The new year has given the left several new shiny pennies to chase around the room.  Michael Wolff's book.  Oprah's campaign speech at the Golden Globe Awards.  President Trump supposedly not knowing the words to the National Anthem.

Wait – I thought the National Anthem was racist!  The California NAACP sure thinks so.  Perhaps by only half-singing at the National Championship game, Trump was showing solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement.

Wolff's book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, is a late Christmas present to Democrats.  Cable and network news shows talk about little else.  The tell-all book about the Trump White House.  Everyone in the White House saying Trump is insane, demented, and childlike.

Except there's one minor detail.  Despite the book saying Cabinet officials think Trump is "dumb as [s‑‑‑]" and a "dope," it turns out that author Wolff did not interview Vice President Pence or any Cabinet members.  Oops.  Minor detail.

From fake news to fake book.

More interesting is Wolff's assertion in the book that "Trump didn't want to win the election because he thought losing could offer untold opportunities."

That's especially interesting in light of the year-long drumbeat about how Trump colluded with the Russians to hack the election, stealing it from Hillary Clinton.

According to the book, Trump's "ultimate goal, after all, had never been to win."  Instead, candidate Trump supposedly said, "I can be the most famous man in the world."  Rather than wanting to be president, "Trump, encouraged by [media mogul Roger] Ailes, was floating rumors about a Trump network.  It was a great future."

The goal was clearly to lose the election.  Another excerpt:

Once he lost, Trump would be both insanely famous and a martyr to Crooked Hillary.  His daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared would be international celebrities.  Steve Bannon would become the de facto head of the [T]ea[ P]arty movement.  Kellyanne Conway would be a cable[] news star.  Melania Trump, who had been assured by her husband that he wouldn't become president, could return to inconspicuously lunching.  Losing would work out for everybody.  Losing was winning.

So why would he collude with the Russians to win an election he didn't want to win?  Not to mention campaign like a madman, five rallies a day, while his opponent napped between coughing fits and falls?

Can't have it both ways here.  The only way the Russian collusion story, and Robert Mueller's "road to nowhere" investigation has even a smidge of credibility, is that Trump wanted to win the election.  And crossed ethical or legal lines to do so.

Yet the book, which has energized the left after a year of Trump's "winning," states quite clearly that Trump did not want to win.

Maybe the narrative can shift from Trump colluding with the Russians – not to win, but instead to lose and further his business empire.  But shazam: out of nowhere, he won.  A Forrest Gump moment.

So, which is it?  If he didn't want to win, there is no reason to collude with the Russians to win.  At least, if we are to believe Michael Wolff.  Or if Wolff is wrong regarding Trump's motivations, then all the other nonsense in the book is suspect.

Given how the media revere Wolff and his book, there goes the Russian collusion story.

Brian C. Joondeph, M.D., MPS is a Denver-based physician and writer.  Follow him on Facebook,  LinkedIn and Twitter.