In the Shadow of the White House Reviews
W ho'south afraid of Donald Trump? All of us, according to the CBS News contributor Major Garrett, who believes that we wait his adjacent tweeted bluster with "frenzied dread". The squalling baby with the nuclear toy box would exist gratified past Garrett's phrase, and indeed Bob Woodward's Fright: Trump in the White House (Simon and Schuster £xx)takes its championship from Trump's claim in an interview that ability depends on frightening people.
Nonetheless in Woodward's meticulous business relationship of office intrigues, the president's men don't seem to exist trembling with fright. What they mostly feel is antipathy for Trump or pity for his ignorance and the "teenage logic" of his obsessively vented grievances. Hence their deft "authoritative insurrection d'état": past purloining documents from Trump's desk-bound or slow-walking his intemperate orders, his aides have finer benched him.
That suits their indolent boss, who is free to spotter goggle box, eat hot dogs and swill downward Diet Coke during what his diary-keepers euphemise as "executive fourth dimension". Periodically, he is wheeled out to sign bills he hasn't read, with jagged penmanship that resembles an overexcited seismograph merely "looks authoritative in black Magic Marker". Told by his ideologues that he's a populist, he mangles the word and says: "I love that. That'due south what I am, a popularist."
Woodward's book really suggests that for Trump, power is not fright only obscenity. The discussions that Woodward'due south sources have helped him to reconstruct are filthily cloacal or grossly sexual. Debates virtually policy are conducted in expletives. The nuclear bargain with Islamic republic of iran, Trump declares, is "shitty". Other problems are categorised equally "bullshit" or "horseshit", while arguments are "ripshit".
Trump, mocking the Obama administration for its genderless bathrooms, looks out at a world barn by "shithole countries" whose inhabitants don't expect Norwegian. Unable to use a computer, he blusters against "cyber shit".
"My guy does non talk in lawmaking," Trump'due south lawyer warns some geeky colleagues. No, he talks in curses and phallic insults. Trump describes Obama as "a weak dick", and HR McMaster responds with a rhyme by calling Trump himself "a prick". Steve Bannon testifies that "I reached out and sucked Reince Priebus's dick" – metaphorically, I assume. Engagements with adversaries are sweatily homosocial. "Man versus man. Me versus Kim," grunts Trump, before boasting with a puffed-up capital letter of the alphabet that he has "a bigger nuclear Push button" than "fiddling Rocket Man". "Nosotros got screwed," he complains most a Chinese trade deal. Banning pre-op transgendered troops, he rages: "What the fuck? They're getting clipped", which Woodward explains as "a rough reference to gender reassignment surgery".
Trump tells Mueller's investigators to "go fuck themselves", and he bombs Syria as a way of saying "Fuck you lot" to Assad. To Putin, I suspect, he might submissively murmur "Fuck me": he is all-powerful on Twitter, where his threats disappear into empty air, just quakes when confronted past the despots he reveres as truthful alpha males.
When he screeches "Pull the fucking thing out!" it's a relief to learn that he'southward referring to an anti-missile organisation. Despite Woodward's title, it's Trump who seems agape – of a job that he can't practice, of the directorate who outwit him, and of imminent legal consequences.
The antidote to fright is loathing. The two were inextricably linked past the satirist Hunter S Thompson, whose spirit Ben Fountain invokes in his blazingly vituperative account of Trump'southward rise, Beautiful Country Burn Once again (Canongate £12.99). Whereas Woodward makes no attempt to characterise Trump, treating him equally a shapeless chaos, always "moving in both directions", Fountain skewers the homo by fixing on his semi-human concrete repulsiveness: he has a caput like "a Terminator battering-ram", the white-circled eyes of a skulking raccoon, and skin equanimous of "kiln colours – brick cherry, hot pink, burnt orangish, a palette keyed to his flame-thrower lick of hair". Trump is later defined as a "bog monster", the product of America's "masturbatory fantasies", who has prevailed because "fright is the herpes of American politics".
By contrast with this eruption of poetic rage, Sean Spicer in The Briefing (Biteback £twenty) gives a masochistically feeble account of his few hapless months in the White Firm press office. He doesn't even blame Trump for pettily excluding him from an audience at the Vatican, when the fervently Catholic Spicer hoped the pope would bless some olive-woods rosary beads for his poor widowed mum. He does embellish the orange ogre's myth past likening him to a unicorn – a tribute to Trump'south fabulosity, or a way of hinting that he is indecently horny?
Spicer, a Republican hack who has made a career out of being a spokesman for the unspeakable, says as little as possible most his sometime boss, and has piddling of interest to say about annihilation else. When invited on to Trump'south campaign plane he appraises the "spotless brass accents" of the Boeing 757'southward decor, and so concentrates on tallying its altitude. "We lifted upward in the air, 5,000, 10,000, 20,000 anxiety," he writes in what must be the dumbest sentence in a vacuous book. At least this vouches for Spicer's ability to count, which seems to desert him when he claims that "the 14th flooring of Trump Tower was simply one flight of stairs above the 5th flooring". I blinked at this, so did some research. Yes, Trump blithely eliminated eight lower floors so that his tower's acme levels could take higher numbers, allowing him to increase the hire; and when he refers to the building, he also habitually adds an actress 10 floors to compensate for the acme of the atrium, which is every bit lofty as his teased hairdo. Even architecturally, the man is an unregenerate liar.
