Freddie Sayers: I was struck reading your book that the world of media politics is changing extremely quickly. In the old days you knew where the power lay — with the big networks, the party establishment, the stars, the newspaper. And now, it’s harder to tell. The characters you cover are in many ways figures from the past.

Michael Wolff: I think this has been the case for some time. Virtually everyone in this business has been challenged in some profound way — and often they’ve been disappeared. They were there, they were important, and then they were gone. One of the interesting things about Rupert Murdoch, of course, is that he has been there for so long — for 70 years. He has held more power and influence far longer than anyone else in our time. But now, the sands are not only shifting but dissolving beneath him.

FS: This week, he finally announced his retirement at the grand old age of 92.

MW: That is partly because at that age, the end comes inevitably — but there are also other factors. It’s not just that he’s aged out of the game. The game has changed, and the game is changing in so many ways against him.

FS: We tend to think of Murdoch as a sort of omnipotent puppet master. But your book presents him as a man overtaken by events. You talk about him mumbling a lot, making the wrong calls, being bullied by his children. He’s actually a rather forlorn figure. And it seems from your account that he’s been like that for some time.

MW: His sell-by date probably ran out some time ago. But he holds on because he’s Rupert Murdoch — because all of the people around him think, “well, he’s Rupert Murdoch, he must still be Rupert Murdoch”. And I think in many ways, that’s not true.

I guess you could say he is reaping what he sowed — and it’s not pleasant for him, especially when it comes to Fox News. Donald Trump won the election largely because of Fox News, and it is confounding — wounding even — to Murdoch that he might have made a man he detests the President of the United States. The ultimate reality is that Fox News and Donald Trump are his legacy.

The tragic irony is that Murdoch never had much to do with Fox News. He started it in 1996 after being rebuffed in his efforts to buy CNN. But he’s never been that interested in television: he never watches it, he certainly isn’t a television executive. He hired Roger Ailes to start Fox News and to grow it — and Roger sat at the top for more than 20 years. It was Roger’s network, not Rupert’s. Although Rupert was happy to collect the incredible amounts of money that rolled in.

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FS: All this paints a very different picture from Succession, the hit TV show, in which the Rupert Murdoch character played by Brian Cox is always in the newsroom. He is obsessed with cable TV. But what you’re saying is that the real Murdoch wasn’t stoking the fires of Fox News — in fact, he was embarrassed of it. It’s in many ways a disappointing revelation.

MW: Rupert Murdoch is a newspaper man. It’s the only thing he really is passionate about — that, and the family dynasty. When you see Rupert with a newspaper, it’s like this physical love affair: the way he handles it, the way he folds it, the way he marks it. You know, it’s nearly erotic. The other parts of his empire, such as television, have made him enormous amounts of money — because he’s a very astute media guy, a business guy. He can see the audience, he can see where the money is flowing. But it’s not him. His love doesn’t flow there.

Now, the bulk of his newspaper holdings — apart from The Wall Street Journal — are no longer profitable. They are declining assets. And it would be very hard to argue that a future without Rupert Murdoch will include his family still holding on to those newspapers.

FS: Has the departure of Tucker Carlson undermined Fox News? Would you say it’s losing its grip on the Right-wing narrative? 

MW: You have to see this against the wider media background: cable television, which was the great media cash cow for 25 years, is a declining business. Its decline won’t be as fast as newspapers — but it is just as inevitable. One of Murdoch’s daughters has been arguing they should sell Fox News because it is only growing less valuable.

FS: Do you think that Donald Trump will win his war against Fox News? He has already boycotted two Fox-sponsored Republican debates. Is he bigger than the network? 

MW: Let’s look at what’s happened so far. Rupert Murdoch, feeling guilty or trying to burnish his legacy, decided that he would try to undermine Donald Trump by inventing the candidacy of Ron DeSantis. DeSantis is a Fox bubble — and he has failed terribly. The result has been that Donald Trump is probably a more popular primary candidate than anyone in modern history. Despite four indictments, and despite New York State having taken away his business, he is still almost inevitably headed for the Republican nomination. He may well be president again. This is all in spite of Fox News.

FS: If you were a betting man, would your money be on Biden or Trump? 

MW: You can logically argue that Trump should not win. He’s always been a minority figure. His campaigns are run in the most chaotic and disorganised fashion. In 2020, weeks before the election, his campaign was $200 million in debt. This has never happened before. So he should not win, except for the fact that in very close races, exogenous factors usually determine the outcome. Will Biden fall over a couple of times? We wait and see. But the important thing to remember is that Trump certainly could become president again.

