I’ve given books shit for being poorly written or full of mistakes before. I’ve also read some pretty poorly written works with questionably poor editing. Fire and Fury makes all of those books look like fucking amateurs.
I went into Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House expecting, more or less, a quickly rushed product. Because that’s exactly what it is; a product made as quickly as possible to capitalize on media frenzy. I mean, for fuck’s sake, the very title of the book is a direct Donald Trump quote from an event that is now largely forgotten by everyone. If the title of the book being a flash-in-the-pan media reference isn’t a red flag that this book was a quick cash-grab, then I dunno what is.
But hey, it certainly worked for the book. The thing sold faster and harder than Steve Bannon’s Mouth-flavored Mountain Dew sells in a Florida gas station. Who would have thought that dramatically titling your book after the direct words of the United States President that were given during aggressive commentary on a rising police state’s nuclear ballistic capability would make it sell really well? Michael Wolff knew! The second ‘f’ in his name must stand for the word ‘Fucking’ in the phrase ‘Really Fucking Good At Naming His Shitty Book Something That Will Make It Sell’.
Okay so I didn’t really like the book, you get that. But why didn’t I like it? Well, the first problem is that it’s not all that interesting. It’s got a couple of tidbits, but overall it’s 100% uncited hearsay and while I don’t exactly doubt any of its accuracy or truth, it doesn’t exactly tell us a whole lot we didn’t already know. When you compose a damning tell-all book, it’s kind of helpful to tell us shit we didn’t already know, you know? However, the book suffers from a much greater secondary issue that truly made it a slog: it’s written so god damn poorly that it’s painful to read.
This book is infuriatingly edited. And when I say the book is “infuriatingly edited” what I really mean is “it’s not edited at all Michael Wolff you stupid asshole, you didn’t edit this book”. Have you ever tried writing a story or a journal before and then after completing it, you re-read it and realize you’ve written a ton of confusingly structured sentences, made frequent typos, threw in random punctuation where it didn’t belong all over the place and had sentences that went on for around 30 words? Yeah, that’s because normally your first draft isn’t exactly perfect, so you go back and you edit it for grammar, spelling, sentence structure and general reading clarity. Michael Wolff got to the ‘finish your story’ part of the process and then leaned back, yawned really loudly and said “ME TOO TIRED TO EDIT ME DO IT TOMORROW ZZZZZ” but tomorrow never came. It never came.
Because waiting for tomorrow would have ruined the book’s dramatic release. See, Michael Wolff is a tricky dick. He didn’t exactly want to write a lexicon of unknown pleasantries of Donald Trump’s campaign and victory. He wanted to write a shitty, old news turd with a stupid eye-catching media-happy title and then get it onto shelves ASAFP.
Fun Fact: As I read a book, I dog-ear pages where I find typos or other editing issues so that I can refer to those pages later when I write a stupid review. When I was done with it, Fire and Fury looked like someone threw it down a staircase and into a goddamn washing machine. There are sooOOoooOOoOO many dog-ears in my copy of the book that if I possibly added a few more of them, I think it would qualify as origami. Let’s look at some of those dog-ears.
“Bannon was making his first official pubic appearance of the Trump presidency,”
Okay fuck you Michael Wolff, even Notepad flags ‘pubic’ down as being the wrong word to use in that sentence (it’s obviously supposed to be the word ‘public’). Did you write your manuscript on a Burger King napkin, you asshole? It’s not all bad, though, because it at least gives you the mental vision of Steve Bannon showing off his pubic for all to see.
“Bannon, with mounting ferocity and pubic venom,”
Michael Wolff what the fuck dude. This marks the second time Michael Wolff "accidentally" writes 'pubic' instead of 'public' when writing about Steve Bannon. Maybe I was wrong, Wolff. Maybe you’re not incapable of editing your typos and you just actually are speaking about Bannon’s pubic area. I apologize.
“This was the job Bannon a week later.”
I’m noticing a running theme with Michael Wolff and his inability to correctly write a sentence whenever he has to mention Bannon’s irresistible jowls. Wolff, do you just really want to fuck Steve Bannon? Is this what this whole thing was about? You could have just asked him!
“It was Bannon who held the line, insisting, sternly, that Obamacare was a litmus Republican issue, and that, holding a majority in Congress, they could not face Republican voters without having made good on the, by now, Republican catechism of repeal.”
Hey, Michael Wolff, did you know, that sometimes, you don’t have to have, a bunch of commas in a sentence, sometimes, you should just rewrite the sentence, to clarify better.
