It's no secret that Donald Trump, someone who would never be mistaken for an intellectual, does not believe in anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD).

We're all familiar with his tweet from 2012 that stated: "The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive."

Fast forward to early 2018. Trump is now president of the United States, and a climate-disruption-driven Arctic cold front recently engulfed vast swaths of the US. Taking a page out of the fossil fuel industry propaganda playbook, Trump tweeted in late December: "In the East, it could be the COLDEST New Year's Eve on record. Perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming that our Country, but not other countries, was going to pay TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS to protect against. Bundle up!"

During the first year of his presidency, Donald Trump and his fossil-fuel backers have filled key positions in his administration with ACD deniers, and their war against scientists and government administrations tasked with dealing with ACD impacts has been one of shock and awe.

Fossil-Fueled Cronies

Rex Tillerson had been CEO of ExxonMobil for a decade when he accepted the post of secretary of state. Tillerson, who famously dodged questions about Exxon's role in sowing doubt about ACD during his confirmation hearings, has stated that our ability to predict the impact CO2 is having on the atmosphere is "very limited."

Mike Pence, Trump's vice president, has called ACD a "myth." He also voted twice against limiting greenhouse gas emissions.

Scott Pruitt, Trump's EPA administrator, refuses to link ACD to CO2 emissions. He was, of course, rabidly opposed to the Environmental Protection Agency itself during his tenure as Oklahoma's attorney general. Pruitt even said he intended to form a team of "independent experts" to challenge well-established climate science because, he claimed, the subject has not yet undergone "a robust, meaningful debate." Thousands of emails released in the early months of the Trump administration revealed the longstanding and very close relationship Pruitt has maintained with the oil and gas industry. Moreover, it has been known for a long time that Pruitt has maintained a secretive alliance with said industry.

Then there is Energy Secretary Rick Perry, who denies humans are the cause of ACD. Meanwhile, another more recent addition to this junta of ACD deniers is Oklahoma Rep. Jim Bridenstine, who has blamed ACD on the sun -- and is now a nominee to head NASA, an agency that spends nearly 10 percent of its budget on monitoring the Earth and its climate. It's worth noting that, echoing Trump's position, Bridenstine has even implied that one day of snow disproved decades-long ACD trends.

Along those lines, we have also Trump's nominee for the Council on Environmental Quality, Kathleen Hartnett White, who has been a long-time outspoken ACD denier. She has called climate science a "kind of paganism" for "secular elites," and claims that excess carbon emissions are "beneficial" and good for plant growth. She has even claimed that UN efforts to reduce global CO2 emissions are actually a secret attempt to create what she has called a "one-world state ruled by planetary managers."

These are simply a few of the "highlights" of those who have been tasked with entrenching ACD denial across the spectrum of the US government under this administration.

Climate Change Vanishes Before Our Very Eyes

Within moments of Trump's inauguration as president, references to "climate change" were erased from the official White House website.

Since then, a generalized scrubbing of all things "climate change" and "global warming" has become the norm across various federal agency websites, from the National Institutes of Health to the EPA. The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, a watchdog group that monitors such things, commented to Mother Jones on these actions: "What has happened is a significant and systematic shift in ways that certain types of information and messages are presented on federal websites."

This "significant and systematic shift" is clearly aimed at ignoring, or at best obfuscating, the facts and reality of ACD. This is indicative of the aforementioned fossil-fuel cronies doing the bidding of their backers.

While there have been far too many changes to websites to include all of them, there are several highlights worth noting.

The position of director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, which has in the past functioned as the president's top science advisor, has remained unfilled. Less than two months into Trump's term, that office's website removed a line from a description of its mission that said it "ensures that the policies of the Executive Branch are informed by science."

Tillerson's State Department removed the term "greenhouse gas" from its Office of Global Change's website, in addition to deleting links to the Climate Action Report.

The National Institutes of Health's environmental unit changed mentions of "climate change" to "climate," and the agency has erased links to a fact sheet about ACD's threats to human health.

The National Park Service has seen nearly 100 documents that describe its action plans regarding ACD scrubbed from its Climate Friendly Parks website.

EPA websites have been the hardest hit. Dozens of links to information aimed at assisting local officials prepare for ACD impacts have been deleted. More than a dozen mentions of the words "climate change" have been removed from the site's main page, and other website pages that had detailed the risks of ACD, goals to curb emissions, and state plans to adapt to more extreme weather fueled by ACD are long gone.

