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Jan. 11, 2018 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
40:36
Fire and Fury - A Review
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So I finished Fire and Fury the other day and I didn't have time to do a review of it, so I thought I'd do it now.
And this is going to be fairly informal just going from the notes I made while I was reading it.
But there's a lot here and it was very interesting.
And I guess getting to the first question that I think most people will ask is do I believe it?
Because if there's one thing that has happened because of this book, it's massive amounts of polarization.
As in the entire, you know, the Trump campaign, you've got Trump, Miller, and a bunch of others who have just come out and categorically denied everything about this book.
And then you have the far left who are running around screaming that this is it.
This means that Trump himself is mentally infirm, in some way incapable of doing anything.
And honestly, that's not what I think is true, given from what I know about the book and the author.
For example, Wolf isn't a die-hard anti-Trump partisan, and he has criticized, as I showed in this year in Stupid, Stelter for being a ridiculous figure and not being fair.
And so this book is really honestly, I think it's probably mostly true.
And I think it's the set of lies upon which history will agree.
To paraphrase Napoleon.
And really, I mean, what this is, what Fire and Fury is, is the novelization of the first six months of the Trump presidency until Bannon leaves.
And it's, I think, probably mostly true, but almost all of it is unverifiable.
At least the important bits can't be verified.
Because a lot of it is dealing with the internal political gossip and powermongering of the Trump administration.
And so these are things that are basically based around people's personal attitudes and responses to events.
And so it's the sort of thing you can never really prove one way or another.
But it would seem to provide an internally consistent map from point A to point B that doesn't require any further explanation.
And to be honest with you, maybe it's just confirming my own presumptions, but honestly, I expected the Trump presidency to work in the way that Wolf describes it.
This is definitely something I would have thought would be likely.
So I actually don't think this book is massively misrepresenting reality.
There are going to be parts where Wolf himself is quoting from something like over 200 sources inside the White House and around it.
So there are going to be many cases where something isn't exactly correct.
And there are going to be things that Wolford is describing that he couldn't possibly know personally because he wasn't there.
And the person giving him the description of what happened is giving their subjective interpretation of it, which might not be accurate or line up with other people's subjective interpretations.
So really you have to take it as it is.
And this is why I think describing it as the novelization of the Trump administration is the most accurate way of doing it.
Even though Wolf stands by all of this, but again, there are just things he can't possibly know and he's taking on faith.
But with that out of the way, as I said, I think it's probably mostly reliable.
And that's only because of the public demonstration of personality that we have seen from the people he's talking about.
It's not incongruent with the way these people act in public, so I personally find myself believing it more often than not.
Okay, so let's talk about the campaign itself.
Now, this was very interesting, as Wolf describes the Trump campaign team as not expecting to win, and kind of didn't want him to, because everyone involved with it was really there out of, as far as Wolf is concerned anyway, a sense of direct personal interest.
They all thought that they would lose, but their careers would benefit overall.
And he goes through each one, explaining what they were planning to do after doing the Trump campaign that would have failed but raised their profiles.
And so when they won, they were a bit out of their element.
Wolf describes it as duplicating the plots to the producers, which is a film I haven't seen, but as I understand it, it requires their failure for them to all succeed.
And they failed to fail.
You realize very quickly that Trump understands literally nothing about politics, which I don't think will surprise anyone.
Trump's political understanding is low, but his understanding of people is very high.
And his understanding of like the working classes is very good.
Very good.
Trump is an outsider in his own elite circle of friends, but we'll get to this in a bit.
So Trump refused to put his own money into the campaign.
He loaned $10 million to the campaign, but wouldn't just directly give his own money, which is weird, considering he's a billionaire.
You think he would.
But I guess you don't become a billionaire by giving away all your money, even if it's your own presidential campaign.
And it's interesting how Wolf describes the Trump Tower becomes like the death star of Fifth Avenue.
But it didn't go very well, apparently, because there was very little ability to plan and organise.
No background checks were made on hires.
And so they were kind of bungling through.