“All right, then, he, too, could play it this way.”
Oh fuck you, Michael Wolff.
In all, I counted twelve typos. There were four instances, by my count, of sentence structure that was so bad that the sentence didn’t even make sense. See, in correct sentence structure, there is a clause, comprised of a subject and a verb, that forms a complete thought. It’s all pretty simple.
“Suzy jumped over the stone.”
See? We have our subject, Suzy. We have a verb, jumped. A simple independent clause to form the action of Suzy jumping over a stone. Michael Wolff looks at basic sentence structure rules and goes “PPFFFFFFTTTT” and then writes bullshit like;
“Given this context, the curious information she presented to White House counsel Don McGahn during the administration’s first week- this was before, in the second week, she refused to enforce the immigration order and was thereupon promptly fired- seemed not only unwelcome, but suspect.”
What the fuck kind of sentence structure is any of this? It reads like a confusing hodge-podge of half-finished thoughts quickly jotted down together in one fast go… oh, wait, yeah. That’s exactly what it was, lol! “This was before, in the second week, she refused to enforce…” makes almost no sense and takes like three re-reads to understand what it’s trying to say. Hey, let me put the effort in to amend this confusing bullshit;
“Given this context, the curious information she presented to White House counsel Don McGahn in the administration’s first week (this was prior to the second week, when she then refused to enforce the immigration order and was fired) seemed not only unwelcome, but suspect.”
See? It’s as if not littering your garbage sentences with random fucking commas and breaking up thoughts into confusing-to-follow chunks will result in clearer, smaller sentences. Take notes, Michael Wolff.
Okay so, to summarize this mess, Fire and Fury is a boring book that doesn’t tell us much of anything new. If you’re late to the party or haven’t followed Trump up to this point then it’s okay as a refresher course, I guess. Other than that, the new information it provides is not only uncited but is also, accumulated all together, pretty much the length of this fucking blog post. It sold itself on the promise that it would be a scathing insider’s view of a seedy underbelly of inner-circle Trump connivings. Instead, it’s a confusing and hard to read piece of shit that was pushed out as quickly as possible to ride the media wave. I feel like an asshole for reading it. I feel like an even bigger asshole for paying money for it. I feel like an even, even bigger asshole for writing about it.
I guess it could be worse, though. I could be the kind of person who actually read this blog post!
 |
| wowee wow, did michael wolff spend almost 10 whole minutes in mspaint designing this radical cover art |
But hey, it certainly worked for the book. The thing sold faster and harder than Steve Bannon’s Mouth-flavored Mountain Dew sells in a Florida gas station. Who would have thought that dramatically titling your book after the direct words of the United States President that were given during aggressive commentary on a rising police state’s nuclear ballistic capability would make it sell really well? Michael Wolff knew! The second ‘f’ in his name must stand for the word ‘Fucking’ in the phrase ‘Really Fucking Good At Naming His Shitty Book Something That Will Make It Sell’.
Okay so I didn’t really like the book, you get that. But why didn’t I like it? Well, the first problem is that it’s not all that interesting. It’s got a couple of tidbits, but overall it’s 100% uncited hearsay and while I don’t exactly doubt any of its accuracy or truth, it doesn’t exactly tell us a whole lot we didn’t already know. When you compose a damning tell-all book, it’s kind of helpful to tell us shit we didn’t already know, you know? However, the book suffers from a much greater secondary issue that truly made it a slog: it’s written so god damn poorly that it’s painful to read.
This book is infuriatingly edited. And when I say the book is “infuriatingly edited” what I really mean is “it’s not edited at all Michael Wolff you stupid asshole, you didn’t edit this book”. Have you ever tried writing a story or a journal before and then after completing it, you re-read it and realize you’ve written a ton of confusingly structured sentences, made frequent typos, threw in random punctuation where it didn’t belong all over the place and had sentences that went on for around 30 words? Yeah, that’s because normally your first draft isn’t exactly perfect, so you go back and you edit it for grammar, spelling, sentence structure and general reading clarity. Michael Wolff got to the ‘finish your story’ part of the process and then leaned back, yawned really loudly and said “ME TOO TIRED TO EDIT ME DO IT TOMORROW ZZZZZ” but tomorrow never came. It never came.
Because waiting for tomorrow would have ruined the book’s dramatic release. See, Michael Wolff is a tricky dick. He didn’t exactly want to write a lexicon of unknown pleasantries of Donald Trump’s campaign and victory. He wanted to write a shitty, old news turd with a stupid eye-catching media-happy title and then get it onto shelves ASAFP.
