Book Review: ‘All or Nothing,’ by Michael Wolff

ALL OR NOTHING: How Trump Recaptured America, by Michael Wolff

In early 2021, after losing the presidency to Joe Biden, an embittered Donald Trump returned to brood at his Florida golf club. Mobs of his supporters had tried to overturn the election on Jan. 6, and many of his closest allies had deserted him, including his son-in-law and onetime chief consigliere Jared Kushner. When a friend asked him about his father-in-law’s prospects, Kushner responded, “What was Nixon’s future?”

This quote appears in the opening act of “All or Nothing,” the latest rapid-fire dispatch by the journalist Michael Wolff, who has made a career of charting Trump’s meteoric political fortunes. The story this time runs from the president’s days of tropical dejection to the heady election of 2024. Wolff skilfully explains how Trump, a man who “might seem to have among the highest luck percentages ever recorded,” survived two assassination attempts, four criminal indictments and a plethora of civil lawsuits to rocket back into the Oval Office.

The book is undeniably gripping — a veritable harvest of slime, sycophancy and sleaze that tells the story of Trump 2.0, an aggrieved pugilist waging a “life or death” campaign. As people — Democrats and establishment Republicans — sought to hold him to account for what they saw as his transgressions (against propriety, against democracy), Trump concocted his own scheme: “The presidency was the revenge that had to be wreaked on his behalf,” Wolff writes. The proposition to the American electorate, in Wolff’s words, was absolutist: “Elect me or destroy me.”

Every presidency has its chronicler: McCullough on Truman, Schlesinger on Kennedy, Caro on Johnson. Their books usually take eons to compile. David McCullough spent 10 years on his Truman book; Robert Caro published the first volume of his L.B.J. biography in 1982 and is still going. They rely on careful consideration of sources stacked in presidential libraries, interviews with major and minor characters, countless hours poring over yellowing tomes.

Not so Wolff, whose chronicles of the Trump years, like Trump’s own rapidly announced and chaotically rolled out executive orders, are run off while events are still molten — “Fire and Fury,” his first, was released after Trump had been in office less than a year. “All or Nothing” arrives just three months after the events in it took place, as impressive a feat of logistics by his publisher as anything. In Wolff’s books, quicksilver sources speak on condition of anonymity, their fired-off texts find their way into printed text, verbatim, alongside secret recordings of donor meetings and Trump’s ramblings. Sprinkled throughout are moments of fierce intelligence and genuine lucidity.

In response to “All or Nothing,” Trump staffers took to X, calling the book “fiction” and writing that Wolff’s work has been “riddled with inaccuracies.” Wolff’s reportorial style has caused consternation in the past — his narrative can sometimes veer into the improbably telepathic — but what could be more appropriate for a president who exists in an alternate reality? (Or, as Wolff puts it, “not truly in the Cartesian universe.”) And what could be more appropriate for a president whose nearest thing to a presidential library was a stash of purloined documents spread around Mar-a-Lago and an archive of social media posts? As the critic Laura Miller once put it, in Michael Wolff, Donald Trump gets the biographer he deserves.

Part of the pleasures of “All or Nothing,” if you can call them that, is seeing things through a Trump-tinged lens. Just as Trump’s social media tics (“Sad,” “Many People Are Saying”) have worked their way into our own mouths, his verbal idiosyncrasies end up in Wolff’s writing. The former representative Matt Gaetz is, for example, a “low-rent Florida party boy,” and the former South Dakota governor Kristi Noem gains the moniker “dog killer.”

Even tense is never assured, as Wolff slips between the semi-reflection of the perfect and the immediacy of the present to describe inflection points. “By midnight, the celebration, such as it is, has turned to many puddles of vomit,” Wolff writes of the night of Trump’s election, “with a scattering of Trumpers asleep on the floor.”

The opening sections of “All or Nothing” largely concern the legal cases brought against Trump by Democratic district attorneys and others, and the way they only spurred Trump onward, putting him in front of cameras where he dominated airtime talking of a vast conspiracy against him. Ordinary people began to donate in response — $4 million flowed into his coffers in the 24 hours after he became the first president to be criminally indicted — and politicians who had shunned Trump over the insurrection returned to the fold.

Conversely, Trump understood that solutions to his problems at court could be solved at the ballot box. As the president stated in a kind of mantra that became gospel during the campaign: “Our legal strategy is our media strategy; our media strategy is our legal strategy.”

Most of the main characters in the book are Trump employees. (“A man largely without friends or intimates,” Wolff says, “he defaulted to his paid companions.”) The closest among them are referred to by their first names. There is Boris (Epshteyn) and Natalie (Harp). The former is a yes-man lawyer who makes his first appearance in Wolff’s book shirtless on a video call. Boris is seemingly eager to step into the shoes of Roy Cohn, Trump’s legal fixer four decades earlier, but Wolff reports that the rest of Trump’s legal team were never quite sure if Boris was wearing a wire and cooperating with a special counsel investigation into the Jan. 6 uprising.

Natalie is Trump’s “fetch-it girl,” who, Wolff writes, runs around after the president with a wireless printer in her backpack printing off flattering articles and fan art. Occasionally, she writes Trump saccharine letters that Wolff, of course, got his hands on: “You are all that matters to me. I don’t want to ever let you down. Thank you for being my Guardian and Protector in this life.”

Wolff is particularly adept at describing Trump donors, billionaires who flock to him as his campaign gathers steam. There is Miriam Adelson, the widow of the megadonor Sheldon, who Trump tells a confidant is “so boring.” There is also Jeff Yass, a secretive billionaire who cozies up to Trump amid the former president’s “dramatic flip-flop” on TikTok.

By the final three sections of “All or Nothing,” Trump has bounced back from his trials and it is the Democrats who are back footed. The cast begins to rotate, too. Natalie stays a constant, but Boris is distanced in the wake of pay-to-play allegations surrounding administration appointments. JD Vance, whom Wolff says Trump hesitated to choose as his running mate until “virtually seconds” before he offered him the job, begins to take a central role.

Another character looms here, too: Elon Musk. Trump seems to disdain him at first. After a rally in October where the X and Tesla mogul paraded around in a T-shirt that rode up his stomach, Wolff reports that the president asked, “What the fuck is wrong with this guy?”

Everyone useful is valued, however, and Trump and Musk are soon buddies: “The two most swollen, bumptious, overbearing and successful men in America, each lacking basic social skills, in the same room.” No wonder that Trump’s campaign fretted from the get-go, Wolff writes, about them “invariably” falling out.

Only when it’s probable that Trump is going to win do Ivanka and Jared — as well as Trump’s wife, Melania, who had also been largely absent — pop back in. That’s not the only sad refrain. By the end of Wolff’s book, we are left again with a deflated Trump, an underdog who has won and seems to hate every minute of it. As an associate says, in Wolff’s paraphrase, “What excites Trump most is not the fire but the clanging fire engines and sirens rushing to the scene.” The implications are worrying: Will President Trump leave policy to ideological terrors, people like his draconic homeland security adviser Stephen Miller? Will he be tempted to light more fires himself, just to see what chaos will ensue? Either way, when the fire trucks come, one thing is certain: Wolff will be hanging off the back.

ALL OR NOTHING: How Trump Recaptured America | By Michael Wolff | Crown | 379 pp. | $32