Michael Wolff shows his nuclear button is 'bigger' and 'more powerful' than Trump's
The swirl of OMG surrounding Michael Wolff’s new book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” is unlike anything I’ve seen in politics. Ever. Sure, we’ve seen tell-all books and gasp-worthy revelations before from deep inside 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. But Wolff paints such a chaotic portrait of President Trump that we now know that the biggest nuclear button in the West Wing was the one on Wolff’s tape recorder.
The New York magazine adaptation of the book, whose publication was moved up to Jan. 5, went online on Wednesday. And its most damning paragraph (to me, anyway) involves a brutal assessment of the president’s abilities, incorporating details from former deputy chief of staff Katie Walsh.
As soon as the campaign team had stepped into the White House, Walsh saw, it had gone from managing Trump to the expectation of being managed by him. Yet the president, while proposing the most radical departure from governing and policy norms in several generations, had few specific ideas about how to turn his themes and vitriol into policy. And making suggestions to him was deeply complicated. Here, arguably, was the central issue of the Trump presidency, informing every aspect of Trumpian policy and leadership: He didn’t process information in any conventional sense. He didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-literate. He trusted his own expertise — no matter how paltry or irrelevant — more than anyone else’s. He was often confident, but he was just as often paralyzed, less a savant than a figure of sputtering and dangerous insecurities, whose instinctive response was to lash out and behave as if his gut, however confused, was in fact in some clear and forceful way telling him what to do. It was, said Walsh, “like trying to figure out what a child wants.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/michael-wolff-shows-his-nuclear-button-is-bigger-and-more-powerful-than-trumps/ar-BBHTXol?li=BBnb4R7&ocid=edgsp
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