In the run-up to the video, Corden joked that by next year’s awards the Trump presidency will have inspired a spoken word album and potential Grammy nominee. Spoofing the concept, John Legend appeared reading from the book, which contains allegations that caused a media firestorm upon its release earlier this month.
“Trump won’t read anything,” Legend said. “He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored.”
“His comb-over: a product called Just for Men,” noted Cher, who was followed by Snoop Dogg and then the rapper Cardi B, who read the now-notorious excerpt about the president’s supposed affinity for eating cheeseburgers in bed. “Why am I reading this shit?” she asked.
After a cameo from DJ Khaled, Clinton lowered the book to reveal herself. “One reason why he liked to eat at McDonalds,” Clinton read aloud. “Nobody knew he was coming and the food was safely premade.”
While chuckles from the live New York City audience could be heard upon Clinton’s appearance, not everyone was amused. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley vented her frustration with Clinton’s cameo on Twitter.
I have always loved the Grammys but to have artists read the Fire and Fury book killed it. Don’t ruin great music with trash. Some of us love music without the politics thrown in it.
Wolff’s book, which has sold more than 1.7m copies and has sat atop the New York Times bestseller list for three weeks, has come under fire for what many regard as unsubstantiated claims and lax fact-checking. Nevertheless, Endeavor Content purchased the film and television rights to the book last week in a deal rumored to exceed seven figures.
Michael Wolff’s explosive book about Donald Trump’s White House exposes the ambition of the First Daughter. But with the power she already has, why bother with a tedious election? asks Arwa Mahdawi in The Guardian. Read on:
Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner are quite the adorable pair, aren’t they? Their relationship is truly something to aspire to. While other couples spend their evenings eating dinner and watching TV, Javanka, it would appear, bond over intimate strategy sessions where they draw up detailed plans for world domination. According to Michael Wolff’s new book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, Ivanka and Jared have their futures all figured out. Wolff writes that the couple have “made an earnest deal” that Ivanka will run for president before Jared. “The first woman president, Ivanka entertained, would not be Hillary Clinton; it would be Ivanka Trump.”
There has been much guffawing over Ivanka’s apparent political ambitions. Does a woman who sells strappy sandals and Instagrams motivational quotes while dabbling in an unpaid internship in the White House seriously think she deserves the highest office in the world? It’s almost as ludicrous an idea as a reality-TV star with no political experience becoming president! No chance. Republican strategist Rick Wilson told CNN, for example, that Ivanka “is much more likely to be driving a Volvo … to visit her husband in a correctional facility than she is to be president of the United States at some point”.
While I would love to think that Ivanka’s future might consist of Volvos and orange jumpsuits rather than Air Force One and the White House, I’m not so sure that will be the case. Indeed, I think the First Daughter is probably right: if there is going to be a female president of the US anytime soon, it will be Ivanka Trump. One could even argue that Ivanka is already the first female president of America. Since entering the White House in a capacity no one seems to really understand, Ivanka has made herself a fixture on the world stage. She sat in at the G20, for example, discussing African migration with the Chinese, Russian and Turkish presidents, German chancellor and Theresa May. She travelled to India to co-host a Global Entrepreneurship Summit alongside Indian prime minister Narendra Modi. She launched a fund for female entrepreneurs with the World Bank. She is basically a part-time president and now she seems to be vying for the full-time gig.
In Daddy’s footsteps? Ivanka Trump is supposed to have made a deal with her husband to allow her to run for president. Photograph: Markus Schreiber/AP
Ivanka may project a saccharine-sweet image –the doting daughter, nurturing mother, and loving wife – but she has proved herself to be more than a little ruthless when it comes to furthering her ambitions and ensuring that her brand is not tarnished by her father’s actions. Wolff’s book reports that Steve Bannon accused Ivanka, who he nicknamed “the queen of leaks”, of routinely leaking information from the White House to make herself and Jared look good. This would certainly seem to be the case. Every time Trump does something which might hurt his daughter’s reputation among the New York liberals from her social set, reports in the media from mysterious sources suddenly appear, detailing how Ivanka and Jared are valiantly working day and night to make things right. It was widely reported last year, for example, that Javanka were instrumental in stopping Trump from overturning an Obama-era order that protected LGBT rights in the workplace.
The queen of leaks’ reputation control strategy seems to have successfully stopped her brand from sinking. While Ivanka has started to draw a lot more criticism from the liberal media now than she did during Trump’s campaign, she still appears to have bipartisan appeal. A Politico/Morning Consult poll conducted last July found that 44% of US voters view Ivanka favourably. And research published by YouGov late last year found that the perception of the Ivanka Trump clothing line among consumers who vote Democrat has been moving in a continuously positive direction since late spring 2017. As Ivanka’s clothing brand is intertwined with her personal brand, that would suggest her stock among Democrats seems to be going up.
