his closest adviser in matters of isolationism and white nationalism, has “lost his mind,” and by declaring war on the written word.

Nero had hoped to last long enough on the throne to re-brand the month of April “Neroneus” and the city of Rome “Neropolis.” He did not succeed. When he was thirty, having spent thirteen years in power, he was condemned by the Roman Senate as hostis publicus, a public enemy. He was doomed. One of his last utterances seemed to mark the despair of the politician-performance artist: Qualis artifex pereo! “What an artist dies in me!”

Scandal envelops the President. Obstruction of justice, money-laundering, untoward contacts with foreign governments—it is unclear where the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation will land and what might eventually rouse the attention of the U.S. Senate. Clearly, Trump senses the danger.

In the meantime, there is little doubt about who Donald Trump is, the harm he has done already, and the greater harm he threatens. He is unfit to hold any public office, much less the highest in the land. This is not merely an orthodoxy of the opposition; his panicked courtiers have been leaking word of it from his first weeks in office. The President of the United States has become a leading security threat to the United States. 

Trump's Republican Sycophants on the Potomac

For years now I have argued that the only way to reform the Republican Party is through massive electoral defeats.  Anyone talking about "reform from within" is clearly delusional.  Now, with the Republican Party's "dear leader" in an apparent mental meltdown (based on his unhinged Twitter rants) over the rapidly selling book, "Fire & Fury," it is far past time to hold Republicans, especially those in Congress, accountable for their betrayal of the nation and their efforts to cover up for and normalize perhaps the most abhorrent individual to ever occupy the White House.  Thankfully, November, 2018, may provide an opportunity to inflict such an accounting. 

It is also important to be mindful that, while their behavior is disgusting - for some it is now approaching efforts to obstruct justice - what is just as vile is the motivation behind their efforts: to further enrich the 1% and large corporations at the expense of everyone else and perhaps the nation's democracy itself.  Even former Trump critics like Lindsey Graham, a/k/a the Palmetto Queen, have sold out the country (in Graham's case, more and more suspect he is being blackmailed either by Trump or the Russians who may have gleaned damaging information from his hacked emails).  A column in the New York Times takes these individuals and the GOP as a whole to task for the betrayal of the country and one might argue, morality and decency.  Here are highlights:

I haven’t yet read Wolff’s book – do I really have to? — but the basic outlines of his story have long been familiar and uncontroversial to anyone with open eyes. Trump is morally and intellectually incapable of being president. He has also exploited his office for personal gain, obstructed justice, and colluded with a hostile foreign power. Everyone who doesn’t get their news from Fox has basically known this for a while, although Wolff helps focus our minds on the subject.

It seems to me that that the real news now is the way Republicans in Congress are dealing with this national nightmare: rather than distancing themselves from Trump, they’re doubling down on their support and, in particular, on their efforts to cover for his defects and crimes. Remember when Paul Ryan was the "Serious, Honest Conservative?" . . . .Now he’s backing Devin Nunes in his efforts to help the Trump coverup.

As Brian Beutler says, Republicans have become the Grand Obstruction Party. Why?

The answer, I think, is that the cynical bargain that has been the basis of Republican strategy since Reagan has now turned into a moral trap. And as far as we can tell, no elected Republican – not one – has the strength of character to even attempt an escape.

The cynical bargain I’m talking about, of course, was the decision to exploit racism to advance a right-wing economic agenda. Talk about welfare queens driving Cadillacs, then slash income taxes. Do Willie Horton, then undermine antitrust. Tout your law and order credentials, then block health care.

For more than a generation, the Republican establishment was able to keep this bait-and-switch under control: racism was deployed to win elections, then was muted afterwards, partly to preserve plausible deniability, partly to focus on the real priority of enriching the one percent. But with Trump they lost control: the base wanted someone who was blatantly racist and wouldn’t pretend to be anything else. And that’s what they got, with corruption, incompetence, and treason on the side.

They knew what Trump was, but were willing to overlook it as long as they could push their usual agenda. . . . Trump didn’t even hesitate about abandoning all his campaign promises and going all in for cutting taxes on the rich while slashing benefits for the poor.

