Michael Wolff has earned the ire of Donald Trump – again. The new Trump book by the author of three other bestsellers “is a total FAKE JOB, just like the other JUNK he wrote”, the 47th president posted after the first revelations from Wolff’s work broke. “I assume … he was able to speak to a small number of people, but not meaningfully.”
Once again, Wolff has poured a samovar of scalding tea on Trump’s lap.
Fire and Fury was released in January 2018 and sold millions, despite Trump’s attempt to block its publication. Siege and Landslide followed. Wolff’s interview with Trump in 2021, for Landslide, remains memorable for its descriptions of place and people as much as for Trump’s usual invective. From Mar-a-Lago, Wolff wrote of “blond mothers and blond daughters, infinitely buxom”, traipsing through the lobby of a palace built to cater to its creator’s sensibilities.
Four years later, All or Nothing is the first major work about Trump’s re-election to drop since the inauguration. Wolff rains on Trump’s parade, offering a breezy but disturbing read about how Trump willed his way back to power and captured a plurality of the electorate.
Like many of us, Wolff stands simultaneously mesmerized and disdainful.
Trump’s rage toward Wolff is at least understandable. In the run-up to the last election, Wolff released tapes in which the late financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein appeared to detail close social ties with Trump, a relationship the president has long denied. Now, on the page, Wolff paints a dismal picture of Trump’s third marriage. “She fucking hates him,” a “Mar-a-Lago patio confidant” tells Wolff of Melania Trump. “She had not enjoyed a single day in the White House. To the extent that they had had a marriage (even on a negotiated footing), it was further disrupted by her husband’s mood swings and constant sense of offense and injury.”
Donald’s 34 criminal convictions for paying the porn star Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about her claimed affair can’t have helped.
Between Trump and his daughter Ivanka, and Jared Kushner, her husband, Wolff depicts a dance of ambitions and expectations.
“Kushner’s own clear and immediate post-White House plan was to put distance between himself and his father-in-law,” Wolff writes, of Jared and Ivanka’s flight from Trump’s side after 6 January 2021 and the attack on Congress. The couple decamped to Miami, not Palm Beach, rather than be part of Trump’s daily orbit. “Asked about his father-in-law’s future by a friend, Kushner replied early on, ‘What was Nixon’s future?’”
Richard Nixon never enjoyed a second act. It seemed Trump would not either.
According to Wolff, in the aftermath of 7 October 2023, and Hamas’s attack on Israel, Kushner was asked to help swat down a Washington Post investigation on Trump and allegations of antisemitism. “No, Ivanka and I aren’t going to do that,” Jared reportedly said. “We’re not going to go and put our names on something and get in the middle of things. That’s just not what we’re going to do this time.” A spokesperson for Kushner and the White House characterized Wolff’s reporting as false.
In his first term, Trump pardoned Charles Kushner, Jared’s father. This year, Trump nominated Kushner Sr to be ambassador to France and Monaco. Gratitude means many things.
All or Nothing also scrutinizes Todd Blanche, Trump’s personal lawyer and pick for deputy attorney general. “In private, Trump liked Blanche’s certainty and forcefulness,” Wolff writes. “But now, in open court [in the Stormy Daniels hush-money case], with sudden humility, unaccountably weak and deferential, Blanche seems to stumble and suck his words and fill his hesitations with ‘ums.’ (‘POTUS really hates ums,’ says a reproving aide.)”
Blanche whiffed, Trump was convicted. For now, Blanche remains at Trump’s side.
The White House has pushed back against Wolff – forcefully.
“Michael Wolff is a lying sack of shit and has been proven to be a fraud,” said Steven Cheung, the White House communications director. Irony abounds. Trump entered office as a twice-adjudicated fraudster as well as the first convicted felon to hold the presidency.
Wolff reports misogyny and racism too. He captures Trump musing that Michelle Obama would replace Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket in 2024. “People call her ‘Mike,’ you know. You know that, don’t you?” he purportedly said, in a series of telephone monologues. “They think she looks pretty manly. Those very big shoulders. What’s that about? That’s what people will call her if she runs, ‘Mike.’ That’s the name she’ll have: ‘Mike.’”
Michelle Obama refused to attend Trump’s second inauguration.
Nor, according to Wolff, could Trump countenance the possibility that Kamala Harris would replace Biden. He saw her as an intellectual lightweight, beneath his contempt. “It won’t be Harris. It’ll never be Harris,” Trump reportedly told the denizens of the Mar-a-Lago patio. In debate prep, Wolff writes, he branded her a “fucking bitch” more than 100 times. Harris won the debate but lost the election. Unlike Hillary Clinton, she also lost the popular vote.
On the other hand, Wolff says, Trump feared Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan. The two had clashed over Covid-19. If it was her, Trump reportedly thought, he was “fucked”.
Now, back in the White House, Trump sits at the center of all news cycles, describing himself as a “king”, watching titans of industry prostrate themselves before him. “But,” Wolff adds, “there is, too, the inescapable fact of his age, term limits, second-term malaise, and his lame-duck status – power ebbs.
“At some point, as hard as it might seem to imagine, events will have a life of their own without Donald Trump at the center of them. And then the story will end.”
Don’t be so sure. Trump openly speaks of a third term.
All or Nothing: How Trump Recaptured America is published in the US by Penguin Random House
