Why Trump Survives the Political Nuke That Is The 'Fire & Fury' Tell-All

Why Trump Survives the Political Nuke That Is The 'Fire & Fury' Tell-All
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“Hail Hydra!” Late in the game, spoiler alert, we learn that the virtuous former Secretary of State Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford, who always had the protagonist role in the classic ‘70s conspiracy thrillers) is the big bad secretly running the neo-fascist Hydra organization inside SHIELD in ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier.’

“Hail Hydra!” Late in the game, spoiler alert, we learn that the virtuous former Secretary of State Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford, who always had the protagonist role in the classic ‘70s conspiracy thrillers) is the big bad secretly running the neo-fascist Hydra organization inside SHIELD in ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier.’

Marvel Studios

So the amazing Michael Wolff book based on his figurative fly-on-the-wall access in and around the Trump White comes out and it’s an absolute sensation. After trying and failing to prevent its publication, and amusingly issuing threats about non-disclosure agreements — as if they could apply to public officials — Il Duce Donald is driven to even greater distraction over the weekend, twittering nerve-wrackingly about being a “very stable genius.”

Trump looked and sounded even more ridiculous. And his allies’ efforts to knock down the credibility of Wolff’s portrayal produced only the thin gruel of a relative handful of minor errors; copy-editing stuff, really. (Not that I buy substantial parts of what Wolff is saying, which we’ll get to.)

The New York media columnist, a clever guy whose chutzpah in hanging in the Trump scene has my deep respect, crowed that his book will destroy the misbegotten presidency.

But the two only public polls covering the publication period show results similar to those before the book’s publication. Gallup a little lower than I think Trump is and Rasmussen a little higher, just as usual.

And the only guy whose career is actually destroyed is erstwhile White House chief strategist/Breitbart News chairman Steve Bannon. His red hot grassroots adherents hate hearing about the fecklessness and weirdly pro-Kremlin duplicities of TrumpWorld. And his billionaire backers have bounced him from Breitbart.

What’s up with that? Well, yo, the red hots wanna hear what they wanna hear. They love that all that stuff is coming from the White House occupied for eight years by the despised first black president. It’s an extremely empowering experience for them, even if Trump is really doing nothing of actual importance for them.

And the billionaires? Well, hey, Trump is POTUS. Even if he is a silly blatherer, he can do plenty for them. He already has with that “tax reform” bill he signed. And the regulatory discretion he can grant is priceless.

One would think that Bannon, Wolff’s principal source and enabler, would have more clearly grasped it all.

Not that Trump is not in worse repute with folks outside his vast but decidedly minority reactionary base. The weight of evidence on display is just too much.

But that, ironically, is also the problem for the book. It’s all a bit too much. Way too much the Alec Baldwin ‘Saturday Night Live’ version of Trump.

I’m a longtime Baldwin fan — he was the perfect Jack Ryan, not to mention quite a good writer — but his Trump sucks. The reason his Trump sucks is that it’s just so buffoonish.

Trump is a know-nothing, an erratic megalomaniac as I've been saying/warning since summer 2015. But he is a very shrewd know-nothing. That’s why he won.

Trump wowed a vast reactionary base and was clever enough to mess up the overconfident and deeply compromised Hillary Clinton just as the contradictions of Clintonism were finally coming home to roost.

As longtime readers know, I wondered repeatedly throughout the campaign if Trump was afraid of being president. He repeatedly blew opportunities to take command of the race. What Bannon and the others in the last command crew to board the train did, as I feared they would, was succeed in focusing Trump on his clever stuff just long enough and at just the right time to barely win the election.

Wolff writes that he was told that Trump and company expected to lose by perhaps six percentage points. Someone may well have told Wolff that, but it’s ridiculous.

I had the race as a toss-up in my election eve column. (I seriously considered predicting a Trump win, but was dissuaded by two elite Democrats who strongly felt Hillary could narrowly hang on. They’re still around, so it’s clear I’ve never been an assassin.)

Of course, the election did in its way end up “up in the air,” with Hillary winning the popular vote by two percent, thanks to California, and Trump eking out narrow wins in a few states to form an electoral college majority.

Wolff also overreaches with his insistence that Trump shows early signs of dementia. If he was that blithering, he would have lost. He was certainly seen enough in public, since he campaigned in public half as much again as Hillary did.

Wolff’s overreaching made it easy for Trump to refute the notion today with his hour-long public “negotiation” session with leaders of both parties on immigration. He looked well enough not to be a real embarrassment.

It’s a low bar, to be sure. But when you set expectations so low, as Wolff and most of the media did, don’t act surprised when Trump surmounts them.

No, the only way to finish Trump in something like this is to trip him up personally. Get him to say the equivalent of “Hail Hydra!,” to borrow the famous phrase from the Marvel universe.

And even then, his base supporters — recall that upwards of 40 percent of Americans back Creationism over science — are so hard core that many would excuse him.

Confrontations like the one between condescending CNN host Jake Tapper and robotic Trump hack Stephen Miller? That does nothing to move the needle.

Not that Trump should get too comfy. He has made some very big mistakes. Why else do he and his people keep getting caught telling lies?

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