Greg Gutfeld may be an asshole but he does not strike me as stupid. So it’s hard to believe he didn’t know that his attempt to shrug off the terrifying picture of Donald Trump painted in Michael Wolff’s new book was as bogus as Trump’s populism.

Here’s how James Fallows summed up Wolff’s depiction of Trump in the new book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (with my emphases added):

Based on the excerpts now available, Fire and Fury presents a man in the White House who is profoundly ignorant of politics, policy, and anything resembling the substance of perhaps the world’s most demanding job. He is temperamentally unstable. Most of what he says in public is at odds with provable fact, from “biggest inaugural crowd in history” onward. Whether he is aware of it or not, much of what he asserts is a lie. His functional vocabulary is markedly smaller than it was 20 years ago; the oldest person ever to begin service in the White House, he is increasingly prone to repeat anecdotes and phrases. … He relies on immediate family members to an unusual degree; he has an exceptionally thin roster of experienced advisers and assistants; his White House staff operations have more in common with an episode of The Apprentice than with any real-world counterpart. He has a shallower reserve of historical or functional information than previous presidents, and a more restricted supply of ongoing information than many citizens. He views all events through the prism of whether they make him look strong and famous, and thus he is laughably susceptible to flattering treatment from the likes of Putin and Xi Jinping abroad or courtiers at home.

And, as Wolff emphasizes, everyone around him considers him unfit for the duties of this office.

There has been such a frenzy of interest in the book that publisher Henry Holt just pushed up its publication date in defiance of a “cease and desist” letter from Trump’s lawyer.

So what’s Trump TV to do? It can’t not discuss the book everyone else is talking about and yet, everything in it is almost too damning to mention.

Enter Greg Gutfeld, cohost of Fox's The Five, with a “There’s nothing to see here” truckload of manure:

GUTFELD: So it’s news that it’s chaos and dysfunctional when non-politicians actually move into a political realm. Isn’t that what this is all about? This guy is there witnessing the end – cronies out and, essentially, you in. These are people that have not governed, who are just like the people who kind of vote – you can say yeah, he’s a billionaire, but he’s kind of like your uncle. So your uncle just became president.

I challenge, that each one of us, if we became president … we would have had a similar experience. And so I think the book’s message … [is] this is not about a perfect White House, it’s about a human White House.

These are not beautiful people from Davos or Aspen or Harvard. These are people who can barely shave. … These are people ignorant of politics but savvy of the street. You put street fighters in there from Queens and elsewhere and the Democrats have to be consistent about this because they nominated a neophyte over Hillary Clinton, remember? They did it first with Obama and they won! So this was just the pendulum.

The biggest problems with this “regular guy, just like Obama” crap is that Obama was a) a Constitutional scholar who also served as both a state and U.S. senator; b) he behaved like a grown up and c) he surrounded himself with well-qualified and respected officials, not family members as ignorant as himself. In short, he acted like a president, not somebody's rich uncle who wandered into the White House without a clue about what to do once he got there.

Watch Gutfeld’s baloney above, from the January 4, 2018 The Five.

Crossposted at News Hounds.
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