Fire and Fury

Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, published in January 2018, is a journalistic account of the first roughly nine months of Donald Trump’s presidency, from the 2016 campaign through early 2017. Wolff, who was granted unusual access to the White House and its surrounding orbit, builds the book around a cast of senior figures including Steve Bannon, Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Reince Priebus, Sean Spicer, and Kellyanne Conway, and he frames the administration as a chaotic rivalry among three competing power centers: the nationalist-populist faction associated with Bannon, the family wing led by Kushner and Ivanka, and the establishment Republicans represented by Priebus and Spicer. The book’s central argument is that Trump himself was a largely uninformed and impulsive figure whose aides struggled to manage him, and that the president did not especially want to win the 2016 election, treating the campaign as a branding exercise until it succeeded. Wolff reports that Bannon described the administration’s early months as a series of self-inflicted crises and that Kushner and Ivanka were often derided by Bannon’s allies as “Javanka.” The narrative covers the firing of James Comey, the travel ban’s rollout, the internal fights over the Russia investigation, and the president’s relationships with figures such as Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes. The book’s reliability was disputed by many of the officials it depicts, and Trump’s legal team sought to block its release, but it became a bestseller and a defining early chronicle of the administration’s internal disorder.