The Department of the Interior (DOI) website has also seen dramatic changes. The Bureau of Land Management's statement about the purpose of a 2015 Fracking Rule that entailed greater regulations for onshore energy production has been removed. Prior to Trump, the DOI website featured an extensive overview of its ACD priorities, which have now been reduced to just a few sentences that focus on the kinds of land the agency protects. Recently, just before this Christmas, the Interior Department rescinded a variety of ACD policies, along with mitigation policies, because they were "potential burdens" to energy development.

The Department of Energy, which runs the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, has made vast changes to its web pages that include the Bioenergy Technologies Office and the Wind Energy Technologies Office, including the reduction of emphasis on renewable energies as replacements for fossil fuels.

Meanwhile, the Department of Transportation (DOT) changed the language it uses across multiple web pages, exchanging "climate change" and "greenhouse gases" for terms such as "sustainability" and "emissions." Furthermore, the DOT's summary was changed from working to "reduce greenhouse gas pollution and improve resilience to climate change impacts" to helping to "enhance sustainability, improve resilience, and reduce energy use and emissions on our highway system."

Attacking the Planet

Another nefarious way in which the Trump administration has been pushing its denialist approach to ACD is by disallowing government scientists from participating in conferences to discuss their work on the subject.

There are numerous instances of this, but one example occurred last October when the EPA canceled speaking appearances of three of its scientists who were to discuss ACD at a conference in Rhode Island.

Actions like this one -- the suppression of the work of government climate scientists -- have been widespread and common enough that several scientists exiled by the Trump administration recently formed a panel in order to continue their work. The scientists, who were members of a federal advisory committee on ACD that was disbanded by the administration, took their research to Columbia University's Earth Institute which went on to hire one of the committee's researchers who will reconvene the panel members to produce the report they were previously working on.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration continues its near-daily attacks on the environment itself, one of the more recent being its announcement to open most US coastal waters to oil and gas drilling. This came on the heels of another announcement that the administration aims to dramatically shrink several ocean monuments in order to allow for more commercial fishing, after announcing plans to shrink several land-based national monuments as well.

The planet's warming, of course, is not pausing to wait out this administration. The last four years have been the four hottest years ever recorded. Signs of runaway ACD abound, and it is only intensifying.

The Trump administration's attack on science and the environment, along with its denial of the largest existential threat to humanity (alongside nuclear war), will continue, and almost assuredly, intensify.
(c) 2018 Dahr Jamail, a Truthout staff reporter, is the author of The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan (Haymarket Books, 2009), and Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket Books, 2007). Jamail reported from Iraq for more than a year, as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey over the last 10 years, and has won the Martha Gellhorn Award for Investigative Journalism, among other awards. His third book, The Mass Destruction of Iraq: Why It Is Happening, and Who Is Responsible, co-written with William Rivers Pitt, is available now on Amazon.

NO, I don't want to write about the affair of Ya'ir Netanyahu. I refuse adamantly. No force in the world will compel me to do so.

Yet here I am, writing about Ya'ir, damn it. Can't resist.

And perhaps it is really more than a matter of gossip. Perhaps it is something that we cannot ignore.

IT IS all about a conversation between three young man in a car, some two years ago.

One of the young men was Ya'ir, the eldest of the two sons of the Prime Minister.

Ya'ir is named after the leader of the "Stern Gang", whose real name was Abraham Stern. The original Ya'ir split from the Irgun underground in 1940, when Britain stood alone against Nazi Germany. While the Irgun stopped its actions against the British government for the time being, Stern demanded the very opposite: exploit the moment in order to get the British out of Palestine. He was shot by the British police.

The modern Ya'ir and his two friends were on a drunken tour of Tel Aviv strip-tease joints, an appellation which often seems to be a polite way of describing a brothel.

Somebody took the trouble to record the conversation of the young men - the sons of the Prime Minister and two of the richest "tycoons" in the country.

This recording has now surfaced. Since the publication, hardly anyone in Israel is talking about anything else.

According to the recording, Ya'ir demanded from of his friend, Nir Maimon, 400 shekels (about 100 dollars), in order to visit a prostitute. When the friend refused, Ya'ir exclaimed: "My father gave your father a concession worth a billion dollars, and you refuse to give me 400 shekels?"

The concession in question concerns the rich gas fields out in the sea near Israel's shores.

In an especially disgusting display of his utter contempt for the female sex, Ya'ir also offered to provide all his friends with the sexual services of his ex-girlfriend.

THIS RECORDING raises a whole pile of questions, each more unpleasant than the next.

