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A close Trump friend who was also a good Bill Clinton friend found them eerily similar--except that Clinton had a respectable front and Trump did not. One manifestation of this outlaw personality, for both Trump and Clinton, was their brand of womanizing--and indeed, harassing. Even among world-class womanizers and harassers, they seemed exceptionally free of doubt or hesitation.
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Michael Wolff |
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2c41ff3
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The Trump campaign had, perhaps less than inadvertently, replicated the scheme from Mel Brooks's The Producers. In that classic, Brooks's larcenous and dopey heroes, Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom, set out to sell more than 100 percent of the ownership stakes in the Broadway show they are producing. Since they will be found out only if the show is a hit, everything about the show is premised on its being a flop. Accordingly, they create a sho..
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Michael Wolff |
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7186b05
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Trump's key supporters worked for him because nobody else would have them.
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Michael Wolff |
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c3f32a4
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This was the peculiar and haunting consensus--not that Trump was guilty of all that he was accused of, but that he was guilty of so much else.
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Michael Wolff |
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f2fe007
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The Trump campaign had, perhaps less than inadvertently, replicated the scheme from Mel Brooks's The Producers.
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Michael Wolff |
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ac990eb
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One day, when Kushner accused Walsh of leaking about him, she challenged him back: "My phone records versus yours, my email versus yours."
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Michael Wolff |
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How's the kid?" asked Ailes, referring to Trump's son-in-law and paramount political adviser, thirty-six-year-old Jared Kushner. "He's my partner," said Bannon, his tone suggesting that if he felt otherwise, he was nevertheless determined to stay on message. "Really?" said a dubious Ailes. "He's on the team." "He's had lot of lunches with Rupert." "In fact," said Bannon, "I could use your help here." Bannon then spent several minutes trying..
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Michael Wolff |
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0cc5b4d
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She treated her father with some lightness, even irony, and in at least one television interview she made fun of his comb-over. She often described the mechanics behind it to friends: an absolutely clean pate--a contained island after scalp reduction surgery--surrounded by a furry circle of hair around the sides and front, from which all ends are drawn up to meet in the center and then swept back and secured by a stiffening spray. The color..
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Michael Wolff |
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cbd89c7
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Bannon had announced himself as Trump's brain, a boast that vastly irritated the president.
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Michael Wolff |
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36dadae
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Shortly after Lewandowski, with whom Hicks had an on-and-off romantic relationship, was fired in June 2016 for clashing with Trump family members, Hicks sat in Trump Tower with Trump and his sons, worrying about Lewandowski's treatment in the press and wondering aloud how she might help him. Trump, who otherwise seemed to treat Hicks in a protective and even paternal way, looked up and said, "Why? You've already done enough for him. You're ..
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Michael Wolff |
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b322086
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Here was a perfect example of an essential Trump paradigm: he acceded to anyone who seemed to know more about any issue he didn't care about, or simply one whose details he couldn't bring himself to focus on closely. Great! he would say, punctuating every statement with a similar exclamation and regularly making an effort to jump from his chair. On the spot, Trump eagerly agreed to let Ryan run the health care bill and to make Price the Hea..
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Michael Wolff |
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7b62a35
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The worry among staffers--all of them concerned that Trump's rambling and his alarming repetitions (the same sentences delivered with the same expressions minutes apart) had significantly increased, and that his ability to stay focused, never great, had notably declined--
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Michael Wolff |
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608578c
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With his misspellings and his use of 1970s lingo--"wire tapping" called up an image of FBI agents crouched in a van on Fifth Avenue--it seemed kooky and farcical. Of the many tweets that Trump had seemed to hoist himself by, from the point of view of the media, intelligence community, and extremely satisfied Democrats, the wiretap tweets had pulled him highest and most left him dangling in ignorance and embarrassment"
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Michael Wolff |
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3d9a3cc
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But Murdoch is, more accurately, not a modern journalist but the last representative from an era when a newspaper was its own advertisement, when it had to sell itself.
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Michael Wolff |
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689903c
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This was his fundamental innovation in governing: regular, uncontrolled bursts of anger and spleen.
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Michael Wolff |
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e2bb2c3
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Jim Baker, chief of staff for both Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush and almost everybody's model for managing the West Wing, advised Priebus not to take the job.
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Michael Wolff |
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379157c
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Trump didn't read. He didn't really even skim. If it was print, it might as well not exist. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semiliterate.
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Michael Wolff |
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e3a2071
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He is, and is pleased to let everybody know it, a winner-take-all businessman--the worst nightmare of sentimental, lefty intellectuals, which is exactly what so many of the Bancrofts have become.
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Michael Wolff |
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c8cffca
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The Trump White House stood less for government and the push-pull of competing interests and developing policies, and more, in a brand-savvy world, as a fixed and unpopular cultural symbol.
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Michael Wolff |
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4d6489f
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If he was not having his six-thirty dinner with Steve Bannon, then, more to his liking, he was in bed by that time with a cheeseburger, watching his three screens and making phone calls--
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Michael Wolff |
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13aff92
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The next day Kellyanne Conway, her aggressive posture during the campaign turning more and more to petulance and self-pity, asserted the new president's right to claim "alternative facts." As it happened, Conway meant to say "alternative information," which at least would imply there might be additional data. But as uttered, it certainly sounded like the new administration was claiming the right to recast reality. Which, in a sense, it was...
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Michael Wolff |
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4007122
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Bannon was making his first official pubic appearance of the Trump presidency,
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Michael Wolff |
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1ec31ca
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Who can talk you through this stuff before you decided to act on it?" "Well," said the president, "you won't like the answer, but the answer is me. Me. I talk to myself."
