Book Review: "Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency"
Michael Wolff's third book on the Trump Presidency is as empty, if slightly less salacious, as the rest.
I have, to put it mildly, a rather skeptical attitude toward the “journalism” of Michael Wolff. While I found Fire and Fury to be a sinfully delicious read, I found Siege to be a rather empty affair, far too reliant on Steve Bannon’s musings and ramblings with little insight into the workings of either Trump’s mind or his White House. I was thus a bit hesitant to read Wolff’s new book, Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency but, as is so often the case, the allure of gossip and palace intrigue was too much to resist.
To my surprise, the book is less salacious than its predecessors, and that’s definitely one of its major strengths. What’s more, it’s very clear throughout the book that Wolff has almost nothing but contempt for Trump, Giuliani, and those who were willing and ready to indulge Trump’s belief that the election had been stolen from him. As he points out time and again, this was a White House that, from its first days in office until its last, was filled with scheming, back-biting, and chaos, led by a floundering tyrant far more invested in having his delusions supported by sycophants than in doing the actual business of government.
That’s not to say that it’s not full of gossip, however, and it’s revealing that Wolff leans so heavily on the “aides” formulation. Time and again, we hear of these “aides” looking at one another incredulously as they watch their boss, the President of the United States, try to hold onto power by overturning a lawful election. Obviously, Wolff wants to give his sources the anonymity that they crave, but if we’ve learned one thing from the Trump years it’s that there were (and are) far too many people who were willing to talk out of both sides of their mouth: telling the man in charge what he wanted to hear while also making sure that they burnish their own reputations after the inevitable collapse of the Trump bubble.
This was always a failing of those who were part of the administration, but it reached truly terrifying proportions in the aftermath of the election. It’s absolutely frightening--terrifying, even--to sit with the knowledge that there were those in Trump’s circle who were more than willing to go along with his efforts to undermine not only the election but actively contributed to it. Obviously Giuliani is the most obvious of the culprits here, but there were plenty of others who were willing and able to throw in their lot with Trump’s desire to overturn the election, even though they knew that it was doomed to failure.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Landslide is exactly a pleasure to read, but it is certainly juicy. Wolff is, I think, a fundamentally cynical person, and this is obvious in almost every page of the book. He has a keen eye for pointing out the most disgusting foibles of his characters--he repeatedly mentions Giuliani’s flatulence, for example--and the men and women whose lives he documents are almost without exception crooked, mendacious, and more than a little seamy. None of this comes as much of a surprise, but it does mean that the book can be a bit of a chore at times.
One of Wolff’s most perceptive observations has to do with Trump’s fundamental understanding of the world and how it works. By now, it’s no secret that in many ways Trump is the television president (a point most eloquently argued in James Poniewozik’s book Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America). “His emotional intelligence was all about performance,” Wolff writes. “He was a circus barker, the ultimate promoter personality, mass rather than class, with a genius sense of how to satisfy the audience. He was an actor playing Donald Trump the character, doing what he thought that character would do, what would most appeal to the character’s audience--what would get ratings.” There’s a lot of truth to this claim, though it does, I think, go a little too far in giving Trump credit for having some sort of conscious control over what is clearly something more akin to an animal instinct.
In fact, as I finished the book, I found myself growing more than a little tired with Wolff’s tendency to view everyone--Trump, the Democrats, the media--as equally complicit in the atrocities committed over the last four years. In particular, his framing of the impeachment hearing, in which his focus on the ineptitude of Trump’s lawyers is matched only by his dismissive attitude toward the Democrats that launched it. Like so many other Trump chroniclers, Wolff persists in flattening the playing field, so that Trump is just one more cynical (if inept) player in a world of such fools.
Landslide is just one of the avalanche of books that have been released in the past several months, most of which aim to give us some new tidit bit of information about Trump and his attempt to overturn the election that didn’t go his way. As Jill Filipovic notes in The Washington Post, it may be that this cottage industry is another instantiation of our collective desire (largely unacknowledged, even to ourselves) to indulge in more of the drama and madness of that era.
For me, Landslide is ultimately something of an empty book masquerading as profundity. Everything about it, from the tone to the lack of notes (or even an index!) suggests that this is a book to be gobbled up in one sitting and then promptly forgotten about. Wolff talks a great deal about being a chronicler of the Trump presidency, but he rarely rises above being a glorified gossip-monger.
Like so many of the others who relied on the leaks coming from the Trump White House to give them fodder for their columns and their books, Wolff seems at something of a loss as to what to do with himself, which is no doubt why he concludes the book by making his own pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago. Of course, Trump engages in his usual sort of rambling, with Wolff faithfully transcribing the exchange. It is, frankly, a bit embarrassing for both of them, and it’s also a reminder that, the more things change, the more they stay the same.