Early on, some speculated that this would be a temporary alliance – that establishment Republicans would use Trump to get what they wanted, then turn on him. But it’s now clear that won’t happen. Trump has exceeded everyone’s worst expectations, yet Republicans, far from cutting him loose, are tying themselves even more closely to his fate. Why?

The answer, I’d argue, is that they’re stuck. They knowingly made a deal with the devil, and can’t back out.  

More specifically, Trump’s very awfulness means that if he falls, the whole party will fall with him. . . . when the corruption is big time, and it’s combined with obstruction of justice and collaboration with Putin, nobody will notice which Republicans were a bit less involved, a bit less obsequious, than others. If Trump sinks, he’ll create a vortex that sucks down everyone involved.

What this means, among other things, is that expecting the GOP to exercise any oversight or constrain Trump in any way is just foolish at this point. Massive electoral defeat – massive enough to overwhelm gerrymandering and other structural advantages of the right – is the only way out.

 Every American who cares about this nation and its future needs to begin working - and do so daily - to make sure that the 2018 midterms are a historic bloodbath for the Republican Party. Volunteer to help build a massive grassroots effort to get every voter possible to the polls to make sure the GOP loses control of the House, Senate and as many state houses and state legislatures as possible.  Virginia and the Alabama special election have shown that this is possible.

Wolff Did What Every Other Reporter Is Too Cowardly to Do

Trump and Michael Wolff

Having been around politics for decades and also been authoring a blog and columns for over a decade as well, one of the games that is played all too often by members of the media and reporters is that of scratching each others backs.  From the politician's perspective, it helps keep coverage more favorable while for the reporter it keeps the doors and access open to the politicians they write about.  In the process, coverage of the unvarnished truth often gets lost in the process as reporters put continued access above their duty to the public to expose corruption, incompetence, sexual misdeeds, etc., etc.   In his new book, Fire & Fury, Michael Wolff threw this game of protecting future access out the window and laid bare what far to many reporters are afraid to do and in the process centered a spotlight on the foul cesspool that is the current occupant of the White House and his enablers and sycophants.  A piece in GQ lays out this premise and explains what so many journalist who play the access game are acting as if someone pissed in their Cheerios and assailing Wolff.  Here are excerpts: 

All of Wolff’s excerpts from Fire & Fury . . . . . it confirms what we have all always known to be true: that the president severely lacks the cognitive ability to do this job, and that he [Trump] is surrounded at all times by a cadre of enablers, dunces, and outright thieves. As much as I wanna discredit Wolff, he got receipts and, more important, he used them. Wolff got it all. Wolff nailed them.

And look how he did it. He did it by sleazily ingratiating himself with the White House, gaining access, hosting weird private dinners, and then taking full advantage of the administration's basic lack of knowledge about how reporting works. Some of the officials Wolff got on tape claim to be unaware that they were on the record. Wolff denies this, but he's very much up front in the book's intro about the fact that he was able to exploit the incredible "lack of experience" on display here. In other words, Wolff got his book by playing a bunch of naive dopes.

Thank God for that. Wolff has spent this week thoroughly exploiting Trump and his minions the same way they've exploited the cluelessness of others. And he pulled it off because, at long last, there was a reporter out there willing to toss decorum aside and burn bridges the same way Trump does.

Everyone around Donald Trump is too polite to Donald Trump. Democrats, foreign dignitaries, underlings… all of them. And the White House press is perhaps the worst offender. From the media pool playing along with Sarah Sanders during press conferences—conferences where Sanders openly lies and pisses on democracy—to access merchants like Maggie Haberman doling out Trump gossip like so many bread crumbs, too many reporters have been far too deferential to an administration that is brazenly racist, dysfunctional, and corrupt. And for what purpose? It’s clear to me that Haberman and the like aren’t saving up their chits for just the EXACT right time to bring this Administration down. No, the only end goal of their access is continued access, to preserve it indefinitely so that the copy spigot never gets shut off. They are abiding by traditional wink-wink understandings that have long existed between the government and the press covering it.