Of course, if Ivanka does run for president, it will likely be on a Republican ticket and she will have to abandon her current pretence at mild progressiveness. Just look at the UK: there is a reason the only two female prime ministers we have had have both been Tories. Electing a woman who is also liberal as leader seems to be far too much for the British establishment to handle.
In the more religious, less tolerant US, it is even more of a challenge. Hillary Clinton may have won the popular vote in 2016, but the levels of misogyny directed against her made it clear that the US establishment still finds it near-impossible to stomach the idea of a female head of state. And certainly not one who is a Democrat.
But perhaps Ivanka will not have to deal with tedious things such as democratic elections, as Clinton did. Perhaps Trump, in his typically innovative manner, will simply change the constitution and appoint Ivanka Empress of America via a 3am tweet. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility. After all, it’s still very early in an already exhausting 2018. Basically, anything could happen.
Tell-all offers insider’s view of White House amid infighting, scrutinising the president’s inner circle, his intellect and his hair
Washington DC, the media, a panicked White House and an incredulous American public were rocked on Wednesday morning when the Guardian published the first details of Michael Wolff’s new book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.
Wolff’s book was much anticipated because he had been granted extensive access to the West Wing and claimed to have conducted about 200 interviews. A summary of some of the key revelations follows.
Campaign
No one in the Trump camp thought he had a chance of beating Hillary Clinton, Wolff writes. The candidate expected to leverage his defeat for wealth, fame and a Trump-branded TV network. Key advisers wanted jobs in television or politics.
In a passage with heavy resonance now, the future national security adviser Michael Flynn is quoted as telling friends that taking $45,000 from the Russians for a speech “would only be a problem if we won”.
Marriage
Melania Trump was among those who thought her husband would not win. On election night she was “in tears – and not of joy”.
The president and his third wife have separate bedrooms (“the first time since the Kennedy White House that a presidential couple had maintained separate rooms”). And on inauguration day, Wolff writes, Trump “was visibly fighting with his wife, who seemed on the verge of tears and would return to New York”.
Wolff also recounts Trump’s alleged technique for seducing married women: quiz their husbands about infidelity, tempt them with “girls coming in from Los Angeles at three o’clock” … and have their wives listen in on speakerphone.
White House
Trump’s bedroom contains three TV screens after he insisted on two more being installed.
“If he was not having his 6.30 dinner with Steve Bannon,” Wolff writes, “then, more to his liking, he was in bed by that time with a cheeseburger, watching his three screens and making phone calls – the phone was his true contact point with the world – to a small group of friends, who charted his rising and falling levels of agitation through the evening and then compared notes with one another.”
Trump had an angry confrontation with the Secret Service: he wanted a lock on the bedroom door, but the agency responsible for security in possibly the most secure building in the world did not.
The president also “reprimanded the housekeeping staff for picking up his shirt from the floor” and “imposed a set of new rules: Nobody touch anything, especially not his toothbrush. (He had a longtime fear of being poisoned, one reason why he liked to eat at McDonald’s – nobody knew he was coming and the food was safely premade.) Also, he would let housekeeping know when he wanted his sheets done, and he would strip his own bed.”
Hair
Ivanka Trump discussed her father’s hair with friends, according to the book. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Trump’s much-discussed haircut is mocked in the book – by his daughter.
Ivanka “often described the mechanics behind it to friends”, Wolff writes. “An absolutely clean pate – a contained island after scalp reduction surgery – surrounded by a furry circle of hair around the sides and front, from which all ends are drawn up to meet in the center then swept back and secured by a stiffening spray. The color, she would point out to comical effect, was from a product called Just for Men – the longer it was left on, the darker it got. Impatience resulted in Trump’s orange-blond hair color.”
Self-image
In a passage that perhaps points to Trump’s underrated understanding of his unique political appeal, Wolff quotes an unnamed “foreign model” asking him: “What is this ‘white trash’?”
“They’re people just like me,” says Trump, “only they’re poor.”
Intellect
Wolff provides telling details about unsuccessful attempts to brief Trump on policy, domestic or foreign, or even the basics of the US constitution.
“I got as far as the fourth amendment,” says his sometime aide Sam Nunberg, “before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head.”
Mental health
Most White House aides and even family members doubt the 71-year-old’s capacity for the job. Trump allegedly did not know, for example, who the former House speaker John Boehner was when he was suggested for chief of staff. Wolff also writes that the president repeats himself constantly, often about what TV anchors have said about him that day.