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FS: Your relationship with Trump is most unusual — and it illuminates some of his strangeness and maybe some of his genius. You are not thought of as a diehard Republican, to put it mildly. And yet he invited you into his circle, he gave you exclusive interviews, and even after you had written about him in a not very flattering way, he kept getting back in touch. Do you still speak to him?

MW: He threatened to sue me and tried to stop the publication of my book. So yes, we’re still in touch. But in a somewhat peculiar way. I think that he’s come to see these books as a positive chronicle — if only because they’ve sold so many copies. Therefore, they must be good. Not too long ago, one of the Trump people said to me: “The only metric we pay attention to is how much attention he’s getting: good, bad, doesn’t make any difference.” So I guess I’m part of that attention matrix.

FS: Allow me to suggest a second theory. Maybe there is still a part of Donald Trump, just as there was a part of Rupert Murdoch, which craves the approval of the liberal establishment. He’s a New Yorker. You’re the Vanity Fair guy: the esteemed journalist of showbiz. Is that fair?

MW: To be perfectly honest, when it comes to Donald Trump, it doesn’t really matter who he’s talking to. He can talk to anyone. The important thing is that he’s talking and someone is listening.

FS: For some people, this will be almost disappointing to hear. We’ve discussed these two outsized, Right-wing characters — Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump — and what you’re saying is that at some level both of them still want to be liked by the mainstream. Does this make them phony conservatives?

MW: Well, I think that is probably true. In a way, it’s more surprising in the case of Murdoch than Trump, who grew up in the bosom of the New York establishment, even if for much of that time he played the buffoon. By contrast, for most of his career, Murdoch has insisted: “I am the outsider.” But clearly, somewhere along the way, he became the establishment — although I’m not sure Rupert himself exactly appreciates this. He became one of the most powerful forces in politics, business, and, of course, the entertainment industry.

FS: Despite having been president, Donald Trump is still mysteriously considered anti-establishment. He’s outside the Citadel. Why is this?

MW: I think part of the genius of Donald Trump — although I’m not sure he planned it out in this way — is that his stature has only increased through conflict. If you spend 14 years as a reality television star, I think you understand that you have to have conflict at every turn — and it doesn’t matter whether it’s real conflict or not, you just have to find an enemy. Challenging “the establishment” is a very convenient way for Donald Trump to keep being Donald Trump.

FS: Let’s focus now on the current president, Joe Biden, because at times your characterisation of Murdoch — slightly too old for the job, slightly overwhelmed by the complexity of the modern world — reminded me of him. Do you think that America has an old man problem? 

MW: Biden looks terrible. He looks like an old man, he walks like an old man, he talks like an old man. I’ve been covering politics for a long time, and Joe Biden, even as a young man, had the air of an old man — certainly in the way he spoke. I think that, under the circumstances, he has actually done a pretty good job. And I think that’s what Joe Biden feels: “I’ve done a good job. So, screw it, I’m 80 and I might fall over at any given moment, I’m gonna do it.”

FS: Do you think liberals are to blame for the rise of Trump — and for the political mess that the US seems to find itself in? 

MW: The liberal establishment has clearly not been up to competing with these rising conservative outliers. It has been unable to respond in any effective manner. I don’t think they have a clear voice. I don’t think that they have a clear mission. I think that they’re caught in their own sense of self-righteousness and self-satisfaction.

For three hours, and in a relaxed mood, he harangued me about the stolen election and all the various bad people, dark forces, and disreputable agencies of government out to get him. This was rendered jauntily, even proudly. He clearly enjoyed the telling. This was his story.

The conversation led to dinner with him and Melania on the Mar-a-Lago terrace and the continuation of his catalogue of grievances, now broadcast to the long line of nightly well-wishers coming to his table. As I tried to leave, he held my arm for a few last-minute words about his unbelievable fortitude in the face of his enemies, adding: “What if they stormed in here to search the place? Mar-a-Lago! Here! Do you believe that’s possible? Well, I wouldn’t put it past them!”

When it did happen, earlier this week, the first word came from Trump himself on his social media network: “My beautiful home, Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, is currently under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents.” He rushed out front as the narrator of events. This was his story, part of his him-against-everyone tale he had been telling for decades. Of course he was going to continue to own it.