But Wolff didn’t do that. He did not engage in some endless bullshit access tango. No, Wolff actually USED his access, and extended zero courtesy to Trump on the process, and it’s going to pay off for him not just from a book sales standpoint, but from a real journalistic impact. I am utterly sick to death of hearing anonymous reports about people inside the White House “concerned” about the madman currently in charge of everything. These people don’t deserve the courtesy of discretion. They don’t deserve to dictate the terms of coverage to people. They deserve to be torched.

Everyone in Trump World Knows He’s Unfit for Office

Trump: just as insane as Emperor Caligula?

Like the scene in the movie the Wizard of Oz where the dog Toto pulls back the curtain and reveals the wizard to be a fraud (see the image below), Michael Wolff’s new book Fire and Fury has done the same to Donald Trump and his White House that is staffed by liars and enablers who have placed their own ambition, greed, and prejudices ahead of the best interests of the nation and its citizens.  As for Trump's desire to stop the publication of the book, his threats show that (i) he has absolutely no understanding of the libel laws as they apply to public figures and politicians, and (ii) the field day that discovery in any lawsuit would be for the book's author and publisher. Only an absolute idiot - which may be the best description of Trump - would open that door.  Why his attorneys haven't shut him up on this losing effort is baffling.   However, perhaps the biggest revelation of the book is that it has shown a spotlight on what anyone one other than Trump's evangelical Christian and white supremacist supporters have known all along (an "open secret," if you will): Trump is unfit for office and presents a clear and present danger to America,    A column in the New York Times and another in The Atlantic excoriate those who have sought to cover up Trump's unfitness with no apparent loyalty to the nation or the oaths to support the United States Constitution.  First, highlights from the Times:

One of the more alarming anecdotes in “Fire and Fury,” Michael Wolff’s incendiary new book about Donald Trump’s White House, involves the firing of James Comey, former director of the F.B.I. It’s not Trump’s motives that are scary; Wolff reports that Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner were “increasingly panicked” and “frenzied” about what Comey would find if he looked into the family finances, which is incriminating but unsurprising. The terrifying part is how, in Wolff’s telling, Trump sneaked around his aides, some of whom thought they’d contained him.

“For most of the day, almost no one would know that he had decided to take matters into his own hands,” Wolff writes. “In presidential annals, the firing of F.B.I. director James Comey may be the most consequential move ever made by a modern president acting entirely on his own.” Now imagine Trump taking the same approach toward ordering the bombing of North Korea.

[Wolff's book] It’s already a consequential work, having precipitated a furious rift between the president and his former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, who told Wolff that the meeting Donald Trump Jr. brokered with Russians in the hope of getting dirt on Hillary Clinton was “treasonous” and “unpatriotic.” On Thursday the president’s lawyers sent a cease-and-desist letter to Wolff’s publisher, Henry Holt, demanding that it stop publication, claiming, among other things, defamation and invasion of privacy. This move would be fascistic if it weren’t so farcical.

But most of all, the book confirms what is already widely understood — not just that Trump is entirely unfit for the presidency, but that everyone around him knows it. One thread running through “Fire and Fury” is the way relatives, opportunists and officials try to manipulate and manage the president, and how they often fail.

Trump’s chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, compares his boss’s intelligence to excrement. The national security adviser, H. R. McMaster, thinks he’s a “dope.” It has already been reported that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Trump a “moron,” which he has pointedly refused to deny.

And yet these people continue to either prop up or defend this sick travesty of a presidency. Wolff takes a few stabs at the motives of Trump insiders. Ivanka Trump apparently nurtured the ghastly dream of following her father into the presidency. Others, Wolff writes, told themselves that they could help protect America from the president they serve . . . . This is a delusion as wild, in its own way, as Trump’s claim that the “Access Hollywood” tape was faked.

Some of the military men trying to steady American foreign policy amid Trump’s whims and tantrums might be doing something quietly decent, sacrificing their reputations for the greater good. But most members of Trump’s campaign and administration are simply traitors. They are willing, out of some complex mix of ambition, resentment, cynicism and rationalization, to endanger all of our lives — all of our children’s lives — by refusing to tell the country what they know about the senescent fool who boasts of the size of his “nuclear button” on Twitter.

