Siege: Trump Under Fire

Michael Wolff gets a lot of side-eye from other Washington journalists, having garnered a reputation for playing fast and loose with facts and embracing gossip without too much compunction. (Making him perhaps the most journalist most fitted to covering Donald Trump.) And, indeed, as Wolff has had to say in a number of press interviews for the book, Siege aims more to “tell a story” and “paint a picture” than parse facts. But if conjuring an impression of the White House was the goal, Siege amply achieves it–Wolff depicts a morass of scoundrels, incompetents, disloyal hangers-on and opportunists, and the extreme dysfunction that inevitably occurs when they attempt to govern a nation. But most vivid of all is the inescapable reality that Donald Trump, according to most anyone who knows him, works with him, or simply happens to encounter him, is an idiot. Not only does he not read, according to Wolff’s informants, he can’t even focus enough to be told about issues and policy.

In all, Wolff’s book makes for extremely juicy gossip and may paint more of a picture than recount a precise history. And it becomes extraordinarily clear that Steve Bannon is the primary source of Wolff’s info and may (okay, absolutely does) have an agenda. But the book is compulsively readable and variously hilarious and horrifying in the tales it tells.