Trump under fire, but he’s still standing

Steve Bannon underestimated his protege, Michael Wolff’s latest insider account reveals.

British Prime Minister Theresa May and US President Donald Trump earlier this month.

The orange baby blimp was airborne, the princes had made themselves scarce and Donald Trump was on his way to Windsor for tea with Her Majesty. You could say the US President was under “siege”. As Michael Wolff notes, just as the Queen was making small talk, back in Washington special counsel Robert Mueller was coolly indicting 12 Russians for hacking the Democrats emails during the US election.

Wait! That was so last year. Since then, the unstoppable Trump has bulldozed through every obstacle. Theresa May’s government has collapsed, yet he’s still standing. The damp squib of the Mueller report is creating more of a quandary for the Democrats — to impeach or not to impeach? — than it is for Trump.

This is not how Wolff’s chief source for the past two years, Steve Bannon, described by the author as the exiled “Virgil” guiding his “descent into Trumpworld”, imagined events would play out. Brooding in his grubby townhouse on Capitol Hill, the arch-provocateur and former White House chief strategist has been longing for a sign that Trump can’t cope ­without him.

Bannon’s sacking for treasonous leaks was a consequence of the first instalment of Wolff’s portrait of the Trump White House, Fire and Fury, published in January last year. An irrepressible romp through the chaotic early days of the administration, the book sold four million copies.

Siege: Trump Under Fire, by Michael Wolff.

Bannon still regards himself as the impresario of Trumpland, the only person who understands the President and his loyal base of “deplorables”, as he calls them (in honour of Hillary Clinton’s insult). But does he? On the evidence of this sequel, he has underestimated his protege.

Wolff opens Siege, which takes us through the second year of the presidency, by wondering “when” rather than “if” Trump will destroy himself. Almost everybody who has been in and out of the White House, he writes, shares his conviction that Trump’s “hallucinatory” time in ­office will surely end in a “train wreck”.

Maybe it will. But this portrait of a president “under fire” turns — almost despite itself — into a depiction of nailed down, armour-plated ­resilience.

As with its predecessor, Siege is filled with ­delicious gossip that is no less entertaining ­because it is of uncertain origin. Wolff no longer has a prize perch inside the White House (incredibly, he was allowed into the West Wing as an observer ahead of the first book), but he still seems to have almost unlimited access to verbatim remarks made by Trump.

Everybody leaks like crazy, Wolff observes, because they can’t stop talking about Trump’s “head-smacking peculiarities”.

The lack of sourcing makes the quotes ­impossible to verify, but they certainly sound like Trump, a man who appears obsessed with belittling those who serve him.

Chief cheerleader Rudy Giuliani, according to the President, “looks like a mental patient”, and Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, is called a “virgin crybaby” who was “probably molested by a priest”.

Former secretary of state Rex Tillerson is the “family dog” and Mike Pence, the Vice-President, is a “religious nut” whose domineering wife is mocked as “Mother”.

Ivanka apart, Trump’s own family isn’t spared: the useless Don Jr, responsible for the ill-fated meeting with the Russians at Trump Tower, should never have been given his name, Trump groans. Plus, of course, there is plenty of alpha male boasting: “I don’t need Viagra, I need a pill to make my erection go down.”

Another of the book’s revelations, or speculations, is that Melania has “established a separate life for herself” at her parents’ house in Maryland. Wolff suggests that the “I really don’t care, do U?” Zara jacket she wore to a migrant child-detention centre was a barely coded message to her errant husband.

US First Lady Melania Trump departs Andrews Air Rorce Base in Maryland wearing a jacket emblazoned with the words "I really don't care, do U?" following her surprise visit with child migrants on the US-Mexico border last year.

One undeniable fact is that Trump’s inner circle has been shrinking with every sacking and walkout. As The Sunday Times political editor Tim Shipman noticed during a recent interview with the President, and this book confirms, the West Wing, usually a hive of activity, has become eerily quiet.

By way of explanation, Wolff writes perceptively that Trump’s leading cheerleader, Kellyanne Conway, has “perfected the art of satisfying Trump while running from him”. She survives by “never being in the room, ­understanding that the room is where Stalin kills you”.

As more and more confidants are sacked or arrested, Trump emerges as the Great Survivor.

Just when all seems lost, as in the stand-off with congress over the funding of the wall with Mexico, he bounces back. That makes the tone and pace of the book difficult for Wolff to get right. He also doesn’t deal with the obvious source of Trump’s endurance: the roaring success (to date) of the US economy.

All the President’s advisers and cronies are terrified of Mueller’s inquiry. But not Trump. “When I say witch-hunt, I mean chicken-shit,” he swaggers, confident of the power of the president to pardon himself as well as others.

Wolff has staked a lot of this book on one eye-catching scoop: the leak of legal advice commissioned by Mueller’s team on how to pursue a successful indictment against Trump for obstruction of justice.

Despite the carefully parsed rebuttal from the office of the special counsel that the documents do not exist “as described”, I don’t doubt their authenticity. The newspaper for which I work, The Sunday Times, has seen them.

The problem is that they no longer matter. Like a lot of journalists who have got their hands on something hot, Wolff is reluctant to admit this. Former FBI director Mueller, whom the author describes accurately as a “hopeless square”, got outplayed by a master wheeler-dealer who has spent his entire career facing down “countless litigations”.

“I’m good at the game,” Trump boasts in the book. “Maybe the best.” His legal mantra is: “If they think they can get you, they will. If they think you will f..k them, they blink.” And Mueller blinked.

Yes, the special counsel has tried to reclaim ground with his double negative about not being confident the President “did not commit a crime”, but it’s too late now. As Wolff observes, the Democrats rested all their hopes of toppling Trump on the kind of 1950s stiff they used to deride. To some extent, so does Wolff, who ­devotes the only boring part of his book to Mueller.

What else, he wonders, might finally undo Trump? Somewhere, under lock and key, are the fabled tapes of The Apprentice TV show, said to be full of Trump’s offensive behaviour. But, “like the ark of the covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark, [they are] somewhere on a pallet, wrapped in tape, in a desert outside of Los Angeles”, says Trump’s former aide on the program.

And of course there is the so-called Moscow “pee tape”, as revealed by the former MI6 spy Christopher Steele. Wolff, though, thinks that Trump will simply be able to denounce any physical proof of its existence as “fake”.

If it’s any consolation for Wolff, and I strongly suspect it is, Trump’s durability is likely to provide him with the material for yet another sequel. True, the rarity value of this kind of inside account is going down — Fire and Fury set a high bar — but Wolff has found the perfect foil for his style of journalism. With Trump, accuracy doesn’t matter. Character is destiny.

Sarah Baxter is deputy editor of The Sunday Times.

Siege: Trump Under Fire

By Michael Wolff. Hachette, 346pp, $32.99