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Michael Wolff's Third Strike At Trump White House Has Hits And Misses

The author has gifts as a writer: a novelistic eye for scene and detail, an ear for realistic dialogue. His story keeps moving, free of constraints common to courtroom lawyers or newspaper reporters.
<em>Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency</em>, Michael Wolff

No matter how many tell-all books are published trashing former president Donald Trump and his gang, the market will make room for one more by Michael Wolff, the magazine writer whose best-selling Fire and Fury established the sub-genre back in 2018.

Wolff penned a sequel, Siege, a year later that again depicted shambolic and often shameless goings-on within the White House. Both books depended largely on unnamed sources and generated considerable controversy.

Wolff's latest salvo is Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump White House, and while it may not be the most important or valuable work in the summer library of Trump lit, it should stand as the most worthy among Wolff's own Trump trilogy, borrowing much of its seriousness from the harrowing events it describes.

Just this month, Wolff is competing with the release of two other major works by frontline reporters: Michael Bender of The Wall Street Journal (Frankly, We Did and Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker of The titles of all three volumes are riffing on famous Trump lines that got attention when first uttered — and echo as highly ironic in the here and now.

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