Thank you for allowing Michael Wolff into your inner circle for eighteen months so that he could chronicle in Fire and Fury how hard you work day and night to make Publius great (again).
Wolff took a year and a half and did over 200 interviews. Even with all this effort, however, Fire and Fury never gets beyond Publius’ single 1,345-word post of September 12, 2016: Dumb Don. Wolf reinforces Dumb Don line-by-line. While readers will learn nothing of substance from Wolff that is not in Publius, the sheer volume of hilarious insider detail puts a laugh in every paragraph. Wolff’s book is a blast.
Wolff began his demolition of our “very stable genius” in May 2016, five months after Publius published Learning to Count With Don Trump in which Publius began his exposé of Don’s massive intellectual insufficiencies.
Fire and Fury painstakingly illustrates Dumb Don’s entire team failing Publius’ Trump Management Protocol (TruMP) test every minute of every day. The result is sidesplitting, a must-read. Every paragraph is another wonderful TruMP twist, all of them real howlers.
Chapter One shows Steve Bannon as an ignorant, inconsistent, incoherent neophyte. His crash since, entirely predictable. In Chapter Two, Don reconfirms his Kremlingate culpability with “Jared has this.” Wow!
There are a few grammar mistakes. “Staff” is incorrectly pluralized. The verb “to construct” is used as a noun. A couple of times. There are split infinitives that do not meet Fowler’s Dictum (“an ugly thing” said Fowler). Number agreement drifts off line here and there, there are several wayward “quites” and some sentences end in prepositions. Past and present tenses often wander.
Wolff also writes about the “left” in American politics when, as we all know, there are no half-decent leftists in the U.S. Bernie Sanders claims to be a socialist but ran for President as a Democrat. The U.S. political spectrum runs from slightly right-of-center Democrats like Hilary Clinton to the pretty far right in a vast spectrum of parties, factions and groups.
Wolff also makes elementary mistakes like, “In the liberal world view, diversity was an absolute good.” Liberals know that diversity = market share = money. That’s what liberals like about diversity. It makes them money. Diversity provides the U.S. with one of its key Ricardian trade advantages. Japan refuses liberal diversity and all of its major consumer brands have been wiped from the world stage as a result.
Wolff goes on to call liberals “cosseted.” But, liberalism is all about the state assuring that markets are open and transparent enough to give everyone a shot at wealth creation, whether it’s buying a house or starting a gigacorp. Nothing cosseted about being stuck in the center of roiling market forces!! As Wolff must know because his work is chronicling the salacious lives of the rich and famous, only the Establishment can be cosseted because that is the purpose of its wealth.
The question is not whether Fire and Fury is, as White House policy adviser Stephen Miller told CNN, a “garbage book.” On this, Publius has Miller hand tied. For two years, Publius has carefully locked Dumb Don into a well-defined box of Don’s mindless flailing. If Miller can’t unlock Publius' box, he can’t touch Wolff.
So, Stephen Miller, Publius’ challenge to you: unlock this! As soon as you try to unlock Don from Publius' box, like translating Don's spectacular twelve-mistake Trumplish sentence of August 15, 2016 into English, you will send him into (yes) a fury. He will humiliate you endlessly. He will (ouch) fire you. And ruin your future. So, as we say in New York, gah head!!
The real question about Fire and Fury is why the White House allowed Miller’s “highly discredible (sic) author” to, as Wolff says, “occupy a “semi-permanent seat on a couch in the West Wing” for so long. What was he doing there? Who authorized his security clearance?
In allowing Wolff to do his usual work, Dumb Don got exactly what he was planning on getting. So why dump all over Wolff? Miller should be defending Dumb Don’s “very stable genius” in making his decision to give Wolff a free hand. Love it!
(Grammar note to Stephen Miller: “Discredible” is not a word. If you meant “discreditable,” the word does not apply to a person but to what a person does. Where did these people go to school?)
Dumb Don, Publius offers you a chance to break out of Publius’ box and prove that you are, as you said of yourself in response to Wolff, a “very stable genius.” You will sit a standard, three-hour, fourth year university exam at a location of Publius' choice. There will be three questions: one each on foreign, domestic and economic issues. The answers will require a detailed knowledge of history. You will be given fifty pages of foolscap and three pens. You will write the answers by hand and they must be legible. You will write alone and unaided. The exam will be proctored. Your answers will also be marked for English grammar and composition skills. All the media will be invited to watch.
Because Publius has already sat Dumb Don down for an exam on brand, he has a very, very good idea of how Don will do. Don did not understand the question—he could not read it himself and had to ask his assistant to read it out loud to him—and even then had to call one of his managers to figure out what he was being asked. The manager, knowing Don’s limitations, fudged. Don failed spectacularly.
How bizarre is this: Had Don passed Publius’ brand exam which was about leveraging Sybil Ludington to his advantage, it is likely that he would have won the popular vote going away in 2016. Instead he had to rely on a humiliating 0.05% of the popular vote to give him the Electoral College while he lost the total vote by over three million. He came into office crippled and has remained so since. Happy Alabama.
Also, it appears that Publius is the only person ever to slam Don down in front of several hundred people. Don cowered—no kidding, he cowered—and he did not recover. As his son Eric said a year or so later, “the family will never forget.”
Dumb Don’s exam will be a lot of fun.
Follow Up
April 16, 2018
Having worked hard at making Publius great by vigorously promoting Fire and Fury, Dumb Don is now working on boosting sales of James Comey's new book, A Higher Loyalty. Once again, it appears from early reviews of Comey's book that you will get lots of salacious details but nothing material that you didn't learn here in September 12, 2016.
What is fascinating is Trump's assertion in a Tweet on November 11, 2012 at 5:56am that., "When someone attacks me, I always attack back ... except 100X more."
Not so.
Don would never attack Publius because he cannot read what is written here and his handlers would never dare try to explain it to him. He would not understand a word they said. He would thrash around like a nut and fire them. So in an age-old exercise of sauve qui peut, they just shut up and let the hits keep coming.
Publius’ Trump Management Protocol (TruMP) works both ways. Don cannot work his way out of it to control those who rip him to shreds. As Publius has with impunity for nearly two and a half years.
December 7, 2018
It took Fox News' Tucker Carlson two and a half years after he read Dumb Don's August 15, 2016 misfire on US security to admit want he has long known. He told Dei Weltwoche that Don is incapable of learning, let alone acting. Well done Tucker! You've deliberately mislead Fox audiences for years. Now tell them what they are supposed to do about this.