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40101d4
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Rebekah took a helicopter from their Long Island estate out to a scheduled fundraiser--with
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Michael Wolff |
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7e69629
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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--Bob and Rebekah Mercer were quite onto themselves.
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Michael Wolff |
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0139121
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Kushner was going to pursue as his first leadership mark a meeting with the Mexican president, whom his father-in-law had threatened and insulted throughout the campaign.
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Michael Wolff |
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8d7d29a
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New York, the world's largest Jewish city.
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Michael Wolff |
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1c9643f
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Kushner, in fact, now believed Bannon would do anything to destroy them. This was personal. After months of defending Bannon against liberal media innuendo, Kushner had concluded that Bannon was an anti-Semite. That was the bottom-line issue.
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Michael Wolff |
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d4797b1
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in a world increasingly swayed by private wealth and personal brands.
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Michael Wolff |
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2955996
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She was a nonevent on the campaign. She became a White House staffer and that's when people suddenly realized she's dumb as a brick. A little marketing savvy and has a look, but as far as understanding actually how the world works and what politics is and what it means--nothing. Once you expose that, you lose such credibility. Jared just kind of flits in and does the Arab stuff.
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Michael Wolff |
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8696b05
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Murdoch suggested that taking a liberal approach to H-1B visas might be hard to square with his immigration promises. But Trump seemed unconcerned, assuring Murdoch, "We'll figure it out."
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Michael Wolff |
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5f342a2
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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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497e00e
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To Walsh, the proud political pro, the chaos, the rivalries, and the president's own lack of focus and lack of concern were simply incomprehensible.
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Michael Wolff |
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60b9ed9
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There was now a fair amount of back-of-the-classroom giggling about who had called Trump what. For Steve Mnuchin and Reince Priebus, he was an "idiot." For Gary Cohn, he was "dumb as shit." For H. R. McMaster he was a "dope." The list went on."
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Michael Wolff |
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df0dc1d
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Scaramucci also took on Steve Bannon: "I'm not Steve Bannon. I'm not trying to suck my own cock." (In fact, 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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abaf310
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In a continuing sign of Trump's Rashomon effect--his speeches inspiring joy or horror--witnesses would describe his reception at the CIA as either a Beatles-like emotional outpouring or a response so confounded and appalled that, in the seconds after he finished, you could hear a pin drop.
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Michael Wolff |
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6dde41b
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Conway, who continued to hold the president's favor and to be his preferred defender on the cable news shows, had publicly declared herself the face of the administration--and for Ivanka and Jared, this was a horrifying face. The president's worst impulses seem to run through Conway without benefit of a filter. She compounded Trump's anger, impulsiveness, and miscues. Whereas a presidential adviser was supposed to buffer and interpret his g..
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Michael Wolff |
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d8f1359
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Careers advance by how well you learn on the job and how well you get along with the rest of the swamp and play its game.
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Michael Wolff |
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f28f868
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This--insulting Donald Trump's intelligence--was both the thing you could not do and the thing--drawing there-but-for-the-grace-of-God guffaws across the senior staff--that everybody was guilty of. Everyone, in his or her own way, struggled to express the baldly obvious fact that the president did not know enough, did not know what he didn't know, did not particularly care, and, to boot, was confident if not serene in his unquestioned certi..
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Michael Wolff |
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da0355a
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this was the fundamental hypothesis of the senior staff, shared by Walsh and everyone else: Trump must know what he was doing, his intuition must be profound.
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Michael Wolff |
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bbd8d25
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also be the easiest one to achieve, since virtually every Republican was already publicly committed to voting for repeal. But Bannon,
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Michael Wolff |
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83be9ff
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alarm signals first went off among his new campaign staff: he seemed to lack the ability to take in third-party information. Or maybe he lacked the interest; whichever, he seemed almost phobic about having formal demands on his attention
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Michael Wolff |
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49df16d
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Kushner was the driver of the Trump doctrine. His test cases were China, Mexico, Canada, and Saudi Arabia. He offered each country the opportunity to make his father-in-law happy.
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Michael Wolff |
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68e8814
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When the president got on the phone after dinner, it was often a rambling affair. In paranoid or sadistic fashion, he'd speculate on the flaws and weaknesses of each member of his staff.