First of all: who made it? Apart from Ya'ir and his two pals, there were only two persons present; the driver of the car and a bodyguard.

This raises some more questions. First, why is the 26-year old man provided with bodyguards at all, and for a tour of strip-tease joints in particular?

Ya'ir has no official function. No son or daughter of any former prime minister has ever been provided with bodyguards. No known danger threatens this particular son. So why must I pay for one? Second, what about the driver? Ya'ir was riding in a government car, driven by a government driver. Why? What right has he to a government car and to a government driver, in general - and in particular for such an escapade?

The episode has drawn the attention of the public to this son of privilege.

Who is Ya'ir Netanyahu? What does he do for a living? The simple answer: Nothing.

He has no profession. He has no job. He lives in the state-owned official residence in Jerusalem and eats at the state's expense.

What about his record? The only service he ever performed was as a soldier at the office of the army spokesman - not much risk of meeting flying bullets there. You need a lot of pull to land such a cozy job in the army.

Every reader can ask himself or herself: where was he or she when they were 26 years old?

Speaking for myself, at that age I had behind me several years of service in the Irgun underground, a year of continual fighting in a renowned army commando unit, a battle wound, and the beginning of my career as the editor-in-chief of a belligerent news magazine. I have earned my living since the age of 15. That is not something special to be proud of - many young people of my generation have the same past (except the journalistic part, of course.)

STILL, THIS part of the story can be explained by the character of this particular young man. Can a parent be held responsible for the character of his offspring?

Like many politicians, Netanyahu had no time for his children. It's the mother who bears most of the responsibility.

Sarah Netanyahu, known as "Sarah'le", is generally disliked. A former airplane stewardess, who "caught" Binyamin at an airport duty-free shop and became his third wife, is a haughty and quarrelsome person, who is in perpetual conflict with her government-paid household personnel. Some of these quarrels reach the courts.

So this is all a family affair, except that it raises some profound political questions.

What is the social setting of the Prime Minister, himself the son of a poor university professor and a government employee for almost all his life?

His offspring consorts with the sons of the country's richest peoples, who are enriching themselves with the active help of the Prime Minister, - Netanyahu influences the government funding of big projects. At the moment, the police are conducting at least four separate investigations into Netanyahu's personal economic affairs.

Practically all of Netanyahu's personal associates and friends are under police investigation. His closest friend, lawyer and relative is under investigation concerning the acquisition of immensely expensive German-made submarines. The navy claims that it does not need all of them.

In his private life, Netanyahu is being investigated for receiving for a long time cases of the most expensive Cuban cigars from super-rich "friends", for whom he provided some services. Sarah'le is investigated for receiving, on demand, a regular supply of very expensive pink champagne from another billionaire, whom she also asked to buy her jewelry.

THIS ENTIRE atmosphere of public and private corruption at the top of the state is very much removed from our past. It is something new, reflecting the Netanyahu era.

One could not even imagine anything like this in the times of David Ben-Gurion. His son, Amos, was implicated in some affairs which my magazine exposed, but nothing even remotely resembling this.

Menachem Begin lived for many years as an MK in the same two-room apartment where he had hidden as the most wanted terrorist in British Palestine. Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres all lived in modest circumstances.

Public humor calls Netanyahu "king" and even "emperor" and speaks of the "royal family". Why?

One reason is certainly the time factor. Netanyahu is now in his fourth term of office. That is much too much.

Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, as Lord Acton remarked. One can replace "absolute" with "long-term".

A person in power is surrounded by temptations, flatterers, corruptors, and as time goes by, his resistance wanes. That, alas, is human.

After the endless presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a relatively honest and effective chief executive, the American people did something extremely wise: it limited a president to two terms. I also have come to the conclusion that eight years is exactly right.

(That applies to myself, too. I was a Member of Parliament for ten years. In retrospect I have drawn the conclusion that eight years should have been enough. During my last two years I was less enthusiastic, less combative)

I DON'T hate Binyamin Netanyahu, as many Israelis do. He does not really interest me as a person. But I believe that he is a danger to the future of Israel. His obsession with clinging to power makes him sell out our national interests to interest groups, not just to billionaires but also to the corrupt religious establishment and many others.

Such a man is unable to make peace, even if he wanted to. Making peace demands strength of character, like taking the risk of being overthrown. Such audacity does not even enter Netanyahu's mind.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has a net worth of $105 billion and is the richest man in the world. But he is not just the richest man at this moment in history. He is the richest person who has ever lived. As of 2017 he and seven other billionaires had a collective net worth equal to that of the poorest 3.6 billion people on earth.