Here again was not only his instinctual story sense, but the ratings rule he had learned in 14 years of reality television: the only thing that matters is conflict.

Since 2016, a grateful Republican party — otherwise muddled, out-of-touch, and hopelessly perplexed by its own angry voters — has adopted his vibrant script. And they eagerly took up its latest chapter. This was war. This was the deep state. This was the Gestapo. Even Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate leader, a man who may despise Trump more than any other in his party, was forced, in the excitement of this new storyline, to take up the defence of the man whose political end he was spending much of his behind-the-scenes energy working to secure.

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Now, to be clear: this search, on the face of it, represented a relatively unimportant scuffle between a minor government agency, the National Archives, trying to enforce a point of principle, and the Trump team in Florida, likely more disorganised than it was intransigent. Of all the threats facing Trump — including a criminal investigation in Georgia over election interference; a criminal investigation in Washington that might encompass fraud, obstruction, conspiracy and sedition; and a civil case in New York which could bankrupt him (in which, this week, he plead the Fifth countless times) — this search might be the least of his problems. Little, and perhaps nothing at all, was really at stake beyond pride. And yet, by dint of his own narrative, the search of Mar-a-Lago now put the Justice Department in the crosshairs of Republican rage, gave Trump and his MAGA Republicans a fiery 2024 issue, and helped guarantee that he will run again and declare his intention soon.

The National Archive law spells out strict procedures for the retention of all executive branch documents and material. And all basically means all. It was well-known that Trump ignored or abused these procedures when he was in the White House, or at any rate refused to take the time, or few seconds of concentration, necessary to comprehend them. When he left, the national archivists found, with archivists’ great alarm, that lots of material from the Trump years had gone missing. Mar-a-Lago promptly returned 15 boxes. Nothing had been unpacked and, hence, it was simple to arrange a quick return trip. Of course, it was easy to imagine that lots more boxes were stored here and there on the Mar-a-Lago grounds. That’s what the Archive believed, and for nearly two years they have been negotiating to get their stuff back, only to be met with delays and indifference from Trump’s office. Finally, they took concerted action.

On Monday, when it all went down, this issue of proper record retention was suddenly joined in reports by the issue of classified material. The law prevents anyone, even with security clearance, from removing classified material from its prescribed place. People have gone to jail for this. This, then, was suddenly the charge that liberals were salivating over: Trump purloining national secrets and illegally stashing them at Mar-a-Lago — a jail sentence surely.

But among the complications here, which, by the week’s end, had become a leading and far from incorrect Right-wing talking point, is the unique relationship a president has with national secrets. A president can declassify secrets at will. Other than nuclear secrets, covered under a different specific statute, a president can declare any secret not secret. At several points in his presidency, aides and others feared Trump would do this inadvertently or, even, by mendacious design. Some saw it as his ultimate threat: if you corner me, I’ll tell all our secrets. Nor does there seem to be precise procedure for presidential declassification, although the Left-wing rushed to try to nail one down. If a president utters a secret, it’s declassified. Does a president, taking classified papers with him even in the last moments of his presidency — and Trump was often grabbing handfuls of papers and waving them about, or flushing them down the toilet — constitute declassification? At any rate, it’s a hard case.

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This search, therefore, might well be, as so many of the Democrats’ most aggressive legal thrusts against him turned out to be, just one more “nothing burger” — that Trump term of art signifying both liberal impotence and Trump’s Teflon coating. Or not. It remains both unclear what exactly was being looked for and unclear what was found, inadvertently, or otherwise. In theory, a federal judge would only have approved the raid because there was probable cause of a federal crime.

At any rate, you don’t search a once-and-possibly-future president without wanting to make a point. And you probably don’t search just for missing boxes. (It seems pretty likely that all presidents walk out with unintended boxes — former presidents move with the same jumble of stuff as the rest of us.) But was the point greater than showing — as the Right wing was charging — that the DOJ simply has the power to do this? Even various concerned liberals urged the DOJ to explain itself.

Here, though, was just one of the many continuing asynchronicities between Trump and the Democrats: Trump plays for daily short-term gain and popularity and is proudly transparent about it; the Democrats, seeing themselves as long term players, are often hopelessly opaque. Indeed, was the DOJ truly after something, or looking awfully out of it in the shadow of congress’s January 6 investigation, just under pressure to do… something? And was even a nothing-burger search something?

