It is debatable whether any book has taken the internet by the storm since the last Harry Potter as Fire and Fury has. Released on Friday, four days before schedule, it was sold out soon with people in DC lining up at midnight with a wind chill of -3 degrees. Not only it is on best-selling lists, its free pdf is now being widely disseminated locally, so eager is the public to understand the twittering (pun intended) of the president of the global super power.
To say the book is unflattering towards Trump is to say that the fireworks at Pompeii were pretty. But it does to a certain extent explain the early morning wakeup call from Trump that ushered the New Year for Pakistan. Not that Pakistan is mentioned by name, it is not, it is more a picture of lunacy painted of the POTUS who may not understand that America needs Pakistan while the war is being waged in Afghanistan. Though the policy change in Afghanistan is detailed, it adheres to the general caricature of Trump as the addled child rather than providing new facts.
Given the ties the Saudi royal family has with Pakistan, it is also pertinent to add that Trump claims to be nearly solely responsible for bringing about the coup. Mostly because Mohammed bin Salman and Trump saw each other as kindred spirits rather than as a political or economic move.
However, what is more shocking in the book is not the depiction of Trump as a loon; it is the cavalier fashion of the entire top hierarchy of the US administration. From their mode of conversation it appears that they view the world as a game of Risk (chess being too complicated for them) without realizing that the policies and actions of the American government has serious repercussions for people. Throughout the book, it seems that people living in other countries are non-entities with neither will nor any importance.
Having said that, the gossipy nature of the choppily written book makes it hard to take it seriously. It appears to be written more with the intention of cashing in on the universal disdain towards Trump than for a depiction of reality or containing any hard-hitting truths.
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