Diary – 11 January 2018

Like every journalist in Washington, I’m enthralled by the new Michael Wolff book, Fire and Fury, which depicts Donald Trump as a president in steep mental decline, derided and despised by his entire entourage, family included. I read with perhaps special attention because I have a book of my own about the Trump phenomenon being released on 16 January, just over a week after Wolff’s. The experience is a little like being the next presenter at the Golden Globes immediately after Oprah Winfrey’s speech. Wolff is interested in personalities, not politics. But while Trump may be stupid or crazy, the people enabling him are neither of those things. The lucky-bounce election of Trump by a freak of the Electoral College offered US Republicans an unexpected opportunity to enact a deeply unpopular agenda. In return, Trump has demanded that they protect him — and attack his enemies. On the very day before the ‘very stable genius’ tweets, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee ordered the Department of Justice to open a criminal investigation of Christopher Steele, compiler of the famous dossier of Trump’s activities in Russia. They didn’t consult or even inform committee Democrats, a sharp breach of Senate practice. Trump wanted it, so they did it. What the world needs to understand is not Trump’s complex hairdo, but his self-serving system of power. That’s my story anyway.

But while we’re talking about personalities, here’s an aspect of Donald Trump’s that I’ve never got past: his hatred of dogs. When Trump tweeted on 5 January that his former aide Steve Bannon had been ‘dumped like a dog’, he recycled an insult he has hurled more than a dozen times since declaring for president, according to the indispensable TrumpTwitterArchive.com. After the 2016 election, a wealthy Trump supporter offered the new First Family a gift of an especially adorable Goldendoodle.