I'm a pretty active on Twitter (@AdrianAlvarez) and I follow the news and its analysis rather closely, so this book was interesting for me as a sort of behind the scenes of the most exhausting season of America I've ever experienced. Last year, it was hard to determine which of Trump's actions were a) born of a nefarious entity outside of the United States, b) born of a fully articulated worldview that hadn't been conveyed on the election trail but which belonged to Trump, and c) were born merely as chaotic byproducts of an inept shit show. If Wolff is to be believed, much of what we all went through last year belonged to the last category, and much of the dangerously articulated thinking was not from a nefarious outside government but from the wretched, apocalyptic mind of Bannon. I'm not convinced by his premise that Trump is too stupid and too dysfunctional to be responsible for the awfulness that was 2017 but a lot of the chaos and childish behavior reported of the president rings too true to be discarded. Trump runs his office like so many bastard producers I've had the displeasure to work for in Hollywood.

I debated reading this because I thought it might be too infuriating. Filling more of my time with this man seemed an act of masochism, however, what I found was a strange comfort in the notion that this president is so incredibly inept that without Bannon he really is limited to only certain kinds of damage: international embarrassments, hateful and ridiculous rhetoric, emboldened sections of society who are, yes, deplorable. I'm not arguing this isn't real damage but that the kind of damage that will be most lasting, the kind of cruel structural recoding of our policies and procedures that we will struggle to correct in our future really comes straight from the GOP in congress and has very little to do with this blathering buffoon and his cadre of dull witted "Bluths."

If there is any takeaway from this book I'd say yes it is dripping with juicy gossip but more than that, it removes any argument the GOP may try and throw out in the coming elections about their party being derailed by Trumpism.

Read it if you can stand it. It has no satisfying ending or even a directly stated argument but it is one hell of a page turner and it sets some context for the machinations of our embarrassing and dishonorable political era.