Not mentioned in the headline, but the Bannon book is called "Saving My Ass: The Distancing." https://t.co/FdQGc19jdM
— Tom Watson (@tomwatson) January 3, 2018
Actually, the scariest bits of the Wolff excerpt are in the explanation for how he got it all. He basically hung out in the WH and recorded everything with zero oversight from anyone. “Wanna see our plan for bombing Pyongyang? Off the record or on or whatever the fuck.” pic.twitter.com/pI30gOBW6c
— Michael Weiss (@michaeldweiss) January 3, 2018
True, the year is yet young. But Wolff has already made his mark on the calendar highlights reel — in much the same way, his critics would say, as a little dog leaves his mark on the leg of the couch — and that seems to be pretty much what Wolff lives for. A description by Michelle Cottle, for TNR, back in 2004:
… It’s difficult for non-New Yorkers to fully grasp the Michael Wolff phenomenon. In the most literal terms, Wolff, from 1998 until he decamped for Vanity Fair this winter, wrote the weekly “This Media Life” column for New York magazine, spinning out stylish, pointed observations on everything from Viacom’s power struggles to Rupert Murdoch’s love life. From the start, Wolff was adamant about being neither a media reporter (working the phones isn’t really his style) nor a media critic (“that dour schoolmarm figure”). Instead, he put himself at the center of the story, giving readers a first-person glimpse of the inner workings of the media biz as it happened to, and all around, him. Uninterested in the working press, Wolff’s special focus (fixation, even) has always been on the power players–the moguls–most of whom he has relentlessly and repeatedly skewered, scraping away the sheen of power and money to reveal the warts, flab, and psychic scars plaguing that rarefied breed of (in Wolff’s view) super-wealthy narcissists who buy, run, and ruin media companies for the gratification of their insatiable egos…
So should Washington’s political chieftains be concerned that the scourge of New York’s mogul class–the man who claims partial credit for Michael Eisner’s current job crisis–has them in his sights? Not really. Whatever his gifts in chronicling the follies and foibles of the Manhattan media elite, Wolff is neither as insightful nor as entertaining when dissecting politics. As New York journalists are the first to acknowledge, Wolff is the quintessential New York creation, fixated on culture, style, buzz, and money, money, money. (For Wolff, nothing is more erotic than a multibillionaire.) Though not of the mogul class, he arguably understands the culture and mindset in which it thrives better than almost anyone. The same cannot be said of politics…
So last decade! A certain ‘Manhattan media elite’ (okay, media elite target) now squats in the Oval Office… and Michael Wolff, presciently, made sure to be there when the occupation started. As it is with Donny Dollhands, it’s not whether the stories in his new book are “true” or “false”; it’s how much attention those stories can draw. Quite a lot!
Wolff book on how top aides regard Trump: “For Steve Mnuchin and Reince Priebus, he was an ‘idiot.’ For Gary Cohn, he was ‘dumb as shit.’ For H.R. McMaster he was a ‘dope.’ The list went on.”
— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) January 3, 2018
From Paul Farhi, at the Washington Post, “Michael Wolff tells a juicy tale in his new Trump book. But should we believe it?”:
… A provocateur and media polemicist, Wolff has a penchant for stirring up an argument and pushing the facts as far as they’ll go, and sometimes further than they can tolerate, according to his critics. He has been accused of not just re-creating scenes in his books and columns, but of creating them wholesale…
According to an unauthorized report in the Guardian newspaper and a lengthy excerpt in New York magazine, Wolff portrays Trump and his closest aides as astonished by his electoral victory in 2016, and wholly unprepared for office. Trump, he reports, had no idea who former House speaker John A. Boehner was when Roger Ailes, a campaign adviser, recommended him as chief of staff. Top advisers and allies doubted the president’s intelligence and openly mocked him.
Open Thread: Michael Wolff, Luckiest Fameball of 2018Post + Comments (167)