The sound and the fury

“That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.”- Joan Didion
           
A few months back, I wrote a column about the death of literacy in America and how the President of the United States, who can’t be bothered to decipher one page briefs and has probably never made it through a whole book other than his own, sets an example for the rest of us with his willful ignorance. Well, sometimes, you’ve got to give credit where credit is due, and today, it’s time for me to eat crow. Donald Trump has made reading Great Again.
           
Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff’s controversial new “insider account” of a year at the White House, is not entirely—or even partially—factual in the same way that Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 wasn’t. The writer has a historically loose relationship with accurate journalism, and it’s becoming increasingly evident that large portions of the book are imagined, based on unconfirmed secondhand stories or drawn from some caricatured fantasy of this administration’s perceived ineptitude.
           
If Wolff owes anyone a cut of the stratospheric royalty checks he’s about to pull in, it’s Donald Trump. He’s a marketing genius, and the minute he threatened to sue Simon and Schuster for libel in hopes of blocking its publication, the Orange Wonder sent sales through the roof. Online booksellers are running out of copies faster than local pharmacies are running out of Tamiflu, and amidst massive cutbacks and closures at brick and mortar stores like Barnes and Noble, this may just be the boon they need to stay afloat. Once again, the president is saving American jobs!
           
Now for the hard part: does a book like this have to be 100 percent veracious to be important, enjoyable (or disheartening, depending on your perspective) and suitable for widespread distribution? The subject of the story himself has never really cared for facts, and in a post-truth society, who needs them?
           
I haven’t read Fire and Fury yet, but most of the reviews provide a description of Trump that isn’t exactly new: he’s an insane narcissist desperate for approval, he’s far and away the most intellectually lazy president ever, he never really planned on getting elected in the first place, and like an addict who can’t put the needle down, he’s still watching cable news constantly despite so openly proclaiming his hatred for it.
 
Salacious bits—including modern day Rasputin Steve Bannon’s claim that meetings with Russian officials were “treasonous”—arise here and there, and the well-publicized rift between the erstwhile top advisor and Jarvanka is fleshed out in great detail. But let’s ask ourselves an honest question: is any of this really all that shocking?
 
If you’re a Trump supporter, anything you read in the press is Fake News (The Grundy Register included), and some new hotshot writer coming along with another scandalous expose is going to do about as much to change your mind as an angry PETA member caterwauling that you really should think about exchanging the bacon cheeseburger in your hand for a tofu patty. The PR blitz is already on to discredit Wolff, reiterate how sane and competent The Donald really is (a very stable genius, as he described himself) and ask THE LAMESTREAM MEDIA why it can’t just give him a chance to Make America Great Again.
 
The author knows he’s preaching to the converted, and with the president’s approval ratings hovering somewhere around 30 percent, he can lay claim to a sizable audience. On a deeper level, it may just be his way of throwing Trump’s tactics back in his face: if you don’t like someone, make things up about them and see what sticks—it could lead you to the highest office in America.
 
With forlorn dispatches from the White House portraying a decimated, despondent man-baby staying in bed until 11:00 a.m. and privately fuming about pretty much everyone (in a nod to fictional kindred spirits MacBeth and Michael Corleone, nearly all of Trump’s original inner circle is gone), it’s tempting to feel a bit of sympathy for him.
 
But when you remember that a professional con man who used to do cameo appearances on “Sex and the City” and spends more paying off “actresses” for their silence than most of us bring home in a year now fancies himself the spokesman for the “Duck Dynasty” voting bloc—or that the same man makes Richard Nixon look like Mahatma Gandhi and built his entire presidential run on a falsehood about his predecessor’s birthplace (that s***hole continent, no less), viciously sharing the lie with anyone willing to listen—you realize what Wolff was really trying to teach us all along: Donald Trump doesn’t deserve a fair shake.