But as soon as Trump became president-elect, he suddenly took on a new air of legitimacy.
suddenly he believed in himself because ultimately like I think I don't even think Trump thought he was going to win I think that they were just making a statement in many ways but as soon as he becomes president-elect suddenly the mood changes around him And everyone realizes, well, maybe this can work.
And maybe, maybe this can be different.
And Wolf describes Trump becoming energetic, funny, fun, and soothing.
Not a tough guy.
In Bannon's words, a warm-hearted monkey, which, I mean, it sounds belittling, but it's kind of a step up from the way he's usually described in the press,
it sounds belittling but it's kind of a step up from the way he's usually described in the press which is again something we'll cover in a bit so a ruthless team of business tycoons enters the office and it's it's like a billionaire buddy movie where trump i mean everyone's like well why is the white house being stuffed with goldman sachs executives you These are the only people Trump knows.
These are his friends, which is why he ends up with billionaires in the cabinet.
And at one point, Anne Coulter is the person who has to turn around and point out to Trump that he can't just hire his children for everything, because Trump's very much a family man first, and he's very loyal to his family and his close allies, like Chris Christie and Rudy Giuliani, who are Trump's only friends with political experience, but they obviously have a huge amount of baggage themselves, and so Trump can't just take them on as he would like, which is to his disappointment.
The book is very interesting because it demonstrates, as Alinsky said, the complex entanglement of elite families at the top of any society, and especially American society, and the way that they interact with one another.
And for anyone who's like, oh, Trump's not an outsider, he absolutely was given Wolfe's description.
Because Trump was like, he was legitimately an outsider to the elite circles because of his presidential run.
I mean, Trump was probably never the most well-respected billionaire in New York or Washington, but his presidential run really made him an outsider to the entire establishment.
So let's talk about the press next.
The press and Trump are both unreliable narrators on either side who are trying to discredit one another.
So nothing either one says is really the truth.
And it's very interesting how like when the press conference that we were told up that he lined them up and it was like a fucking firing squad, Wolf goes through that in more detail.
And it sounds like I wish I had been a fly on the wall of that.
That sounds like the most fun thing to have watched in my life, you know, just in anyone's life.
But the elites tended to confide, like, not just the elites, but like, and when I say the elites, I mean, I'm talking like, you know, the sort of political insiders.
And this is involving people in the press.
Like, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski of MSNBC had a previous personal friendship with Trump.
So you can imagine that their opposition to Trump was personally hurtful for him.
And he didn't really know how to deal with it.
And they end up becoming the source of a lot of White House leaks, which is, again, something we'll talk about in a bit.
But the media snubbed Trump.
And Trump was annoyed by that because Trump thinks the media is important.
He's tried to cozy up to them.
He's been his whole life trying to be a celebrity.
And he's basically been rejected by them, which to him is a very hurtful thing.
And Wolf describes the media as a constant power game with people rising and falling.
And the media, in the opinion of the media, always has the last word, which is one of the reasons when Michael Wolfe brings up Gamergate, he just describes it as a harassment campaign against women.
Trump himself is obsessed with the media.
Much of his daily conversation was about what anchors had said about him and his administration.
Because for Trump, the media represented power, the power of public opinion.
And this is very important to Trump.
So when Spicer comes on as press secretary, and he's, I mean, he's genuinely nervous to accept the job.
And when he, I don't know whether you remember, but watching any of his press conferences was like watching a man who looked like he was about to go in front of a firing squad.
Spicer was always sweaty and nervous.
And if anything Wolf has said is true, it's completely understandable why.
Because Trump apparently regularly berated Spicer for his poor performances, which are constantly putting pressure on the man, which honestly I think would be a fine way of explaining why Spicer looks like a deer in the headlights.
Given the media's scorched earth tactics against the Trump administration, the press operations became one of the central pillars of the Trump administration itself.
And I can completely understand why.
I mean, Trump has been in the year he's been in office, he has been in a constant war against the press just for Setting a kind of moral authority that he's been trying to achieve, that the press has been constantly undermining from the word go and as a deliberate method of operation.
The press know what they're doing and they're doing it on purpose.
