Showman must go on

The fourth volume of Michael Wolff’s series on Donald Trump received the ultimate accolade from a Trump insider on the eve of publication. The White House communications director, Steven Cheung, described the author as a “lying sack of shit” who fabricates stories and has “a peanut-sized brain”. This is how we can be sure he had genuine access to Trump’s circle, because all the president’s handlers and courtiers talk crudely like that in All or Nothing. They trade vitriol, dump on each other and gossip about the boss, and the poison and backbiting soon finds its way to Wolff.

The book feels authentic, and in Trumpworld that is what counts. Wolff is peerless at evoking the manic energy, chaos and rivalries of Trump’s court. To the amazement of even his closest associates, the disgraced president gambled everything on a rip-roaring comeback and won. Defiance of the law of political gravity is the gift that keeps giving for the American president – and for Wolff, his master chronicler, who writes with a zest and brio worthy of his subject’s “joie de guerre”.

Who can deny, as Wolff claims in All or Nothing, that Trump is “the most extraordinary showman in the history of US politics”? He is the “man on a tightrope without a net” off whom nobody can take their eyes. Had Trump lost the 2024 election, his biographer might now be carrying on chronicling his possible bankruptcy, perhaps even jailing. That’s how high the stakes were. The story of how Trump clawed his way back to the White House makes this volume more important, but also less interesting. It could have been the final word on his failed power grab; instead it has been relegated to interim “between the presidencies” status.

Wolff’s narrative cannot compete for jaw-dropping drama with the transgressional “shock and awe” of the first few months of Trump’s second term. For his first bestseller, Fire and Fury (2018), the author had astonishing fly-on-the-wall access inside the White House. For Siege (2019), his second volume, he had to make do with leaks, but received a constant drip feed from insiders, given the clash of egos and the head-spinning number of departures during Trump’s first administration.

The third volume, Landslide (TLS, July 30, 2021), followed Trump into the election-denying wilderness after his loss in 2020. Anybody else would have chucked in the towel at that point, but Trump had no inner life to fall back on. He kept doing what he knew best: playing Mr President at Mar-a-Lago, his resort in Florida, and continuing to campaign. There is a delicious moment in All or Nothing when Jared Kushner is asked about his father-in-law’s prospects. “What was Nixon’s future?” he scoffs, before slinking halfway back to the fold after Trump lays waste to all Republican primary challengers. Wolff describes the sleek Kushner and his wife, Ivanka, as the ultimate “survivors”.

Mar-a-Lago, a sunny place for shady people, comes to life as vividly as any of the characters. This is where Trump can remain in his pomp, playing the Big Man to visiting supplicants while his advisers half fear him and half laugh up their sleeves at all the shenanigans. The boxes of classified documents stashed in the shower exemplify the tawdry theatre of the absurd in which he stars. And Mar-a-Lago remains a pleasure dome of dreams and fantasies, where aides fight over proximity to the boss. Wolff calls it Trump’s “true Camelot”, though one “intimate” described it as more “Jonestown”.

The cult of Trump is personified here by a little-known character called Natalie Harp, also known as the “human printer” for her dogged determination to run after Trump on the golf course – or wherever else – with a portable printer on her back, pouring out a stream of drivel, fan postings and social media conspiracy theories that make him feel good. Like a cur, she would tell him: “You have the absolute right to cuss me out, if need be, when I deserve it”.

A good-looking blonde out of Trump central casting, Harp was singularly devoted to the boss, finding ways to sneak overnight into cubbyholes at Mar-a-Lago and his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, while grander aides lodged in cheap hotels down the road. After initially taking dictation for Trump’s truth-allergic Truth Social feed, she began exerting more influence over its contents and, according to Wolff, was responsible for smuggling far-right Maga types such as Laura Loomer into his orbit. Harp remains close at Trump’s side in the White House.

At one point, the Secret Service deemed her “a potential danger to herself and to the president”. Some wondered whether Trump was in sexual thrall to her, but Wolff thinks the seventy-eight-year-old president’s interest in such matters “flatlined” the more he became obsessed with politics. If Wolff is to be believed, the imperturbable Melania has long kept her distance. “She fucking hates him”, says a member of Trump’s entourage.

Melania’s absence on the campaign trail and in the courtroom was so glaring that aides began to wonder how to prepare the voters for a “part-time first lady”. They needn’t have worried. Asked flat out where she was by the conservative podcaster Megyn Kelly, Trump described his wife as having the mystique of the reclusive Greta Garbo. As Wolff notes, the American public has long been astonishingly willing to accept Trump’s alternative vision of reality.

There are longueurs in the book. The various courtroom dramas, which seemed so engrossing at the time and fuelled Trump’s comeback, now feel stale, given how the stakes have shrunk. Trump always insisted, rightly, that “our legal strategy is our media strategy, our media strategy is our legal strategy”; and he made the most of the Perry Mason drama. But who cares now what Trump thought of his lawyers (usually, nothing good)?

Some of the characters Wolff concentrates on seem inconsequential, such as the alleged Trump whisperer Boris Epshteyn, whom all his sources seem to hate. The sweaty legal consigliere is suspected of “wearing a wire” for Jack Smith, the special counsel, and there are amusing jokes about him being “exfiltrated” to Moscow. But the book suffers from being rushed out following Trump’s victory and, perhaps, from the increasing busyness and greater discretion of Wolff’s contacts as the election hots up.

Elon Musk only enters the scene late, and it is not clear at this stage what a huge role he will come to play. Wolff quotes Trump mocking his manic jumping on stage: “What is wrong with this guy and why doesn’t his shirt fit?” Comments about mass deportations by the anti-immigrant fanatic Stephen Miller (now deputy chief of staff) are seen as loose-lipped ravings rather than predictions of policy. Wolff misreads what the president’s second term will look like: “Perhaps he will try to enjoy himself”, he muses.

All the entertaining writing and brilliant character vignettes can’t disguise Wolff’s inattention to the political threat posed by Trump. Time and again, he puts his subject’s success down to a run of good fortune rather than political strategy or cunning. Yet he concedes that his ability to wear down the legal system, obliterate his rivals and monetize “vanity” enterprises such as Truth Social is unparalleled.

Trump’s extraordinary showmanship was on display in Butler, Pennsylvania, when he pumped his fist in the air after an assassin’s bullet grazed his ear. Michael Wolff regards this as “the ne plus ultra demonstration of Trump’s luck”. Not once does he admit that the 45th and 47th president might be any good at this thing called politics.

Sarah Baxter is director of the Marie Colvin Center for International Reporting

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