Review: Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff

2.5 stars for Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff.

The United States of America is in deep political trouble and is worse than we can imagine. How does a man who knows nothing other than perhaps building construction become the President of the country?

Fire and Fury is a good read if you are looking for a chronological order of what has happened in the Trump's candidacy right up to Trump's administration in the first two hundred over days.

There are certainly interesting news which has not been made available to the man on the street during the Trump's presidency. This book is after all about how news of the inner workings of the White House go into free circulation and how a group of people struggle, each in their own way, to come to terms with the meaning of working for Donald Trump.

All things considered, this book only manages to capture my full attention for the first half, after which, with the worsening in appearance and disappearance of characters and continued discontinuity of narratives, I find it so chaotic and confusing that I simply skim through the rest.

Review: The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President by Bandy X. Lee

2 stars for The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President by Bandy X. Lee.

Is Donald Trump "crazy like a fox" or is he "crazy like a crazy"?

This book is a collection of articles written by 27 different mental health professionals, citing all the reasons, to the moon and back, why Donald Trump, the 45th and current President of the United States, is now the most dangerous man in the world.

These articles, categorised into 3 parts: The Trump Phenomenon, The Trump Dilemma and The Trump Effect, are interesting and even educational in the sense that we see the application of psychological concepts on Trump behaviour. Some of these mental health professionals associate Trump with a variety of diagnoses, such as narcissistic personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, paranoid personality disorder, delusional disorder, malignant narcissist, and even some form of dementia.

I get it that these psychiatrists and mental health experts recognize the urgency of the situation in which they come to the conclusion that the most powerful man in the world is also the bearer of profound instability and untruth. Yes, I dig it. What I don't understand is the need for repetition. Reiteration. Be it personality disorder, or dangerous individual psychological patterns, or creation of own reality, or inability to manage the inevitable crises, it is not necessary to harp on the same over and over, again and again. Seriously! I have lost count of the number of times it has been mentioned about Trump's assertion that President Obama wiretaps Trump Tower during the election campaign, or Trump's claim that he has the biggest inaugural crowd in history, or Trump's firing of FBI director James Comey, to name but a few.

In any case, the die has been cast. The choice made. What's done is done. Barring an impeachment, resignation or assassination, Mr Donald John Trump will remain president until at least the end of his four-year term: 20th January 2021.

Well, the world as we know it may cease to exist with a 3:00 a.m. nuclear tweet. If it comes to pass, so be it.