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5d945ea
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Donald Trump, even more than his father, was perceived as a vulgarian--after all, he put his name on his buildings, quite a declasse thing to do.
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Michael Wolff |
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b6db096
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In early February, an Obama administration lawyer friendly with Sally Yates remarked with some relish and considerable accuracy: "It certainly is an odd circumstance if you live your life without regard for being elected and then get elected--and quite an opportunity for your enemies."
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Michael Wolff |
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6a1c0fd
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military figures like James Mattis, H. R. McMaster, and John Kelly: they found themselves working in an administration that was in every way inimical to basic command principles.
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Michael Wolff |
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f01e711
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less a person than a collection of terrible traits.
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Michael Wolff |
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0674ca8
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The fabulous, incomprehensible irony that the Trump family had, despite the media's distaste, despite everything the media knows and understands and has said about them, risen to a level not only of ultimate consequence but even of immortality is beyond worst-case nightmare and into cosmic-joke territory. In this infuriating circumstance, Trump and his son-in-law were united, always aware and yet never quite understanding why they should be..
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Michael Wolff |
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ab55cc3
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you don't know what he hears because he just talks.
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Michael Wolff |
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8addca6
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He wasn't serving up these insults for effect--well, not entirely. And his behavior wasn't carefully calculated; it was tit for tat, and he likely would have said what he'd said even if no one was left standing with him. (This very lack of calculation, this inability to be political, was part of his political charm.) It was just his good luck that the Trumpian 35 percent--that standing percentage of people who, according to most polls, seem..
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Michael Wolff |
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74253a6
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Bannon's presence on the council was just as much driven by the need to babysit the impetuous Flynn, prone to antagonizing almost everyone else in the national security community. (Flynn was "a colonel in a general's uniform,"
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Michael Wolff |
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d1d9aa7
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By Sunday evening, a feeling perhaps most reminiscent of election night 2016, desolate and confounded, spread through the mainstream media, the liberal establishment, and among all those who were confident that they had surrounded Donald Trump and left him nowhere to run. This was--and there could hardly be any better illustration--defeat snatched from the jaws of victory.
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Michael Wolff |
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c578fdf
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He was the ultimate antiliberal: an authoritarian who was the living embodiment of resistance to authority.
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Michael Wolff |
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84f4331
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The first woman president, Ivanka entertained, would not be Hillary Clinton, it would be Ivanka Trump.
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Michael Wolff |
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c99ba86
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Chaos was Steve's strategy," said Walsh."
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Michael Wolff |
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8d66a63
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the central issue of the Trump presidency, informing every aspect of Trumpian policy and leadership: he didn't process information in any conventional sense--or, in a way, he didn't process it at all.
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Michael Wolff |
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4792f49
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the firing of FBI director James Comey may be the most consequential move ever made by a modern president acting entirely on his own.
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Michael Wolff |
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b8ff3eb
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He's a guy who really hated school," said Bannon. "And he's not going to start liking it now."
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Michael Wolff |
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dffa9f4
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Media is personal. It is a series of blood scores. The media in its often collective mind decides who is going to rise and who is going to fall, who lives and who dies.
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Michael Wolff |
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8119211
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that looseness with the truth, if not with reality itself, are an elemental thread of the book.
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Michael Wolff |
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36862ee
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he could yet make a case for a straight line from Nixon to Trump.
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Michael Wolff |
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d1374e1
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Trump, a man whose many neuroses included a horror of forgetfulness or senility,
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Michael Wolff |
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6692a5c
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In politics somebody has to lose, but invariably everybody thinks they can win.
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Michael Wolff |
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b764766
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The leitmotif for Trump about his own campaign was how crappy it was and how everybody involved in it was a loser.
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Michael Wolff |
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b0da428
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To Trump, he was just up against Sally Yates, who was, he steamed, "such a cunt."
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Michael Wolff |
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9003405
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It was the first presidential instance of what the campaign regulars had learned over many months: on the most basic level, Trump just did not, as Spicer later put it, give a fuck. You could tell him whatever you wanted, but he knew what he knew, and if what you said contradicted what he knew, he simply didn't believe you.
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Michael Wolff |
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9f4309e
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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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31da2b9
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Donald Trump was a step up--and early in the 2016 race, Trump became the Breitbart totem. (Many of Trump's positions in the campaign were taken from the Breitbart articles he had printed out for him.) Indeed, Bannon began to suggest to people that he, like Ailes had been at Fox, was the true force behind his chosen candidate.
