Prohibited from tweeting, Trump still has Michael Wolff as his megaphone. Landslide is Wolff’s third book in as many years on a man he despises but whose absurd antics he can’t help enjoying. Other Trump chroniclers worry about his glowering autocratic menace or his haphazard approach to governance. For Wolff, who began his career on the Hollywood Reporter, not the Washington Post, such liberal qualms are secondary. He sees Trump not as a political phenomenon but as the monstrous spawn of showbiz and PR – an exhibitionistic performer whose only talent is for self-advertisement and who, like many other celebrities, has made a career out of behaving badly.
Wolff shrugs that Trump is “nutso” and regards his calamitous administration as a “shitshow”. Despite this nihilistic frivolity, Wolff’s attitude matches that of his subject. Trump presided at meetings in the Oval Office as if he were Jeremy Kyle with access to nuclear weapons, fomenting conflict between his advisers and sitting back to smirk as they duked it out. Contentedly watching the insurrection of 6 January on television, he marvelled at the horned, kilted, war-painted crazies running amok in the Capitol and said “It’s like Let’s Make a Deal”, a gameshow in which the audience dresses in zany costumes to catch the host’s eye.
As Wolff sees it, Trump’s sheer cluelessness absolves him of blame. He never had a plan for his term of office, and in the absence of intention how can he be accountable for the consequences of his blundering actions and bloviating words? As a self-contradicting agent of chaos, he is – as Wolff shockingly declares – “an innocent”. Wolff even validates Trump’s preening sense of his own beautified or beatified aura by suggesting that he has “charisma in the Christian sense”.
Wolff’s jocular irresponsibility causes him one or two remorseful twinges. The Murdochs and Trump, he says, were locked in a marriage that was “quite sadomasochistic”, and Wolff is just as dependent on the man he so entertainingly and lucratively abuses. Although Fox News was “the foundation of the Trump movement”, Rupert Murdoch considers Trump to be “a fucking idiot” and on election night the network took its revenge by prematurely declaring that Biden had won the crucial state of Arizona. Populism is oxygenated by tabloids and trash-talking cable channels, and at a loftier level Trump’s liberal critics are his inadvertent enablers, because they keep him lodged in our overwrought brains. Wolff is exasperated by the determination of the Democrats to impeach Trump all over again after 6 January, even though they knew that a conviction would be voted down in the Senate; he concludes that they did so because “everybody existed, still, in a relationship to Donald Trump. Hence, without him, you might not exist.” Quite so – and neither would Wolff have been contracted to complete his trilogy of cataclysmic tattle.
Wolff tartly comments on the “semi-ironic and nakedly opportunistic motives” of Steve Bannon, who helped create Trump and then helped Wolff to destroy him by acting as a behind-the-scenes informant, after which Bannon slithered back into favour and obtained a presidential pardon for his alleged fraud. Wolff, blithely unselfconscious, possesses the same duplicity. Granted an interview with Trump, he confides that he is going to call his book about the election and its aftermath Landslide, and is “only slightly concerned that he might read the irony”. Yes, Trump was too dumb to realise that the title refers not to the landslide victory he claims to have won last November but to the mountain of obloquy that has slid downhill to bury him. Yet Wolff can’t afford to sneer at the cynical double-dealing of Bannon or Murdoch. He needs access, while Trump – who previously threatened to sue Wolff but now flatters him as “the most powerful reporter” – needs an outlet; each satisfies the other. Sadist and masochist are so intertwined that they merge in a sickly coital embrace.
Given Trump’s desire to monopolise our attention, I was pleased to find that he’s almost upstaged here by one of his brown-nosing flunkies. In a farcical subplot, Rudy Giuliani signs on as a catastrophically inept fixer and a supplier of useless legal advice. I thought I knew everything about Giuliani’s bodily emissions – the black hair dye that courses down his face like molten lava when he sweats, the drivel that bubbles from his lips when he talks – but Wolff tunes in to another effusive orifice. Giuliani has the habit, as Wolff delicately puts it, of “passing gas”, and White House aides are seen retreating in alarm: if you can catch Covid from a sneeze or a cough, why not from an un-smothered fart? Perhaps those rippling detonations were Giuliani’s act of homage to his boss, a sort of anal hip-hip-hooray: in certain Welsh and English regions, to trump means to break wind.
The closest Wolff comes to reckoning with the damage done by these unhinged buffoons is in a couple of mock-epic slurs. “The Cartesian world had ended,” he says of a “paranoid, hallucinogenic, and ludicrous” press conference held by Giuliani. “This wasn’t Shakespeare,” he remarks of Trump’s downfall, which involved no “transformational moment” of self-revaluation. After his interview with Trump – which is actually an irrational, impenitent stream of consciousness, the aural equivalent of Giuliani’s seeping hair dye – Wolff leaves him enthroned in the tacky splendour of his Florida country club. “But would he stay there?” asks the final sentence. The question is a double tease, though now it’s Wolff who seems unaware of the irony. Trump may be bluffing about another presidential campaign in 2024; Wolff, however, must be itching for a chance to turn his bestselling trilogy into a tetralogy.