Jan Articles

In How Dare You, I described the fact that nearly a year into Trump’s presidency, his opposition still has
not come to terms with the fact that he did actually win the election:

The larger issue here is that those who would consider themselves our cultural betters have affixed to
their beliefs the status of The Truth, by fiat. What is accomplished by this is the elevation of what really
are mere opinions to base maxims of the sort that are the foundation of the country, thus in theory
unassailable.

And so when Trump disagrees with this or that leftist talking point, and vehemently to boot, there is a
collective shock that permeates the commentariat. How dare Trump express views which aren’t in
agreement with the one Truth that is Leftism in all its forms? How dare Taylor Swift not instantly
condemn Trump despite having no reason to voice an opinion, and furthermore how dare Taylor Swift
disagree when she is declared to be a white supremacist? How dare Sidney Crosby, a white man, turn up
to the White House to accept praise from Trump?

The fact that leftism has gone without a real challenge for multiple decades, and in particular through
the Obama years, has rendered the nascent Trump era to be nothing short of a hammer blow through
the sensibilities of most leftists. Many still haven’t come to terms with the fact that Trump really is the
president, and more fundamentally that the Leftist Truth is not held as such by a YUGE swath of America.

The recent excitement over Michael Wolff’s new book, Fire and Fury, purporting to be an inside look at
the Trump White House is further evidence that the failure to come to terms with Trump 45 is as
prevalent as ever. Indeed, it seems that Trump Derangement Syndrome has reached levels that
shouldn’t be possible. In the past week, this book has been endlessly covered in the mainstream media,
with Wolff himself doing interviews with basically every network and media publication to drum up the
hype, which has been bolstered by stories of how the book has been flying off the shelves in record
time.

President Trump has unsurprisingly said less than favorable things about the book, and in fairness it
does have much in the way of logical inconsistencies. For a start, it puts forth the popular leftist fiction
that Trump really didn’t want to be president. Wolff’s ‘evidence’ for this is the fact that Trump actually
ran an outsider’s claim, as opposed to doing things the way a career politician would. He writes:

The Trump campaign had, perhaps less than inadvertently, replicated the scheme from Mel Brooks’s The
Producers. In that classic, Brooks’s larcenous and dopey heroes, Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom, set out
to sell more than 100 percent of the ownership stakes in the Broadway show they are producing. Since
they will be found out only if the show is a hit, everything about the show is premised on its being a flop.
Accordingly, they create a show so outlandish that it actually succeeds, thus dooming our heroes.
[…]

The Trump calculation, quite a conscious one, was different. The candidate and his top lieutenants
believed they could get all the benefits of almost becoming president without having to change their
behavior or their fundamental worldview one whit: we don’t have to be anything but who and what we
are, because of course we won’t win.

Many candidates for president have made a virtue of being Washington outsiders; in practice, this
strategy merely favors governors over senators. Every serious candidate, no matter how much he or she
disses Washington, relies on Beltway insiders for counsel and support. But with Trump, hardly a person in
his innermost circle had ever worked in politics at the national level—his closest advisers had not worked
in politics at all. Throughout his life, Trump had few close friends of any kind, but when he began his
campaign for president he had almost no friends in politics. The only two actual politicians with whom
Trump was close were Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie, and both men were in their own way peculiar and
isolated. And to say that he knew nothing—nothing at all—about the basic intellectual foundations of
the job was a comic understatement. Early in the campaign, in a Producers-worthy scene, Sam Nunberg
was sent to explain the Constitution to the candidate: “I got as far as the Fourth Amendment before his
finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head.”

Almost everybody on the Trump team came with the kind of messy conflicts bound to bite a president or
his staff.

In short, Wolff is perplexed at the fact that Trump was genuine, a trait foreign to those who work in
journalism and politics. According to Wolff’s logic, the measure of Trump as a ‘serious candidate’ would
have been his reliance on hundreds of ‘experts’ who would have run he was to utter in public through
carefully curated focus groups so as to craft a message which statistically had the best shot of winning.

