‘All or Nothing: How Trump Recaptured America’ could easily be written off as one of the many Trump Derangement Syndrome-inspired trashy reads of recent years.
Among the blurbs displayed by Audible is a candid assessment of Michael Wolff as an author, as expressed by President Trump himself: “He is FAKE NEWS, a total LOSER, and no one should waste their time or money in buying this boring and obviously fictitious book!”
Trump has taken Wolff very seriously in the past though. After being impressed by what he saw in Wolff during a 2016 interview (and subsequent article), Trump gave the writer privileged access to the White House in the early days of his first presidency.
The hundreds of interviews Wolff carried out and the explosive on-the-record and off-the-record comments contributed to ‘Fire and Fury’ becoming a national bestseller, one which enraged its key subject.
Wolff has cashed in on his Trump connections since then; ‘All or Nothing’ is his fourth book on the American president. A more introverted politician would have cut off all contact by now, and yet Wolff credibly claims to have dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago during the post-2020 interregnum.
His new book relies massively on anonymous sources within the Trump camp: people who provided background information or off-the-record quotes which could never be attributed to any particular person.
That will be enough to deter many would-be readers, but it shouldn’t be, and for two reasons.
Firstly, the fact that Wolff established extensive connections within Trumpworld from 2016 onwards suggests that he retains many of those relationships today.
For those operating in the intersection between the political and media worlds, information is the coin of the realm, and all interlocutors benefit from a healthy flow of information: a text message here, a phone call there. There is good reason to believe that Wolff’s sources are reliable and that most of the information contained here is true.
Secondly, even if Wolff is a liberal journalist with an axe to grind – and in many instances, he does drift into outright and shallow partisanship – that does not render his book worthless.
Journalists who report on politics often highlight important information about politicians they like or dislike almost unbeknownst to themselves. That is why books from the tell-all tabloid genre can be more valuable than carefully curated political memoirs (the likes of which Trump will never write anyway).
The story begins with the king in exile licking his wounds after the November 2020 election and January 6th insurrection, while explaining to anyone who will listen that Joe Biden had rigged the election.
He is facing a litany of lawsuits, some of them fair and some of them unfair. There is a serious chance that the 45th president will do prison time.
At Trump’s lowest ebb, nobody truly believed he had won in 2020, except for Donald. Nobody truly believed he could come back and win in 2024, except for Donald.
Wolff describes the various legal machinations as Trump’s team of incompetent lawyers worked to keep their employer out of jail and in the presidential race.
The orders came from Trump himself and were reiterated time and time again: “Our legal strategy is our media strategy. Our media strategy is our legal strategy.”
On one level, Trump’s steadfastness is unremarkable: the Democrats gave him no choice but to run to save himself from lawfare. But his persistence in the circumstances was superhuman, and Wolff’s description of how this unfolded is gripping throughout.
Trump was not the beneficiary of a brilliant strategy, but its key architect.
Facing indictment for election racketeering in Georgia (a charge he was surely guilty of), Trump realised what an arrest would mean in propaganda terms, and practiced his mug shot pictures for days in advance.
The image taken in an Atlanta jailhouse became instantly famous. Looking at it, he turned to his aides for guidance about the caption, before deciding himself: ‘NEVER SURRENDER!’
In between the legal and political titbits, Wolff’s account explains some of the key differences between the first and second Trump administrations.
Trump has long hired beautiful women in part due to their appearances. Susie Wiles, a hugely experienced Florida political operator, does not fit the Trump mold in this sense, and was not initially held in high esteem.
Yet she would go on to be his most effective ever campaign manager in 2024, and has since ensured the relatively smooth running of the Trump White House while serving as Chief-of-Staff.
Wiles was a key voice in deciding upon JD Vance as the vice presidential pick. Unlike other key Trump advisers, she is low-key in her approach, and appears to have no ambitions beyond being the best Chief-of-Staff she can be. It is hard to imagine her joining the attention seekers on the podcast circuit someday.