And so the Trump administration has to actively fight back against it.
So then we come to talk about the Jews, which is something that Michael Wolf brings up in the book.
He says that New York is the largest Jewish city and the media is the most Jewish of industries, which is rather woke.
Jared Kushner, who is Jewish himself, is given the problem of Israel and making it viewed as like making the Jew take care of the other Jews.
None of the Trump team really knew Kushner very well, and because of the internal politicking inside Trump's administration, Kushner brought in more golden sacks and Wolf describes them as tough guy Jews to fight against Bannon's populist power.
Kushner becomes very powerful within the Trump administration and ends up winning a lot of sort of the contests within the administration to the point where Henry Kissinger ends up commenting that in Trump's White House, it's a war between the Jews and the non-Jews, which I guess if the Jews are saying that, what are you supposed to say?
I can't tell them that there's not that.
But this brings us to the internal politicking inside the Trump administration.
And it's very, very interesting because of the way Trump himself is.
And so I guess let's discuss Trump himself.
Because Trump's a very interesting man, and not in a negative or positive way, in my opinion.
Like, at one point, Wolf describes Trump as essentially playing the character of Donald Trump.
And so he's always on.
He's always thinking about the character of Donald Trump rather than being a person.
And it's the sort of thing I guess Trump has been doing for such a long time, that is his personality now.
And so the book seems to be really negative towards Trump as a person.
But I didn't read it that way at all.
I can see a regular person reading, if they were to put themselves in the description of Trump, they would see it as being hugely negative.
But given how the media has spent the last two years now acting like Trump is Hitler, then it's actually surprisingly positive.
Because if there's one thing that Wolfe's book does for Trump, is it makes him look well-intentioned, even if it makes him look like an idiot.
And that, in my opinion, is a massive step up from the media just calling him the new Hitler who wants to eradicate various races of people.
Because there's no hint of any of that, as far as I'm concerned, as far as I noticed.
It's more that Trump's deficiencies are inherent within him.
And so it's kind of like a well-intentioned giant who goes around smashing things by accident, even though he wasn't trying to.
And so, yeah, Trump isn't actually portrayed as badly as one might think.
So apparently, Trump did not enjoy his inauguration.
He'd been bad-tempered and fighting with people all day, which is why during the inaugural speech, which was written by Bannon, it comes across as kind of ominous, which I agree with.
It's very interesting.
But it's weird that Wolf points out that the next day that the narrative of the inaugural day had been completely rewritten in Trump's head.
As far as Trump was concerned, this was a great day.
Everything had been great.
Because Trump is like they found him as an instinctive force of personality.
As in, he's like the spirit of a thing rather than the thing itself.
And, you know, like Wolf describes Trump as being like the last alpha male, how he likes being an outlaw and flouting convention, and how Bannon sees him as like an anti-politician.
And the media as well, the way the media reacted to this was great.
Wolf points out that the media went to war with him, thinking they could act shocked and demonstrate how factually wrong Trump was.
But being correct was not how Trump won his base, so it had no effect.
The base was won by Trump being la resistance.
That Trump was fighting back against cultural forces rather than worrying about being factually correct.
And that's true.
That's absolutely true.
Trump apparently seems to have been intimidated by actually moving into the White House and didn't really change it much.
And this is strange given how the White House is probably a step down from what Trump is used to living in.
So there's definitely a kind of symbolic importance to it for him.
But apparently as well, Trump actually does work.
This is something that Wolf does point out a few times.
The Trump is actually trying to do things.
Trump's problem is that effectively he's offended every institution.
And so they're all opposed to him on the grounds that he isn't working with them as they would like, which is understandable.
What's interesting is that Trump is described as essentially post-literate.
He doesn't read.
He doesn't read anything unless it's pertinent to him, unless it's something he needs to read.
Because essentially, I think what the problem is is that he's been a billionaire for a very long time.
And so he can just pay someone to read something out to him, pay someone to tell him what he needs to know.
And so he doesn't have to.
And this has given him an extremely short attention span because he doesn't need to be someone who has to cultivate a long attention span and really take in a big chunk of information.