Because Trump didn’t do this, he must not have wanted to win. So what was his endgame? Well, Wolff
has the answer:

He wasn’t going to win! Or losing was winning.

Trump would be the most famous man in the world—a martyr to crooked Hillary Clinton.
His daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared would have transformed themselves from relatively obscure
rich kids into international celebrities and brand ambassadors.
Steve Bannon would become the de facto head of the Tea Party movement.
Kellyanne Conway would be a cable news star.
Reince Priebus and Katie Walsh would get their Republican Party back.
Melania Trump could return to inconspicuously lunching.

That was the trouble-free outcome they awaited on November 8, 2016. Losing would work out for
everybody.
Shortly after eight o’clock that evening, when the unexpected trend—Trump might actually win—seemed
confirmed, Don Jr. told a friend that his father, or DJT, as he called him, looked as if he had seen a ghost.
Melania, to whom Donald Trump had made his solemn guarantee, was in tears—and not of joy.

There was, in the space of little more than an hour, in Steve Bannon’s not unamused observation, a
befuddled Trump morphing into a disbelieving Trump and then into a quite horrified Trump. But still to
come was the final transformation: suddenly, Donald Trump became a man who believed that he
deserved to be and was wholly capable of being the president of the United States.

According to Wolff, Trump was after fame, despite already having reached the pinnacle of it. He had
already been a worldwide celebrity for 40 years, and indeed it was his 100% name recognition that got
him in the door in the first place.

According to Wolff, Ivanka and Jared were destined to become ‘international celebrities’ (although
Ivanka already was) and brand ambassadors for a brand which Trump knowingly sacrificed by virtue of
his campaign not being politically correct, rather highlighting Ugly Truths in a world which is addicted to
Pretty Lies.

According to Wolff, Trump ran so that Steve Bannon (who was a Ted Cruz guy until Trump brought him
on board in August of 2016, after Trump had won the Republican nomination) could lead the Tea Party
movement, a movement which had been largely irrelevant for years, and whose adherents were mostly
NeverTrumpers until Trump won the general election.

According to Wolff Trump ran so that Kellyanne Conway (who like Bannon was a Cruz supporter until
late on) would achieve media superstardom, despite having consistently been in the political media for
20 odd years at that point.

In other words, Donald Trump spent two years of his life and millions of his own money, flying endless
miles around the country to give rally after rally (including 24 stops in 10 states over the final week of
the campaign, including a 6 rally 6 state final 24 hours in which each 90 minute speech seemed to have
more energy than the last), all the while enduring incessant bad press from the chattering classes which
incited hatred in huge parts of the electorate, all so he could lose.

But alas, fate would not let him lose. The narrative Wolff advances of Trump’s campaign beings o bad
and inept that it could only be understood as trying to lose then makes the campaign of Hillary Clinton
look that much worse. It also renders the idea that a man trying to lose would then conspire with Russia
so that he won. These basic discrepancies in logic mean little to those with an anti-Trump agenda, for
whom the book is seen in good standing simply because it is written in the right spirit, as opposed to
being factually accurate.
With respect to Clinton, it was people of Wolff’s ilk, namely the entire media and political class, who
kept telling us that Hillary Clinton was the most qualified candidate in the history of mankind. Surely she
should be capable of defeating all ‘serious candidates,’ let alone a man who was actively trying to lose.

However, this is the same class which, in recent days fell for an exquisite troll which advanced a fake
excerpt from Fire and Fury detailing Trump’s wishes to have ‘The Gorilla Channel’ installed on White
House television so he could indulge in his pastime of marveling over gorilla combat for hours on end.

That so many were fooled by this highlights the eagerness of Trump’s opposition to believe anything
that paints Trump as a bumbling idiot while exposing the fact that Fire and Fury is little more than a
dispenser of such fantasy pills for the willing consumer.