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e312410
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it was the Jarvanka idea to try to trade off amnesty for the border wall.
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Michael Wolff |
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bc90c3a
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the president himself was unsure about where he himself stood; he kept asking people if Kelly liked him.
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Michael Wolff |
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b95dbe1
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No one in the country, or on earth, has given less thought to health insurance than Donald," said Roger Ailes. Pressed in a campaign interview about the importance of Obamacare repeal and reform, Trump was, to say the least, quite unsure of its place on the agenda: "This is an important subject but there are a lot of important subjects. Maybe it is in the top ten. Probably is. But there is heavy competition. So you can't be certain. Could b..
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Michael Wolff |
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892adc3
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His son-in-law and daughter hoped--they were even confident--that they could speak to DJT's better self, or at least balance Republican needs with progressive rationality, compassion, and good works.
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Michael Wolff |
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485099e
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the more doubts gathered around Flynn, the more certain the president became that Flynn was his all-important ally.
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Michael Wolff |
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b482db9
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It was yet one more example, among his many now, of the comic-absurd, movielike politician who just says whatever is on his mind. Unmediated. Crazylike.
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Michael Wolff |
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4eb19e1
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Others were now recruited and, despite their obvious impressions of the man, agreed to sign on. Jim Mattis, a retired four-star general, one of the most respected commanders in the U.S. armed forces; Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil; Scott Pruitt and Betsy DeVos, Jeb Bush loyalists--all of them were now focused on the singular fact that while he might be a peculiar figure, even an absurd-seeming one, he had been elected president
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Michael Wolff |
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55c188a
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Trump added another tic, a lifelong sense that people were constantly taking unfair advantage of him.
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Michael Wolff |
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1596200
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His was a zero-sum ecosystem. In the world of Trump, anything that he deemed of value either accrued to him or had been robbed from him.
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Michael Wolff |
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72a6256
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As often as not, he surprised himself. "What did I say?" he would ask after getting severe blowback."
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Michael Wolff |
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7baec44
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It was a process of suggesting, in throw-it-against-the-wall style, what the president might want, and hoping he might then think that he had thought of this himself
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Michael Wolff |
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a1ce2f5
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Trump didn't read. He didn't really even skim. If it was print, it might as well not exist.
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Michael Wolff |
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8c2f79e
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Priebus had an agenda of his own: heeding Senate leader Mitch McConnell's prescription that "this president will sign whatever is put in front of him," while also taking advantage of the White House's lack of political and legislative experience and outsourcing as much policy as possible to Capitol Hill."
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Michael Wolff |
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a6192c2
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The daughter will take down the father," said Bannon, in a Shakespearian mood."
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Michael Wolff |
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1170448
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On June 9, 2016, Don Jr., Jared, and Paul Manafort met with a movieworthy cast of dubious characters in Trump Tower after having been promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton. Don Jr., encouraged by Jared and Ivanka, was trying to impress his father that he had the stuff to rise in the campaign.
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Michael Wolff |
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d08743b
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Dopey Don Jr. (Fredo, as Steve Bannon would dub him, in one of his frequent Godfather borrowings) was simply trying to prove he was a player and a go-to guy.
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Michael Wolff |
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c2d5a4f
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The chance that Don Jr. did not walk these jumos up to his father's office on the twenty-sixth floor is zero," said an astonished and derisive Bannon, not long after the meeting was revealed. "The three senior guys in the campaign," an incredulous Bannon went on, "thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the twenty-fifth floor--with no lawyers. They didn't have any lawyers. Ev..
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Michael Wolff |
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e4e6037
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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. No one will survive..
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Michael Wolff |
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ea50bf0
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The president did not truly listen to anybody. The more you talked, the less he listened.
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Michael Wolff |
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8d40221
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Look, Kasowitz has known him for twenty-five years. Kasowitz has gotten him out of all kinds of jams. Kasowitz on the campaign--what did we have, a hundred women? Kasowitz took care of all of them. And now he lasts, what, four weeks? He's in the mumble tank. This is New York's toughest lawyer, broken. Mark Corallo, toughest motherfucker I ever met, just can't do it.
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Michael Wolff |
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2976dce
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A small man with a Mr. Magoo stature and an old-fashioned Southern accent, Sessions was bitterly mocked by the president, who drew a corrosive portrait of physical and mental weakness.
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Michael Wolff |
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065bdfa
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The organization therefore needed a set of internal rationalizations that would allow it to trust a man who, while he knew little, was entirely confident of his own gut instincts and reflexive opinions, however frequently they might change.
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Michael Wolff |
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db46ef1
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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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1390602
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The contrast between the two men, Comey and Trump, was in essence the contrast between good government and Trump himself. Comey came across as precise, compartmentalized, scrupulous in his presentation of the details of what transpired and the nature of his responsibility--he was as by-the-book as it gets. Trump, in the portrait offered by Comey, was shady, shoot-from-the-hip, heedless or even unaware of the rules, deceptive, and in it for ..