These figures have been in the news of late but without much useful analysis. The corporate media refuse to state what is obvious. Namely that inequality is worse around the world precisely because these super rich people demand it.

While pundits and politicians go on breathlessly about oligarchs in Russia, they seldom take a look at the wealthiest in their own back yard and the control they exert over the lives of millions of people. When Amazon announced it would choose a site for its new headquarters cities across the country began a furious race to the bottom. Amazon is not alone in the thievery department. Major corporations like Walmart always request and receive public property and public funds in order to do business.

Some 235 cities have put themselves in the running for this dubious venture. Chicago is willing to give Amazon $1.3 billion in payroll taxes that prospective employees would ordinarily pay that city. If Chicago wins this booby prize Amazon employees would pay taxes to their employer and not to the government. This is truly cutting out the middle man and makes real the rule of, by, and for the wealthiest.

The potential for public outrage isn't lost on unprincipled politicians. Some cities now refuse to reveal how much they plan to give away. But the news to date is disheartening with Boston offering $75 million while Houston is willing to part with $268 million. Amazon says it will hire 50,000 people but their business model already pays employees so little that many of them qualify for public assistance, despite being employed.

The United States is as much of an oligarchy as countries it usually disparages but it is far more dishonest about its true nature. All talk of democracy is a lie as the rich get richer, by an additional $1 trillion in 2017, and wield more and more power over the lives of everyone else.

The Bezos juggernaut is not restricted to theft of public money. He is also the sole owner of the Washington Post, one of the most influential newspapers in the country. Bezos owns a newspaper that is an organ of the ruling elite and he also has a $600 million contract to provide the Central Intelligence Agency with cloud computing services.

The Washington Post was the force behind Propaganda or Not, an effort to destroy left wing voices like those at Black Agenda Report. Under the guise of fighting Russia and so-called fake news the Bezos owned Post began the censorship campaign that has put the left's presence on the internet in such jeopardy.

Politicians outdo one another giving away public resources to the richest man on the planet who also owns a major newspaper and services the surveillance state. If it can be said that any one person rules the world Bezos would be obvious choice. No one in Chicago, Boston, Houston or any of the other cities giving away the store ever voted for Jeff Bezos. All talk of democracy is a sham as long as the richest people take from the rest of humanity.

The effort to make government an irrelevance is thoroughly bipartisan. Republicans and Democrats alike are willing to turn over government coffers to Bezos and his ilk and the rights of the people be damned.

Whoever wins this tarnished brass ring ought to be consigned to political defeat. The mayor, aldermen, city council members or whoever else brings disaster to their locality should be punished for aiding and abetting the theft. If these cities can give to the richest man who ever lived, they can surely use public money to help their residents right now. But they will never do that because they are all bought off and compromised. They are either cynical or afraid to go against the real rulers of the country.

Bezos may look like the villain in a James Bond movie but there is nothing funny about him. He is deadly serious and so are his intentions. In a Bezos run world every worker will be impoverished, every level of government will subsidize corporations, and anyone who speaks out will be discredited and under surveillance.

A quick note about Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury, which upon a second pass still has, to put it mildly, some serious issues: As any art historian can pick out a forgery, veteran journalists reading this book will quickly spot an oversold narrative and perhaps unprecedented sourcing issues.

The tortured "Author's Note" preceding the prologue almost reads like a novel in itself. In fact, trying to follow Wolff's idea of what "off the record" means or does not mean is like trying to follow the hands of a three-card monte dealer. It just can't be done.

As a White House source put it, Wolff's narrative personality is almost like a comedy act in itself:

"He's like the old Jon Lovitz character from Saturday Night Live," the source said. "You know - 'Yeah, I went to Harvard, that's the ticket. And, yeah, I was on the couch in the West Wing for months, that's the ticket.'"

The second is a Primary Colors-style novel about what goes on behind various closed doors in the Trump White House, based on a few bits and pieces of fact, which are offset by mountains of eye-rollingly insupportable supposition, spiced with occasional stretches of believable analysis.

There is considerable debate in the media world, on both the left and the right, about the value of this book (even I've gone back and forth on it). In the end, I think it's like a piece of moldy rye bread - you have to cut around the hairily sourced parts to keep from getting poisoned. But on a broad level, there is something to dig into.

