I’m sure by now everyone has heard about the Michael Wolff book,’Fire and Fury’, that purports to challenge Trump’s sanity, among other claims.
My prediction is, this book will fail to have any lasting impact (beyond the immediate headlines, like we’re seeing now), like all the left’s past efforts to stop Trump. This book will change no minds: The people who are most shocked and appalled by this book are those who never liked Trump to begin with; those who support Trump won’t read and or won’t care, and for good reason: The author has a history of fabrication, and the book cherry picks only the negatives about Trump and ignores the positives. Other claims, such as Trump “not wanting to be president” are outright specious. If Trump didn’t want to be president, why would he have have campaigned so hard, especially in the final weeks?
In early 2016, when it became apparent that Trump was a viable contender and not just a media spectacle, the left began promoting the narrative that Trump would be bad for the economy, the stock market, and ‘foreign and domestic relations’. According to the left, Trump would hurt America’s ‘global standing’, ‘disgrace the Office’, and so on. They also tried to portray Trump as a misogynist and a racist.
As we all know, the left failed and Trump won. And the narrative of Trump being bad for America was also shown to be demonstrably false, as the S&P 500 notched its second-strongest year since as far back as 1998, with a 20% gain. Furthermore, the US economy grew at a solid 3.5% clip and unemployment fell to nearly two-decade lows of just 4%.
So the left went on the attack again, this time trying to to implicate Trump for colluding with Russia during the campaign, and various other criminal activity. The left combed through as much information as possible for a ‘smoking gun’ that would directly prove that Trump was complicit in election fraud, but came up short. Trump, the Teflon president, could not be stumped, could not be stopped. Trump Jr., Emails, Muller, Comey, Flynn, Manifort, etc. all came up short. Hope of impeachment dissipated as Trump proved to not only competent, but retained the support of House Republicans.
The pattern has been for everything that the left throws at Trump to not stick. It’s not just that people have short memories, but that Trump hasn’t actually done anything illegal. The Iran contra scandal, although Reagan was never implicated, was probably far worse than anything Trump was involved with. Much of the concern pertains to Trump’s campaign staff , his son, and son in law. Trump probably didn’t do a good enough job vetting his campaign staff.
So now, the left, in desperation, is trying another tactic: conscripting journalist shills such as Michael Wolff to sow seeds of doubt that Trump is mentally unfit for office. You have to understand how the liberal media works. First, they conscript a purportedly ‘unbiased’ and respected journalist to write a negative book or expose about Trump (or any major public right-wing figure). Then they, the media, reference such work as an ‘impartial authority’ to promote and bolster the intellectual credibility of their overtly left-wing agenda. These five of so left-wing outlets (Vox, CNN, The Atlantic, New York Times) are working in unison to foment a narrative, in addition to Michael Wolff, in the hope of convincing people who have actual power (such as House Republicans) to distance themselves from or even repudiate Trump. The whole thing was coordinated in advance, long before the book was even released. Normally when a book is released, the media picks up on it gradually unless the author is really famous, such as Hillary Clinton. Furthermore, they are recruiting disgruntled flunkies such as Bannon to turn against Trump.
As For Trump’s mental acuity, Bush famously had his ‘Bushisms’, and he still got two terms. House republicans, average voters don’t expect the president to be this exemplar of articulateness.