Michael Wolff's Book

The political news this week has been all about the contents of Michael Wolff's new book about the first year of the Trump administration. The picture painted therein is one of staggering incompetence, both on the part of the president and those around him. Indeed, the book itself would not have been possible without a profound misunderstanding by most of the Trump inner circle with regard to how reporting works and what statements are considered fair game.

Wolff himself is a person most often described by compound expressions containing the word "sleaze," but to his credit he has done something extraordinary in modern American politics. He has shown that he is willing to sacrifice the relationships he cultivated while writing the book in order to tell the real story. For most political reporters, these relationships are their livelihood, and great care is taken to abide by certain informal arrangements which prevent anything the source considers egregious from being published. It is an unusually sure bet that Wolff has burned those bridges, and in doing so closed the door on substantial future benefits for himself. His motives are still probably selfish - I imagine he prefers the glamor of being the guy who gave the administration the finger - but the choice involved sacrifice, and happens also to perform a valuable public service.

The reason that Wolff's book is a public service is because it makes inescapably clear, in compact form, what the body of reporting from the beginning of Trump's campaign has told us about the kind of person he really is. He is vain, insecure, and cheerfully ignorant of and uninterested in public policy, yet still obstinate in clinging to his whims in the face of counsel and evidence. He is unashamedly corrupt. He values loyalty over competence. He views his administration not in terms of the people who put him where he is or even the policy he seeks to enact, but in terms of himself. He is, in sum, a near-perfect approximation of the sort of person who ought not to occupy any public office, least of all the Presidency.

A number of powerful Republicans have willfully deceived themselves regarding Trump's fitness for the office he holds. In spite of his behavior, they have stuck by him because he has helped them win policy victories, because they are too cowardly to criticize a president still popular with their own base voters, and because cheering anything the other side hates has become second nature. But at certain moments - the Access Hollywood tape, the Corker feud, the Charlottesville response - their inner doubts have surfaced publicly in spite of themselves.

One effect that I hope the book will have is to strip the veneer of respectability from a position that pretends not to notice what has become painfully obvious - Trump as the President of the United States is a danger to himself and others. It would be a very long way from a solution to our problem, but certainly it would be a very welcome first step for everyone to finally acknowledge that the emperor is naked.