He can just pay someone to boil it down for him and get it done.
Sort it out.
What do I need to know?
Is this a threat to President Trump?
No, not really.
Great, get it out.
Go and sort it out.
Go do something with it.
He doesn't need to personally know.
And so this gives him this remarkably short attention span.
And it also means that he's very difficult to deal with for his underlings.
And I said this on Facebook.
The way that Wolf portrays Trump is like describing a half-lucid God who has a very short window of time for which you to kind of pray to him.
And if you're lucky, that will be the thing that sticks in his mind as he carries on being Trump.
Because effectively, like Trump has been a professional decision maker for a long time, but he never really has to have his own thoughts personally.
Like, this is the way that it comes across to me.
It was like someone would come in and they'd make an argument.
And if Trump found the argument internally consistent and persuasive, then that argument became Trump's argument until someone else came along and presented an argument.
In which case, Trump would say, right, it is or is not persuasive to him.
Act on it.
That's actionable.
Do that.
Don't do that.
You know, he would make snap decisions really quickly.
I mean, one of the things was like with the military and the transgender ban.
Apparently, he'd been presented with four options and was expected to ruminate on these, but 10 minutes later, he just picked one and was tweeting about it.
And everyone was just like, holy shit, would he please work with us?
But he can't because he's Trump.
And he's a decision maker.
And that's it.
But, I mean, he's described by Gary Cohn as an idiot surrounded by clowns and like less of a person than a collection of terrible traits.
And this is another thing as well.
Michael Wolf, he does not in any way try to lessen the terrible personality traits that Trump has.
And Trump has many terrible personality traits.
I mean, he's a dick.
He constantly is trying to sleep with his friends' wives.
He's constantly trying to hurt people in many ways.
And yet, it doesn't come across like he is a bad person, which is weird.
It comes across more like he just doesn't understand himself, his own actions, and he has the self-control of just a child in a chocolate factory.
He just doesn't have that kind of self-control.
I mean, he doesn't come across like a rapist or anything.
He's not like a Harvey Weinstein.
He's more like a teenager trapped in a billionaire's body.
That's how it comes across.
Just a teenage boy who never really grew up.
That's just how Trump comes across.
And I genuinely feel for the people underneath him because Bannon, Prius, and Kushner were constantly having a power struggle between themselves.
And they worked out that essentially it wasn't being persuasive that mattered.
It was really proximity that mattered.
Being the last person to speak to Trump was the most important thing about influencing Trump.
And so it put them all on notice and you ended up, I mean, the reason Bannon looks so unbelievably haggard is because he worked all the time.
And one of the features of his work was being always on call to Trump.
Being certain that he could be around if Trump needed to talk to someone was part of his job, which sounds awful to me.
I mean, and like I'm saying, Trump's not, he's not portrayed in a particularly flattering light, but it's not nearly as negative as I would have thought.
I mean, you know, he's prone to temper tantrums and he views not he views all of like the name Trump is essentially like his personal press plan and he views the media as a battlefield and he assumes that everyone wants 15 minutes of fame and has a strategy because in Trump's view all news Is manipulated and designed.
And Wolf says on some level he thinks all news is fake.
And so this is why he reacts as he reacts.
Because he is a cynical actor, but I don't think he's self-aware enough to know that he's a cynical actor.
He's like a senile narcissist.
So yeah, I mean, like, trying to get a bead on Trump as a person is very difficult.
And I feel bad for him and for the people who have to deal with him.
I honestly would not know how to do it.
I wouldn't want to have to do it myself.
Bannon is easily one of the most interesting people in the book.
Bannon is a master strategist.
He is the man who knows how to get this done.
And Bannon works very, very hard.
As I said earlier, he's haggard and just aging because he is always working.
He's a full-time culture warrior.
And his motto is just do things.
Just do it.
Make something happen.
Bannon, when he first got into the White House, Bannon just got to work and became unreachable.
And this made him look like a schemer and like he was untrustworthy.
And to be honest with you, I think Bannon probably is a schemer and probably is untrustworthy.
