The Trump Trilogy: A Comparative Review

Fire and Fury is like hanging out with White House staffers after work, listening to them gossip at their favorite watering hole. Unhinged is like giving a sympathetic ear to a friend’s rant against her bosses after she’s just been fired. Fear is like reading the transcript of a particularly contentious deposition.

Together, these three books make up what I call The Trump Trilogy. They were all highly touted when they were published and all purport to reveal the inner workings of the Trump White House during its first, chaotic year. They all deliver but in different ways and it’s interesting to compare and contrast them—and also contrast the selected tidbits that were breathlessly hyped when published with the real revelations buried deeper in their pages. 

Each has its strengths and weaknesses. While all intend to reveal the inner workings of the Trump White House, the authors had different approaches. In Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff wants to put the reader on the same sofa he occupied in the West Wing, talking to anyone who happened to sit down and shoot the breeze (although his chief source was pretty clearly Steve Bannon). In Unhinged, Omarosa Manigault Newman takes the reader along on her personal journey from growing up in Youngstown, Ohio’s public housing projects to Washington, DC’s Executive Mansion. In Fear, Bob Woodward concentrates on the White House decisionmaking process and the substance of policy, particularly in foreign affairs, trade and national security. 

Of the three, Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury and Unhinged by Omarosa are stylistically the best. Wolff is an excellent writer and has a real feel for emotional punches, using colorful language and expert narrative to build and deliver highs and lows. Unhinged is the easiest, quickest read, something you can devour at the beach if you’re so inclined. (And thank you, Omarosa, for finally explaining your name: It’s a contraction of Omarosaonee, which means “my beautiful child desired” in a Nigerian language. She shortened it in school.) 

My respect for Bob Woodward is unbounded. He’s the greatest reporter of his generation. But no one ever accused Woodward of being a great writer. As with all his books, in Fear he churns out forests of wooden prose. As a reader you know that every word has been sourced, vetted and confirmed. You are getting as accurate and complete an inside account of what went down as it is possible for any journalist to deliver. But color? Description? God forbid, analysis? Fuggedaboudit.

My purpose in reading all these books was to try to gain insight into the character of Donald Trump, to try to anticipate what he might do next and to simply be better informed so I can be ready for the next punches—or tweets, as the case may be.

No surprise here: In every book, Donald Trump comes across as a repulsive, repugnant, disgusting, lying monster, who governs through fear in an impulsive, selfish, ignorant, stupid way. He is utterly untethered to the truth or to history and is leading the United States toward despotism, isolation and disaster. 

His closest associates confirm this: Fear tells the story of the meeting between Trump and his generals in the Pentagon’s “Tank,” which prompted Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to famously call him “a f***ing moron.” White House Chief of Staff John Kelly called Trump “an idiot” and called his own job “the worst in the world.” His own personal lawyer, John Dowd, felt that “Trump had one overriding problem that Dowd knew but could not bring himself to say to the president: ‘You’re a f***ing liar.’” Says Omarosa: “When his temper flares, he does not—cannot—hold back, and it’s terrifying to watch. If he’d spoken that way to a diplomat or head of state, it would have been disastrous.”

Omarosa and Woodward both make a point of Trump’s total lack of empathy for any one or any thing, using near-identical terms. As Reince Priebus, puts it in Fear: “The president has zero psychological ability to recognize empathy or pity in any way.” And Omarosa agrees, writing: “Donald Trump's single greatest character flaw as a leader and human being is his complete and total lack of empathy.”

Both Fire and Fury and Unhinged are also in agreement on Trump’s illiteracy. Wolff says that staff regarded Trump as “semi-literate” at best and Omarosa calls him “just this side of functionally literate.” She continues: “I'll go on the record and say that Donald Trump has never read from beginning to end any of the major pieces of legislation, policies, or even some of these executive orders that he has signed.” 

Omarosa’s insights

Interestingly, it’s Omarosa’s book of the three that provides the fullest psychological portrait of Trump and she comes from a unique perspective: She’s known him the longest on a personal level. Both Wolff and Woodward are interlopers, outsiders. Omarosa first met him on The Apprentice in 2003 (the show aired in 2004). He was her mentor and friend and though she had numerous academic, journalistic and political accomplishments prior to going on the show, including a stint in the Bill Clinton White House—a minor revelation in the book—it was The Apprentice that really made her a public figure and celebrity, if a minor one. She owed Trump much and it colored her relationship with him.

That’s why it’s so startling to read of his mental deterioration and advancing dementia from her. She has a baseline no other author possesses. 

While watching Trump being interviewed by NBC’s Lester Holt, Omarosa writes: “While watching that interview, I realized that something real and serious was going on in Donald's brain. His mental decline could not be denied. Many in the White House didn't notice it as keenly as I did because I knew him way back when. They thought Trump was being Trump, off the cuff. But I knew something wasn't right.” 

This becomes a theme throughout the rest of the book based on Omarosa’s familiarity with Trump in the days when he could do complex negotiations and calculations in his head, could speak clearly and act rationally. She really thinks he’s losing it mentally, with vast and dangerous implications for the United States and the world. Plenty of people think that Trump is crazy but here’s more solid evidence.

