Trump Got Wolffed
The president should have known better. Michael Wolff does not mess around.
www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/01/04/donald-trump-michael-wolff-book-216245
I’m not the only one to arrive at that observation. On Twitter today, Roger Ailes biographer Gabriel Sherman wrote, “One of the baffling things about Trumpworld giving access to Wolff: all they needed to do was call Murdoch and he would have said don’t cooperate b/c Wolff had written nasty book on him. And Jared/Trump speak to Murdoch all the time!”
Six minutes later, Wolff tweeted back at Sherman, “I kept waiting for that call to be made.”
Why wasn’t the call made as Wolff began collecting string for Fire and Fury, his new book about the Trump White House? The simple answer is that Wolff appears to have mastered a journalistic skill that allows him to suck up one moment and then, when seated at the keyboard, to spit out.
This technique was fully displayed in his Murdoch book, which both accepts the media tyrant on his own terms and demolishes him (as I noted in my review). That book grew out of Wolff’s sympathetic and sometimes flattering account of Murdoch’s takeover of the Wall Street Journal in the September 2007 Vanity Fair. Perhaps confusing Wolff’s positive take with an offer of eternal supplication, Murdoch gave the writer an all-access pass to his operation. How all-access was it? In the book’s acknowledgments, Wolff wrote, “None of this would have been possible without the singular cooperation of this book’s subject, who not only was (mostly) a patient and convivial interviewee but opened every door I asked him to open.” Wolff also extended thanks to Murdoch business executives and family members for honoring the old man’s request that they cooperate.
Murdoch’s high regard for his Boswell ended as soon as the book was finished. A few weeks before its official release, the mogul lacerated Wolff and his publisher for the book’s alleged inaccuracies. “It contains some extremely damaging misstatements of fact which I will be happy to point out to you if we could meet. Otherwise I will have no option other than to speak to Random House,” Murdoch emailed Wolff.
[...]That Murdoch got suckered by Wolff says volumes about Murdoch’s naiveté. But the fact that Trump got suckered by Wolff a decade after his frequent telephone companion Murdoch got suckered says even more. Did Trump never ask Murdoch about Wolff? (If that’s the case, Murdoch would have very good reason to have called Trump a “fucking idiot,” as Wolff reports.) How can it be that Murdoch never volunteered to Trump in one of their phone calls that Wolff would smile in his face but ultimately stab him? Wolff’s penetration of the White House presents two equally damning conclusions about Trump—that’s he’s too much of an egoist to care who might be loitering around the White House, gathering string on him, and that he’s too incurious about the world to spot a potential danger to his presidency.