Reading the book, there are at least a few real points about Trump that shine through:

1.) Trump has almost no ideological convictions and is motivated almost entirely by the classic narcissistic value equation, i.e. how much praise or scorn he gets on a second-to-second basis, from whom, and why. Had he not run as a Republican - and in particular won on a platform scripted by a nationalist true believer like Bannon - he might very well by now have been pushed into a completely different kind of presidency. Trump wants so badly to be liked that, especially with the influence of Kushner and Ivanka, he might easily have allowed his White House to drift back toward his original politics, which (as New Yorkers and furious conservatives alike will clearly remember) was once squarely in the Bob Rubin rich-guy sort-of Democrat mold.

President Donald Trump waves to the crowd after speaking at the 2017
National Scout Jamboree in Glen Jean, West Virginia on July 24, 2017.

3.) The result is an insane paradox of an America led by a doomed and trapped psyche. This is a president who in another era might have been confined to the impact of an ordinary bad commander-in-chief (we've had many), i.e., sedated and/or scripted in public, and kept on the golf course the rest of the time while the empire runs on the dreary autopilot of donors, P.R. flacks and military advisers.

Instead, we get a leader whose most dangerous moments come during his ever-expanding calendar of hyper-tweeting downtime (incidentally, is anything more certain than the term "executive time" replacing "taking my talents to South beach" as this generation's euphemism for masturbation?). All those crazed Trump tweets guarantee an endless cycle of paranoia and rebuke - and a permanently paralyzed White House.

Anyway, it's a fascinating book. But too long for most people in the Internet age to actually read. So without further ado, here's shorter Michael Wolff, in chapter form:

a) The Author's Note:

See if you can make sense of this passage:

"Many of the accounts of what has happened in the Trump White House are in conflict with one another; many, in Trumpian fashion, are baldly untrue. Those conflicts, and that looseness with the truth, if not with reality itself, are an elemental thread of the book. Sometimes I have let the players offer their versions, in turn allowing the reader to judge them. In other instances I have, through a consistency in accounts and through sources I have come to trust, settled on a version of events I believe to be true."

b) Prologue: Ailes and Bannon

This is the most interesting part of the book, and not just because Wolff has the stones to use the word "louche" in a sentence early on (there's an "I went to college, honest" word choice about once every four pages in Fire and Fury). This passage alone sums up 30 years of the history of right-wing thinking:

"Ailes was convinced that Trump had no political beliefs or backbone. The fact that Trump had become the ultimate avatar of Fox's angry common man was another sign that we were living in an upside-down world. The joke was on somebody - and Ailes thought it might be on him."

In the end, of course, the joke is on everyone, as Trump's brain fumbles hopelessly out of bounds and neither side successfully appropriates his presidency, which becomes an endlessly circular, purposeless, narcissistic tweet-storm.

1. ELECTION DAY

Wolff becomes roughly the 40,000th writer to compare Trump's campaign to The Producers. In classic Hollywood formula-script fashion, the Trump campaign is presented as composed of characters that each have their own desperate motivation to lose, only to each be crushed in their own way by the shocker result.

This chapter reads a lot like Shattered, the acid catalogue of finger-pointing that took place among high-ranking Clinton campaign figures after Hillary's loss, except here it's backwards. In this case, the characters start to blame each other for somehow transforming what Steve Bannon called a surefire "broke dick" loser campaign into a winner.

The only person who truly believed from the start that Trump would win is Melania, who had learned to expect, with religious certainty, that her husband would deliver upon the worst-case scenario in every situation. She was right.

President-elect Donald Trump, with his family, addresses supporters at an election
night event at the New York Hilton Midtown November 8, 2016 in New York City, New York.

The president spends the Saturday after the election begging guests to stay to meet a late Rupert Murdoch, not yet realizing he is the president of the United States and probably should be at the top of every party's A-list from now on.

The fate of Chris Christie and the White House chief-of-staff job is explained. Christie, who played a huge role in Trump's election by being the first establishment Republican to endorse his candidacy (until then, Trump's top backers were celebrity not-smart people like Gary Busey, John Daly, and Johnny Damon), would almost certainly have been chief of staff. But Trump does the unthinkable and gives daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner official posts in his White House, over the objections of noted ethicist Ann Coulter.

In his prosecutor days Christie had put Jared's dad Charlie Kushner in jail in 2005 for tax evasion and witness tampering, among other things, so Christie is cashiered as an impossible fit with the family-run administration.

A number of other unsuitable candidates for the chief post are considered until Trump finally settles on Reince Priebus, a lifetime Republican functionary who lacks the willpower to refuse the suicidal assignment.

