Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House

[Shogun]

Bannon doggedly went through the Trump oeuvre highlighting possible insights and policy proscriptions. Part of Bannon’s authority in the new White House was as keeper of the Trump promises, meticulously logged onto the white board in his office. Some of these promises Trump enthusiastically remembered making, others he had little memory of, but was happy to accept that he had said it. Bannon acted as disciple and promoted Trump to guru—or inscrutable God.

This devolved into a further rationalization, or Trump truth: “The president was very clear on what he wanted to deliver to the American public,” said Walsh. He was “excellent in communicating this.” At the same time, she acknowledged that it was not at all clear in any specific sense what he wanted. Hence, there was another rationalization: Trump was “inspirational not operational.”

Kushner, understanding that Bannon’s white board represented Bannon’s agenda more than the president’s agenda, got to wondering how much of this source text was being edited by Bannon. He made several attempts to comb through his father-in-law’s words on his own
before expressing frustration with the task and giving up.

Mick Mulvaney, the former South Carolina congressman now head of the Office of Management and Budget and directly charged with creating the Trump budget that would underlie the White House program, also fell back on the Trump spoken record. Bob Woodward’s 1994 book, The Agenda, is a blow-by-blow account of the first eighteen months of the Clinton White House, most of it focused on creating the Clinton budget, with the single largest block of the president’s time devoted to deep contemplation and arguments about how to allocate resources. In Trump’s case, this sort of close and continuous engagement was inconceivable; budgeting was simply too small-bore for him.

“The first couple of times when I went to the White House, someone had to say, This is Mick Mulvaney, he’s the budget director,” said Mulvaney. And in Mulvaney’s telling Trump was too scattershot to ever be of much help, tending to interrupt planning with random questions that seem to have come from someone’s recent lobbying or by some burst of free association. If Trump cared about something, he usually already had a fixed view based on limited information. If he didn’t care, he had no view and no information. Hence, the Trump budget team was also largely forced to return to Trump’s speeches when searching for the general policy themes they could then fasten into a budget program.

 

[Shogun]

The three advisers were in open conflict by the end of the second week following the immigration EO and travel ban debacle. This internal rivalry was the result of stylistic, philosophic, and temperamental differences; perhaps more important, it was the direct result of the lack of a rational org chart or chain of command. For Walsh, it was a daily process of managing an impossible task: almost as soon as she received direction from one of the three men, she would be countermanded by one or another of them.

“I take a conversation at face value and move forward with it,” she defended herself. “I put what was decided on the schedule and bring in comms and build a press plan around it and bring in political affairs and office of public liaison. And then Jared says, Why did you do that. And I say, ‘Because we had a meeting three days ago with you and Reince and Steve where you agreed to do this.’ And he says, ‘But that didn’t mean I wanted it on the schedule. That’s not why I had that conversation.’ It almost doesn’t matter what anyone says: Jared will agree, and then it will get sabotaged, and then Jared goes to the president and says, See, that was Reince’s idea or Steve’s idea.”
...
Analysis or argument or PowerPoint did not work. But who said what to Trump and when often did. If, at Bannon’s prodding, Rebekah Mercer called him, that had an effect. Priebus could count on Paul Ryan’s clout with him. If Kushner set up Murdoch to call, that registered. At the same time, each successive call mostly canceled the others out.

 

[Shogun]

Bannon was making his first official pubic appearance of the Trump presidency

For a book with this much hype....they should have paid for a better editor.
I don't think I've ever read such a sloppy book.

 

[mastermind]

For a book with this much hype....they should have paid for a better editor.
I don't think I've ever read such a sloppy book.

I agree

A lot more grammatical mistakes than you would expect.

 

[TheDarceKnight]

I am planning on buying this book just for the pure insight into the fukkery that this presidency has been.

I fully expect Years from now for some director to use this book to create some kind of hilarious movie.

The crazy thing is that the movie could be like a Lord of the Rings length trilogy and still have time for more fukkery...9 hours might not be enough time.

