Fire and Fury summary

Being part of an underdog campaign and part of a White House staff are two entirely different matters, something Jared Kushner learned rather quickly. Once this transition was made, Kushner noticed that Steve Bannon was no longer acting as buddy-buddy as he had been.

Getting Trump elected functioned as a common goal, something that bonded everyone on the staff – but now it was about deciding policy, and Bannon’s agenda was completely different from Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump’s.

Steve Bannon came from the world of Breitbart media, led by Rob Mercer and his daughter Rebekah Mercer, both of whom had a vision of an America that was small government, anti-regulation, anti-Muslim and pro-Christian.

Over the years, Breitbart became a central voice in the alt-right movement of ultra-conservatives, the people who turned up in force at Trump rallies and are seen as his core group of supporters. These are the folks Trump was likely referring to when he said people would continue to support him even if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue.

After his first week in office, Trump invited Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, co-hosts of the MSNBC talk show Morning Joe, to visit the White House, and he couldn’t understand why they weren’t as pleased with the reaction to the travel ban as he was. Despite the thousands of protesters filling the nation’s airports and the many families torn apart, Trump’s opinion was that “We did great!”

All of Jared’s friends and advisors warned him against taking a job in the White House, but both he and Ivanka felt that they were the best safeguard against unchecked Trumpism and the only ones who could prevent the president from succumbing to his worst impulses.

Dating back to mid-2016, there were rumors in the press that the Trump campaign was in cahoots with the Russian government. But just prior to his inauguration, the details of an independent investigation suggested a very troubling connection indeed.

The Steele Dossier – named after its author, Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent – details a disturbing scenario. If the dossier is to be believed, the Russians have incriminating information on Trump and may be using it to manipulate him and his presidential powers.

Trump doesn’t read. He basically thinks that he shouldn’t have to read, and that’s why he had his assistant, Hope Hicks, read the newspapers for him and present him with a positive spin on the news each morning.

His refusal to read is so absolute that some within the White House staff have wondered if perhaps he has a reading deficiency, or maybe dyslexia.

At the start of June, Trump was fuming over the Russia investigation and actually kicking around the idea of firing Jeff Sessions and Robert Mueller, and replacing the attorney general with someone still loyal to him – either the former mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani, or Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey.

Bannon had to keep telling him that, first of all, neither Giuliani nor Christie had a snowball’s chance in hell of getting confirmation approval for the position and, second of all, that there’s no such thing as executive privilege to avoid an investigation.

For the most part, Trump has had a hard time seeing how he could possibly be to blame for any of the problems facing his administration. The business with Russia was all the fault of Sessions; how could he recuse himself and not protect Trump?! It didn’t make sense.

Trump is also in the habit of getting a lot of bad press by publishing early-morning, uncontrolled Twitter blasts aimed at various people who he feels have wronged him in some way. Yet, whenever he’s asked about these tweets, he’s always dismissive or confused, as if to say, “What’s the big deal?”