In an “extracted column” for the Hollywood Reporter this week, Wolff wrote that at a festive season party at Mar-a-Lago, a “heavily made-up” president “failed to recognize a succession of old friends”.
Russia
Bannon was Wolff’s main source on how the White House reacted to Trump’s firing of the FBI director James Comey – which he says was Ivanka and Kushner’s idea – and the appointment of the special counsel Robert Mueller.
Bannon strenuously denies any involvement with Russia-related events but does not spare the rod on others: the meeting at Trump Tower was “treasonous”, “unpatriotic” and “bad shit” and there is “zero” chance Trump did not know of the meeting involving his son Donald Jr, Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort. The president may have met the Russians himself, Bannon says.
He also suggests that Trump has never understood what trouble he is in over Russia and claims money-laundering charges, such as those denied by Trump’s onetime campaign chairman Manafort, are what will bring the Mueller investigation to its head, probably involving Deutsche Bank and the Kushner property empire.
Wolff quotes the former Fox News chief executive Roger Ailes telling Trump: “You’ve got to get right on Russia. You need to take this seriously, Donald.”
“Jared has this,” Trump replies. “It’s all worked out.”
Republicans
Attempts to control Trump include the former White House press secretary Sean Spicer saying he was “glad to be out of the loop” when family members and close aides met with Trump Air Force One to write a misleading statement about the Trump Tower meeting with a group of Russians.
Trump’s only party allies are the New Jersey governor, Chris Christie, and the former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. Both wanted key administration roles but were rejected – in Christie’s case by Ivanka Trump, referring to his role in sending Jared Kushner’s father to jail.
Infighting
Trump’s response to Mueller is at the heart of the extensively quoted derision from staff members about the president’s mental state; the president himself is quoted deriding everyone around him, sons – known to White House staff as “Uday and Qusay”, after Saddam Hussein’s offspring – and daughter included.
“There was now a fair amount of back-of-the-classroom giggling about who had called Trump what,” Wolff writes. “For [the treasury secretary] Steve Mnuchin and [the former chief of staff] Reince Priebus he was an ‘idiot’. For [the economic adviser] Gary Cohn, he was ‘dumb as shit’. For [national security adviser] HR McMaster, he was a ‘dope’. The list went on.”
Bannon is ranged against Kushner and Ivanka and in the words of Richard Nixon’s adviser Henry Kissinger: “It is a war between the Jews and the non-Jews.”
It seems perhaps the most hated entity is “Jarvanka”, AKA Kushner and Ivanka Trump. Wolff also writes that the couple had a much-mocked deal: that “the first woman president … would not be Hillary Clinton; it would be Ivanka Trump.”
Confidants
Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
Trump’s outside advisers express similar derision. Rupert Murdoch reportedly called Trump “a fucking idiot”. Tom Barrack has denied saying Trump is “not only crazy, he’s stupid”. Ailes is depicted as relatively supportive, but he died in May 2017.
Wolff also discusses Trump’s preference for women as close aides, Hope Hicks and Kellyanne Conway being prominent examples: “He needed special – extra-special – handling. Women, he explained to one friend with something like self–awareness, generally got this more precisely than men. In particular, women who self-selected themselves as tolerant of or oblivious to or amused by or steeled against his casual misogyny and constant sexual subtext – which was somehow, incongruously and often jarringly, matched with paternal regard – got this.”
Bannon
Wolff writes that Bannon, his chief source in the book, was solely responsible for Trump’s “American carnage” inaugural speech, which was delivered with the new president’s “golf face”, a scrunched-up expression of boiling rage that experienced handlers know to be wary of.
The explosion of controversy, though, may have imperilled Bannon’s perch at Breitbart News. The billionaire backers Robert and Rebekah Mercer have withdrawn their patronage.
The Guardian
Bannon has told supporters before that they should read this publication to understand how “they” think. Thanks to Wolff, we know now that “though one of the leading English language left-leaning newspapers”, the Guardian is nevertheless the former key adviser’s “favorite paper”.
Amid the daily din of Donald Trump’s White House comes Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff’s tell-all, just in time for the first anniversary of the Trump inaugural. Like the “burn book” in the movie Mean Girls, Fire and Fury contains a toxic tale that singes all.
In Wolff’s telling, Trump World is cacophonous and dysfunctional. Trump and those who work for him come across as all too happy to “share”, while loyalty is almost wholly absent from their landscape.
Trump purportedly mocks his own sons’ intellectual shortcomings and derides Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, as a suck-up. Melania Trump, the president’s third wife, cries in sorrow on election night over her husband’s electoral college win. Steve Bannon, Trump’s former senior adviser, pummels Jared and Ivanka, AKA Javanka, for their incredible lightness of being.
