Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics

and the Trump presidency for the New Spectator USA website. This morning I went to a hotel in Mayfair

to meet Michael Wolfe, who is a world-famous journalist and the author of Fire and Fury.

And we talked about his new book about the Trump presidency, which is called Siege.

And I'm sorry if the sound quality is a little odd, but we were recording in his hotel room.

It was in 2016. I think I read a piece by you. quality is a little odd, but we were recording in his hotel room.

It was in 2016. I think I read a piece by you about how all journalists were getting Donald Trump wrong because they were so busy sort of clutching their pearls and shrieking

in horror at what was happening that they were missing the fact this was maybe the greatest

story of all time. I don't think anyone can accuse you of having missed the story, but are you

still amazed at how little journalists seem to concentrate on the story and how often they

just grandstand about Trump? Yeah, you know, I mean, I think that most journalists, at least most journalists in the

circles that I move in are incredibly divided about this.

That you have to see Trump as the ideological enemy, as the ideological needier of

modern culture.

Yeah.

In a way that clipses the ability to see him as the most amazing figure of our time.

Yeah.

So, and I understand this, and I can certainly, certainly sympathize with seeing this as the

nadir of something or other.

Yeah.

But at the same time, from just a dramatic level of the inability, certainly the inability

of my imagination to have to create something like Trump.

...