Wolff dishes more (alleged) Trump dirt
BY MARY REINHOLZ
Prolifi c novelist Joyce Carol
Oates, responding last year to
questions posed by The Guardian,
cited Michael Wolff’s runaway
bestseller “Fire and Fury, Inside the
Trump White House” as a book that
made her laugh out loud. She called
it “scathing, hilarious, terrifying and
(in an odd way) comforting.”
This humble scribe can understand
the comforting part of Wolff’s
takedowns of Trump. For an anti-
Trump reader, it’s the satisfaction
of seeing a political enemy pinned
down and sliced up like sushi by a
clever wordsmith’s mordant prose.
Wolff is no H. L. Mencken
but the 65-year-old Village resident
once again performs an oftencomic
hit on the hopelessly unfi t
commander in chief in “Siege, Trump
Under Fire.” The omniscient thirdperson
sequel begins with Trump’s
second year in offi ce and ends with
the release of the Mueller report in
March of this year.
Along the way, the author shows
Trump getting bested by Russian
president Vladimir Putin in Helsinki
and set up for more defeat, even
after Special Counsel Robert Mueller
lets him off the hook.
“His escape, such as it was, would
be brief,” predicts Wolff who believes
that Trump, “an unpredictable
and vengeful president,” is on a path
of inevitable self-destruction.
Wolff only rarely cites his sources
beyond Steve Bannon, the former
White House strategist.
The 315-page book has plenty
of gossipy revelations about who’s
screwing who and unsubstantiated
allegations that Trump’s third marriage
to Melania is in name only,
plus other cheap shots against Vice
President Pence’s wife, referred to as
“Mother.”
Trump comes across as a cartoon,
predictably boasting about his sexual
prowess and insisting he doesn’t
need Viagra. Bannon’s observations
are the most revealing and disturbing,
particularly when he comments
on the West Wing’s state of denial
over the #MeToo movement. He says
there is a real fear that the women
accusing Trump of sexual misconduct
during the fi rst campaign might
come back …and with others.
“They’re in my dreams,” Bannon
tells Wolff. “Remember the girl at
the China Club? I do. Kristin Anderson.
She says Trump put two
digits in her vagina at the bar. She’s
Greenwich Village author Michael Wolff has released his second
tell-all book on President Trump, again chockful of unsourced revelations.
forty-three, forty-four now, and one
of these days she’s gonna look right
in the camera on Good Morning
America and she’s going to say, ‘He
came in the back of the bar when I
was eighteen years old and put two
fi ngers in my vagina…my vagina..
my vagina.’ And you’re going to hear
that at 8:03 in the morning and she’s
going to start crying. And then two
days later, there is going to be the
next girl…and the next girl. It will
be siege warfare.”
So far, there’s been nothing close
to “siege warfare,” since Friday, when
75-year-old E. Jean Carroll, a wellknown
advice columnist, accused
Trump of raping her in a dressing
room at Bergdorf Goodman during
the 1990s. Her disclosure was part
of an installment in her new book,
“What Do We Need Men For? A
Modest Proposal,” which appeared
in New York magazine, with Carroll
on the cover in the same black coat
dress she wore during the alleged
three-minute rape. Trump soon responded,
saying, “I’ve never met this
person in my life,” and claiming she
was just trying to sell a book. Carroll
joins at least 15 other women
who have accused Trump of sexual
assault, including his fi rst wife Ivana
(who later recanted).
In interviews, Wolff has said he
spoke to 150 people for “Siege.” But
his veracity is in serious dispute.
Mueller, for one, has denied Wolff’s
claim that his offi ce drafted but
didn’t use a three-count indictment
of Trump for obstruction of justice.
And Alan Dershowitz, famed Harvard
law professor emeritus, dismissed
Wolff’s assertion in “Siege”
that he asked Trump during a White
House dinner for a $1-million retainer.
Dershowitz — who has written
a book arguing against Trump’s
impeachment — called the assertion
“completely, categorically false,” according
to The New York Times.
Also stretching credulity is Wolff’s
unverifi ed claim that Jared Kushner
became Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed
bin Salman’s “closest international
ally,” in order to emerge as
a “dominant foreign policy voice” in
his father-in-law’s administration.
MBS is believed to be behind the
grisly 2018 murder of Saudi journalist
Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi
consulate in Istanbul. Wolff quotes
Kushner disparaging Khashoggi as a
“terrorist,” not a journalist to a reporter.
He also claims Kushner suggested
to the mercurial 32-year-old
MBS that he should order the “arrest”
and “quick execution” of the
15 plotters involved in Khassoggi’s
assassination. Say what?
Meanwhile, Trump this week won
plaudits across the aisle for pulling
back against planned military
strikes against Iran after that bad
actor of a Middle Eastern country
shot down a U.S. drone. So Wolff is
getting ahead of himself in concluding
that Trump is politically a dead
man walking. He hasn’t cracked up
totally so far and neither, apparently,
has the imprisoned Paul Manafort,
his former campaign director.
There’s an anecdote in “Siege”
about Manafort’s alleged sexual proclivities
when he was a free man and
living with his wife in Trump Tower.
It appeals to the prurient interest but
sheds little light on the body politic
or on Manafort’s situation as an inmate
in protective custody.
Manafort apparently was transferred
last week from a federal
prison in Pennsylvania — where he
was serving a seven-and-one-halfyear
sentence for fi nancial crimes —
to the Metropolitan Correction Center
in Lower Manhattan (rather than
Rikers Island) to await arraignment
on New York State charges. His attorney
says that the latter charges
amount to double jeopardy, as in,
an illegal second prosecution for the
same offenses he was previously put
on trial for.
20 July 4, 2019 TVG Schneps Media