 

[DonKnock]

For a book with this much hype....they should have paid for a better editor.
I don't think I've ever read such a sloppy book.

They might have done voice dictation for a lot of this just to get it through even faster. It was definitely rushed out with more concern for content than finite production details.

It sounds very conversational in the audio version.

 

[Shogun]

Jews and Israel were a curious Trump subtext. Trump’s brutish father was an often vocal anti-Semite. In the split in New York real estate between the Jews and non-Jews, the Trumps were clearly on the lesser side. The Jews were white shoe, and Donald Trump, even more than his father, was perceived as a vulgarian—after all, he put his name on his buildings, quite a déclassé thing to do. (Ironically, this proved to be a significant advance in real estate marketing and, arguably, Trump’s greatest accomplishment as a developer—branding buildings.) But Trump had grown up and built his business in New York, the world’s largest Jewish city. He had made his reputation in the media, that most Jewish of industries, with some keen understanding of media tribal dynamics. His mentor, Roy Cohn, was a demimonde, semiunderworld, tough-guy Jew. He courted other figures he considered “tough-guy Jews” (one of his accolades): Carl Icahn, the billionaire hedge funder; Ike Perlmutter, the billionaire investor who had bought and sold Marvel Comics; Ronald Perelman, the billionaire Revlon chairman; Steven Roth, the New York billionaire real estate tyc00n; and Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino magnate. Trump had adopted a sort of 1950s Jewish uncle (tough-guy variety) delivery, with assorted Yiddishisms—Hillary Clinton, he declared, had been “shlonged” in the 2008 primary—helping to give an inarticulate man an unexpected expressiveness. Now his daughter, a de facto First Lady, was, through her conversion, the first Jew in the White House.

The Trump campaign and the White House were constantly supplying off-note messages about Jews, from their equivocal regard for David Duke to their apparent desire to tinker with Holocaust history—or at least tendency to stumble over it. At one point early in the campaign, Trump’s son-in-law, challenged by his own staff at the New York Observer and feeling pressure about his own bona fides, as well as seeking to stand by his father-in-law, wrote an impassioned defense of Trump in an attempt to prove that he was not an anti-Semite. For his efforts, Jared was rebuked by various members of his own family, who clearly seemed worried about both the direction of Trumpism and Jared’s opportunism.

There was also the flirtation with European populism. Whenever possible, Trump seemed to side with and stoke Europe’s rising right, with its anti-Semitic associations, piling on more portent and bad vibes. And then there was Bannon, who had allowed himself to become—through his orchestration of right-wing media themes and stoking of liberal outrage—a winking suggestion of anti-Semitism. It was certainly good right-wing business to annoy liberal Jews.

Kushner, for his part, was the prepped-out social climber who had rebuffed all entreaties in the past to support traditional Jewish organizations. When called upon, the billionaire scion had refused to contribute. Nobody was more perplexed by the sudden rise of Jared Kushner to his new position as Israel’s great protector than U.S. Jewish organizations. Now, the Jewish great and the good, the venerated and the tried, the mandarins and myrmidons, had to pay court to Jared Kushner who until little more than a few minutes ago had truly been a nobody.

For Trump, giving Israel to Kushner was not only a test, it was a Jewish test: the president was singling him out for being Jewish, rewarding him for being Jewish, saddling him with an impossible hurdle for being Jewish—and, too, defaulting to the stereotyping belief in the negotiating powers of Jews. “Henry Kissinger says Jared is going to be the new Henry Kissinger,” Trump said more than once, rather a combined compliment and slur.

Bannon, meanwhile, did not hesitate to ding Kushner on Israel, that peculiar right-wing litmus test. Bannon could bait Jews—globalist, cosmopolitan, Davoscentric liberal Jews like Kushner—because the farther right you were, the more correct you were on Israel. Netanyahu was an old Kushner family friend, but when, in the fall, the Israeli prime minister came to New York to meet with Trump and Kushner, he made a point of seeking out Steve Bannon.