3. Day One

Everybody warns Trump not to mess with the intelligence community. "If you fuck with the intel community... you'll have two or three years of a Russia investigation, and every day something else will leak out," Jared is told by one of Wolff's Someones. Kushner, alarmed, comes up with a plan to build a bridge to the "IC" with a Day One presidential visit to the CIA. Trump dutifully shows up for the address and doesn't take off his overcoat, lending him a "hulking gangster look" that may or may not have been designed to ingratiate him with an audience of spies.

He proceeds to go off on a lunatic rant about the size of the inauguration crowd, how God stopped the rain just in time to allow the great Trump to speak, and how he, Trump, didn't really take down a bust of Martin Luther King, despite what a guy named Zeke from Time tweeted, because "I would never do that, I have great respect for Dr. Martin Luther King." This is the first of many bridge-building efforts that don't work out so well.

4. Bannon

Bannon goes from being a team player pre-election to being "focused on my shit." He passes David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest around the White House so that staffers can learn what a political establishment looks like and to recognize a true presidential "mien" (Wolff went to college!). Foreigners, we learn, are the ne plus ultra mania of Trumpism (ibid).

A growing fault line inside the Trump White House is described as beginning to be visible between establishment GOP functionaries like Priebus, Spicer and Priebus deputy Katie Walsh on the one hand, and the likes of Bannon and ex-Jeff Sessions aide and seeming escaped med-school cadaver Stephen Miller on the other. Who will get the upper hand?

US President Donald Trump stands alongside Chief Strategist Stephen Bannon (L) upon arrival
at Snap-On Tools in Kenosha, Wisconsin, April 18, 2017, prior to signing the Buy American, Hire American Executive Order.

Bannon invents the term "Jarvanka" to describe Jared Kushner and wife Ivanka Trump. Trump invites Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough to the White House and serves fish. Mika doesn't eat fish. A long story about Kushner and the New York Observer is told that ends with an explanation about how Trump, who once sought to conquer the New York media scene, eventually had to flee it, going to Hollywood to become a reality star.

This story is important because in Hollywood and then through the election, Trump becomes so famous that the coastal media set - which had effectively driven Trump from New York in the first place in search of less judgmental audiences in flyover country - is now once again forced to cover Trump; a "fabulous, incomprehensible irony," as Wolff puts it.

Also in this chapter: Ivanka once dated an heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, Jamie Johnson, who cast her in a bizarre movie about the horrible travails of inheriting assloads of money, a film called Born Rich (ultimate marijuana challenge: get baked and watch a tuxedoed Jamie's intro narration without laughing).

"If you have a douchebag dad, and everyone is open about it, then maybe it becomes fun and life a romantic comedy," Wolff writes, channeling Ivanka. "Sort of."

6. At Home

Trump is increasingly mad at the media, in particular at The New York Times, which has reported he stalks around the White House at late hours in a bathrobe.

Bannon's interpretation of the bathrobe detail is that this is a way of depicting Trump as losing it, a la Norma Desmond, the spiraling loony ex-actress in Sunset Boulevard.

Trump complains to everyone that he doesn't have a bathrobe, and moreover wouldn't think of wearing one, and can't believe people would think he does.

"Do I seem like a bathrobe kind of guy?" Wolff says he demands of "almost everyone" he spoke to in the wake of the Times story. This is the kind of thing that passes for important in the Trump White House.

7. Russia

Fire and Fury, while a devastating "notional" portrait of Trump generally, describes a White House that seems genuinely to believe the Russiagate scandal to be a complete hoax. The only crack here is that some of Wolff's sources wonder what Michael Flynn might have "roped the president into."

Wolff furthermore describes a White House that seems more concerned that Russiagate investigations might lead toward more-real revelations in unrelated business dealings.

Bannon says he likes Flynn, that Flynn reminds him of his uncles, but "that's the problem, he reminds me of my uncles."

Flynn, depending on what he says going forward, is, according to Wolff, maybe the most powerful person in Washington.

President Donald Trump speaks on the phone with Russian President
Vladimir Putin in the Oval Office of the White House, January 28, 2017 in Washington, D.C.

Priebus, says Wolff, is expected to lose his job "as soon as his losing it would not embarrass the president too much." Katie Walsh, the deputy chief of staff, is portrayed as a Stalinesque figure, quietly assuming all the real organizational responsibilities of the palace while a bunch of more bombastic and self-aggrandizing males proudly pretend to be in charge of the historic ongoing failure that is this presidency.

Trump's ability to read is questioned. Then, that question is questioned, as Wolff notes that Trump can read headlines about himself. "He's just a guy who really hated school," Bannon says, "and he's not going to start liking it now."

