Hoon: Trumpism dies with Trump says Wolff

It may be a bumpy ride for the world but the era of Donald J. Trump will die with him if we can wait him out says the author of four best-sellers on the indefatigable real-estate bloviator-turned-President.

Michael Wolff has spent a decade tracking Trump’s improbable rise, Icarian fall, and resurrection, fed by salacious insider stories — gossip and alarming insights. His latest book All Or Nothing: How Trump Recaptured America is a fast-moving page-turner released within a month of the inauguration of the 45th president as the 47th.

“It feels like I have written too many books on Donald Trump, and, I am trying to resist…working on a fifth,” Wolff told The Hoon. Yet, Trump really is absorbing — drawing all the light towards him and needing it desperately.

In a rollicking interview for The Hoon with Bernard Hickey and Peter Bale, Wolff described the in-fighting in an inexplicably successful Trump campaign fuelled by Trump’s singular focus on himself; his predictions (spoiler alert: Wolff reckons Trump will explode); and his journalistic methods and thoughts on the future.

The one and only

Wolff describes Trump as “suis generis” — Latin for ‘one of a kind’ and says he will neither be repeated nor leave a legacy for others to pick up the mantle of Trumpism.

“It's going to end in the obvious way: he's going to come to the limits of his term, and at 78 years old, he's going to come to the limits of his life. So at that point, we will be able to to to exit from this story. It will not go on post-Trump. It is not going to go on with JD Vance. It's not going to go on with any of these other Shmendriks [a Yiddish word for idiots.]

“Trump is truly sui generis. There is no one like him. No one is going to be able to do this again. There will be all sorts of damage and wreckage in his wake, but nevertheless, we will, at at the point at which he exits, return to some relatively familiar baseline,” Wolff said on The Hoon.

Meanwhile, like watching an arsonist at work, it’s hard not to stare: “You can use that metaphor or the train wreck because I continue to believe that it will finally smash into something that it cannot go through.”

The book, whose audiobook version is read by Wolff with dry cynicism and a little awe, captures the madness of the Mar a Lago crowd who insist on calling Trump “Mr President” even when out of office, as though the election of Joe Biden never happened (which of course in his mind it didn’t). The sycophants and enablers tell Trump what he wants to hear cocooned in his own ego and kitsch castle.

Wolff, writing in the book, marvels at Trump’s orange rhino hide and determination to turn legal cases and convictions that would destroy anyone else into ammunition for his insatiable desire for headlines: ‘Given the rage with which Trump continued to damn the “witch hunt” against him, he remained, in fact, fairly sunny about his situation. This was in part because he was, by nature, impervious to the outside world. He lived in a highly controlled universe populated only by lackeys, flunkies, and sycophants. And, too, the vulnerabilities that undermined ordinary mortals—the doubts, shame, and fear—­were absent in him. Conflict made him feel alive.’

“What Donald Trump is stays as a constant. The fact that he became the president is just like changing real estate. The guy in the White House in 2017…was…no different from the guy in Trump Tower. The guy in Mar a Lago was no different from the guy in the White House and here we are again. The fixed point always is Donald Trump. That…thing…everybody says [that] ‘the indisputable point of presidential history is that the presidency changes whoever holds it.’ This is not true about Donald.”

Wolff dismisses the idea that behind the madness of Trump is a cabal of focused, intelligent, political operatives somehow using him to fulfill their own agenda be that tariffs, disengagement from alliances, or almost any other policy or strategy.

“Headlines are the strategy, whether that's chaos or not…and because today's headlines are obviated by the next day's headlines, I guess that is a form of chaos. But central to this is headlines. He needs to dominate every news cycle, every headline,” Wolff said. “That's what he lives for. That's the entire point of the process.”

Reports that people around Trump a cooking up a plan — a so-called Mar a Lago Accord — to weaken the dollar and bully holders of U.S. debt — are the stuff of being in the Trump orbit but having no real influence over the star at its centre.

