A book all too worthy

By Masha Gessen
12:36 P.M.

The President .. is a deranged liar who surrounds himself with sycophants. He is .. functionally illiterate and intellectually unsound. He is manifestly unfit for the job. Who knew? Everybody did.

So why has a poorly written book containing this information, padded with .. tedious detail, become an overnight sensation, a .. best-seller, and the topic of every other political column, podcast, and dinner conversation? It seems we are in bigger trouble .. than we .. realized ...

At the end of the day, we sit down in front of the screen and watch the late-night comedians state the obvious: they imagine the unimaginable, think the unthinkable, and speak the unspeakable. There is nothing funny about it, but we laugh with relief. However briefly, the comedians free us from the nagging sense that we are crazy. It’s not us, it’s him. The laughter becomes hysterical ...

Wolff’s book seems to occupy a middle ground: between the writing of White House newspaper reporters, who exercise preternatural restraint when writing about the Administration, and the late-night comedians, who offer a sense of release from that restraint because they are not held to journalistic standards of veracity. That middle ground, where there is neither restraint nor accuracy, shouldn’t exist ...

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/fire-and-fury-is-a-book-all-too-worthy-of-the-president