The Archers before sleep is replaced by Fire and Storm, Audible version, the book rocking America, about the first year of Trumps Presidency. God is in the detail. In this case conversations: ‘He’s a fucking idiot’, was Murdoch’s evident first words putting down the telephone to Trump.
While Sudan remains unresolved, goodness knows what is happening in Syria, Trump is quoted as saying he didn’t want “having all these people from shithole countries come here”, and the US should stop admitting immigrants from Haiti and El Salvador and instead bring in more people from Norway, whose prime minister met with Trump on Wednesday. (Wolff says in his book Trump is most influenced by who he has spoken to last – he does not read, or remember the previous conversations) Post Literal.
The shocking thing is it’s not surprising. Trump launched his political career by pushing a conspiracy theory that the first black president was not actually born in America. He called all Mexicans rapists. His first act as president was to ban Muslims from entering the United States. He said Haitian immigrants ‘all have aids’ and that Nigerians live in “huts.”
Such an overt declaration validates and encourages racism, otherness, xenophobia, protectionism. But I hope it will also galvernise the opposition, shake the Trump foundation, bring more evidence to weigh in the end the reign of a man not good for office.
‘The weakness of the book is that it concentrates on drama, personalities and the spectacle of a self-described “very stable genius”. It fails to note something arguably more important: that in the month before the book’s publication, Congress passed a tax bill that was a Republican fantasy — drastically cutting taxes on corporations and the super-wealthy, adding a trillion dollars to the national debt, and opening up the Alaskan Arctic to oil drilling, a goal that the Republicans have tried and failed to achieve for the past 30 years.
Last year, Trump allowed the most extreme elements of the GOP to add countless judges to the federal bench, and so shift the judicial branch to the hard right for decades. This new year has seen them expand offshore oil drilling beyond anything Reagan dreamt of, continue the crackdown on illegal immigration (200,000 Salvadorians are now being deported after living in the US for decades), and wage a new war on widely popular, legal cannabis. In other words, the Republican Party is finding a way to cordon off Trump as far as is possible from actually running the country, but is using him as a base-pleaser and an antagonist to everyone they hate.
Kalikellett 
At first I thought we were about to find ourselves living in a reality that before could have only been imagined by a writer like Paddy Chayefsky. A year into the Trump presidency I realize it is far more scary.
Every morning I experience a slight anxiety attack as I start reading the NYT.
I’ve not yet decided if I will actually read Michael Wolff’s book.