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Michael Wolff |
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b247981
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chronic naysayer, he viewed each member of his inner circle as a problem child whose fate he held in his hand. "We are sinners and he is God" was one view; "We serve at the president's displeasure," another."
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Michael Wolff |
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24f6cc0
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Trump was Trump--careless, capricious, disloyal, far beyond any sort of control.
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Michael Wolff |
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0ad091b
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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.
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Michael Wolff |
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45df601
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just when you felt on top of the world in the Trump administration, you could probably count on getting cut down. That was the pattern and price of one-man leadership--insecure-man leadership.
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Michael Wolff |
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211492b
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Almost everybody in the White House followed Trump's thinking by tracking whom he had called the night before.)
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Michael Wolff |
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817ffdf
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Trump, said Bannon, noting the obvious, was the least disciplined man in politics.
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Michael Wolff |
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6caa1fd
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Trump, in a smart move, picked up his media reputation and relocated it from a hypercritical New York to a more value-free Hollywood, becoming the star of his own reality show, The Apprentice, and embracing a theory that would serve him well during his presidential campaign: in flyover country, there is no greater asset than celebrity. To be famous is to be loved--or at least fawned over.
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Michael Wolff |
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269725d
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Expertise was the last refuge of liberals, ever defeated by the big picture.
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Michael Wolff |
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a16e1c1
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Donald, you can't do it. You've made your bed and Steve is in it.
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Michael Wolff |
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60c6943
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Some seducers are preternaturally sensitive to the signals of those they try to seduce; others indiscriminately attempt to seduce, and, by the law of averages, often succeed (this latter group of men might now be regarded as harassers). That was Trump's approach to women--pleased when he scored, unconcerned when he didn't (and, often, despite the evidence, believing that he had). And so it was with Director Comey.
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Michael Wolff |
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95d3584
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The president, while often a fabulist in his depiction of the world, was quite a literalist when it came to how he saw himself.
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Michael Wolff |
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ba73b0b
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Bannon invariably found some reason to study papers in the corner and then to have a last word; Priebus kept his eye on Bannon; Kushner kept constant tabs on the whereabouts of the others.
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Michael Wolff |
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7c17265
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trying to win without consideration, plan, or clear goals had, in the course of the administration's first nine months, resulted in almost nothing but losses.
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Michael Wolff |
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806126c
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The president himself, absent any organizational rigor, often acted as his own chief of staff, or, in a sense, elevated the press secretary job to the primary staff job, and then functioned as his own press secretary
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Michael Wolff |
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dda1df8
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Trump problem. He hopelessly personalized everything. He saw the world in commercial and show business terms: someone else was always trying to one-up you, someone else was always trying to take the limelight.
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Michael Wolff |
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47c6bcd
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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.
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Michael Wolff |
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cbc6273
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Haley had courted and befriended Ivanka, and Ivanka had brought her into the family circle, where she had become a particular focus of Trump's attention, and he of hers. Haley, as had become increasingly evident to the wider foreign policy and national security team, was the family's pick for secretary of state after Rex Tillerson's inevitable resignation. (Likewise, in this shuffle, Dina Powell would replace Haley at the UN.) The president..
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Michael Wolff |
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cf00003
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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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fe4d55a
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If Trump cared about something, he usually already had a fixed view based on limited information. If he didn't care, he had no view and no information.
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Michael Wolff |
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a5983c1
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For Walsh, it was a daily process of managing an impossible task: almost as soon as she received direction from one of the three men, she would be countermanded by one or another of them.
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Michael Wolff |
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e969ac6
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I now understand what it is like to be in the court of the Tudors," reflected Bannon."
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Michael Wolff |
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56fc21b
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There was, curiously, general agreement in the West Wing that Donald Trump, the media president, had one of the most dysfunctional communication operations in modern White House history.
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Michael Wolff |
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0ff9249
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He held his face in his hands for a moment and then looked up again. "I'm pretty good at coming up with solutions, I came up with a solution for his broke-dick campaign in about a day, but I don't see this. I don't see a plan for getting through. Now, I gave him a plan, I said you seal the Oval Office, you send those two kids home, you get rid of Hope, all these deadbeats, and you listen to your legal team--Kasowitz, and Mark Dowd, and Jay ..
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Michael Wolff |