Bombshell Wolff book on Trump poses threat for Republicans in midterms

Jonathan Ernst | Reuters

President Trump ponders the answer to a question from a reporter en route to Hanoi, Vietnam, aboard Air Force One.

Nor do a growing economy and rising stock values offer Republicans much comfort in 2018. Early polling shows Democrats strongly positioned for midterm gains in November.

In recent days, Republicans have found more cause for alarm. Trump’s year-end interview with The New York Times featured a series of rambling, unfocused assertions at odds with reality.

His tweeted demand of “Jail!” for former Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin evoked images of autocratic leaders elsewhere. His belligerent boast of having “a much bigger and more powerful…nuclear button” than North Korea’s Kim Jong Un’s amplified doubts about the capacity for handling the presidency’s power over war and peace.

“It raises the question about whether the president has the judgment and discipline that are commensurate with that power,” said Richard Haass, a national security aide under both Presidents Bush and now head of the Council on Foreign Relations. “That ought to concern people.”

So does the harsh depiction in Michael Wolff’s expose of Trump’s first year in office. In the book “Fire and Fury,” those deriding the president’s capabilities, judgment and stability include his senior-most aides and family members.

“He couldn’t really converse, not in the sense of sharing information or of a balanced back-and-forth conversation,” Wolff wrote in characterizing the view of Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner.

At another point, Wolff described the president as “a figure of sputtering and dangerous insecurities.” Determining his wishes, Wolff quotes ex-White House aide Katie Walsh as saying, was “like trying to figure out what a child wants.”

The damaging assessments extend beyond the personal. Steve Bannon, who served as chief executive of Trump’s campaign and chief strategist in his White House, called it “treasonous” for top Trump advisers to meet with Russians offering dirt on Hillary Clinton at Trump Tower in June 2016. Contradicting the president’s assertions that he knew nothing of that meeting until much later, Bannon said there was “zero” chance that Donald Trump Jr. did not take those Russians to his father’s office that day.