I wanted facts, not personality attack.I bought this book because I was intrigued and pretty excited to see what goes on in the White House behind the scenes. Look, I’m not a Trump fan, but the way the “author who had so much access to the White House” wrote this book was just sad and demeaning. He had so many really really nasty and brutal comments about Trump and nearly most of it I found myself questioning how on earth those “facts” could be true or how the author even found some of the information he did.
Like I get that you’re biased, but this was too hard for me to read. I mean he just bashes the president left and right and is relentless about it. I only ended up reading a few chapters and I really don’t plan on picking the book up again.Fire and Fury is a product of very bad reporting.
How did Michael Wolff ever get access?
I find it astonishing that anyone in a senior position in the White House, much less the president himself, would allow a man with Michael Wolff’s reputation as a scandal-monger to set foot in the place, let alone hang out with them for eighteen months. But Edward Helmore has an explanation (The Guardian, January 14, 2018): “After writing relatively positive profiles of Trump and Bannon for the Hollywood Reporter, Wolff joined the parade of job-seekers and ring-kissers at Trump Tower in the weeks after the astonishing election result. ‘I said to the president, “I’d love to come down and be an observer at the White House.” That’s when he thought I was asking for a job. I said, “No, no. I might want to write a book.” His face fell. He was completely uninterested. So I pressed a little. I’d really like to do it. So it was, “Yah, yah. OK sure.”’”
What’s missing from Wolff’s reporting
One more thing about the book: in any serious effort at political analysis or reporting, it’s customary to include notes, usually extensive ones, about the sources of the author’s information. There are no notes in Fire and Fury. Nor does Wolff date the conversations he reports having had or learned about. This is exceedingly sloppy reporting. The sheer lack of real documentation makes it mere sound and fury, signifying nothing we didn’t know already. All it really offers is the titillation of gossip, a confirmation of our darkest suspicions with a few juicy new details.

The creepy part is that Wolff is giving us just what Trump gives his base: mere assertions, rarely attributed to specific individuals. What we learn about those individuals makes them highly unreliable sources — and that makes Wolff himself the least reliable of all. It doesn’t help matters that the book was written rapidly and sloppily and received little copy editing; the text is full of omitted words and errors that escape spellchecking, like “differed” when he means “deferred.”
Someday, hopefully, very soon, we’ll get the real inside story, highly documented. Maybe it will come from some other journalist now toiling in obscurity, but more likely it will come from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s indictments and the evidence for them. It will be longer than Wolff’s book and less entertaining. But it will be factual — and likely far, far more shocking