Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House
Michael Wolff
Political Documentary/Tell-All
310 pages
Published January 2018

It took me a while to get my hands on this one – I was watching the scandal around its release, and laughed my butt off when the publisher scorned Trump’s threats and published it early instead. My copy finally came in at the library, and I’ve been reading it off and on for the last couple of weeks. I normally read books far faster than that, and it’s not a long book, but I kept having to set it aside for numerous reasons.

It could have benefited from more thorough editing – between a couple of typos, some odd grammar, and a phrase being repeated twice in the same sentence (I think the sentence may have originally been broken across two pages, so no one realized, and then in the final formatting it was all together) – it definitely had some technical problems.

It was also just infuriating. Especially the beginning, where so many of the campaign staffers don’t think Trump SHOULD be president, but still campaign for him because it’s impossible that he could win, so what does it matter if they don’t think he should? That was incredibly frustrating to read.

Honestly there wasn’t a lot in this book that I didn’t already know, but I’ve been following politics pretty closely since early 2016. If you haven’t, and you’re looking for a good way to get up to date on current American politics, this could be a pretty good place to start. (Don’t stop at this book, though, there’s a lot that it doesn’t cover.)

I can’t say that anything really surprised me. Everything sounds like what I’ve come to expect from this administration. The book is decent, but anything terribly salacious from it has been pulled out and splashed across the news at this point, so if you’ve been paying attention, I don’t actually think it’s worth spending your time on. It’s certainly not the groundbreaking INSIDE LOOK THAT NO ONE’S SEEN HURRY AND READ IT that it was advertised as.

Incidentally, this works as a book title with alliteration for my PopSugar 2018 Reading Challenge.

From the cover of Fire and Fury:

With extraordinary access to the West Wing, Michael Wolff reveals what happened behind-the-scenes in the first nine months of the most controversial presidency of our time in Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.

Since Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th President of the United States, the country―and the world―has witnessed a stormy, outrageous, and absolutely mesmerizing presidential term that reflects the volatility and fierceness of the man elected Commander-in-Chief.

This riveting and explosive account of Trump’s administration provides a wealth of new details about the chaos in the Oval Office, including:
— What President Trump’s staff really thinks of him
— What inspired Trump to claim he was wire-tapped by President Obama
— Why FBI director James Comey was really fired
— Why chief strategist Steve Bannon and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner couldn’t be in the same room
— Who is really directing the Trump administration’s strategy in the wake of Bannon’s firing
— What the secret to communicating with Trump is
— What the Trump administration has in common with the movie The Producers

Never before in history has a presidency so divided the American people. Brilliantly reported and astoundingly fresh, Fire and Fury shows us how and why Donald Trump has become the king of discord and disunion.