As to be expected, Bannon takes no prisoners and speaks with the loudest voice. He brands the now infamous June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower that was attended by a passel of Russians, Don Jr, Kushner and Paul Manafort, Trump’s then campaign manager who is now under indictment, as “treasonous”, “unpatriotic” and “bad shit”.
Bannon also sees special counsel Robert Mueller tightening his noose around the Oval Office. “I’m pretty good at coming up with solutions,” Wolff quotes Bannon as saying. “I came up with a solution for his broken-dick campaign in a day, but I don’t see this. I don’t see a plan for getting through.”
To his credit, Wolff catches the parallels between Bannon and Trump: “If Trump is incapable of sounding like a president, Bannon had matched him; he was incapable of sounding like a presidential aide.”
Trump’s circle of “friends”, family and acquaintances are depicted as no less unsparing in their criticisms of the president. According to Wolff, Rupert Murdoch called Trump “a fucking idiot” after the two men ended a phone call. Given the pending Fox-Disney deal, Murdoch may be wishing Fire and Fury dropped a few months later.
Sean Hannity, Trump’s staunchest ally on television, is audibly disturbed by Trump’s failure to offer condolences to the widow of Roger Ailes, Hannity’s former boss at Fox News. Hannity is caught saying: “What the fuck is wrong with him?”
In a similar vein, Tom Barrack, a 30-year Trump buddy, allegedly observed: “He’s not only crazy … he’s stupid.”
For the record, Barrack – who denied making that statement after the first excerpts of the book were published – chaired Trump’s inaugural, was according to Wolff considered for White House chief of staff, and brought Manafort into the campaign.
Even Javanka piles on. Upset by his father-in-law’s indecision over America’s response to Syria’s use of chemical weapons, Kushner complains that the president just doesn’t get it. As for Ivanka, she is reported to have mocked her father’s hair.
Fire and Fury also captures the ethno-religious tensions that have apparently marred Trump’s White House. Wolff quotes Henry Kissinger’s take on the feud between Kushner and Bannon as “a war between the Jews and non-Jews”. Here, Kissinger and Wolff likely overstate. But the backdrop of Pepe the Frog as a constant campaign meme, coupled with David Duke and white nationalist Richard Spencer’s man-crushes on Trump, leave the reader wondering.
Wolff’s access to Trump and his inner circle is evident. At the outset, Wolff writes of how he sat down with Trump in his Beverly Hills home, while Kushner and Trump aides Hope Hicks and Corey Lewandowski milled about. Likewise, the quotes obviously bespeak knowledge and close proximity.
Unlike Hillary Clinton, Trump represented a movement, and that fact deserved greater elucidation by Wolff. Said differently, among Fire and Fury’s shortcomings are its failure to adequately explain how Trump arrived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and its insufficient appreciation for the bond forged by Trump and his base. In that sense, the book lacks the connective tissue present in Devil’s Bargain, Joshua Green’s take on the Trump campaign and the first few months of the presidency.
Clearly, Fire and Fury has set off a storm that has left its share of casualties. By Wednesday night, Bannon was on a political respirator and his role as keeper of the Trumpist flame was no more.
Steve Bannon listens as Donald Trump speaks to the press in the Cabinet Room of the White House. Photograph: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images
In addition to being pummeled by the president, Bannon has reportedly been abandoned by the Mercer Family, his benefactors. Adding insult to injury, Michael Grimm, an ex-congressman convicted of tax evasion, disavowed Bannon’s support for his comeback. Bannon had gone from the leading voice of populism militant to a caricature. As for Trump, he has reminded the Faithful there shall be no others before Him.
The first amendment may also be tested. In addition to sending a cease-and-desist letter to Bannon for allegedly violating a non-disclosure agreement, Trump’s lawyers threw a legal brushback pitch at Wolff and Henry Holt, the book’s publisher. Without citing any particular false content, Team Trump threatened legal action in an attempt to halt publication.
Significantly, Trump’s lawyers did not cite national security as grounds for killing the book in its cradle. Rather, this fight is about honor and intimidation. Henry Holt responded by bringing publication forward to Friday. The book, the publisher claimed, is “an extraordinary contribution to our national discourse”.
Synchronously, Steven Spielberg’s movie, The Post, which portrays the Nixon administration’s unsuccessful attempt to block the Washington Post and the New York Times’ publication of the Pentagon Papers, is now in theaters. Ultimately, that episode became viewed as a prelude to Watergate and Richard Nixon’s downfall.
Make no mistake, Wolff’s latest is a must-read. It pulls away whatever curtain still cloaks the Trump White House, leaving those who know Trump best to do the talking.