Maybe, at the moment, people in the Trump orbit feel complacent because a year has passed without any epic disaster, unless you count an estimated 1,000 or so deaths in Puerto Rico, which they probably don’t.

Eventually, we’ll hit the ground, and assuming America survives, there should be a reckoning to dwarf the defenestration of Harvey Weinstein and his fellow ogres. Trump, Wolff’s reporting shows, has no executive function, no ability to process information or weigh consequences. Expecting him to act in the country’s interest is like demanding that your cat do the dishes. His enablers have no such excuse.

I would add that these criticisms extend to every Republican member of Congress who have closed their eyes to Trumps unfitness and perhaps even his possibly treasonous dealings with Russia.  McConnell, Ryan, the list goes on and on have betrayed the nation in favor of their party and its hideous reverse Robin Hood agenda. 

The piece in The Atlantic goes further in demanding an accounting of those who have sought to hide the open secret that Trump has no business in the White House - or any public office.  Here are highlights:

Three months ago, when Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey of The New York Times unloaded their first big report about Harvey Weinstein’s pattern of sexual aggressiveness and abuse . . . . Of the reactions that flowed from this and parallel revelations—about Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly in the Fox empire, or Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose in mainstream TV, or Kevin Spacey and Louis CK in the film world, or Michael Oreskes and John Hockenberry in public radio, or Mark Halperin and Leon Weiseltier in print and political media, and down the rest of the list—one response was particularly revealing. It was that the behavior in question had been an “open secret.” 

In the very short term, a few people reflexively offered “open secret” as an explanation, even a rationalization. . . . . But you rarely hear rationalizations of that sort any more. Now the open-secret premise usually leads to a follow-up question. If “everyone” knew what was going on, why didn’t anyone do more to stop it? And this in turn has led to institutional and personal self-examinations. In all these cases, the malefactor remains most to blame. But “it was an open secret” now properly seems a broadened indictment, of all those who quietly let him get away with it, rather than an excuse. The details in Michael Wolff’s new book Fire and Fury make it unforgettable, and potentially historic. . . . But what Wolff is describing is an open secret.

Based on the excerpts now available, Fire and Fury presents a man in the White House who is profoundly ignorant of politics, policy, and anything resembling the substance of perhaps the world’s most demanding job. He is temperamentally unstable. Most of what he says in public is at odds with provable fact, from “biggest inaugural crowd in history” onward. Whether he is aware of it or not, much of what he asserts is a lie. . . . . He is aswirl in foreign and financial complications. He has ignored countless norms of modern governance, from the expectation of financial disclosure to the importance of remaining separate from law-enforcement activities.

And, as Wolff emphasizes, everyone around him considers him unfit for the duties of this office. . . . This is “news,” in its detail, just as the specifics of Weinstein’s marauding were real, hard-won news. But it also is an open secret. This is the man who offered himself to the public over the past two-and-a-half years.

I chronicled signs of every one of these traits through the campaign cycle, in The Atlantic’s 162-installment “Trump Time Capsule” series. But practically anyone else in political journalism can make a similar claim. Who and what Trump is has been an open secret.

It was because of this open secret that nearly 11 million more Americans voted against Trump last year than for him, including the three million more who voted for Hillary Clinton.

It was because of this open secret that virtually every journalistic endorsement in the country went against him, including from publications (like The Dallas Morning News or The Arizona Republic) that are ordinarily rock-ribbed Republican, and others (like USA Today) that had not offered endorsements before or (like The Atlantic) generally did so only once per century. It was because of this that his party’s previous nominee, Mitt Romney, publicly denounced him—and that most of the political establishment, Democratic and Republican alike, assumed that no person like him could ever reach the White House.