He's accused of being mean, dishonest, and untrustworthy, a small-time hustler who made it big, a full-time culture warrior, and that chaos was his strategy.
And it was in many ways.
He deliberately provoked progressives, obviously.
And so Gamergate comes up, as Wolf refers to it as the precursor to the alt-right movement, which is about harassment against women in the games industry, which just goes to show the press does have the last word.
And what's interesting is that policymaking flowed upward from Bannon mostly, who is essentially trying to trick Trump into believing that Bannon's ideas were Trump's ideas.
And it's really funny because Trump essentially just agreed with everything Bannon said when it came to policy and like and social policy especially.
Like if Trump wanted to explain to like people what it was he wanted, he would just turn Bannon on like a robot, like a like a like a switch.
And Bannon would just talk for 10 minutes and explain what Bannon wanted and then Trump would tell him stop and then that would be it.
That would be Trump's policy on immigration or whatever it was.
But Bannon is described as the alt-right militant.
Kushner was the New York Democrat and Priebus was the establishment Republican.
And you can see how these would have contradicted one another.
But the thing is, Bannon, he's not really alt-right.
He's just more just an American nationalist.
He's nowhere near as pure as the alt-right need him to be.
But Bannon's Trumpism was radical isolationism, Protean protectionism, and determined Keynesianism, which, as Wolf observes, are all counter to Republicanism.
And obviously, they're completely counter to anything the Democrats would want.
So Bannon was a real outsider as well.
But he definitely had a lot of influence.
Because I mean, like, initially, he had a great deal of mastery over Trump, but by about 10 weeks in, apparently this had crumbled.
And Trump and Bannon found themselves at odds.
Wolf describes Bannon as a working-class revolutionary who believed in his cause, a populist nationalist with a cause so radical that nobody thought it could happen.
And Bannon spoke for Trump's unarticulated political view.
But again, this is until Trump turns on Bannon, in which case, like, Bannon, really, he started outshining the master.
And then Trump starts shitting repeatedly on Bannon as often as possible.
And it probably wasn't helped by Bannon occasionally describing himself as President Bannon.
And he was like constantly putting himself about and he was in, you know, in everyone's business if possible and made a lot of enemies.
And the thing is, Bannon is one of the most ballsy men I've ever seen.
At least if Michael Wolf's description of it is anything to go by.
Trump starts promoting other people above Bannon.
He starts focusing on others around Bannon and kind of isolating him.
And I guess Bannon doesn't give a shit or something.
Because I mean, like, at one point he goes to war with Ivanka Trump.
And it was just like, fuck.
And so he's in a meeting in the White House in front of Trump.
And he just points at Ivanka and says, you are a fucking liar.
And just to her face in front of her father.
And Trump is just like, well, what do you got to say to that, Ivanka?
It's just like, fuck.
I mean, at one point, Bannon's quote is just saying, I will fuck you.
Like, the full-on culture warrior that he is.
And honestly, I find myself kind of liking Bannon.
Kind of liking the fact that he was a man with initiative and made things happen, even if he was like the sleaziest kind of guy.
He made for an interesting character in a story, if nothing else.
And I tell you, quickly, Ivanka Trump's relationship with Ivanka's relationship with Donald is very interesting because Ivanka effectively has a business relationship with her father.
She understands, I mean, her and Jared Kushner.
Well, I can't remember whether it's Jared Kushner.
Her and Trump's son-in-law have a very clever relationship because Jared goes around essentially trying to ameliorate the excesses of Trump's rhetoric and trying to explain to people, yeah, so Trump said this, but what he means was this.
And Ivanka and her husband are very politically savvy, and this is why they ended up coming into conflict with Bannon.
And I just can't believe the balls on Bannon's just curse out his own daughter in front of Trump.
That was pretty shocking.
So anyway, the problem of the Trump administration was the fact that Trump couldn't really be relied upon to take a consistent point of view or party line on anything.
It was just the last person who spoke to him was the one who influenced him.
And so with previous Kushner and Bannon, this was a real problem because they all had diverging political goals and they needed Trump on board to achieve any of them.
