Michael Wolff’s book about the Trump White House corroborates something that reporting on the president has alluded to previously: He never contemplated that he might be elected.
For Trump, a businessman turned reality TV star, the campaign represented an exercise in brand building. The Times’ election tracking needle wasn’t the only indicator that Hillary Clinton would win the election. Until the end, Trump thought she would too.
“The candidate and his top lieutenants believed they could get all the benefits of almost becoming president without having to change their behavior or their fundamental worldview one whit; we don’t have to be anything but who and what we are, because of course we won’t win,” Wolff writes in “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.”
For Trump, “losing was winning,” Wolff adds. “Trump would be the most famous man in the world – a martyr to crooked Hillary Clinton.”
The calculus also applied to members of Trump’s campaign team.
In Wolff’s telling, the campaign would vault Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner to the status of global celebrities and ambassadors for the Trump brand. Steve Bannon “would become the de facto head of the Tea Party movement.”
Kellyanne Conway would be a cable news star. And Melania Trump could return “to inconspicuously lunching” and raising the couple’s son.
Anyone who has watched Trump before or after the election could reasonably wonder why he even wanted to be president.
“After little more than three weeks, Trump’s behavior is no more erratic than it used to be, but in the context of the Presidency it seems so,” Jeffrey Frank, writing in The New Yorker, noted last February, less than a month after Trump took the oath of office.
Frank ventured that nothing the presidency offered could top the reality that Trump had created for himself in New York. As Frank put it:
“Life in midtown Manhattan was good for a fellow like Trump, who was recognized everywhere and regarded even by his detractors more as a cartoon than a threat. He could enjoy the city’s pleasures, which included dining at San Pietro, a favorite restaurant… For someone like Trump, Washington cannot be the most exciting place to live, and won’t be unless he begins to thrive in the company of world leaders who don’t speak English, and philosophers like Paul D. Ryan, the Speaker of the House, who could probably go on for hours about, say, how a medical savings account offers tax relief for low-income workers who are about to lose their affordable health insurance. Then there are the briefings and hours of meetings and piles of memoranda, but having to read more than a page, or too many bullet points, is said to test the limits of Trump’s attention—and the camera demands the image of stern attention. That, at least, seems to be one of his core beliefs.
Wolff’s book does nothing so much as confirm that observation. Which leaves one to wonder whether instead of railing against Wolff, the president would not have been better off simply noting that Wolff gets most of the story right. And leave it that. At least that would jibe with reality.
The issue isn’t that Trump was a long shot. Underdogs win elections, too. Trump gamed the process to achieve an end other than the one he set out to achieve. By winning he failed miserably. That has to be a first in the history of the presidency.