Wolff's Trump Book on Sale Four Days Early; Wolff Taped Sources

While Der  Trumpenführer continues to lash out at Steve Bannon over statements Bannon made in Michael Wolff's new book on the insanity and malfeasance of the Trump White House, word is out that (i) sales of the book are starting tomorrow instead of next week, and (ii) Wolff has tapes of his sources to back up his allegations. Obviously, the tapes will make it far harder for Trump apologists to claim that Wolff's sources never made the statements attributed to them. And meanwhile, the furor coming from the White House and efforts to attack the book and its publisher - a cease and desist demand was sent by a Trump attorney to both Wolff and the publisher - will only serve to make sales even more brisk (you can pre-order it on Amazon now - I did).  A piece in Axios looks at how Wolff documented the book and his sources.  Get out your popcorn as the shit storm begins in earnest.  Here are Axios excerpts:

Michael Wolff has tapes to back up quotes in his incendiary book — dozens of hours of them.

Among the sources he taped, I'm told, are Steve Bannon and former White House deputy chief of staff Katie Walsh.

·        So that's going to make it harder for officials to deny embarrassing or revealing quotes attributed to them in "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House," out Tuesday.
·        In some cases, the officials thought they were talking off the record. But what are they going to do now?
·        Although the White House yesterday portrayed Wolff as a poseur, he spent hours at a time in private areas of the West Wing, including the office of Reince Priebus when he was chief of staff.
·        The White House says Wolff was cleared for access to the West Wing fewer than 20 times.
·        Wolff, a New Yorker, stayed at the Hay Adams Hotel when he came down to D.C., and White House sources frequently crossed Lafayette Park to meet him there.
Some reporters and officials are calling the book sloppy, and challenging specific passages.·        How could Wolff possibly know for sure what Steve Bannon and the late Roger Ailes said at a private dinner?
·        It turns out Wolff hosted the dinner for six at his Manhattan townhouse. 

Part of Wolff's lengthy index entry for Bannon:

Anti -Trump Bombshells: "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House"

Michael Wolff's new upcoming book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, based on interviews with many in Donald Trump's inner circle, details the intrigue, in-fighting, and all-around chaos that swirled around both Trump’s election campaign and his first year in the White House.  The first excerpts of the book have been leaked to The Guardian. Subsequently, New York Magazine published an even more substantive portions of the book that contains numerous bombshells that will be embarrassing at best for Trump supporters and Republican apologists. For the morally bankrupt evangelical Christians who have continued to support Trump, the expose passages on how Trump liked to entrap the husbands and ruin the marriages of women with whom he wanted to have sex (see the image below) underscore that these people have no standing to lecture anyone on morality or anything else.  Two columns in the Washington Post and a piece in Raw Story that catalogs the ten largest bombshells make it painfully clear that Trump is unfit for office and is a danger to the nation.  Take the time to read the Raw Story piece.   The first column in the post by a conservative columnist who makes it clear that none of these bombshells should be surprising.  Here are excerpts:

As excerpts from Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury” dribble out, the argument in favor of using the 25th Amendment may improve:

Here, arguably, was the central issue of the Trump presidency, informing every aspect of Trumpian policy and leadership: He didn’t process information in any conventional sense. He didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-­literate. He trusted his own expertise ­— no matter how paltry or irrelevant — more than anyone else’s. He was often confident, but he was just as often paralyzed, less a savant than a figure of sputtering and dangerous insecurities, whose instinctive response was to lash out and behave as if his gut, however confused, was in fact in some clear and forceful way telling him what to do. It was, said [former deputy chief of staff Katie] Walsh, “like trying to figure out what a child wants.”

This is as troubling as it is unsurprising. For a couple of years, it has been apparent to anyone who cared to look hard that Trump was never mentally, emotionally or temperamentally fit to be president. Those who argued that character didn’t matter were both wrong and missing the point. Sanity matters. The book — at least from the excerpts — confirms what dogged opponents of his presidency have always said: He’s an unhinged man-child utterly lacking in the skill needed to be president.

 [T]he book is utterly humiliating for the enablers, the deniers, the Trump-whisperers, the right-wing media and ultimately the voters who put this character in the Oval Office. 

