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33,000 emails she deemed "personal" remained unaccounted for. Bannon, along with many other Republicans, suspected that in this cache of emails was a clear road map of how Bill and Hillary were funding the Clinton Foundation, trading, they suspected, on her position in the Obama administration for cash contributions."
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Michael Wolff |
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He had no ability to distinguish the important from the less important. There seemed to be no such thing as objective reality.
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Michael Wolff |
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Immigration was not just Trumpism's sine qua non, it was the fundamental intellectual pillar that any dope could understand.
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Michael Wolff |
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Trump did not want a White House that ran by any method other than to satisfy his desires.
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Michael Wolff |
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Trump's need for constant affirmation and his almost complete inability to talk about anything but himself.
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Michael Wolff |
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An overriding characteristic of the Trump presidency was the fact that almost all conflicts became personalized.
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Michael Wolff |
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television host directing the president to do whatever might most compel a television audience--took the game a big step further.
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Michael Wolff |
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Acting, in his view, was the greater and more important legal skill.
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Michael Wolff |
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the Trump bubble. Trump was incapable of admitting vulnerability--any at all.
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Michael Wolff |
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Trump demanded subservience, but when he got it he was suspicious of the person providing it.
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Michael Wolff |
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Confused to find that the power of the presidency had limitations, he came to see the limitations as his own
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Michael Wolff |
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The mantra was simple: if there was no Wall, there was no Trump. Stopping immigration was the Trump story.
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Michael Wolff |
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better understand the rules: they worked for Donald Trump, not for the president of the United States.
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Michael Wolff |
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He believed he could spook the other side.
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Michael Wolff |
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Sooner or later, Trump felt contempt for anyone who showed him too much devotion.
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Michael Wolff |
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Jay Sekulow then turned the points raised by the special counsel into a list of specific questions--and then leaked them, as though these were in fact the special counsel's questions
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Michael Wolff |
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Trump needed to surround himself with the dysfunctional and the inept, because he was dysfunctional and inept.
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Michael Wolff |
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the Khashoggi debacle provided yet another example of the bizarre and inexplicable relationships that Trump and his family had formed with bad guys around the world,
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Michael Wolff |
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So clear was his inability to take any criticism or to participate in any honest argument about policy that the attempt was almost never made.
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Michael Wolff |
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Lopez Obrador, a left-wing populist poised to challenge Trump, the right-wing populist.
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Michael Wolff |
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Trump pardons were less judicial corrections or acts of forbearance and kindness than statements of defiance.
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Michael Wolff |
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They weren't operatives, they were believers, which is what Trump wanted them to be.
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Michael Wolff |
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The more acute the stress, the more active the leakers, the bigger the story.
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Michael Wolff |
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resisters, working in the Trump White House, who had come to see themselves as patriots protecting the country from the president they worked for.
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Michael Wolff |
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Real estate was the world's favorite money-laundering currency,
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Michael Wolff |
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Trump as the man nearly everyone knew him to be: erratic, unfocused, impetuous, likely not of sound mind.
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Michael Wolff |
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and even Trump treated him rather like a dog who kept creeping back into the house.
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Michael Wolff |
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Fooling some of the people all of the time defined Trump's hard-core base.
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Michael Wolff |
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To have worked anywhere near him is to be confronted with the most extreme and disorienting behavior possible. That is hardly an overstatement. Not only is Trump not like other presidents, he is not like anyone most of us have ever known.
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Michael Wolff |
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son. The aide went on giddily talking about the special bond golfing dads have with their sons until it was clear that he was getting the Trump freeze--an ability to pretend you didn't exist while at the same time intimating that he might kill you if you did. By contrast, Melania's singular focus was her son. Together, mother and son occupied a bubble inside the Trump bubble. She assiduously protected Barron from his father's remoteness. Ev..
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Michael Wolff |
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People who had the money to bribe, who fundamentally believed that anyone could be bribed, and who had outsize influence on the legal structures that might otherwise restrict bribery, had become major foreign policy players in key parts of the world.
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Michael Wolff |
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Trump saw the world through the filter of other people's weaknesses.
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Michael Wolff |
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He defended himself by ridiculing others.
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Michael Wolff |
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Trump certainly ran his business as though it were a criminal enterprise.
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Michael Wolff |
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The Kushner family's desperate need for cash was turning U.S. foreign policy into an investment banking scheme dedicated to the refinancing of the Kushner family debt.
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Michael Wolff |
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For Trump and his most dedicated confederates there was only one truly reliable issue: illegal immigration. In Trump's short political history, the issue had never failed to inspire and activate core voters.
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Michael Wolff |
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He had little doubt that Trump was guilty of most of what he was accused of. "How did he get the dough for the primary and then for the general with his 'liquidity' issues?" asked Bannon with his hands out and his eyebrows up. "Let's not dwell."
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Michael Wolff |
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Trump could only be part of an organization that attended to him with unalloyed devotion; he could not really imagine another type. He insisted that the White House operate more like the Trump Organization, an enterprise dedicated to his satisfaction and committed to following and covering for his peripatetic and impulsive interests. Trump's management practices were entirely self-centered, not task-oriented or organizationally based. An ou..
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Michael Wolff |
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The inside joke became--echoing Karl Rove as Bush's brain and later Steve Bannon as Trump's brain--that now it was Sean Hannity who had become Trump's resident genius. Trump had ended up with someone even stupider than he was. Yet this was fitting, because Trump deeply resented the implication that he ever needed to depend on someone else's acumen or intelligence--or, really, that there could possibly be anyone who was smarter than he was. ..
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Michael Wolff |
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Sheriff Joe Arpaio, an anti-immigration figure and Trump supporter, got a pardon. So did Scooter Libby, the Bush administration leaker whom President Bush, a frequent target of Trump derision, had failed to pardon, and so did Dinesh D'Souza, the right-wing author. Martha Stewart was a possibility. So was the corrupt former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, who was brazen and overweening
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Michael Wolff |