Wolff Says Mueller Didn't Indict Because Trump Was Ready to "Blow Up
Everything"
By Chauncey DeVega, Salon Published June 18, 2019
President Trump speaks to press on the South Lawn of the White House on June
7, 2019, in Washington, D.C.
President Trump speaks to press on the South Lawn of the White House on June
7, 2019, in Washington, D.C.
Chen Mengtong / China News Service / VCG via Getty Images
It is not an easy task to discern the truth when confronting a president and
his allies who have created their own reality, one in which truth and lies
have no absolute meaning and are, for them, ultimately interchangeable.
Donald Trump does this on a personal level: he has lied at least 10,000
times while president.
During his recent interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos, Donald Trump
continued to lie in public, asserting that he did not try to fire special
counsel Robert Mueller. As multiple sources and witnesses agree, this is not
true. Trump also asserted that he can do anything that he wants, according
to the Constitution: He apparently believes he is a king or emperor. This
too is a lie. The Constitution grants the president no such powers, and was
drafted by the framers to stop demagogues and would-be tyrants such as
Donald Trump.
Never miss another story
Get the news you want, delivered to your inbox every day.
Your Email
Trump has told his followers not to believe their eyes and ears or the news
media, but only to trust him. In Trump's political cult he is the ultimate
arbiter of reality and facts. This represents Orwell's warnings about
totalitarianism in 1984 made real in the age of Trump. In all, Trumpism is
both a form of collective narcissism and mass delusion for its leader and
followers.
How does one craft a biography or other factual narrative about a person
like Donald Trump, his presidency and the people embedded in it? Despite his
obvious criminal and dangerous behavior, how is Trump always able to escape?
Why did Robert Mueller decline to indict Donald Trump for obstruction of
justice, or even to state his conclusions clearly? If Trump is forced from
the White House, either by defeat at the polls in 2020 or impeachment and
conviction, will he leave peacefully?
In an effort to answer these questions I recently spoke with Michael Wolff,
the controversial reporter, author and biographer who has written for
Newsweek, USA Today and Vanity Fair. Wolff is the author of numerous books
including the bestseller Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. He
continues that story in his new book, Siege: Trump Under Fire.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. My conversation
with Michael Wolff can also be listened to through the player above.
Chauncey DeVega: If someone wrote this story of Trump's presidency as
fiction, would you believe it? It seems so fantastical and impossible.
Michael Wolff: I would come at it a different way. This really is an
incredibly good story. All good stories are in a sense unbelievable until
you make them believable. Trump is a classic example of that in a way.
Donald Trump, who is the president of the United States, is a madman. Donald
Trump is a psychopath. This is something to be afraid of. What the American
people and the world did not realize about Donald Trump is the nature of
this kind of madness. It is so egocentric, attention deficit-like and
self-centered.
Is Donald Trump making everyone around him sick and pathological, giving
them permission for horrible behavior? Or is Donald Trump just a reflection
of deeper problems in America?
There is a third possibility. Donald Trump is wholly aberrant. He is a
person the likes of which we have never seen before in America. Just imagine
a man who for 45 years has lived a totally external life. No private life,
no family, no intimacy for many years. And he doesn't care about it. I used
to see Trump in New York, every night, he would be out somewhere like a
shark, moving through these gatherings. He was looking for acknowledgement
and attention. In the Woody Allen movie "Celebrity," Trump plays himself. In
the movie he is a soulless celebrity. There's no mystery here about who and
what Donald Trump is.
Does Donald Trump really exist? He seems to be a type of human cartoon
character that is somehow now president.
Donald Trump is an actor. His greatest success in life is not in the real
estate business but rather as a reality TV show performer. Trump is also, in
my opinion, a bit crazy. This may be from an organic disturbance in his
brain or he literally made himself crazy in the pursuit of attention. That
happens to actors on occasion. But Donald Trump is a more extreme example
because he had to do more to command all this attention. He has spent more
time at it. This is all a fluke circumstance. Trump was not supposed to
become president of the United States, so he has been catapulted into
essentially a fictional role. So in that way, I think you can argue that he
does not really exist - most certainly as the president of the United
States.