Willful denial explains part of it. But what’s the excuse, now that they know who he is, for allowing him to stay? The book should also inform how the press interviews him. We know he’s unhinged, so acting as his stenographer is not elucidating. Seeing what he knows, how much of a grasp of details he commands, how he reacts when challenged and the degree to which his short-term memory may be off is, it seems, where we should direct our attention.

One of Trump's defenders is Senator Lindsey Graham who once upon a time was a severe critic.  Why the change in course for Graham?  The whispers I have heard suggest that Trump may have the goods to "out" Graham as gay which would not go over well with the knuckle draggers in the South Carolina GOP base. 

The second Washington Post column gets to the issue made famous by the Watergate investigations: what did the president [Trump] know, and when did he know it.?  Here are relevant highlights:

While President Trump’s allies often seem to be striking out randomly in all directions when defending him on the topic of Russia, the underlying theme of their arguments is that the whole scandal is, as the president himself often says, phony, made up, a hoax, fake news. Over time, this claim has grown weaker and weaker.

Two items released today show how much harder it’s going to get for them, because they cast light on a Trump campaign acting like it knew it was doing something wrong.

The first and more colorful one comes from the Guardian, which obtained a copy of a soon-to-be-released book by Michael Wolff based on extensive interviews with Trump associates. Unlike most Trump allies, Stephen K. Bannon makes no excuses for the meeting that Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and campaign chairman Paul Manafort had in June 2016 with a group of Russians who had offered up damaging information on Hillary Clinton: 
 The meeting was revealed by the New York Times in July last year, prompting Trump Jr to say no consequential material was produced. Soon after, Wolff writes, Bannon remarked mockingly: “The three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor – with no lawyers. They didn’t have any lawyers.

“Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad s–t, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately.”

Bannon hasn’t confirmed or denied that he said that rather explosive thing to Wolff, although Breitbart, the website he runs, has reprinted that excerpt without objection.  . . . . Bannon also seemed to believe the scandal was going to get much bigger — and keep in mind, he was telling Wolff these things last summer.

Bannon also identifies money laundering as a key area of vulnerability for the Trump family, which is indeed one of the prime areas of focus for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation. When they start asking about money, “They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV,” Bannon told Wolff.

If Papadopoulos was blabbing about what he had learned [about Clinton emails stolen by Russian intelligence] to an Australian diplomat, the chances he hadn’t told his superiors on the Trump campaign (whom he was obviously desperate to impress) are probably close to zero. . . . If he did tell his superiors, that would mean the Trump campaign learned Russia was hacking Democrats as early as April 2016 and didn’t inform the FBI. Nor did the campaign inform the FBI in June 2016 when Russians who had been presented to them as representing the Kremlin asked for a meeting to pass on damaging information on Hillary Clinton.

If you’re a Trump partisan, you might explain the campaign’s behavior with the ignorance defense: Perhaps they were so stupid and naive that they didn’t realize there was a problem seeking help in their campaign from a hostile foreign government. Or you might argue, as some have, that because there is no specific crime called “collusion” (even though collusion with Russia very well may have violated one or more of a number of statutes), the campaign did nothing wrong and therefore there was no need to alert the authorities about what Russia was attempting.

The trouble is that when the story of the Kushner/Trump Jr./Manafort meeting broke in the press in June 2017, the president and those closest to him attempted to cover it up. President Trump personally dictated an absurdly misleading statement for Trump Jr. to release to the press . . . . The coming Trump/Bannon feud should be entertaining, but to wrap this all up, I’ll refer you to something else Bannon told Michael Wolff, about the meeting with the Russians:

“The chance that Don Jr. did not walk these jumos up to his father’s office on the twenty-sixth floor is zero.”

Bannon is guessing here, because he wasn’t there at the time. And he could be wrong. But it’s hard to believe that Trump Jr., who expressed his excitement about meeting the Russians, wouldn’t have kept his father abreast of developments. That matters a great deal, because in the end the most important political question will be the old one from Watergate: What did the president know, and when did he know it?

We don’t know the answer yet, and I’m pretty sure President Trump is hoping we never find out.