Welcome to HOWL Michael Wolff's Substack

Trump Time and How We Live In It

Design by Amy Gibson @amyanastasiaportfolio

The descent of the country we know into an ever-more uncertain and unrecognizable place is the subject that we haven’t yet found a true way to talk about. And, increasingly, there is the fear of what might happen to us if we do. I dearly hope in this Substack—and my intention is to turn to it on a daily basis—not to spend all my time talking about the bleakness of our time and place. In fact, much of what I have written about Trump in my up-close observations of him and based on the running stream of gossip I get from people close to him is that, however mendacious, he is also a great comic figure, fundamentally incompetent, who will pass and leave us blinking in the light—what the hell was that?—but none too worse for wear.

Our lives might continue, in other words; we might even close our eyes to him. And that is one aspect of reality. But the other aspect, is that he turns out to be more insistent and insatiable—for power, money, and vengeance—than anyone ever imagined.

My subject here is this situation: we are living our lives, for many of us lives that are still good, in the face of Trump’s constant and increasing encroachments and depredations. “Howl,” is the title of this Substack. In addition to hanging a hat on the obvious connection to my name, it is the title of a poem written in 1955 by the poet Alan Ginsberg (who is from Paterson, NJ, where I am from), a nightmare vision of the modern age in which you might foresee the rise of a soulless and pitiless beast like Trump. And, indeed, we have seen many in our time, though none quite so virulent, shameless, and indefatigable. I also considered calling this Substack “The Rise and Fall of Donald Trump,” because, despite all, I continue to believe he will depart, one way or the other, naturally or ignominiously, and there will be no one of his like to replace him.

And yet, more and more, I cannot help feeling that, like all authoritarians, he will have defied so many conventions and laws and made so many enemies, that the only way to avoid his own destruction is to hold on to power. That would mean, truly, for all of us, a broken world. Still, here we are. The question of what is happening is tied to what’s going to happen, which in turn is tied to the even more fundamental question: how did this happen? Answers to these questions, as best as we can supply them, are the necessary context to how we think about and talk about where we are.

It is almost beyond comprehension to me, not to mention sense, that I am ten years into trying to answer these questions, with four books about Donald Trump’s political rise behind me—Fire and Fury (2018); Siege (2019); Landslide (2021); All or Nothing (2025). This Substack continues that effort on a more frequent and urgent basis than a book schedule. There are also other reasons to turn to Substack. I have, in many years of picking apart American politicians and others with impunity and joy, never seen the media climate so chilled. The organizations we writers and journalists customarily work for have become more hesitant and cautious than most of us have ever experienced.

Along with the very personal window I’ve had into Trump’s frightening impulses, desires, and rages, I’ve had another view of Trump through the person who may have been far closer to him for far long than anyone else: Jeffrey Epstein. In 2014, Epstein, hoping he might achieve some measure of rehabilitation after his imprisonment on sexual abuse charges, began talking to me with the hope that I might write about him; his particular hope was that I might elevate him by writing about his circle of powerful friends, to whom he offered me startling access—our conversation, continuing, sporadically, until 2019. It comprised upwards of a hundred recorded hours and was revealing not just about him, but about his friendship with Donald Trump. Trump had begun his Quixotic run for the presidency, and then, seemingly against all reason and odds, found himself in the White House during the time I was speaking to Epstein. I am, I’m confident, the one journalist who can tell the Epstein story from the inside rather than the outside—and as millions of people calling for answers recognize, it is a vital story.

So many aspects of the age of billionaires, with all our conflicting awe and fear of them; the age of conspiracies, that desperate effort to explain the inexplicable; the age of predation, and its stark revelation of inequity and the brutality of power; and the age of Trump, and the roots of amorality… all converge in the black hole of Jeffrey Epstein. The difficulties I’ve encountered trying to tell this story is a tale in and of itself (I will share aspects of this unexpected struggle in this Substack). As recently as this summer, when the Epstein scandal swept back into the news because of Trump’s ham-handed effort to keep it under wraps, my proposal for a book that might tell much of the Epstein story was met by an awkward silence by many of the same publishers who have otherwise gladly and handsomely published me or sought to publish me in the past.

They are afraid. And for good reason. The risk of a lawsuit is one thing; the near inevitability another. Indeed, I am among the growing list of people who have been reliably threatened and sued by Trump lawyers in an effort to discourage any discussion of Trump’s links to Epstein.

The world we live in is, to say the least, an increasingly fraught place—the bad outweighs the good at a rapidly increasingly rate. Fear, caution, restraint, looking over your shoulder is more and more the world in which we live.

I am deeply sympathetic to the impulse to ignore all of this. If you can, I completely understand why you would. In the many Instagram videos that I’ve made trying to talk through these issues, my wife, Victoria, without whom I would only be words on a page, films me in settings largely around our own home to remind us that Trump cannot colonize everything, that peace and serenity do continue to exist.

Although this Substack is indeed meant to be a howl, hoping many people will hear, my intention here is to do it in a way that sheds light on the particulars and on the details rather than the hopelessness, and to share what I have learned about the flawed and fallible human beings who, no matter their monstrousness, can be counted on to screw themselves in the end. That, I continue, to believe.

I hope you’ll join me.

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