And so, like I said, it was like trying to get the attention of a half-lucid god.
Eventually, like the great eye of Trump would be on Bannon or Kushner and they would be desperately trying to make their case before it just moved on before anything could happen.
But then they realized that Trump was very responsive to the media because Trump views the media as the power of public opinion.
And so the leaks began.
And this was this, I think, was the reason for the leaks, or at least Wolf seems to think they're for the leaks.
Because proximity to Trump was how power over Trump worked.
And so instead of, you know, constantly chasing Trump, they would actually allow the media to lead Trump by the nose.
Because as much as Trump can manipulate the media, the media manipulates him too.
And so this is why literally everyone in Trump's administration just started leaking to the media.
If they had a personal issue that they wanted to be put on the table the next day, the previous day they would go to, that day they would just go to the media, like, and this could be almost anyone in the media.
A lot of it, Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough were a source of constant leaks, but obviously Breitbart as well.
And various other ones, where they would leak it and the press would get hold of it.
That would create the agenda for the next day.
And so that's how people could control what Trump would do.
And basically, all of these leaks from Bannon, Kushner, and Priebus were to get at one another.
They weren't against Trump or anything like that.
They were just against each other.
And Spicer ended up cracked.
Sean Spicer ended up cracking down in a meeting on this where he basically just belligerently browbeats them all after confiscating all their phones and just dresses them all down saying, look, you're making us look like a laughing stock, which indeed they were.
But the problem is that this, being the president with an adversarial press and many other institutions opposed to him as well, must be really tough.
It must be stressful as hell.
Because Trump himself was a major source of insider leaks because he just couldn't stop talking.
To relieve stress, he would phone up people in the evening and just ramble about them how it was going, spilling loads of secrets in the process.
And none of it would be like, you know, you can't tell anyone this.
He would just say a bunch of stuff.
Trump would leak loads without even realizing he'd leaked anything.
And so it was just like, well, okay.
I mean, it's just funny, I guess.
And the things I kind of feel bad for him.
Because he does seem to come across with a man as a man with good intentions trying to get his agenda done that he was elected into office to do.
And I completely believe that it's a hugely stressful job.
But basically, news about the inner workings of Trump's administration and his own mind became public knowledge.
And this was something that the media could use on a daily basis to undermine his authority.
So let's talk about Russia.
The book claims that he took 45k from Russia, that Manafort was under financial investigation.
The piss dossier was nothing.
Nobody would touch it until BuzzFeed leaked it.
The media ended up picking up a vast conspiracy with the Russians, Putin's blackmail scheme.
And either the massive conspiracy was true, or in Wolf's opinion, the media had gone fucking nuts.
And either way, he thought that was monumental.
Because, I mean, basically, the Russia thing is definitely not true.
Despite, you know, like, Wolf says that Russia Yate was nothing, really.
Like, the investigation revealed a possible four-man conspiracy, goes through a list of them, Trump attending a dinner in Russia that Putin did not attend.
And Wolf just comes to the conclusion that the Trump campaign was not well organized enough to collude with Russia.
And then, for some reason, after this, Trump meets with a bunch of Russians in Trump Tower, stupidly without lawyers.
Again, I don't even think that's collusion.
I think that's Trump just being absent-minded and dumb.
And not necessarily him, but his campaign organizers.
Just, I mean, I think that Wolf is correct.
I don't think Trump's campaign was basically well run enough to be able to collude with the Russians.
I don't think they were capable of it.
What's interesting is the absence of Mike Pence in this narrative.
Trump's office and Trump, Kushner, Priebus, and Bannon, the sort of like little triad under God, are basically fighting this constant battle.
And it's really intense, and it sounds like it's absolutely raging.
Whereas if you then look over to Mike Pence's office, it's just like a calm, green, and pleasant field with birds cheeping and butterflies flying around, and nothing's going on.
Pence's office was made up by people of people who seemed to like each other and respect each other and were known for working efficiently, like answering their phone calls and emails quickly and being generally compliant.
And Pence had seemed to take pains to become like a non-entity, which obviously resulted in him looking like the weakest vice president in decades, totally useless.
