I have just finished the first three chapters of Fire and Fury. A lot of the bite has been taken out of reading it, because there were so many spoilers in the press before I even got around to reading the book. But the details are still pretty compelling. It may be confirmation bias on my part, but Wolff’s summation of events and his characterizations are spot on. You can look at Trump today, and at the people around him today, and see how the book basically explains them. It’s plausible, and if there are any errors or misquotes in it, they would not nullify the general conclusions and observations therein. It’s as much a work of anthropology as politics. Wolff was not unlike a research anthropologist embedded in some strange new culture, trying to make sense of the locals’ customs and mores.

Between the Wolff book and the Congressional transcript, we all have a lot of reading ahead of us.