In the days after the search, there were rumours (Democratic rumours, of course) of a secret source at Mar-a-Lago directing the search not just to mishandled documents but to incriminating ones, a smoking gun related to his election plot or, even, nuclear secrets. This was credible — or at least not incredible — because Trump tends to command the opposite of loyalty even among his closest staff. Others described the search as characteristic of the ever-cautions Attorney General, Merrick Garland. He was testing the waters for an indictment and taking careful measures of the potential backlash. Or, already moving towards an indictment of the former president, he was softening up the public for it.

In traditional politics, a politician under this sort of siege would see among his supporters and even in his inner circle a certain winnowing of options. The outlook, everyone would understand, was grim. At best, you could only look to limit the damage. In most instances, the FBI showing up at your door would, alas, mean end of story.

But what has confused liberals for the whole of the Trump era is that almost every mortal legal arrow they have shot at him has had the opposite of its intended effect. They haven’t even hobbled him. They have only ever enlarged the Trump story, creating new options for him, more dedicated supporters, and an ever-grander battlefield.

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Most immediately, the FBI search — the “assault” in Trump terms — has become for Trump’s family, inner circle, and MAGA-aligned candidates, a prod to get him to declare his presidential run. It is the persistent state of even the closest Trumpers to know no more about what he will or won’t do or when than anyone else — “the king of optionality,” said one aide recently, with both admiration and annoyance.

Indeed, to their frustration, Trump has reverted to his long history of toying with presidential runs. Perhaps, most honestly, he has told various aides he wants to put off an announcement for as long as possible because he doesn’t want to work as hard as he’d have to with an immediate declaration. (Trump’s fundamental laziness has never received its rightful due as a political consideration.) But their futures are also on the line (and they are hungry for the money to start flowing). Plus, they are worried, in a way that Trump is not, about Florida’s upstart governor, Ron DeSantis, who has been climbing in the polls. In a way, the search is what they have been waiting for. Story-wise, “fuck you” is an irresistible element for Trump. Running, and running now, is the counterpunch from his Roy Cohn handbook.

The relentless push against him, from Mueller to Stormy Daniels, to impeachments one and two, has not only failed to bring him down, but continued to fuel the outrage of his mighty base. He is attacked, he responds — mostly in the kind of head-smacking asymmetrical fashion that confounds procedure-bound liberals and delights so many of his anarchic-leaning followers.

Then, with name-calling, counter-insults, and in the ensuing chaos, he declares that he has prevailed. Arguably, his stolen election plot line has bogged the story down — even he can’t figure out a credible way to declare victory. But shadowy forces in the government coming after him, and, at the same time, him daring them to as the big man standing in the Mar-a-Lago doorway… Well, that’s good. It’s the state against the individual. The Man against our man. It’s violating someone’s home! It’s nasty! Goddamnit, it’s civil war. Victory is him running again (pay no attention to whether he will win). And, as well, it’s all a very sweet money-raising pitch.

In the nearly eight years now since the Trump campaign began, neither the Democrats, nor that stubborn core of anti-Trump Republicans, have managed to find their own storyteller, or to recognise that the language, assumptions, and honour of politics may have changed. Despite massive evidence to the contrary, they have continued to act with the conceit that this is a country of laws not of men, no matter how many times this approach has disappointed them. In this, Merrick Garland, in his opaque, almost lugubrious, fair-mindedness and incrementalism, like Robert Mueller before him, seems to be a perfect representative. Politics is the business of lawyers and not of showmen, Democrats continue to believe that, and the law happens at its own pace without vulgar publicity. As the week went on, Garland, in evident frustration, was forced into a brief public justification for the search. Simultaneously, there were more or less official leaks that it might be “nuclear documents” the FBI was looking for.

Finally, the release of the actual search warrant spelled out some of the possible charges against him, including violating the Espionage Act (which is not spying or treason, though it sounds like it), giving liberals a sudden burst of the kind of hope they have harboured since the long-ago Russian investigation.

But while for others in the public eye an FBI search would be a great humiliation and fearful reckoning, when Trump returns to Palm Beach next month from his summer redoubt at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, and greets club members on the Mar-a-Lago terrace, he will regale them with tales of this attack. He will tell them that this not only represents the end of the republic unless he protects it, but also the stuff of Trump legend — a story of his heroism and his opponents’ impotence.

“Let them come,” he said to me, as my visit ended, a little more than a year ago. “If they think they can get away with that. They probably think they can. How stupid can you get?”