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The ‘Fire and Fury’ author is out with another bestseller, but the same networks that gave his first volume wall-to-wall coverage have greeted this one with deafening silence — and he thinks he knows why.
By Michael Wolff
In the days before my book Fire and Fury was published in 2018, Donald Trump threatened me with pretty much whatever he could: prior restraint, libel suits and ever-more invective. At that time, this was looked at by me along with my publisher and lawyers, and the general media community, as ludicrous posturing. The barriers to prior restraint certainly seemed all but insurmountable and the idea that you could libel a sitting president nonsensical. John Sargent, the CEO of Macmillan, the publisher of my book, issued a blistering rejection of the White House’s efforts at coercion. I was welcomed by nearly every media outlet to continue my so-called libel against the president, and the book went on to sell 5 million copies worldwide. My two subsequent books about the Trump administration, Siege and Landslide, enjoyed that similar combination of Trump ire and media attention (and, with typical Trump inconsistency, a dinner invitation, between the second and third books, to Mar-a-Lago, because, as Trump explained, “You get big ratings”).
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Now I’ve published my fourth book about Donald Trump, All or Nothing: How Trump Recaptured America, an account, from sources in close and constant contact with him, of his mercurial if not daft behavior during the 2024 campaign, and of the flunkies and yes-men who surrounded him, many who now occupy senior-most roles in the new White House. The book was met by typical Trump fury: the White House communications director calling me, in the new language of politics, a “lying sack of shit,” and the president, in his own long post, making threats and issuing epithets in the same vein as in 2018.
But the difference this time is striking and frightening.
While the book has been greeted by gratifying reviews in many print outlets, including the New York Times, and debuted at No. 9 on the Times’ bestseller list, most every significant television news outlet — ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN — has declined to have the book discussed on its news shows. MSNBC, a network whose bread and butter is opposition to the president, and which, out of all the others, had booked me for several shows, including Lawrence O’Donnell, a show I regularly do when I publish a book, canceled those appearances as soon as soon as portions of the book began to leak, followed shortly by the White House tirades.
Jesse Rodriguez, MSNBC’s chief booker, explained to representatives from my publisher, Crown, the Penguin Random House imprint, that the book was being reviewed by “Standards and Legal,” in itself an unusual step. Rodriguez, who kept assuring my publishing team that he hoped we’d soon be back on schedule, seemed to express surprise as this turned into a multi-week and indeterminate process. (Curiously, SKY, the Comcast division in the U.K., has produced a 90-minute documentary based on my book that is now airing in Europe.)
Rebecca Kutler, the new head of MSNBC, acknowledged to a senior-most figure in the entertainment community concerned about the blackout (blacklist?), who contacted her on my behalf, that the decision was out of her hands and rested with executives at NBCU and its parent, Comcast, and that the industry was “in a new climate.” (MSNBC, at this same moment, was canceling some of its most left-leaning personalities, including Joy Reid.)
“In a new climate,” is the same language that Boris Epshteyn, one of Trump’s lawyers with significant sway over legal matters in the new administration, used with me in a threatening call days before publication. He cited the settlement ABC had made over Trump’s tenuous lawsuit against George Stephanopoulos for saying Trump was found liable for rape in the E. Jean Carroll case, when it was, technically, a verdict of sexual abuse under New York State’s narrow definition of rape (the judge said “Mr. Trump in fact did ‘rape’ Ms. Carroll as that term commonly is used and understood in contexts outside of the New York penal law.”). In addition, Epshteyn cited the ongoing settlement discussions with CBS over its editing of Kamala Harris’ 60 Minutes interview, and the leverage the White House had over CBS parent, Paramount Global, which is pursuing a merger with another entertainment group, and over any other media company that might need its licenses renewed or its mergers approved.
In the days following his post attacking me as fake news, Trump followed up with threats of lawsuits against journalists that use unnamed sources to report on his actions.
My own publisher, confident in our legal footing and absolutely stalwart as we prepared the book for publication, suddenly offered to have a lawyer sit in to monitor any interviews that I might give about the book and Donald Trump. (I declined.)
I know from some of the same White House sources that informed my book that major media companies are actively seeking advice from Trump insiders about how to appease the White House in an effort to avoid litigation and regulatory interference. Among the answers they have been given is the example of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos paying Melania Trump $40 million for a documentary about her life, a suggestion that there are various network projects that the Trump children might like to pursue, and lists of Trump-friendly names who might appear on mainstream media news shows.
That is the new climate.
To some degree, this is all predictable Trump stuff — God knows he has threatened the media enough. What was not anticipated is how quickly and easily the media has capitulated and groveled. In the past, news organizations have met governmental threats and incursions with implacable resistance. The media still rests much of its pride on the forcefulness with which it stood up to Richard Nixon over the Pentagon Papers and Watergate and its determination not to allow any sort of damaging precedent that might open the door to future interference and intimidation. But in this new climate, where corporate parents are hostage to Trump’s whims — MSNBC’s parent, Comcast, is, for instance, spinning off the network and likely hoping to sell it, which will need regulatory approval from Trump’s FCC — news divisions don’t seem to have much of a chance.
ABC’s decision to fold in the Stephanopoulos case, even before forcing the president to sit for a deposition (in which he might have been asked to outline exactly what happened in the Bergdorf Goodman dressing room with E. Jean Carroll), may have, in media history, as much significance as the landmark 1964 case, New York Time Company v Sullivan, where the Supreme Court held that freedom of the press clearly trumped the interests of politicians.
All is far from lost, of course. We are not yet at the McCarthy era low point in media menace. Indeed, Jimmy Kimmel used material from my book to make caustic fun of Trump in a recent monologue — comedy has, apparently, more backbone than news. And my book is now in wide circulation — anyone is free to read my story of Trump’s manic flights and depressive rages throughout the campaign.
But we should no longer believe that Trump’s threats are toothless and farcical or that the mainstream media has the will to stand up to them. Trump, in his war against the media and a free press, is winning.
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