In what’s becoming an everyday news event, the infighting and incompetence that has characterized the first year of the Trump White House was again exposed last week, thanks to Michael Wolff’s new tell-all book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. The hoopla surrounding the book’s release, and the administration’s reaction to it, spurned even more buzz, this time about the president’s mental fitness.
It’s tempting to get sucked into the pop psychology emanating from a juicy, if flawed, political book of the moment. But at the end, Trump is no more or less unfit than he was when elected. It’s clear that even if he truly wanted to, he is incapable of behaving in any way other than as the racist Tweeter-in-Chief.
Fire and Fury makes for a sensational read and fun cocktail party palaver, but attention on White House dysfunction as described by Wolff lacks discussions of how people around Trump deal with Trump’s racism. It’s a glaring omission because this is who Trump is and has always been.
Paul Musgrave, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, captures this perfectly in a recent op-ed in the Washington Post, labeling Trump the WYSIWYG president, employing the computer programming acronym for “what you see is what you get.”
After watching Trump’s first year in office, Musgrave dismisses all the popular excuses or searches for “some hidden meaning behind the erratic actions of he man who now sits in the Oval Office,” to conclude Trump is, well, just what we see in his daily diet of ridiculous tweets:
But nearly a year in, it turns out that the truth is hidden in plain sight: Trump’s actions appear angry and impulsive because Trump is angry and impulsive… The real secret of the Trump administration is that it is the WYSIWYG presidency. There is no grand plan or veiled purpose. There is no wizard behind the curtain — just an old, irate, obnoxiously ignorant man.
Trump has a history of racism that is decades old, well-documented, and not “fake news.” What’s more, those around him know — or should know — this to be the case. As such, it’s instructive to avert our eyes momentarily from Trump’s irrational outbursts and turn instead to those who enable the president to act “like a child,” in the colorfully descriptive language of Wolff’s overnight best-seller.
Rather than imposing some adult discipline, those who work for Trump serve as enablers, covering up his incompetence or make excuse for his racist behavior because it serves their selfish purposes.
Amid a plethora of salacious details of dysfunction during the administration’s first year, Wolff’s book serves up anecdotes and quotes that, even if they’re not the most accurate, conform to what many of outside observers of the administration believe based on reading or watching daily news accounts. Wolff has repeatedly told interviewers that “100 percent of the people” he interviewed questioned Trump’s fitness for office.
Wolff’s writing (and the administration’s enraged response to it) makes it clear that Trump is cosseted — inside the White House by sycophantic staffers and outside of it by self-serving GOP leaders in Congress. If Wolff’s book is to be credible, then he would have seen or heard something related the racial motivations of Trump and key advisers in behind-the-scenes discussions around decisions like imposing the Muslim ban; attacking Colin Kapernick or Jemele Hill; issuing confusing statements supporting white nationalists in Charlottesville; or insulting the American citizens victimized by Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico.
There will be questions about the reporting but a surprising number of people in WH, referenced in this book, basically say this – he’s not capable of being President. These are not his political enemies. https://t.co/MgkfJYZhrw
— Katty Kay (@KattyKayBBC) January 4, 2018
Those are just a handful of examples of overt racism from the first year of this administration. So there must be some revelations regarding the racism and white privilege that have been the lodestone that led to his election and serves to keep him close to his base of support, primarily a diminishing slice of white, GOP-leaning America — particularly with the access Wolff had to top Trump officials.
Yet, in Fire and Fury, we’re treated to the delicious gossipy nuggets such as the fact that Trump enjoys gorging on Big Macs in bed at 6:30 p.m. or that his daughter, Ivanka, entertains friends with a stand-up routine of how her dad achieves that gravity-defying comb over. The failure to see and report on obvious racism in and around the Oval Office calls into question whether Wolff can be viewed as a reliable narrator of what actually transpired in the first year of the Trump White House.
Paul Krugman of the New York Times picked up on this in a recent column, noting that Wolff’s book “helps focus our minds on the subject” of Trump’s unfitness to be president, but doesn’t spread the responsibility for the train-wreck administration in all the places where it rightly belongs. Krugman suggest GOP leaders in Congress should be called out as well for the “Faustian bargain” they struck with Trump:
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.
Let me be perfectly clear, I’m not excusing or minimizing Trump’s behavior. He is, after all, the president of the United States and what he says and does can have life or death consequences for millions of people in the U.S. and around the globe. But in our nation’s democratic tradition, the president is one among many citizens. His power derives from the consent of those he leads. As such, the racial stink swirling about this president doesn’t begin or end at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Rather, it extends far and wide, across Washington and seeps deeply into the soil of the nation that allowed him to become its head of state and, regrettably, continues to support his lying, race-baiting leadership.
While some in Washington’s chattering classes may delight in a feeding frenzy of stories about White House dysfunction contained in a cartoonish book about a reality show president, such an unserious treatment of Fire and Fury tends to normalize Trump’s behavior and largely excuses it because he’s a rich, white, male bully. If Wolff’s accounts seek behind the scenes veracity, its telling depictions demand the full exposure of Trump’s racism — and the insidious work of his empowering minions.