9. CPAC

It's a long book but Wolff doesn't have much material, so he fills a lot of it with the transcripts of that weird series of days in which Bannon touches Priebus on the knee at the CPAC conference, only to have Reince recoil (although this scene is not described in the book). Rebekah Mercer, daughter and heiress to hedge fund manager and major right-wing donor Robert Mercer, who had rescued Trump's floundering campaign after Pussygate, is seen saying the president's insane CPAC speech (basically a declaration of war against the news media) showed him at his "most gracious and charming."

10. Goldman

Wolff discusses how Bannon, Trump and Kushner have differing views about Jews. This somehow becomes a segue to talk about how Goldman, Sachs vets like Gary Cohn and onetime Goldman philanthropic chief (and noted Davos schmoozer) Dina Powell were brought into the White House by Jarvanka. The new Goldman-enhanced team is given credit for composing Trump's relatively sane speech to a joint session of Congress, for which he is, for a few brief hours, praised by almost everyone in the news media, even Van Jones. Jarvanka decrees that "Reaching Out" is the new watchword.

Bannon, who "cast himself as a Cassandra to anyone who would listen," correctly predicts the adulation won't last. Because the virtue of Donald Trump, at least to Bannon, is that he will never be accepted by the "cosmopolitan elite," which by extension includes the news media - which in turn means Bannon will have the White House back in violent conflict with the right people soon enough.

11. Wiretap

Jeff Sessions becomes the center of the latest Russiagate controversy. Trump doesn't understand why talking to the Russians was a big deal.

Tony Blair visits Jared Kushner in a freelance diplomacy capacity and purportedly lets on that the British may have had the Trump campaign under surveillance. This becomes an obsession with Trump, who goes bonkers when he sees Bret Baier interview Paul Ryan on Fox on March 3rd, 2017, quoting a Circa report about surveillance involving the Trump Tower.

It seems like Baier just misspoke in using the word "wiretap," but Trump goes nuts and tweet-storms at 4:35 a.m. that Trump Tower had its "wires tapped."

Then he calls Priebus and holds the phone up so that he, Priebus, can hear a playback of the interview between Baier and Ryan, who appears to kinda-sorta endorse the Circa report in the appearance. Ryan later tells Priebus he was just "BS-ing through the interview."

12. Repeal and Replace

The effort to undo Obamacare fails spectacularly in an episode that either speaks to the total incompetence of the Trump White House, or to a brilliant strategic move by Steve Bannon to demonstrate to Trump the total impotence of Paul Ryan and establishment pols like him. Or both, or neither.

13. Bannon Agonistes

Steve Bannon sees America as hopelessly divided into two hostile groups, one of which will win and one of which will lose. It is a modern undeclared civil war in which the rise of one side will mean, necessarily, the marginalization of the other.

Bannon had originally succeeded in making Trump a believer of this idea. Now, however, the failure of the health care debacle has instead begun to convince Trump that Bannon has to go. The logic here, as relayed by Wolff:

"Bannon's efforts to use the epic health care fail as evidence that the establishment was the enemy had hopelessly backfired. Trump saw the health care failure as his own failure, but since he didn't have failures, it couldn't be a failure, and would in fact be a success - if not now, soon. So Bannon, a Cassandra on the sidelines, was the problem."

The Mercers, who had rescued Trump's campaign and installed Bannon, apply pressure to keep Bannon around. A compromise is reached: Bannon will begin leaving at more reasonable hours, and not lingering in case Trump needs a dinner companion.

14. Situation Room

"The unique problem here," writes Wolff, "was partly how to get information to someone who did not (or could not or would not) read."

Trump says of H.R. McMaster, his post-Flynn National Security Advisor: "That guy bores the shit out of me... He looks like a beer salesman."

Then Trump sees McMaster perform well on Morning Joe and decides he's made a good hire.

Bannon has pushed Trump pretty far into what is described as a radical isolationist posture toward the Middle East (or, as Bannon puts it more succinctly, "Fuck 'em").

Now, however, a chemical attack in Syria takes place, and Ivanka and Dina Powell - this is according to Bannon - get Trump's eyes in front of pictures of child chemical-warfare victims "foaming at the mouth."

Trump, Bannon says, melts. He may not like to read, but pictures work. The president (allegedly) calls "a friend" that night. "The foam," Wolff reports him saying. "All that foam."

Trump launches a missile attack in response, and informs the visiting first couple of China over a dinner of "Dover Sole, haricots verts, and thumbelina carrots" that the attack has been completed. Fire and Fury has a fish motif.