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Michael Wolff |
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17f3774
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Trump had little or no interest in the central Republican goal of repealing Obamacare. An overweight seventy-year-old man with various physical phobias (for instance, he lied about his height to keep from having a body mass index that would label him as obese), he personally found health care and medical treatments of all kinds a distasteful subject. The details of the contested legislation were, to him, particularly boring; his attention w..
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Michael Wolff |
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57a70c5
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Just doing things became a Bannon principle, the sweeping antidote to bureaucratic and establishment ennui and resistance. It was the chaos of just doing things that actually got things done. Except, even if you assumed that not knowing how to do things didn't much matter if you just did them, it was still not clear who was going to do what you wanted to do. Or, a corollary, because nobody in the Trump administration really knew how to do a..
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Michael Wolff |
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d5683e7
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A happy wife is a happy life," he said, echoing a popular rich-man truism."
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Michael Wolff |
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e877833
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Bannon averred: "When you take out all the never-Trump guys who signed all those letters and all the neocons who got us in all these wars ... it's not a deep bench."
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Michael Wolff |
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d2c3aa1
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It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything.... Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.
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Michael Wolff |
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df65ed5
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This required some tutoring for Trump, who referred to the Chinese leader as "Mr. X-i"; the president was told to think of him as a woman and call him "she.")"
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Michael Wolff |
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07f65d1
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Why did we do this on a Friday when it would hit the airports hardest and bring out the most protesters? almost the entire White House staff demanded to know. "Errr ... that's why," said Bannon. "So the snowflakes would show up at the airports and riot." That was the way to crush the liberals: make them crazy and drag them to the left."
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Michael Wolff |
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d950b36
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Much of the left--which had resoundingly and scathingly rejected the intelligence community's unambiguous assessment of Edward Snowden as a betrayer of national secrets rather than a well-intentioned whistle-blower--now suddenly embraced the intelligence community's authority in its suggestion of Trump's nefarious relationships with the Russians.
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Michael Wolff |
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03d1a61
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Then he imposed a set of new rules: nobody touch anything, especially not his toothbrush. (He had a longtime fear of being poisoned, one reason why he liked to eat at McDonald's--nobody knew he was coming and the food was safely premade.) Also, he would let housekeeping know when he wanted his sheets done, and he would strip his own bed.
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Michael Wolff |
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2ad4cce
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myrmidons,
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Michael Wolff |
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73735e9
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Kushner became the representative in the White House of the liberal status quo. He was something like what used to be called a Rockefeller Republican and now might more properly be a Goldman Sachs Democrat. He--
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Michael Wolff |
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a9dcf99
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The theory, suddenly presented as just this side of a likelihood, was that the Russians had suborned Donald Trump during a trip to Moscow with a crude blackmail scheme involving prostitutes and videotaped sexual acts pushing new boundaries of deviance (including "golden showers") with prostitutes and videotaped sex acts."
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Michael Wolff |
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afc39f3
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It's all exaggerated. My exaggerations are exaggerated.
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Michael Wolff |
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b1b3562
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purpose of actually changing the country. Changing it quickly, radically, and truly.
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Michael Wolff |
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bc48ff7
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Steve Bannon was running the Steve Bannon White House, Jared Kushner was running the Michael Bloomberg White House, and Reince Priebus was running the Paul Ryan White House.
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Michael Wolff |
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3e32d91
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We serve at the president's displeasure,
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Michael Wolff |
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6d246d2
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It was insidious. It was, to them, although they didn't put it this way, similar to the kind of dark Clinton-like conspiracies that Republicans were more wont to accuse liberals of--Whitewater, Benghazi, Emailgate. That is, an obsessive narrative that leads to investigations, which lead to other investigations, and to more obsessive no-escape media coverage. This was modern politics: blood-sport conspiracies that were about trying to destro..
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Michael Wolff |
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f4c9a99
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It was part hortatory, part personal testimony, part barstool blowhard, a rambling, disjointed, digressive, what-me-worry approach that combined aspects of cable television rage, big-tent religious revivalism, Borscht Belt tummler, motivational speaking, and YouTube vlogging. Charisma in American politics had come to define an order of charm, wit, and style--a coolness. But another sort of American charisma was more in the Christian evangel..
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Michael Wolff |
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58cbbd0
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Sean Spicer, whose job was literally to explain what people did and why, often simply could not--because nobody really had a job, because nobody could do a job. Priebus, as chief of staff, had to organize meetings, schedules, and the hiring of staff; he also had to oversee the individual functions of the executive office departments. But Bannon, Kushner, Conway, and the president's daughter actually had no specific responsibilities--they co..
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Michael Wolff |