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Bannon had promised to come to this small dinner arranged by mutual friends in a Greenwich Village town house to see Roger Ailes,
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Michael Wolff |
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masher.
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Michael Wolff |
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Much of the president's daily conversation was a repetitive rundown of what various anchors and hosts had said about him.
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Michael Wolff |
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If Ryan could be counted on to handle Congress, thought the president, well, phew, that takes care of that.
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Michael Wolff |
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One of Jared Kushner's many new patrons was Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, whom Kushner had gotten to know when, on the banks of the River Jordan in 2010, they both attended the baptism of Grace and Chloe Murdoch, the young daughters of Rupert Murdoch and his then wife, Wendi.
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Michael Wolff |
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But now there seemed to be a new understanding: Donald Trump believed he had vastly more power, authority, and control than in fact he had, and he believed his talent for manipulating people and bending and dominating them was vastly greater than it was. Pushing this line of reasoning just a little further: senior staff believed the president had a problem with reality, and reality was now overwhelming him.
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Michael Wolff |
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But now, the new president-elect--after the most astonishing upset in American history--was on tenterhooks waiting for Murdoch.
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Michael Wolff |
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fundamental Bannonism: stop thinking you can somehow get along with your enemies.
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Michael Wolff |
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he acceded to anyone who seemed to know more about any issue he didn't care about,
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Michael Wolff |
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On March 27, the Office of American Innovation was created and Kushner was put in charge. Its stated mission was to reduce federal bureaucracy--that is, to reduce it by creating more of it, a committee to end committees.
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Michael Wolff |
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4c99a3f
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Theory 4: But then there was the those-that-know-him-best theory, some version of which most Trumpers would come to embrace. He was just star-fucking.
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Michael Wolff |
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Trump is less a person than a collection of terrible traits.
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Michael Wolff |
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It's worse than you can imagine. An idiot surrounded by clowns.
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Michael Wolff |
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Trump's wounded feelings--his sense of being shunned and unloved on the very day he became president--helped send that message. When he came off the podium after delivering his address, he kept repeating, "Nobody will forget this speech." George W. Bush, on the dais, supplied what seemed likely to become the historic footnote to the Trump address: "That's some weird shit."
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Michael Wolff |
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Like the entire Saudi leadership, MBS had, practically speaking, no education.
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Michael Wolff |
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Nobody now believed that firing Comey was a good idea;
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Michael Wolff |
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In an age when all successful political candidates are surrounded by, if not at the beck and call of, difficult, even sociopathic, rich people pushing the bounds of their own power--and the richer they were, the more difficult, sociopathic, and power-mad they might be--
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Michael Wolff |
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the three men working hardest to maneuver the president--Bannon, Kushner, and Priebus.
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Michael Wolff |
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the week of July 24 was a head-slammer. First, it opened the next episode in what had become a comic-opera
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Michael Wolff |
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He clearly did not understand that what conservative media elevated, liberal media would necessarily take down.
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Michael Wolff |
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Hicks, sponsored by Ivanka and ever loyal to her, was in fact thought of as Trump's real daughter, while Ivanka was thought of as his real wife. More functionally, but as elementally, Hicks was the president's chief media handler. She worked by the president's side, wholly separate from the White House's forty-person-strong communications office. The president's personal message and image were entrusted to her--or, more accurately, she was ..
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Michael Wolff |
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Insecurity was soothed by entitlement.
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Michael Wolff |
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He was a clown-prince version of Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Trump believed, offering catnip to deep American ire and resentment, that one man could be bigger than the system.
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Michael Wolff |
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7721554
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China is where Nazi Germany was in 1929 to 1930. The Chinese, like the Germans, are the most rational people in the world, until they're not. And they're gonna flip like Germany in the thirties. You're going to have a hypernationalist state, and once that happens you can't put the genie back in the bottle.
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Michael Wolff |
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Although the Republicans in the 2018 congressional races were looking, according to Bannon's numbers, at a 15-point deficit, it was Bannon's belief that the more extreme the right-wing challenge appeared, the more likely the Democrats would field left-wing nutters even less electable than right-wing nutters.
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Michael Wolff |
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Bannon learned about the piece when 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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the president's views of foreign policy and the world at large were among its most random, uninformed, and seemingly capricious aspects.
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Michael Wolff |
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His departure would return the Trump organization to pure family control--the family and its functionaries, without an internal rival for brand meaning and leadership. From the family's point of view, it would also--at least in theory--help facilitate one of the most implausible brand shifts in history: Donald Trump to respectability.
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Michael Wolff |
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His advisers didn't know whether he was an isolationist or a militarist, or whether he could distinguish between the two.
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Michael Wolff |
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He had little to no experience in foreign policy, but he had no respect for the experts,
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Michael Wolff |
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Trump would shortly become a Gorsuch fan. But before settling on Gorsuch, he wondered why the job wasn't going to a friend and loyalist. In the Trump view, it was rather a waste to give the job to someone he didn't even know.
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Michael Wolff |
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Indeed, the protesters who believed they were seeing the company's relationship with Trump in political terms were actually seeing this in conventional brand terms and zooming in on the disconnect. Uber's customer base is strongly young, urban, and progressive, and therefore out of sync with the Trump base. Brand-conscious millennials saw this as beyond policy dickering and as part of an epic identity clash. The Trump White House stood less..
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Michael Wolff |
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7ccdc8b
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I am in a constant state of shock and horror.
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Michael Wolff |
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he thought emotionally, not strategically.
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Michael Wolff |
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Dina relied on Ivanka to offer regular assurances that not everyone named Trump was completely crazy.
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Michael Wolff |
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For anything that smacked of a classroom or of being lectured to--"professor" was one of his bad words, and he was proud of never going to class, never buying a textbook, never taking a note--he got up and left the room."
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Michael Wolff |
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The leaking culture had become so open and overt--most of the time everybody could identify everybody else's leaks--that it was now formally staffed.
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Michael Wolff |
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Do nothing" had long been viewed as an unacceptable position of helplessness by American foreign policy experts. The instinct to do something was driven by the desire to prove you were not limited to nothing. You couldn't do nothing and show strength." --
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Michael Wolff |
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Then there was Bannon, conducting something of an alternate-universe operation,
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Michael Wolff |
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He was postliterate--total television.
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Michael Wolff |
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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.
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Michael Wolff |
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2c27fba
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you just had to go with the president's whims. As for the president, it was quite clear that deciding between contradictory policy approaches was not his style of leadership. He simply hoped that difficult decisions would make themselves.
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Michael Wolff |
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Bannon's deconstruction of the administrative state meant to take with it media, academic, and not-for-profit institutions.
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Michael Wolff |
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A pro wrestling fan who became a World Wrestling Entertainment supporter and personality (inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame), Trump lived, like Hulk Hogan, as a real-life fictional character.
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Michael Wolff |