Wolff also makes clear that Jared Kushner consciously distanced himself from his father-in-law after the 2020 election, and this has had the unintended benefit of reducing his influence and that of Ivanka during the second administration.
In Trump 2.0, the family is less prominent and the policy priorities are clearer.
There is something more to the subtle change in Trump’s behaviour which goes beyond the calming influence of Susie Wiles or the absence of his more disruptive offspring.
Approaching his 80th birthday, Donald John Trump is becoming somewhat more serious as a human being.
Natalie Harp is not a name most observers will recognise, but occupies a lot of space in Wolff’s account. The attractive 30-something is known as the ‘human printer’ for her role in constantly accompanying Trump, and providing him with printouts of positive media coverage.
Oddly, after a life of philandering, Wolff’s sources suggest that The Donald no longer engages in affairs, and there is no real speculation that the relationship with Harp is romantic in its character.
“Since the first year in the White House…he was, if you had to draw the obvious conclusion, post-sex. He replaced it with politics,” the author writes.
A recent off-the-cuff statement by Trump that he wants to end the war in Ukraine to improve his own prospects of eternal salvation did not get the attention it deserved. Trump will never be as focused as he should be, but there is a sense that this time around, he is deadly serious about accomplishing some major tasks.
Given his own journalistic background, the author’s reflections about how Trump gets his message across to the American public are worth paying attention to.
These also contradict a great deal of conventional wisdom about American politics. In decades past, scornful liberals spoke of Fox News having an almost magical hold over conservative America.
Yet in the aftermath of 2020, Trump deliberately ignored Fox for years due to his disgust at its decision to recognise Biden’s victory for what it was. Rupert Murdoch and those close to him retaliated by seeking to elevate Trump’s rivals in the Republican primaries, but the ending of the Trump-Fox partnership had no discernible impact at all, with the former president stampeding over all his adversaries with ease.
Perhaps Trump’s most incredible accomplishment is how he prevailed against the establishment media, while utilising the new types of modern communication such as long-form podcasts.
This is in spite of the fact that Trump is himself quite the traditionalist on the media front. Wolff writes that Trump retains a strange reverence for Time magazine and the importance of being on its cover page, in spite of the diminishment of that outlet’s significance in recent decades.
“Everybody in the Trump age – Trump and his MAGA cohorts, anti-Trumpers and their political and bureaucratic support structures – exists in a state of hyperbole. On the one hand there is Trump and his invective, and threats against liberal society. On the other, anti-Trumpers and their efforts to do anything to stop him,” Wolff writes.
Trump Derangement Syndrome is real. Many of those who will read or listen to this book suffer from this ailment, and though the book certainly will not cure them of it, like a Lemsip in winter, it may provide some temporary relief.
Aside from constant anxiety, TDS sufferers exhibit two main symptoms: an inability to recognise anything positive or admirable in the make-up of Donald Trump; and an inability to recognise any of his achievements.
Nobody who reads ‘All or Nothing’ could believe that he regained the presidency through dumb luck.
Accidents of history can certainly change the world, as when Trump turned his head slightly in Pennsylvania just before the would-be assassin fired at him on that fateful July day.
But Trump’s victory was no such accident. There is a unique brilliance to him which coexists easily with chronic flaws. His inability to accept defeat is born of his refusal to accept reality, and he possesses a level of showmanship which exceeds that of any of his predecessors.
Contrary to Wolff’s withering predictions, Trump 2.0 has been strikingly successful in key areas.
In less than a year, his bellicose nature has upended the post-WW2 economic and security order and forced Europe to take the lead in its own defence.
He has shattered any sense of large-scale illegal immigration being an inevitability which both major political parties would accept.
At the same time, his sincere aversion to war (possibly a consequence of him being from the Vietnam generation) and his emphasis on personal diplomacy has made the world a somewhat more peaceful place.
We do indeed live in the age of Trump, and the most consequential president since Reagan shows no signs of slowing down.
Michael Wolff is not going to stop writing about Trump, and as long as he is on this side of the grave, Trump is never going to stop providing material.