Donald Trump Did Not Want To Be President

This article would be dystopian gold, if it weren't for the horrifying fact that it might be real. It chronicles the mass chaos of the White House after the election in 2016, the unexpected result of a campaign created to lose. According to Michael Wolff, who spent 18 months conducting interviews with the President and those around him, the people behind his entire campaign never meant to win. Many may have suspected that was the case, but this account brings a new chill on the state of the US. 

Right up to the election, no one suspected Trump may emerge victorious. Trump himself never expected, nor wanted, to be President. "Even though the numbers in a few key states had appeared to be changing to Trump’s advantage, neither Conway nor Trump himself nor his son-in-law, Jared Kushner — the effective head of the campaign — ­wavered in their certainty: Their unexpected adventure would soon be over. Not only would Trump not be President, almost everyone in the campaign agreed, he should probably not be. Conveniently, the former conviction meant nobody had to deal with the latter issue." From a poorly run campaign to the harried confusion following the win, Wolff describes how nearly everyone near the campaign was "shocked and bewildered" by Trump's election. Bannon, Priebus, and Kushner were all effectively jockeying for power in a system in which titles and qualifications meant little. Making matters worse, so was the President himself. "If Bannon, Priebus, and Kushner were now fighting a daily war with one another, it was exacerbated by the running disinformation campaign about them that was being prosecuted by the President himself."

The descriptions of Trump himself are not new, nor are depictions of the unmanaged White House, but this account brings us ever closer to the madness. It confirms for us that, if the account holds true, Trump was wildly unprepared for office because he never meant to hold it.