Bannon (and the Chinese) are mortified, but everyone else is thrilled that, for the first time, Trump shows evidence of being "manageable."

Guided-missile destroyer USS Porter launches a tomahawk
land attack missile in the Mediterranean Sea, Friday, April 7th, 2017.

There is a long discussion about what to do about the White House Correspondents' Dinner. The universal assessment is that Trump can dish it out but can't take it, and is not particularly funny - at least not "in that kind of humorous way," Kellyanne Conway is quoted as saying.

There is relief among the staff when it is decided Trump will not attend. He instead goes to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where he inspects a line of "colorful wheelbarrows."

16. Comey

Wolff's telling of the Comey firing story seems to come almost entirely from Bannon's viewpoint. Most of the theories of what happened seem to involve the family, and Ivanka in particular, being afraid the Russia investigation will eventually lead to personal business matters. "The daughter will take down the father," Bannon-Cassandra prophesies on.

A huge part of Trump's problem in Washington, Bannon says, is his inability to understand the mindset of people who seek collective prestige - the "association with hegemonic organizations and a sense of higher cause" - as opposed to individual aggrandizement. Trump, Bannon explains, doesn't get the idea and continually insults career functionaries for being what they're supposed to be, because he doesn't understand anyone who would want that kind of job.

17. Abroad and At Home

Trump and the family pack up for a trip to the Middle East to establish peace there. No problem! They go to Saudi Arabia to visit the Crown Prince of the House of Saud, Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz al Saud, a.k.a. MBS.

They don't establish peace in the Middle East. But they do have a $75 million party thrown for them, where the fam gets driven around in gold golf carts and Trump gets to sit "on a throne-like chair."

18. Bannon Redux

Bannon exults in Trump's withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, another move designed to permanently place Trump on the other side of a battle with the cultural elite. Bannon crudely says this is a blow to Ivanka.

"Score," he is quoted as saying. "The bitch is dead."

19. Mika Who?

Bannon is quoted as saying that, in his estimation, there is no way Donald Trump Jr. did not bring the dirt-promising Russian delegation led by Natalia Veselnitskaya up to his father's office. "The chance that Don Jr. did not walk these jumos up to his father's office on the 26th floor is zero," Bannon says.

The Urban Dictionary defines a "jumo" as "used universally to insult any person/s regardless their gender, race, nationality, etc."

20. McMaster and Scaramucci

On the reason Anthony Scaramucci wasn't hired initially: "The problem was that, really, nobody liked him."

New White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci speaks to members of the media
in the Brady Press Briefing room of the White House in Washington, Friday, July 21, 2017.

21. Bannon and Scaramucci

Bannon is feeling superior because Gary Cohn, "once a killer enemy," is by summer trying to curry favor, in search of a Fed Chair appointment.

Cohn is "licking my balls," Bannon says, in an image viciously relayed without warning by Wolff.

Bannon also seems pleased to hear that special prosecutor Robert Mueller has hired Andrew Weissman to his team. Bannon thinks this is deliciously bad news for Jarvanka, who now, Bannon says, have "the LeBron James of money laundering investigations" on their tail.

"You realize where all this is going," Bannon says. "This is about money laundering."

And once again, Bannon-Cassandra predicts that Mueller will steamroll through Manafort straight into Trump family business dealings, Deutsche Bank, etc., what Bannon calls the "greasy shit."

"They're on a beach trying to stop a Category Five," he says.

22. General Kelly

After Charlottesville, Jarvanka urges the hyper-tweeting, defensive and clearly tone-deaf Trump to take a strident posture condemning hate groups and racialists.

Bannon counsels against it, saying, "It will be clear his heart's not in it."

Bannon also advises against the disastrous impromptu presser at Trump Tower that Trump does anyway, sinking the White House into major crisis after Charlottesville.

Bannon at this point calls Robert Kuttner of the American Prospect and gives the interview that will seal his fate - and not coincidentally, provide the end of Wolff's narrative. In the curiously unguarded interview, he says of his enemies in the White House: "They're wetting themselves."

In fact it is Bannon who is out. He immediately runs to Breitbart, swearing revenge. About a half-year later, he is out of that job, too.

Leaving us in the moment we're in now: with Bannon sidelined, but billionaires like Trump and Mercer and permanent Beltwayers back piloting this ghost ship of a presidency. Will Mueller find the "greasy shit" and put an end to it all? Or will the Trump family complete the full Producers-style four-year jail sentence?