Paschal Donohoe on Michael Wolff’s Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency

“Getting to Denmark” is about more than a visit to Copenhagen. This phrase was coined by the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama to describe the journey undertaken by a society in the creation of a stable state. This process was explored in his book The Origins of Political Order.

Fukuyama’s foundations for stability are: the need for the state to obey the law that it creates, the necessity of accountability, and the need for institutions to be effective and modern.

These qualities are mostly associated with liberal democracies, where a virtuous cycle is created. Elected governments aspire to be effective, but understand that the responsibility of wielding authority requires the acceptance of constraint. Voters, in turn, expect the institutions of state to be relevant to their lives. So Getting to Denmark is always possible. But so is the opposite. Progress is not guaranteed. The journey can falter, pause or fall into reverse.

These risks are central to Landslide, by veteran American journalist Michael Wolff. This is his third book on the White House of Donald Trump, a sequence that began in 2018 with the bestselling Fire and Fury.

Landslide begins with the final phases of the Trump re-election campaign and moves to the searing drama of election day and efforts to challenge that result. The refusal to accept defeat was the catalyst for the storming of Capitol Hill on January 6th, followed by the unprecedented second attempt to impeach a sitting president.

Two themes are central to this narrative. First, Wolff is explicit in questioning the capacity and rationality of the then president of the United States of America. He argues that “Trump’s true assault on democratic norms was to have removed organization, strategy, method, rationale and conscious decision-making from the highest level of government”.

Second, that the former president has maintained the fealty of his supporters to an extraordinary level. The author writes that this is now “the most striking and determinative fact of the political age”.

The concluding pages describe the deposed monarch of Mar-a-Lago, determining the fortunes of Republican Party candidates and politicians by the granting of audience or the denial of favour.

The common thread of these themes is the Trumpian belief in an election won by a “landslide” but denied by a conspiracy of Democrats, media, foreign enemies and Big Tech.

Speaking at a political rally in Georgia, Trump lays out “a veritable catechism of the information that he had selected and absorbed to argue his case”. Interspersed only by chants of “Stop the steal” he thunders in the third person that “President Trump won. President Trump won as we said both in Florida and then Ohio. And by the way, won by a lot . . . Let me tell you, this election was rigged.”

The drama in the White House is vividly described. A multitude of actors appear and fade, but most are the subject of skilfully described moments of drama. The defence lawyer for President Trump is introduced through his emotional breakdown when he is told that his college-age son cannot sit near him on the floor of the Senate.

The axis of this book is the relationship between the president and Rudy Giuliani. Their darker energies connected, expanding the possibilities open in the pursuit of electoral victory. Wolff writes that “Giuliani, willing to tell Trump not only that he could do whatever he wanted to do, but that he could go beyond this, offered Trump vastly more power. . .  and discretion than even Trump himself thought possible”.

Landslide is thrilling but incomplete. The role of the supreme court and Congress are only seen through the lens of Trump. There is no broader consideration of their role. Cabinet secretaries are mostly absent from these pages.

Despite the access of Wolff to the inner circle of the White House, the historic meeting, where Vice-Pesident Mike Pence refused to intervene in the electoral college vote count, is only the subject of a couple of pages.

This leads to a deeper difficulty. The access to sources in this book is extraordinary. But, there is no reckoning. The greatest sin in these pages is the sucking of individuals into the reality-changing vortex of President Trump. However, there is little recognition of the role of individual responsibility as democratic institutions were pushed to their very limit.

This matters. Currently, volunteers are assembled in the Veterans Memorial Coliseum of Arizona searching for bamboo fibres on ballot papers. This is to prove the claim that ballots were flown in from Asian countries to assist in a Biden victory.

The claim of a denied electoral victory could yet reverberate through American politics. So the Wolff sequence of books may not be a trilogy; more could yet follow. This does not lessen the responsibility of the author to judge.

Paschal Donohoe is Minister for Finance and president of the Eurogroup