By all indications Donald Trump is rarely alone. If a person is never alone,
there is no time for critical self-reflection.
The idea of critical self-reflection and Donald Trump does not exist. If
Trump's time is not filled with other people or him talking to someone else
and doing a monologue, motor-mouthing, he is watching television. There is
no moment of silence. There is no moment in which Trump is alone.
The other surreal aspect of Donald Trump is that he listens to the
television, literally. It is as though Fox News is telling him what to do
and he slavishly obeys. The president should be driving the agenda, not
having it set by TV personalities and a right-wing entertainment machine.
There may be a silver lining there. If someone is telling Trump what to do,
he's actually incapable of hearing them. It's not as if Trump is truly
capable of doing anything. No. 1, he has no real goal other than just
attention for himself. He has no real ability to follow things from one
moment to the next. When I toured Europe to talk about my book "Fire and
Fury," I would get all these questions about Trump staring a war: Is he
going to take America and the world into some catastrophic military action
that more rational people would avoid?
My response was, that is not impossible except that modern war is a very
complicated thing, it is very data-driven. Complexity is beyond Donald
Trump. It would be a nightmare for him to be in a room and have to make
decisions. For Trump it is a nightmare to have to consider what the
implications of a large set of data might be.
He would actually rather do the opposite - and in fact he did the opposite
with the North Korea situation. This is not a situation of a politician
creating war to distract from other things. North Korea is an example of a
politician who created peace to distract from other things. Now, in fact, it
was not peace; it just wasn't a war. The North Korea situation is exactly
the same now as it was when Trump was threatening them with all kinds of
bellicose language. Now he embraces North Korea with all kinds of soothing
language. But the situation on the ground has not changed whatsoever. It's
just the spin that Trump has weaved around it.
We should not deny Trump agency and responsibility for his behavior. But in
writing your two books on the Trump White House you've had access to many
people. Is Donald Trump being manipulated by the likes of Stephen Miller,
Steve Bannon, the plutocrats who just want more tax cuts, Christian
nationalists and other opportunists?
Yes, they are trying to manipulate Trump. But again, the peculiar inverted
silver lining here is that you cannot really manipulate Donald Trump. He
doesn't listen. He can't absorb information. He's completely uninterested in
the desires and views of other people. Therefore, what gets through his
filter is very little. Sometimes what does get through does influence him.
But this is not very much information, and it does not last for very long.
How do you write a book about the Trump White House and his cabal when the
people who are closest to Trump are so fundamentally dishonest? Donald Trump
himself has publicly lied at least 10,000 times during his time as
president. How do we sort out truth from fiction when dealing with these
people? How does one go about crafting an authentic narrative?
There are two issues here. How do you select sources that you want to trust?
I think that just comes from getting to know these people. Getting to see
what their track record is of telling you information that later on is
proved to be true, Like any relationship, how do you trust it? But then the
other part of the narrative is about the distance you're always moving away
from reality. And whether you're moving from reality because somebody is
lying to you or you move away from reality because the subject you are
writing about can't recognize reality. Another possibility: Is the principal
involved with remaking reality themselves, either because they're unglued in
time and space, or because the truth doesn't matter to them? What if this
person just lies about everything?
How does Trump always seem to survive? The Mueller report is damning, even
with William Barr's redactions. Yet Trump soldiers on.
Primarily because the bar is now set at a different level for Trump's
behavior. It is now about what he can get away with. Trump's whole career
has been about what he can get away with. All presidents set the bar in a
different way. The bar is about getting parts of their agenda accomplished;
it's about their place in history; it's about getting re-elected. On that
level, Trump's bar is about getting away with his bad behavior. The Mueller
report is incredibly damning, but Trump, at least for the moment, seems to
have gotten away with it all.