Spicer claims to suffer from "Cosmic guilt", so he must live in dread of the purgatorial flames after the months he spent lying for Trump. Mayhap his flushed face and flustered stuttering in the press room evinced spiritual anguish every bit well as embarrassment. Aware that his immortal soul was at risk, he read a daily extract from "the book Jesus Calling" before he faced the reporters; he also conscientiously chewed Orbit cinnamon gum throughout his briefings – a masticated Hail Mary to cleanse a mouth that was the channel for and then many damnable untruths?
More fearless than Spicer, Trump's ejected aide Omarosa Manigault Newman sashays in for the impale in Unhinged (Simon & Schuster £twenty). Despite protestations of indignation almost Trump'due south racism, her quarrel with him is not ideological. Her book is an assassination, all the more than deftly executed considering Omarosa – whom Trump's befuddled abet Rudy Giuliani calls Amarosa, which is definitely a misnomer – learned near treachery by studying Trump. Cast equally the villain on his reality evidence The Apprentice, she remodelled herself as "a female person version of him". In the view of this rampant alter ego, Trump is at one time infantile and senescent, a pampered creature of uncensored id whose brain hardly adult before information technology was rotted past the 44,000 cans of Diet Coke he has then far swilled. "Mental decline", as Omarosa judges, is accompanied by moral debility: she calls Trump "Twitter Fingers", then watches his tiny hands unpaternally stray "low on Ivanka's hips". Having broken all the rules of governmental propriety, is he capable of outraging a cardinal taboo?
Omarosa'south bad-mouthing has a righteous tinge: she recently got religion and is now an ordained Baptist minister. "To God be the celebrity!" is her book's last line. I assume the glorification she refers to is the gloss and glitz of her celebrity status, with profits as proof of divine favour. When she deserts her flock for a "total Trump detox" on Celebrity Big Blood brother, she relishes "being sequestered away from the world": ignoring the omnipresent cameras, she makes Big Bro's panopticon sound like a nunnery.
The deity is besides stealthily at work in the machinations of pious Mike Pence, who as Michael d'Antonio and Peter Eisner argue in The Shadow President (St Martin's Press £16.99) affects humility while he counts the days to Trump's removal and his ain accession. Pence's religiosity, an onetime associate comments, is an alibi for his fiendishly determined ambition. In Mr Trump'due south Wild Ride (All Points Books £22.99) Major Garrett observes that Trump'south legal dangers and legislative impotence mean that his supporters are left with merely his "mania – the last, inexhaustible commodity". Trump is finer a nihilist, who now rants about possible impeachment to ratchet up the drama of his downfall. By dissimilarity, Pence is a cold-blooded man of principle, or of what d'Antonio and Eisner call "evil principles", fixated on the transformation of licentious, liberty-loving America into a theocratic police land. "Be afraid, be very afraid," Omarosa whispered to a Big Blood brother confidant, anticipating Woodward's refrain every bit she reflected on the menace of the deputy she called "the Stepford Veep".
Garrett remembers Newt Gingrich, another sanctimonious political twister, quoting Rilke to justify Trump'south antics: "If you lot take away my demons, will the angels leave likewise?" The same supernatural forces are at play in Woodward's book, where Bannon discerns "the hand of God" in Trump'south ballot while Priebus describes the solitary bedroom where he does his unsupervised tweeting as "the devil'south workshop".
Ben Fountain accuses America of schizophrenia, as red and bluish states or white and black races tug the matrimony apart; I'd say that the land is embroiled as usual in a Manichean battle betwixt Eden and Armageddon, puritanism and decadence, with Pence and God on ane side and the vii deadly but succulent capitalistic sins embodied past Trump on the other. Better the devil nosotros know than the holy hypocrite who's next in line?
Fright: Trump in the White House past Bob Woodward is published by Simon & Schuster (£twenty). To order a copy for £17.20 go to guardianbookshop.com or phone call 0330 333 6846. Free United kingdom p&p over £10, online orders merely. Telephone orders min p&p of £i.99
Beautiful Country Burn down Once more by Ben Fountain is published by Canongate (£12.99). To society a copy for £xi.17 go to guardianbookshop.com or phone call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Telephone orders min p&p of £1.99
The Briefing by Sean Spicer is published by Biteback (£20). To order a copy for £17.20 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Costless UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
Unhinged by Omarosa Manigault Newman is published by Simon & Schuster (£xx). To social club a copy for £17.xx go to guardianbookshop.com or telephone call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £x, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £i.99
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/16/fear-trump-in-white-house-bob-woodward-briefing-sean-spicer-review
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