“There's a clear dichotomy,” Wolff told The Hoon. “There's what's on Trump's mind, and then the conversations everybody else has been having. And the fact that there is not necessarily a connection there means that the conversations everybody else has been having are either meaningless or involve something that Trump doesn't care about…I can't say this emphatically enough…let me be perfectly clear, he's not listening to those people. They have never actually spoken to him. They've listened to him. They have never spoken to him. They have never gotten two consecutive sentences out in his presence.”

A review in the New York Times captured the horrifying yet compelling drama portrayed in Wolff’s tale of TrumpWorld and in the norm-immolating presidency.

“What excites Trump most is not the fire but the clanging fire engines and sirens rushing to the scene,” a Trump insider tells Wolff, prompting the New York Times reviewer to wonder ‘Will President Trump leave policy to ideological terrors, people like his draconic homeland security adviser Stephen Miller? Will he be tempted to light more fires himself, just to see what chaos will ensue? Either way, when the fire trucks come, one thing is certain: Wolff will be hanging off the back.’

Wolff admits he struggles to pull himself away from the spectacle of Trump: “The story goes on. I mean, I wish it did not go on, but it continues to go on so that there is reason to tell it. Also, it’s Donald Trump, so nobody pays attention to anything else. So if you're a good writer, if you're a writer of books, it is a propitious subject.”

“… a lying sack of s**t”

For his part, Trump has attacked Wolff frequently but in his comments on the new book effectively confirmed Wolff did have access in his circle: “He called me many times trying to set up a meeting, but I never called him back because I didn’t want to give him the credibility of an interview…I assume, however, he was able to speak to a small number of people, but not meaningfully.”

Trump spokesman, Stephen Cheung, whom Wolff described as a “nice guy” to The Hoon, called the writer “a lying sack of s**t”.

A writer first

What of his craft? Wolff prefers to describe himself as a writer rather than a journalist — telling stories with verve and panache rather than what he might see in other more reportorial authors as a halting approach distracted by rules on sourcing, attribution, and fact-checking. He reckons gets the sweep of history right.

He and I have talked before about what he calls the “Church of Journalism” whose high priests accuse him of flamboyant if not inflated storytelling. Not unlike Trump might, Wolff gives it back at least as good as he gets and has the homes and lifestyle to show for the millions of books he has sold — not least on the Trump saga.

He also bridles at a comparison with say Bob Woodward of the Washington Post who has built a career as an author on the now 50-year-old scoop on Watergate.

“The only difference between Bob Woodward's approach and method and mine, because Bob also allows a range of anonymous sources, is that I'm a significantly better writer than Bob Woodward is,” Wolff says archly and with a smile sitting in front of a bookcase where I can see tomes by the pugnacious Norman Mailer.

Apart from chronicling the life and times of Trump, Wolff is best known as the most biographer of Rupert Murdoch. In The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch Wolff turned a remarkable level of access to Murdoch and his family into a story that laid bare the drama that would become Succession.Fire & Fury described Murdoch calling Trump a “f*****g idiot”. Yet Murdoch and his Fox News are crucial allies of the monster they created, Wolff said: “It’s among the most bitter ironies of Rupert’s life: his dream was to elect a US president and that, tragically for him, turned out to be Donald Trump.”

Interviewing Wolff at the gorgeous Long Island second home from which Wolff spoke to us, journalist Ben Smith wrote that the huge sales of Fire & Fury were allowing him to ‘finally afford the lifestyle he had already been living.’

But what of the future? Is he scared his young children and now grandchildren from the offspring of his first marriage will grow up in a world defined by the chaos of ‘TrumpWorld’: “I tend to be an optimistic person…so I tend to believe this too will pass only to bring on something else that will, in turn, pass.”

* The Hoon is an offshoot of Bernard Hickey’s The Kaka. We record the show in front of a live audience on YouTube each Thursday and then publish an edited audio version on the usual podcast platforms on Friday.

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