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Michael Wolff |
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7268929
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In this regard, Bannon was not so much an entrepreneur of vision or even business discipline, he was more simply following the money - or trying to separate a fool from his money. He could not have done better than Bob and Rebekah Mercer.
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Michael Wolff |
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04657ae
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You could hardly find an entity more at odds with military discipline than a Trump organization.
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Michael Wolff |
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bcf9762
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Good management reduces ego. But in the Trump White House, it could often seem that nothing happened, that reality simply did not exist, if it did not happen in Trump's presence.
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Michael Wolff |
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d022847
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The point could hardly have been clearer: if the president was pressuring the director because he feared that an investigation of Michael Flynn would damage him, then this was an obstruction of justice.
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Michael Wolff |
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1ffcd00
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we could confidently call some of the most peculiar remarks ever delivered by an American president. "I know a lot about West Point, I'm a person who very strongly believes in academics. Every time I say I had an uncle who was a great professor at MIT for 35 years, who did a fantastic job in so many ways academically--he was an academic genius--and then they say, Is Donald Trump an intellectual? Trust me, I'm like a smart person."
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Michael Wolff |
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e62df7f
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In the early days of Trump's presidency, the situation seemed clear to everybody: three men were fighting to run the White House, to be the real chief of staff and power behind the Trump throne. And of course there was Trump himself, who didn't want to relinquish power to anyone.
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Michael Wolff |
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91c2e32
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Alas, politics itself has more and more become a discrete business. Its appeal is B-to-B--business-to-business. The real swamp is the swamp of insular, inbred, incestuous interests. This isn't corruption so much as overspecialization. It's a wonk's life. Politics has gone one way, the culture another. The left-right junkies might pretend otherwise, but the great middle doesn't put political concerns at the top of their minds.
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Michael Wolff |
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ceee2c2
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he lied about his height to keep from having a body mass index that would label him as obese),
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Michael Wolff |
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03942f2
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The president's worst impulses seem to run through Conway without benefit of a filter.
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Michael Wolff |
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d3b98a2
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Hence, she and everyone else was translating a set of desires and urges into a program, a process that required a lot of guess work. It was, said Walsh, "like trying to figure out what a child wants."
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Michael Wolff |
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40834df
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calamity of their own making.
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Michael Wolff |
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b1325a8
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Look, Kasowitz has known him for twenty-five years. Kasowitz has gotten him out of all kinds of jams. Kasowitz on the campaign--what did we have, a hundred women? Kasowitz took care of all of them. And now he lasts, what, four weeks? He's in the mumble tank.
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Michael Wolff |
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36a27e6
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hurry. * * * Bannon had delved deeply into the nature
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Michael Wolff |
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03ae6d0
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McConnell and the president were barely on speaking terms. From his August "working holiday" in Bedminster, the president's staff had tried to organize a makeup meeting with McConnell, but McConnell's staff had sent back word that it wouldn't be possible because the Senate leader would be getting a haircut."
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Michael Wolff |
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ba7eb1a
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The face-off quickly escalated into an existential confrontation between the two sides of the White House--two sides on a total war footing. "You don't know what you're doing," shouted a livid Bannon at Hicks, demanding to know who she worked for, the White House or Jared and Ivanka. "You don't know how much trouble you are in," he screamed, telling her that if she didn't get a lawyer he would call her father and tell him he had better get ..
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Michael Wolff |
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3988069
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The Kushner position was not helped by the fact that the president had been gleefully telling multiple people that Jared could solve the Middle East problem because the Kushners knew all the crooks in Israel.)
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Michael Wolff |
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8d8743f
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The Best and the Brightest
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Michael Wolff |
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8b7bdf7
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Trump for dinner every night, or at least made himself available--one bachelor there for the effective other bachelor. (Priebus would observe that in the beginning everyone would try to be part of these dinners, but within a few months, they had become a torturous duty to be avoided.) Part of Jared and Ivanka's calculation about the relative power and influence of a formal job in the West Wing versus an outside advisory role was the knowled..
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Michael Wolff |
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fed8410
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But if Halberstam defined the presidential mien, Trump defied it--and defiled it.
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Michael Wolff |
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5747e71
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The less likely a presidential candidate is, the more unlikely, and, often, inexperienced, his aides are--that is, an unlikely candidate can attract only unlikely aides, as the likely ones go to the more likely candidates. When an unlikely candidate wins--and as outsiders become ever more the quadrennial flavor of the month, the more likely an unlikely candidate is to get elected--ever more peculiar people fill the White House.
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Michael Wolff |