Fun Fact: As I read a book, I dog-ear pages where I find typos or other editing issues so that I can refer to those pages later when I write a stupid review. When I was done with it, Fire and Fury looked like someone threw it down a staircase and into a goddamn washing machine. There are sooOOoooOOoOO many dog-ears in my copy of the book that if I possibly added a few more of them, I think it would qualify as origami. Let’s look at some of those dog-ears.
“Bannon was making his first official pubic appearance of the Trump presidency,”
Okay fuck you Michael Wolff, even Notepad flags ‘pubic’ down as being the wrong word to use in that sentence (it’s obviously supposed to be the word ‘public’). Did you write your manuscript on a Burger King napkin, you asshole? It’s not all bad, though, because it at least gives you the mental vision of Steve Bannon showing off his pubic for all to see.
“Bannon, with mounting ferocity and pubic venom,”
Michael Wolff what the fuck dude. This marks the second time Michael Wolff "accidentally" writes 'pubic' instead of 'public' when writing about Steve Bannon. Maybe I was wrong, Wolff. Maybe you’re not incapable of editing your typos and you just actually are speaking about Bannon’s pubic area. I apologize.
“This was the job Bannon a week later.”
I’m noticing a running theme with Michael Wolff and his inability to correctly write a sentence whenever he has to mention Bannon’s irresistible jowls. Wolff, do you just really want to fuck Steve Bannon? Is this what this whole thing was about? You could have just asked him!
“It was Bannon who held the line, insisting, sternly, that Obamacare was a litmus Republican issue, and that, holding a majority in Congress, they could not face Republican voters without having made good on the, by now, Republican catechism of repeal.”
Hey, Michael Wolff, did you know, that sometimes, you don’t have to have, a bunch of commas in a sentence, sometimes, you should just rewrite the sentence, to clarify better.
“All right, then, he, too, could play it this way.”
Oh fuck you, Michael Wolff.
In all, I counted twelve typos. There were four instances, by my count, of sentence structure that was so bad that the sentence didn’t even make sense. See, in correct sentence structure, there is a clause, comprised of a subject and a verb, that forms a complete thought. It’s all pretty simple.
“Suzy jumped over the stone.”
See? We have our subject, Suzy. We have a verb, jumped. A simple independent clause to form the action of Suzy jumping over a stone. Michael Wolff looks at basic sentence structure rules and goes “PPFFFFFFTTTT” and then writes bullshit like;
“Given this context, the curious information she presented to White House counsel Don McGahn during the administration’s first week- this was before, in the second week, she refused to enforce the immigration order and was thereupon promptly fired- seemed not only unwelcome, but suspect.”
What the fuck kind of sentence structure is any of this? It reads like a confusing hodge-podge of half-finished thoughts quickly jotted down together in one fast go… oh, wait, yeah. That’s exactly what it was, lol! “This was before, in the second week, she refused to enforce…” makes almost no sense and takes like three re-reads to understand what it’s trying to say. Hey, let me put the effort in to amend this confusing bullshit;
“Given this context, the curious information she presented to White House counsel Don McGahn in the administration’s first week (this was prior to the second week, when she then refused to enforce the immigration order and was fired) seemed not only unwelcome, but suspect.”
See? It’s as if not littering your garbage sentences with random fucking commas and breaking up thoughts into confusing-to-follow chunks will result in clearer, smaller sentences. Take notes, Michael Wolff.
Okay so, to summarize this mess, Fire and Fury is a boring book that doesn’t tell us much of anything new. If you’re late to the party or haven’t followed Trump up to this point then it’s okay as a refresher course, I guess. Other than that, the new information it provides is not only uncited but is also, accumulated all together, pretty much the length of this fucking blog post. It sold itself on the promise that it would be a scathing insider’s view of a seedy underbelly of inner-circle Trump connivings. Instead, it’s a confusing and hard to read piece of shit that was pushed out as quickly as possible to ride the media wave. I feel like an asshole for reading it. I feel like an even bigger asshole for paying money for it. I feel like an even, even bigger asshole for writing about it.
I guess it could be worse, though. I could be the kind of person who actually read this blog post!
POINTLESS NUMERICAL SCORE:
2/10
Try harder, Michael Wolff, you human asswipe.
POINTLESS NUMERICAL SCORE (ADJUSTED FOR PRODUCT SUCCESS):
15/10
Okay you win this round, Micheal Wolff, you human asswipe.
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