For me, the real revelation from Unhinged is the reason Omarosa gives for Trump’s extreme hatred of Barack Obama. It’s not the mockery he received from Obama at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2011. Nor is it sheer racism, although that’s part of it. As she writes:

“Barack Obama's presidency incensed Donald Trump. In his mind, Obama wasn't just black, he was foreign, with a father from Kenya. He was suspicious of Obama's otherness, which is an actual term in the study of ‘whiteness.’ The otherness wasn’t just being black; it was being African. Foreign. Exotic. Other. By Barack Obama becoming president, he made Donald Trump look like a fool. Trump took it personally, that the nation chose Obama over him, even though he wasn't running.”

It is just astonishing—at least to me—that this man, who hadn’t been involved in electoral politics, who had never held public office, who had never declared or run in a political campaign, nonetheless felt so entitled and superior by reason of his sheer existence that he felt usurped by the success of a man who was smart and worked extremely hard against long odds in a career in politics and public life. This is a sense of arrogance and entitlement and cosmic egomania that is literally breathtaking. But it also explains a lot—and this sense of entitlement certainly hasn’t diminished as long as Trump has held office.

Omarosa also provides an interesting perspective on education issues since supporting historically black colleges and universities was part of her minority outreach portfolio. It was while pursuing these duties that she crossed paths with Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

Omarosa warns: “Her plan, in a nutshell, is to replace public education with for-profit schools”—all of them, the entire system, not just a few. “In each cabinet meeting, I was seated in the row near her. I can tell you, after a year of sitting in those meetings and observing her, that she's woefully inadequate and not equipped for her job. She is just as horrible as you suspect she is. … She does not care about your children. Be afraid. Be very, very afraid.”  

(On a personal note, this hit particularly close to home for me because one of Betsy DeVos’ primary allies in Congress is Rep. Francis Rooney who represents Florida’s 19th Congressional District, my own. Rooney, whose entire education was parochial and private and has never spent a day of his life in a public classroom, is a great friend of DeVos and pursued her agenda legislatively with bills to cut education programs (House Resolution 3957) and Pell grants to disadvantaged and minority students (House Resolution 4414). Rooney has called public education “brainwashing” and thinks scholarships and tuition grants in return for public service are “like paying people to fight against us,” since he sees public service as part of the “deep state.” I worked for Rooney’s challenger in the midterm elections but Rooney won in this heavily Trumpist district. He bears close watching in the next Congress.)

Obviously, race plays a major role both in the Trump candidacy and presidency. Given Omarosa’s race and her position as an adviser to the president and head of minority outreach, racial relations are important to her account of her time with Trump before, during and after his candidacy. It constitutes too much of the book to fully recount in a review.

But it’s also where I, anyway, have to part with any sympathy for Omarosa. She worked very hard to get this man elected, as she chronicles. She excused and overlooked the racism he expressed in his very first utterance as a candidate and expounded every day. She was well rewarded for her personal loyalty and her prominence as Trump’s most visible black supporter. And she turned a consistent blind eye to the hatred and bigotry he spouted throughout the year of his campaign.

“…If you recognize that we live in a racialized society and label someone racial, you can work with that,” she writes. But as Trump’s racism became more blatant once he was in office she came to believe that he actually wanted to start a race war. “I didn't want to believe it. I rejected what other people said about him because they didn’t know him like I did. I had to go through the pain of witnessing his racism with my own eyes, and hearing it with my own ears, many times, until I couldn't deny it any longer.”

Well, that took a while! Sorry, Omarosa, no absolution here. You worked hard to put this creature in office, you stood by him and excused him for nearly two years and writing a book about your disillusionment doesn’t pardon your actions in the dock of history.

The crisis

More than their differences the three books together paint a picture of an utterly incompetent administration in perpetual chaos, riven by factions and dominated by a raging despot of diminishing sanity. In fact, it’s not really an “administration” that Trump is running—it’s a royal court with Trump as monarch, or a religious cult, with Trump as its god. Those who are insufficiently worshipful are ultimately cast out. (And Trump really believes his word is holy: Omarosa relates how he wanted to take the oath of office on a copy of The Art of the Deal, rather than the Bible.) 

Worse, it’s clear that Trump’s efforts to establish this kind of world around himself don’t stop at the White House gates. It’s the mindset he wants to extend to the entire globe—the universe, even.

These are the kinds of actions that the American Founders rebelled against, “a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States,” as they said in the Declaration of Independence. Back in 1776 they concluded: “A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.” It’s clear from these books that we have such a prince again, in the heart and at the head of a free republic.

If you already hate Trump, these books provide details of why he’s so loathsome. If somehow you’re not convinced, they should convince you.

But all the effort of researching, writing, publishing and ultimately reading these accounts is for nothing if they don’t spur action. The final conclusion from all the books is inescapable: We have a president who is unfit, unhinged and extraordinarily dangerous, aided and abetted by the ignorant, the weak and the corrupt. We could lose our democracy. We could lose our independence. We could lose the notion of objective reality itself. In his reckless endangerment of the environment and his ignorance of the power of nuclear weapons, we could lose the planet. We are in a state of existential crisis and I mean “existential” in its fullest sense—our existence is at risk.

We can’t just absorb the facts and lessons of these accounts. These books must be a spur to action—while action is still possible.

It has been said that “America is great because it is good—when it ceases to be good it will cease to be great.”

We indeed need to make America great again—by making America good again.