President Trump famously threatened North Korea with “fire and fury” if it continued testing nuclear weapons and threatening to annihilate the United States. But North Korea called his bluff … repeatedly. Therefore, the irony cannot be lost even on this blowhard that he’s the one now wilting under Fire and Fury.
What’s more, this only validates prevailing criticisms about his thin skin. Because the fire and fury in this case stems not from the nuclear war Trump threatened but from a hit piece some author wrote.
Amidst the daily din of Donald Trump’s White House comes Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff’s tell-all, just in time for the first anniversary of the Trump inaugural. Like the ‘burn book’ in the movie ‘Mean Girls,’ Fire and Fury contains a toxic tale that singes all.
In Wolff’s telling, Trump World is cacophonous and dysfunctional.
(London Guardian, January 5, 2018)
Duh …
Yesterday, true to form, Trump had his lawyers threaten the publisher with, well, fire and fury if it proceeded with publication. Therefore, it can only add insult to his injured feelings that, despite this threat (or probably because of it), the publisher moved up the original publication date.
‘Due to unprecedented demand, we are moving the on-sale date for all formats of Fire and Fury, by Michael Wolff, to Friday, January 5, at 9 a.m. ET, from the current on-sale date of Tuesday, January 9,’ a Henry Holt spokeswoman told CNN Thursday afternoon.
(CNN, January 4, 2018)
As indicated above, this is just the latest in a litany of instances where someone called Trump’s bluff, showing time and again that his wuff is far worse than his bite.
He habitually ridicules other politicians as laughingstocks, and has even insinuated that every one of his predecessors made the country look foolish at one time or another. But this is just another manifestation of his psychopathology of projection, which I originally diagnosed in “Forget the Clinton Foundation. Shut Down the Trump Organization!” August 26, 2016. Because, frankly, Trump is the biggest laughingstock in the history of American politics, and no president ever made the country look more foolish than he does every day.
It’s certainly fair to call him a laughingstock for the ham-handed way he tried to stop the publication of this book. After all, not only did the publisher defy him in mocking fashion but the book has already become a #1 national bestseller to boot. Which is why you can bet your bottom dollar that not just other journalists but former aides are rushing to publish their equally explosive tell-all about the goings-on “Inside the Trump White House.”
In any event, here, in my own words, are 10 of the many salacious tidbits Wolff shares:
- Everyone in Trump’s administration thinks he’s a fool. Wolff documents “100 percent of them” calling him things like a “moron,” a “f*cking idiot,” “dumb as sh!t,” and “not only crazy … but stupid.”
- Gary Cohn, head of the president’s National Economic Council, has a viral e-mail in which he says of Trump and his White House, among other things, that: “It’s worse than you can imagine. An idiot surrounded by clowns. …Trump is less a person than a collection of terrible traits.”
- Melania is sensible enough to sleep in a separate bedroom from Trump. Rumor has it that this prick has a peanut for a dick. But it makes sense that she wouldn’t touch him even if he had a 10-inch pole … (This tidbit might be this “explosive” book’s only redeeming revelation.)
- Never mind his infamous seething over the size of his crowd, he spent his inauguration day pouting over the refusal of any notable celebrity to attend his inauguration.
- Nobody in Trump world, not even Trump himself, expected him to win. They all treated his presidential campaign as nothing more than a brand-building reality TV show, which could lead to other more lucrative TV and business opportunities.
- Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief political strategist, says that famous meeting Donald Jr and Kushner had with Russians in Trump Tower to get dirt on Hillary was not only “unpatriotic” but “treasonous.”
- Trump’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared have struck a two-for-one, Bill and Hillary-type bargain, which calls for Ivanka to become the first female president with Jared to follow. This clearly shows that Trump is not the only one in that family who suffers laughable delusions of grandeur. (To be fair, though, one can hardly blame them. After all, if Americans are stupid enough to elect him, why not them?)
- Trump has the intellectual curiosity of a donkey and the attention span of a gnat. His aides say he’s only semi-literate and is like a child who craves constant attention and needs immediate gratification.
- Trump is showing clear signs of early-stage dementia.
- Trump not only has a penchant for grabbing women by the pussy, he gets his kicks out of entrapping his friends’ wives to have sex with him.
Meanwhile, this book is causing the kind of shock and awe in Washington today that George W. Bush caused when he started raining real fire and fury down on Iraq in March 2003. Never mind that Trump demonstrated on a daily basis throughout his presidential campaign that he is as ignorant and arrogant as he is lecherous and mendacious.
This is why it’s so disingenuous that reporters and politicians are pretending to be “shocked, shocked” by Wolff’s revelations. As it happens, I’m on record imploring them to prevent Trump – by any means necessary – from ever getting within a mile of the White House. Here, for example, is what I wrote in “Humping Trump Exposes News Anchormen as Worse than Car Salesmen,” May 2, 2016.
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Remarkably, they report every single thing he says as ‘Breaking News,’ especially the Tourrete-like insults he hurls at other candidates. In fact, you had to have been living on Mars over the past year not to have his boorish punch lines ringing in your ear. …
The news media have become so focused on chasing profits that chasing news has become a distraction. …
Trump was probably right when he boasted that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, in broad daylight, and still get enough votes to win this nomination. … People, it seems, just want to be entertained — even in politics; and, the more gauche and scandalous the better. Hence the popularity of reality TV, the tabloidization of the news, and the rise of Trump — the impact on cultural development, or even the welfare of the country, be damned.
Accordingly … I am challenging prominent Republicans like Mitt Romney, Ted Cruz, and members of the #NeverTrump movement — who have publicly damned Trump as dangerous and utterly unfit to be president — to make a public show of endorsing Hillary, the presumptive Democratic nominee.
For, if ever there were a time to put love of country above loyalty to party, this is it; especially given reports that Trump’s signature trait is that he prizes loyalty not to country or party but to himself above all else.
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Still, I suppose there’s something to be said for having all of these concerns about Trump’s fitness to serve as president catalogued so comprehensively in one tabloid-style book.
I cannot overstate my disgust at watching so many Republican leaders betray their own principles to help Trump get elected. But they could find redemption in getting him out of that White House ASAP. I urge them to do so – by any means necessary – before he inflicts any more irreparable harm, not just on the United States but the entire world.
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