POLITICS
TOO FAMOUS – THE RICH, POWERFUL, THE WISHFUL, THE NOTORIOUS, THE DAMNED
by Michael Wolff (Bridge Street £20, 398 pp)
Michael Wolff asked Donald Trump once why he would like to become president. Without hesitation, Trump answered: ‘To be the most famous man in the world.’
This brazenness isn’t exactly new: it’s the sort of answer Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great might have given. But it’s certainly not how Roosevelt or Truman would have answered, and it tells us much about the way things are going.
Wolff is the American journalist who wrote the bestselling Fire And Fury, a mesmerising portrait of life inside Trump’s White House.
Michael Wolff wrote Fire And Fury. It is a fascinating portrait of Trump’s White House. He has collected a number of journalistic pieces to make a book. Pictured: Donald and Melania Trump
This follow-up is a collection of various journalistic pieces from over the years, and it’s often just as startling — and dismaying about Anglo-American politics and power.
Wolff can get up close to our New Elite and make it quite ugly.
From his interactions with the gilded ruling class, one thing is clear: There are few differences between Liberals/Conservatives, Democrats/Republicans, capitalist entrepreneurs, and Big Government justice fighters.
Only the Rich and the Poverty are the real differences. That was the way it has been since its inception. Even though our current leaders are not as impressive, they seem to be apathetic, unselfish, visionary and statesmanlike than some of their predecessors. They are ruthless and manipulative.
There’s an encounter with Boris Johnson here, too, by the way: in shirt and boxer shorts, having temporarily mislaid his trousers. This is from back in 2004, when Boris was a cavalier libertarian, ‘pro-hunting and smoking and smacking’, instead of today’s cavalier authoritarian. Wolff surmises that Boris’s greatest strength is humour, ingeniously comparing him to Ronald Reagan. Boris is still funny, however.
A Democrat himself ‘without a bone of Right-wing sympathy in my body’, Wolff nevertheless depicts the Clintons as ‘a closed political organisation . . . a kind of secret society’, with Hillary ‘one of the most disliked and distrusted people in the United States’.
A future U.S. president could just be Trump’s own son-in-law, the ‘callow and unprepossessing’ Jared Kushner, a ‘Machiavellian mandarin’ who nevertheless wielded huge invisible power under his father-in-law.
TOO FAMOUS: THE RICH, THE POWERFUL, THE WISHFUL, THE NOTORIOUS, THE DAMNED by Michael Wolff (Bridge Street £20, 398 pp)
If he ever gets the big job in the White House he won’t be another Trump, though, but a billionaire friend of billionaires, ‘adept’ at the ‘oligarch-dominated favor-bank world’. Wolff says Trump was never a potential oligarch.
Hard-nosed hack as he is, Wolff gleefully puts the boot in all over the place, including a demolition of Christopher Hitchens, the British journalist who made it big in the U.S. as a ‘public intellectual’.
Wolff called him a bully. I am able to confirm the statement thanks to one of my many, rare and wonderful encounters with famous people. Hitchens was shouting at an Italian waiter at Hay-on-Wye, demanding whisky well after the closing time. After refusing politely, Hitchens stormed out of the bar drunkenly. How they treat their waiters can reveal a lot about a person.
In the spring of 2019, in the run-up to Jeffrey Epstein’s prosecution for trafficking underage girls, Wolff was privy to a jaw-dropping pre-trial preparation meeting in the billionaire’s New York mansion.
Epstein’s supreme arrogance is powerfully conveyed. Never for one moment does he think he’ll go down. With friends such as these, he doesn’t think he will ever fall. You can see photos of him with Bill Clinton and Trump as well as Mick Jagger, Woody Allen or Castro. . . Left-wing or Right-wing, Muslim or Jewish, they’re all in the same club.
Epstein’s PR man, or acting coach, reminds him: ‘We’re trying to show remorse.’ Preparing him for questioning, he wants to know the true age of the youngest girl involved. Epstein airily says she was 14, but she worked ‘in strip clubs, massage parlours . . . had tattoos’. So that’s all right then.
‘Aristocrats in the French Revolution,’ is how Wolff sums up this gallery of grotesques. That’s how it ended, as we all know.