Trump is a survivor who is all about living to fight another day. It is not
about his reputation or what he has accomplished. It's certainly not about
Trump's place in history. What ultimately matters for Donald Trump is not
going to jail. If you make yourself into a kind of person who no one
understands, then no outsider can game out what you will do, what your
reactions and behavior will be. No one can count on your response. Such a
person is very scary.
Mueller was thinking that Donald Trump wears a suicide vest of sorts. If
Mueller had pushed Donald Trump into a corner he would blow up everything.
Donald Trump would take the country's political institutions down with him.
Trump would take down the Department of Justice. Trump would not care. For
somebody like Robert Mueller, this was a reality he had to confront. Mueller
was likely thinking to himself, "I have to deal with the fact that somebody
who has as much power as I do, or more, can use this power in a way that
could harm everybody in a much greater way." Robert Mueller decided it was
much better to let Donald Trump just run out the clock than to give Trump
the opportunity and the cause to destroy everything, the country's political
institutions.
In my several years of writing and doing interviews about Donald Trump I
have been trying to warn the public that Robert Mueller believes in
America's political institutions. Consequently, Mueller would only take his
investigation and his findings so far.
You were absolutely correct. After the Mueller report came out, Steve Bannon
said to me, "Never send a Marine to do a hitman's job." Robert Mueller is an
institutionalist. He plays by the book. He plays by the rules. Robert
Mueller sees a larger picture than just his assignment to go and get Donald
Trump.
In your new book Siege: Trump Under Fire, you claim that Robert Mueller had
actually written a draft document indicting Donald Trump for obstruction of
justice. Obviously, Mueller then decided to not go down that path. Why not?
I don't know what was on Robert Mueller's mind. The Mueller investigation
was two years behind closed doors - which is in itself a little odd. Mueller
came out and said, "The report speaks for itself." In fact, the report is
not very clear. I may not know what was on Robert Mueller's mind, but I do
know that among the documents that I have are a set of research papers on
the nature of the special counsel's office itself. These papers conclude
that the Office of the Special Counsel is a pretty fragile construct.
Can the president of the United States directly fire the special counsel?
These researchers concluded the answer is "yes." If the special counsel's
office is closed down, what happens to the work product? The answer is not
clear. But is it possible that in this case, Mueller's findings could have
been destroyed? Just run through the shredder? Yes. So I think Mueller came
to focus on his own vulnerability. I think that Mueller came to see his goal
here as not just holding Donald Trump accountable but as not being fired.
Because if Mueller is fired then he is not able to hold Trump and his inner
circle accountable in any way.
Remember, there are people within the special counsel's office such as
Andrew Weissman, who are among the most aggressive pursuers of white-collar
criminals. It would have been perfectly logical for the special counsel's
team to formulate the kind of indictment that they thought might have been
possible and then to make the argument that the special counsel - despite
standing Justice Department policy - could in fact indict a sitting
president.
So where does Bob Mueller come out on that? I think in the end Mueller
decided, "Let's stay in business." Mueller's decision was to be Delphic,
really, rather than prosecutorial.
How do you think Trump's presidency ends? Will Trump even leave if forced
out of office?
Trump is not going to let himself lose. Therefore, if it looks like he's
going to lose, Trump will declare victory and get out.
As some have speculated, will Donald Trump then cause general mayhem?
Donald Trump's mission is to attract attention to himself. So yes, Trump
will be a voice which people will find either impressive or incredulous.
Trump is not going to disappear until he dies or goes to jail. As we have
always been, we, the American people and the world, are stuck with Donald
Trump.
Should the Democrats impeach Donald Trump? What advice would you give Nancy
Pelosi and other Democratic leaders?
The important thing is pulling back the layers of Donald Trump. I would like
someone to do this in a very methodical way. There is Donald Trump's
financial history. What Donald Trump has done since Jan. 20, 2017, to get in
the way of people trying to investigate him. What is happening in the Middle
East, as the Trump family and the Kushner family try to arrange future
financing for themselves. Nancy Pelosi and Congress should be laying this
all out for the public. They have an opportunity to tell the story of Donald
Trump in another way, and I think probably in a more forceful way. We need
to see the smoking guns.
