We all know the story of Fire and Ice, lots of dragons and strong women queens fighting of the evil male king of the dead. Now we have Fire and Fury, a story of a misunderstood King fighting off fake news and slanderous sayings.
President Trump is possibly best known for his catch phrase “You’re Fired”, what President Trump overlooked is the psychological effect those two words has on a person receiving them. What everyone entering the TV show “the apprentice” accepts as a part of the fun, in real life, being mishandled and mistreated is construed differently. Being fired from a real job is painful, no matter what the reason.
Michael Wolff is no fan of President Trump, that is obvious, however, we need to ask ourselves, how reliable are his sources? In any US court of Justice, one of the main issues that is always considered are the reliability of witnesses. In media, it seems that reliability is more of a nuisance, credibility even less so and imagination is the main stay of opinion. While the First Amendment protects the freedom of speech, we must ask, does the first amendment protect imagination too? Can we create news for the sake of sating our imagination? The concept of fake news is not new, in fact it is one of the oldest tricks in the book (pun intended).
While the book does use fake facts and unreliable sources, it does hit some points, one of which is Trump’s thin skin and explosive temperament.
When we take a closer look at the book Fire and Fury, we see so called reliable sources include Steve Bannon. What is amazing is that no one wants to remember the way the media portrayed Bannon before his departure from the White House. The public forgets to remember, which is a convenience that Wolff and his kind know only too well. The public is easily maneuvered, and using Bannon as a reliable and credible source is a direct contradiction to what the media thought of Bannon before Fire and Fury. Bannon is the owner of an extreme right wing racist news platform that came under fire from the media from the moment he was offered the CEO position in Trump’s campaign. He was discredited, and media claimed that Bannon was hampering Trump’s success with his connections to the Klu Klux Klan and his anti-Semitic leanings. It is no wonder that Trump fired him, since his daughter is a Jewish convert and his son in law helped spur the move to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel by moving the US embassy to Jerusalem.
It seems that when sources can be manipulated to get attention, then people like Wolff will spare no unreliable source as a means to state a fact. Once fake news has been placed there will always be two camps, those that understand the news is questionable and the other camp that believes every piece of rubbish that is printed or presented to them. This leads me to conclude that the age of reason and science has not yet been met, we are still in the age of art and infancy, where we like to live in fantasies and believe every conspiracy theory and bad source just to strengthen a misconception of reality that suits our own egotistical desires.
It is easy to hate a successful person, it’s a global pastime. President Trump is everyman’s hated rich guy, because he flaunted his wealth as he made it. He used the media and still uses it to promote his thoughts. While the book does use fake facts and unreliable sources, it does hit some points, one of which is Trump’s thin skin and explosive temperament. However, when you already know that Trump is a hard boss, why would you trade in your life for a moment in the White House? Perhaps personal greed fuels White House officials more than a desire to truly help the President. This is the case with Bannon, a chance of an extreme right-wing activist getting control of a nations capital structure.
To conclude, Wolff has successfully given us a successful fiction, dressed up as a fact and presented as a documentary while in reality it is a work of fiction, dressed up in opinion and presented as an ego trip to gain popularity. It makes for a good read, but it is so far from reality that it makes me wonder, perhaps we should ask Wolff to write a book about Vladimir Putin and use Alexey Navalny as his reliable source, or perhaps a book about Jesus and use Judas Iscariot as his reliable source, that is about the same kind of relevance as using Steve Bannon to source a book about Donald Trump.