On Israel, Bannon had partnered with Sheldon Adelson, titan of Las Vegas, big-check right-wing contributor, and, in the president’s mind, quite the toughest tough-guy Jew (that is, the richest). Adelson regularly disparaged Kushner’s motives and abilities. The president, to Bannon’s great satisfaction, kept telling his son-in-law, as he strategized on Israel, to check with Sheldon and, hence, Bannon.

Bannon’s effort to grab the stronger-on-Israel label was deeply confounding to Kushner, who had been raised as an Orthodox Jew. His closest lieutenants in the White House, Avi Berkowitz and Josh Raffel, were Orthodox Jews. On Friday afternoons, all Kushner business in the White House stopped before sunset for the Sabbath observance.

For Kushner, Bannon’s right-wing defense of Israel, embraced by Trump, somehow became a jujitsu piece of anti-Semitism aimed directly at him. Bannon seemed determined to make Kushner appear weak and inadequate—a cuck, in alt-right speak.

So Kushner had struck back, bringing into the White House his own tough-guy Jews—Goldman Jews.

Kind of a weird vibe to this passage
I appreciate the fukkery, but I'm not sure about this book...

 

[TheDarceKnight]

For a book with this much hype....they should have paid for a better editor.
I don't think I've ever read such a sloppy book.

I agree

A more grammatical mistakes than you would expect.

Could it have to do with the fact that they pushed up the release in response to the cease and desist?

Maybe they wanted to take more time but decided to push it out?

Not trying to be a smart ass. Genuinely curious.

 

[MR. Conclusion]

I have never heard of a bigger collection of psychopaths. misfits, losers and just the most despicable group of people all in one situation. Unreal.

 

[voltronblack]

From reading this book does anyone else feel it just as much about Bannon as is about Trump. Because if everything had gone as Bannon plan it to go he would become next Roger Ailes but with the Mercers turning their back on him he lost Breitbart and the Alt-Right . I wonder what his next move will be or does he even have and moves to make?

 

[Serious]

Yea my biggest take away so far is how on point the good posters of HL have been throughout this whole ordeal. Really had our collective finger on the pulse of this, in particular the Bannon/Alt-Reich threat like you mentioned.

Listening to this (I got audiobook version) has felt more like reminiscing something I lived through than revealing deep secrets I had been un-privy to

sharing is caring breh

 

[2stainz]

The next day Trump tweeted: “The U.S. has a 60 billion dollar trade deficit with Mexico. It has been a one-sided deal from the beginning of NAFTA with massive numbers . . .” And he continued in the next tweet . . . “of jobs and companies lost. If Mexico is unwilling to pay for the badly needed wall, then it would be better to cancel the upcoming meeting . . .”

At which point Peña Nieto did just that, leaving Kushner’s negotiation and statecraft as so much scrap on the floor.​

@ That passage. Kush set all that up....and the Donald came through and shyt all over it

 

[Formerly Black Trash]

This nikka Bannon seem like an evil genius
Fukk him as a person HOWEVER
I admire how he was a nobody trying shyt until it stuck and just played the background
To the point where someone who was at Goldman Sachs with him was like I don’t remember that nikka

 

[Grano-Grano]

This nikka Bannon seem like an evil genius
Fukk him as a person HOWEVER
I admire how he was a nobody trying shyt until it stuck and just played the background
To the point where someone who was at Goldman Sachs with him was like I don’t remember that nikka

He's smarter than that lil homo Kushner. He knows how to move with wolves. Trump and his fruity boy wonder only live for the likes and approval.

 

[voltronblack]

This nikka Bannon seem like an evil genius
Fukk him as a person HOWEVER
I admire how he was a nobody trying shyt until it stuck and just played the background
To the point where someone who was at Goldman Sachs with him was like I don’t remember that nikka

But kinda funny in a way when he stop being the mastermind working behind Breitbart and the alt-right things start take a take a turn for the worse with the Mercers starting to turn cold on him and his plans of turn himself in the next Roger Ailes going up in smokes .