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Michael Wolff |
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ee534cf
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He had somehow won the race for president, but his brain seemed incapable of performing what would be essential tasks in his new job. He had no ability to plan and organize and pay attention and switch focus; he had never been able to tailor his behavior to what the goals at hand reasonably required. On the most basic level, he simply could not link cause and effect.
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Michael Wolff |
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fact-checkers from the magazine called him for comment about Scaramucci's accusation that he sucked his own cock.)
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Michael Wolff |
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He just keeps going," Ailes had marveled to a friend after the first debate with Hillary Clinton. "You hit Donald along the head, and he keeps going. He doesn't even know he's been hit."
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Michael Wolff |
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1580321
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An important aspect of Kaplan's New York Observer and its self-conscious inside media baseball was that the paper became the prime school for a new generation of media reporters flooding every other publication in New York as journalism itself became ever more self-conscious and self-referential. To everyone working in media in New York, Donald Trump represented the ultimate shame of working in media in New York: you might have to write abo..
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Michael Wolff |
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3eeb7d4
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He answered emails in one word--partly a paranoia about email, but even more a controlling crypticness.
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Michael Wolff |
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5d06917
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They were all concerned that Trump did not understand what he was up against. That there was simply not enough method to his madness.
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Michael Wolff |
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48b1de7
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Theory 2: Trump was part of a less-than-blue-chip (much less) international business set, feeding off the rivers of dubious wealth that had been unleashed by all the efforts to move cash, much of it from Russia and China, out of political harm's way. Such money, or rumors of such money, became an explanation--still only a circumstantial one--in trying to assess all the Trump business dealings that largely remained hidden from view.
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Michael Wolff |
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d7b214d
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said the president in his first week in the White House during a late-night call. "It's all exaggerated. My exaggerations are exaggerated."
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Michael Wolff |
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e816ba5
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But the prospect of her husband's actually becoming president was, for Melania, a horrifying one. She believed it would destroy her carefully sheltered life--one sheltered, not inconsiderably, from the extended Trump family--which was almost entirely focused on her young son.
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Michael Wolff |
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388daed
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it confirmed Bannon's worst fear: Trump, in his true heart, was a marshmallow.
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Michael Wolff |
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Trump loved to hear complain about the CIA and the haplessness of American spies, had been told by his friends that it had not been a good idea to take $45,000 from the Russians for a speech. "Well, it would only be a problem if we won," he assured them, knowing that it would therefore not be a problem."
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Michael Wolff |
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d01663a
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Here was yet another battle to be won or lost. Bannon regarded Kushner and Cohn (and Ivanka) as occupying an alternative reality that had little bearing on the real Trump revolution. Kushner and Cohn saw Bannon as not just destructive but self-destructive, and they were confident he would destroy himself before he destroyed them. In the Trump White House, observed Henry Kissinger, "it is a war between the Jews and the non-Jews."
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Michael Wolff |
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f1ca75a
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And it was not only calls from friends worried about him, but staffers calling people to call him and say Simmer down. "Who do you have in there?" said Joe Scarborough in a frantic call. "Who's the person you trust? Jared? Who can talk you through this stuff before you decided to act on it?" "Well," said the president, "you won't like the answer, but the answer is me. Me. I talk to myself."
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Michael Wolff |
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ac41c4d
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It was an operatic unraveling. So mortifying was this development that when Reince Priebus, the RNC head, was called to New York from Washington for an emergency meeting at Trump Tower, he couldn't bring himself to leave Penn Station. It took two hours for the Trump team to coax him across town. "Bro," said a desperate Bannon, cajoling Priebus on the phone, "I may never see you again after today, but you gotta come to this building and you ..
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Michael Wolff |
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733787f
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Trump was not a politician who could parse factions of support and opprobrium; he was a salesman who needed to make a sale. "I won. I am the winner. I am not the loser," he repeated, incredulously, like a mantra."
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Michael Wolff |
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e4bbf94
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Later that evening, a concert at the Lincoln Memorial, part of an always awkward effort to import pop culture to Washington, ended up, absent any star power, with Trump himself taking the stage as the featured act, angrily insisting to aides that he could outdraw any star.
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Michael Wolff |
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57fa7df
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Trump had no real relationship with either father or daughter. He'd had only a few conversations with Bob Mercer, who mostly talked in monosyllables; Rebekah Mercer's entire history with Trump consisted of a selfie taken with him at Trump Tower. But when the Mercers presented their plan to take over the campaign and install their lieutenants, Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway, Trump didn't resist. He only expressed vast incomprehension abou..
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Michael Wolff |
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789fd8b
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While nobody would ever say Trump was sensitive when it came to women, he had many views about how to get along with them, including a theory he discussed with friends about how the more years between an older man and a younger woman, the less the younger woman took an older man's cheating personally.
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Michael Wolff |
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5f4bd67
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Bannon didn't promote internal debate, provide policy rationale, or deliver PowerPoint presentations; instead, he was the equivalent of Trump's personal talk radio. Trump could turn him on at any moment, and it pleased him that Bannon's pronouncements and views would consistently be fully formed and ever available, a bracing, unified-field narrative
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Michael Wolff |
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4c3b077
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One particularly profitable transaction with the president was to bring him new, ever harsher criticism of his chief strategist, or reports of other people criticizing him. It was important to know not to say anything positive to Trump about Bannon. Even faint praise before the "but"--"Steve is obviously smart, but..."--could produce a scowl and pout if you didn't hurry to the "but." (Then again, saying anyone was "smart" invariably incurre..
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Michael Wolff |
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161cd31
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But Ailes was convinced that Trump had no political beliefs or backbone. The fact that Trump had become the ultimate avatar of Fox's angry common man was another sign that we were living in an upside-down world. The joke was on somebody--and Ailes thought it might be on him.
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Michael Wolff |