Power Over Truth: Michael Wolff and David Frum on Trump's First Year

This review, originally published in Critics at Large is reproduced on this site because any discussion of Donald Trump will involve extensive crossing the line that according to David Frum is a threat to American democracy.

Photo by Drew Angerer.

"Again, I just wrote what I thought and what I heard. That's one thing about the book: There really aren't any politics in the book. I have no side here. I'm just interested in how people relate to one another, their ability to do their jobs and a much less abstract picture of this world than whatever the political thesis may or may not be." – Michael Wolff, Hollywood Reporter

Even before the publication of Michael Wolff's mega bestseller, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (Henry Holt and Company, 2018), media outlets, among them The Guardian and New York offered their own searing scoops: Trump's former strategist, Steve Bannon, claimed that the June 2016 meeting between Trump's son and Russian officials was "treasonous" and "unpatriotic"; Trump expected that he would not win the election nor did he covet it. Instead, he anticipated that he would become the most famous man in the world, a martyr to "Crooked Hillary," and that his daughter, Ivanka, harboured presidential ambitions.

Wolff, an award-winning journalist writing in such prestigious publications as New York and Vanity Fair, and the author of a biography about the media mogul, Rupert Murdoch, has garnered a reputation in the journalistic world that is not "bullet proof" according to Kyle Swenson of the Washington Post. Drawing upon a large array of critics who skewer Wolff as a purveyor of celebrity gossip and for being less than scrupulous with the truth – one questions his journalistic ethics for "pushing the facts as far as they'll go and sometimes farther than they can tolerate" –Swenson leaves us with the impression that Wolff should be read cautiously.

Yes They Can: Naomi Alderman's The Power

This review, originally posted in Critics at Large, is reproduced on this site because the novel explores whether or not women, now endowed with special powers, do sometimes cross a line.

The 2017 publication of Women & Power: A Manifesto by the eminent classical scholar, Mary Beard offers a witty and caustic literary and historical overview of how women have been ridiculed, demeaned and silenced. She begins with the moment that Telemachus in The Odyssey told his mother Penelope to "shut up," go to her room and resume her own work leaving public speech to men. Eventually, Beard spotlights the moment over two millennium later when Senator Elizabeth Warren was silenced for quoting from a letter by Coretta Scott King (the widow of Martin Luther King), while others, like Bernie Sanders, were not. Beard is a particularly apt scholar to pen this manifesto considering the inflammatory vitriol that has been hurled at her for her publicly speaking about controversial issues. Beard's manifesto could be read in conjunction with Naomi Alderman's speculative-fiction novel, The Power (Little, Brown and Company, 2017) since she speculates what would happen if men were removed from their perches of power, demeaned, violated and silenced?

The Power is couched as "A historical novel" written by Neil Adam Armon. It is framed by an exchange of letters thousands of years into the future between Neil, who pleads for patronage from an address at "The Men Writers Association" and a woman called Naomi. He explains to her that he has written a novelized history after his academic studies have been ignored. Naomi’s responses, especially in the backend, are flecked with ridicule, charged with sexual innuendos, and downright condescending. Even before we read the novel within the novel, this literary conceit signals that we are entering into a vastly changed reality: the traditional schematics of sex and power are reversed with women exercising the real power while men are the disrespected other.