2025-09-21
37 分钟Hello and welcome to Meet the Writers.
I'm Georgina Godwin.
My guest today is one of the most talked about chroniclers of Donald Trump.
His quartet of books, Fire and Fury, Siege, Landslide and All or Nothing, have shaped how the world understands Trump's presidency, his collapse and his rather improbable return.
Known for his sharp eye and for stories that insiders can't stop reading and can't always deny, he's charted the chaos of Trump world like nobody else.
And today we'll hear about that extraordinary body of work and what it means for America, politics, media and the world.
Vika Wolf, welcome to Meet the Writers.
Thanks for having me.
I wondered if we could just start with your early years in journalism.
What first drew you to it, and what sort of writer did you think you'd become back then?
Well, I thought I would become a novelist, and I still hope someday I'll write a novel.
That has not happened yet.
But I was drawn, I just don't think I had any other, I just never crossed my mind to do anything else.
I mean, my mother was a newspaper reporter.
And I went to work for the New York Times when I went to Columbia.
So I guess, I mean, my third year at Columbia, I wrote the New York Times a letter.
I just said, you know... I don't know what it said, didn't say very much.
And I thought this is, one had to do this because if you didn't do this, well, you weren't doing anything, and one was safe because you weren't gonna get a job at the New York Times for writing a letter, but 24 hours after I wrote this letter, they called me up and they said, when can you start?
And I guess at that moment they were having trouble filling the spots of people at the absolute bottom of the newsroom, which is where I started in, which was just a terrible, terrible, terrible job, mostly involving getting hot dogs for people.
And you had to go out into Times Square, which was at that time a kind of fraud experience.