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eee1d6b
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The new politics was not the art of the compromise but the art of conflict.
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Michael Wolff |
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ca926b1
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Indeed, health care, a no-fun issue--suddenly becoming much less fun, if, as seemed increasingly possible, Ryan couldn't deliver--palled before the clarity of Comey, and the fury, enmity, and bitterness Trump, and Trump's relatives, now bore him.
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Michael Wolff |
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e47e5c4
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coming
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Michael Wolff |
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bb3cba0
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It's worse than you can imagine. An idiot surrounded by clowns. Trump won't read anything--not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored. And his staff is no better. Kushner is an entitled baby who knows nothing. Bannon is an arrogant prick who thinks he's smarter than he is. Trump is less a person than a collection of terrible traits.
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Michael Wolff |
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76a7a27
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But, as Bannon emphasized, he was never going to get the facts right, nor was he ever going to acknowledge that he got them wrong, so therefore he was not going to get that approval. This meant, next best thing, that he had to be aggressively defended against the media's disapproval.
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Michael Wolff |
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c195f62
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By ten weeks in, Steve Bannon's mastery of the Trump agenda, or at least of Trump himself, appeared to have crumbled. His current misery was both Catholic in nature--the self-flagellation of a man who believed he lived on a higher moral plane than all others--and fundamentally misanthropic. As an antisocial, maladjusted, post-middle-aged man, he had to make a supreme effort to get along with others, an effort that often did not go well. Mos..
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Michael Wolff |
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6eddfba
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There was no competition in Trump Tower for being the brains of the operation. Of the dominant figures in the transition, neither Kushner, Priebus, nor Conway, and certainly not the president-elect, had the ability to express any kind of coherent perception or narrative.
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Michael Wolff |
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f69230a
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president might have been involved usually became
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Michael Wolff |
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df448f1
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In mutually codependent fashion, Ivanka relied on Dina to suggest management tactics that would help her handle her father and the White House, while 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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4ca5a84
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Trump was effusive in his praise for Kushner. "Jared's gotten the Arabs totally on our side. Done deal," he assured one of his after-dinner callers before leaving on the trip. "It's going to be beautiful." "He believed," said the caller, "that this trip could pull it out, like a twist in a bad movie."
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Michael Wolff |
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adaa957
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Trump won't read anything--not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored. And his staff is no better. Kushner is an entitled baby who knows nothing. Bannon is an arrogant prick who thinks he's smarter than he is. Trump is less a person than a collection of terrible traits. No one will survive the first year but his family. I hate the work, but feel I need..
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Michael Wolff |
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cb90245
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For Trump, as for many showmen or press release entrepreneurs, the enemy of everything is complexity and red tape, and the solution for everything is cutting corners. Bypass or ignore the difficulties; just move in a straight line to the vision, which, if it's bold enough, or grandiose enough, will sell itself.
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Michael Wolff |
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07feb23
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Trump's standard operating procedure--conflict, insults, reversals, dismissals--is still reported with breathless surprise. The most obvious man on earth is yet, to the media, always astonishing. Whose fault is that? Covering a train wreck requires different skills from covering politics. But political reporters continue to apply the hyperrationality of political life and its heightened sense of cause and effect to Trump and his White House..
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Michael Wolff |
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293467a
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What is looking like unhinged chaos is actually him in a place of comfort," tweeted Maggie Haberman, one of the Times reporters on the Trump beat. Haberman, who likes to assert a stubborn ownership of the Trump story, implies something approximating presidential strategy and point of view."
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Michael Wolff |
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b43a335
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He was, after all, Donald Trump, however much you shined him up.
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Michael Wolff |
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6206b1d
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Theory 5: The Russians, holding damaging information about Trump, were blackmailing him. He was a Manchurian Candidate.
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Michael Wolff |
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a6e7628
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The real question, of course, was how Bannon, the fuck-the-system populist, had ever come to think that he might get along with Donald Trump, the use-the-system-to-his-own-advantage billionaire
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Michael Wolff |
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514d6b2
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Donald Trump's marriage was perplexing to almost everybody around him--or it was, anyway, for those without private jets and many homes. He and Melania spent relatively little time together. They could go days at a time without contact, even when they were both in Trump Tower. Often she did not know where he was, or take much notice of that fact. Her husband moved between residences as he would move between rooms. Along with knowing little ..
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Michael Wolff |
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34535b8
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His callers, largely because they found his conversation peculiar, alarming, or completely contrary to reason and common sense, often overrode what they might otherwise have assumed to be the confidential nature of the calls and shared the content with someone else.
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Michael Wolff |
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9e9092c
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We serve at the president's displeasure," another."
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Michael Wolff |
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5692d6a
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in the larger Trump view, it was during the cold war that time and circumstance gave the United States its greatest global advantage. That was when America was great.
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Michael Wolff |
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6b1f130
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Clinton.