But from Pence's point of view, this is actually a genius move.
What are we going to do?
We're going to get our heads down.
We're going to get on with the work.
We're not going to cause any drama.
And we'll get out of this okay.
And that seems to be the response from the Pence office, which is totally sensible.
And it's the same with the generals as well.
They're professional, like, insiders.
They're people who work within the system.
They understand the system.
They want to use the system.
Unlike Trump and his core administration, who are a bunch of renegades, essentially.
And so anyone working as the old guard would work becomes completely invisible.
Despite the fact that he's a complete non-entity to the story, Wolf has to bring in Richard Spencer.
He apparently goes to CPAC and he's kicked out because it's not for white identitarians.
But there's nothing relevant about Spencer in this.
He's just a footnote, really.
Foreign policy under Trump isn't particularly well documented.
But it seems that Trump kind of likes it.
For example, Trudeau, who's described as a 45-year-old globalist, just comes to see Trump and basically bends the knee.
He just swallows his tongue.
He just shuts up, closes his mouth, and says, Yeah, we're going to work really well with Trump.
And that's something Trump was happy with.
You know, he gets on very well with the Saudis.
He gets on very well with the Saudis.
Because basically, the Saudis are their foreign policy and their diplomacy is essentially about sucking off a person's ego, which Trump enjoys greatly, obviously.
And he considers himself to be treated like a king when he goes to Saudi Arabia.
And so he thinks it's great.
He doesn't notice it, as far as we can tell, as a form of manipulation.
With the Afghan war, it's clearly going badly.
It's considered to be a graveyard for careers.
And so Trump bitches out the generals for two hours, furiously telling them to do whatever the rank and file thought they should do because he thinks that they're just in it to save their own careers instead of solving any problems.
And that's a very interesting point of view.
And honestly, I think one that probably holds more merits than people would be apt to allow themselves to admit.
Because the rank and file are the ones who have to deal with it on a daily basis.
They probably know what needs doing on the ground.
But all in all, it's a very well-written book.
It's very compelling to read.
And it doesn't get boring at all.
In fact, it's a hugely complex story that must have taken Wolf a long time to accurately put together as a narrative of events.
And I didn't notice any I didn't notice any problems with the details that Wolf had laid out, like the public events timeline of it.
I didn't notice any problems with that, which is good.
And like I said, honestly, I don't think it's inaccurate.
I don't think it's wrong.
It adequately explains things without trying to make them look like worse people than they are, but doesn't try to make them look like good people because a lot of the people involved obviously aren't.
And so it's honestly, I think it's probably a fairly reliable inside look into the culture of the Trump administration.
Like I said, all of the details might not be 100% accurate, but this is probably the lie upon which history will agree about the Trump administration.
And honestly, it could have been a lot worse.
It really doesn't make Trump look like Hitler.
It doesn't make him look malevolent.
It makes him look like a well-meaning idiot who has been detached and ensconced in this billionaire's world for his whole life.
Or for at least the last 40 years or something.
It makes him look like he's just out of it.
He's just not really in touch with the lower orders, except for his conception of the working man, with whom he gets on very, very well.
And you can see that about his rallies.
I mean, his rallies are really popular.
And they look like they're fun.
I've watched a bunch.
look like they're a lot of fun to attend so i'm not surprised that like it's very interesting how he gets on most with just the regular working class joes And yet he has to deal with billionaire elitists who are all very intelligent, very well educated.
And he's not.
But it's very interesting.
And like I said, I think there's more credibility to this than the Trump administration will want to admit.
But also, it really doesn't make Trump look as bad as the press wants it to look.
If anything, I think this kind of protects Trump from many of the narratives that they're spinning.
Because Wolf, as I said, isn't just an anti-Trump partisan.
And the press effectively are, at this point, the opposition party, as Bannon has described them.
But anyway, that's my thoughts on it.
It's definitely worth your time.
It's definitely worth your time to read.
It's a lot of fun.
It's interesting.
I had a good time reading this book.
I think there's probably a lot in it that's genuinely true.
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