YOU CAN PICK A REASON WHY HE OBSTRUCTED JUSTICE:

As Wolff tells it, Trump is, ultimately, a self-fixated performer rather than a politician, and his primary goal is to monopolize public attention. ("This man never takes a break from being Donald Trump," Wolff quotes Bannon as saying.) This depiction probably understates Trump's devotion to making money, as well as his racism and nativism, both of which go back decades. But, in any case, even performer-Presidents have to make some decisions, and Wolff devotes a good deal of space to the most fateful call Trump has made so far: the firing of the F.B.I. director James Comey, last May. Whether Trump's firing of Comey amounts to obstruction of justice is a central focus of the investigation being conducted by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, into the President's behavior.

In Wolff's account, the battle lines inside the White House were clearly drawn. Bannon, Reince Priebus, who served as chief of staff before Kelly, and Donald McGahn, the White House counsel, were adamantly opposed to firing Comey. "McGahn tried to explain that in fact Comey himself was not running the Russia investigation, that without Comey the investigation would proceed anyway," Wolff writes. In an Oval Office meeting, Bannon told Trump, "This Russian story is a third-tier story, but you fire Comey and it'll be the biggest story in the world."

Ranged on the other side of the issue, according to Wolff, were some of Trump's cronies outside the White House, including Chris Christie and Rudolph Giuliani, who "encouraged him to take the view that the DOJ was resolved against him; it was all part of a holdover Obama plot." Even more important, Wolff goes on, was the concern of Charles Kushner, Jared's father, "channeled through his son and daughter-in-law, that the Kushner family [business] dealings were getting wrapped up in the pursuit of Trump." As the President considered whether to get rid of Comey, Jared and Ivanka "encouraged him, arguing the once possibly charmable Comey was now a dangerous and uncontrollable player whose profit would inevitably be their loss."

But "Fire and Fury" also stresses that the prime mover in the firing of Comey was Trump himself. In the end, the President cut almost all of his advisers out of his final decision-making process:

Jared and Ivanka were urging the president on, but even they did not know that the axe would shortly fall. Hope Hicks . . . didn't know. Steven Bannon, however much he worried that the president might blow, didn't know. His chief of staff didn't know. And his press secretary didn't know. The president, on the verge of starting a war with the FBI, the DOJ, and many in Congress, was going rogue.

Eight days after Trump fired Comey, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed Mueller to take over the Russia investigation. Although the findings of Mueller's probe aren't yet known, and Trump's lawyers insist that the probe will clear the President of any wrongdoing, Wolff was surely right to stress the momentousness of the decision to get rid of the "rat"-- Trump's term for Comey. Wolff recounts near the end of the book that, five months after Comey's firing, Bannon was predicting the collapse of Trump's Presidency. Speaking in Breitbart's headquarters, which Bannon refers to as the Breitbart Embassy, Bannon told people there was a 33.3-per-cent chance that the Mueller investigation would lead to Trump's impeachment, a 33.3-per-cent chance that Trump would resign, "perhaps in the wake of a threat by the cabinet to act on the Twenty-Fifth Amendment," and a 33.3-per-cent chance that he would "limp to the end of his term. In any event, there would certainly not be a second term, or even an attempt at one. 

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