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Michael Wolff |
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7343942
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some had idly speculated about how long he would go on if he could command time as well as language. The consensus seemed to be forever. The sound of his own voice, his lack of inhibition, the fact that linear thought and presentation turned out not at all to be necessary, the wonder that this random approach seemed to command, and his own replenishing supply of free association--all this suggested that he was limited only by everyone else'..
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Michael Wolff |
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b01afeb
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There was some argument about this, because he could read headlines and articles about himself, or at least headlines on articles about himself,
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Michael Wolff |
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3be1b61
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But not only didn't he read, he didn't listen. He preferred to be the person talking.
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Michael Wolff |
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599ba9c
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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.
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Michael Wolff |
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211342c
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While he wanted a job with the Trump administration, the Mooch specifically wanted one of the jobs that would give him a tax break on the sale of his business. A federal program provides for deferred payment of capital gains in the event of a sale of property to meet ethical requirements. Scaramucci needed a job that would get him a "certificate of divestiture," which is what an envious Scaramucci knew Gary Cohn had received for the sale of..
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Michael Wolff |
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3dadf9d
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The president fundamentally wants to be liked" was Katie Walsh's analysis. "He just fundamentally needs to be liked so badly that it's always ... everything is a struggle for him." This translated into a constant need to win something--anything. Equally important, it was essential that he look like a winner. Of course, trying to win without consideration, plan, or clear goals had, in the course of the administration's first nine months, res..
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Michael Wolff |
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b202a50
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Melania sometimes spoke Slovenian with Barron, particularly when her parents were around--and they were frequently around--infuriating Trump and causing him to bolt from any room they were in.
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Michael Wolff |
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b5b12bb
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The fundamental premise of nearly everybody who joined the Trump White House was, This can work. We can help make this work. Now, only three-quarters of the way through just the first year of Trump's term, there was literally not one member of the senior staff who could any longer be confident of that premise. Arguably--and on many days indubitably--most members of the senior staff believed that the sole upside of being part of the Trump Wh..
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Michael Wolff |
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58f9295
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Trump could bring Trumpism down...
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trumpism
trump
white-house
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Michael Wolff |
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d41aac9
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But the point really was that Trump had wanted to confront and humiliate the FBI director. Cruelty was a Trump attribute.
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Michael Wolff |
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a84cada
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Hyper-by-the-book Rod Rosenstein--heretofore the quintessential apolitical player--immediately became, in Washington eyes, a hopeless Trump tool. But Rosenstein's revenge was deft, swift, overwhelming, and (of course) by the book.
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Michael Wolff |
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71d8bc0
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Of the many Trump gashes in modern major-power governing, you could certainly drive a Trojan horse through his lack of foreign policy particulars and relationships.
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politics
trump
white-house
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Michael Wolff |
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ca64a49
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Why? You've already done enough for him. You're the best piece of tail he'll ever have," sending Hicks running from the room."
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Michael Wolff |
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2300bbb
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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.
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Michael Wolff |
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9d94728
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this was not a problem to address, this was a person to focus on:
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Michael Wolff |
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db2fec2
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Most especially, he was miserable because of Donald Trump, whose cruelties, always great even when they were casual, were unbearable when he truly turned against you.
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Michael Wolff |
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fa4a260
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yet discover the charm and wisdom of Donald Trump. Where past presidents might have spent portions of their day talking about the needs, desires, and points of leverage among various members of Congress, the president and Hicks spent a great deal of time talking about a fixed cast of media personalities, trying to second-guess the real agendas and weak spots among cable anchors and producers and Times and Post reporters.
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Michael Wolff |
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3ec56f4
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they were unable to hire a law firm with a top-notch white-collar government practice. By the time Bannon and Priebus were back in Washington, three blue-chip firms had said no. All of them were afraid they would face a rebellion among the younger staff if they represented Trump, afraid Trump would publicly humiliate them if the going got tough, and afraid Trump would stiff them for the bill. In the end, nine top firms turned them down.
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Michael Wolff |
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e247e12
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All news was to some extent fake--he understood that very well, because he himself had faked it so many times in his career. This was why he had so naturally cottoned to the "fake news" label. "I've made stuff up forever, and they always print it," he bragged."
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Michael Wolff |
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4e9779b
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As always, Trump's regard or scorn was infectious. If you were in favor, then whatever and whomever he associated with you was also in favor. If you weren't, then everything associated with you was poisonous.
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Michael Wolff |
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0afeec6
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he had no interest in personnel problems, since they put the emphasis on other people.
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Michael Wolff |
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4c94cc4
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The New York real estate deals were dirty, the Atlantic City ventures were dirty, the Trump airline was dirty, Mar-a-Lago, the golf courses, and the hotels all dirty. No reasonable candidate could have survived a recounting of even one of these deals. But somehow a genial amount of corruption had been figured into the Trump candidacy- that, after all, was the platform he was running on. I'll do for you what a tough businessman does for hims..
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trump
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Michael Wolff |