|
9e7035c
|
The real swamp is the swamp of insular, inbred, incestuous interests.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
df02fe3
|
persiflage.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
5857a56
|
The president, on the verge of starting a war with the FBI, the DOJ, and many in Congress, was going rogue.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
db43e69
|
There was a plot against him.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
a083980
|
His senior staff largely dealt with these dark hours by agreeing with him, no matter what he said.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
fcdb160
|
He had no interest in precision, or even any ability to be precise.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
7060893
|
Cohn's derisive contempt for Kushner as well as the president was even greater. In return, the president heaped more abuse on Cohn--the former president of Goldman Sachs was now a "complete idiot, dumber than dumb."
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
d3bd43f
|
this was another--and to some quite the ultimate--example of how difficult it was for the president to function in a literal, definitional, lawyerly, cause-and-effect political world.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
894004e
|
The Mexican president refused to construct a pretense for paying for the wall, a pretense that might have redounded to his vast advantage (without his having to actually pay for the wall).
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
e594561
|
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. Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it's all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately. Even if you didn't think to do t..
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
77eec43
|
Donald Trump, whose cruelties, always great even when they were casual, were unbearable when he truly turned against you.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
650024b
|
most of the leaks, certainly the juiciest ones, were coming from the higher-ups--not to mention from the person occupying the topmost echelon. The president couldn't stop talking.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
0126b93
|
success of the speech confirmed the Jared and Ivanka strategy: look for common ground. It also confirmed Ivanka's understanding of her father: he just wanted to be loved. And, likewise, it confirmed Bannon's worst fear: Trump, in his true heart, was a marshmallow.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
23e1397
|
For each of his enemies--and, actually, for each of his friends--the issue for him came down, in many ways, to their personal press plan. The media was the battlefield. Trump assumed everybody wanted his or her fifteen minutes and that everybody had a press strategy for when they got them. If you couldn't get press directly for yourself, you became a leaker. There was no happenstance news, in Trump's view. All news was manipulated and desig..
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
4cd6f58
|
60 Minutes (TV show) 666 Fifth Avenue
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
ebdc562
|
He wasn't a tough guy. He was "a big warm-hearted monkey," said Bannon, with rather faint praise."
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
686b48c
|
Almost all the professionals who were now set to join him were coming face to face with the fact that it appeared he knew nothing. There was simply no subject, other than perhaps building construction, that he had substantially mastered.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
185b04e
|
His sons, Don Jr. and Eric--behind their backs known to Trump insiders as Uday and Qusay, after the sons of Saddam Hussein--wondered if there couldn't somehow be two parallel White House structures, one dedicated to their father's big-picture views, personal appearances, and salesmanship and the other concerned with day-to-day management issues.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
4339bcd
|
if they don't respond to sucking up, they might respond to piling on.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
da7c446
|
These powerful figures tried to
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
14fc0b2
|
That was the way to crush the liberals: make them crazy and drag them to the left.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
297005f
|
Bannon, with mounting ferocity and pubic venom, could abide them less and less every day.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
3c447dd
|
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. This presented a do-over opportunity for the world in its relationship with the United States--or it did if you were willing to speak the new Trump language, whatever that was. There wasn't much of a road map here, just pure opportunism, a new transactional openness. Or, even mo..
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
a3307f3
|
In practice, the new foreign policy, an effective Trump doctrine, was to reduce the board to three elements: powers we can work with, powers we cannot work with, and those without enough power whom we can functionally disregard or sacrifice. It was cold war stuff. And, indeed, 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.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
b94ec23
|
Trump, in Bannon's view, was a chapter, or even a detour, in the Trump revolution, which had always been about weakness in the two major parties. The Trump presidency - however long it lasted - had created the opening that would provide the true outsiders their opportunity. Trump was just the beginning.
|
|
steve-bannon
|
Michael Wolff |
|
852b57d
|
the case against collusion with the Russians and the case for it. It was a case, or the lack of one, not of masterminds and subterfuge, but of senseless and benighted people so guileless and unconcerned that they enthusiastically colluded in plain sight.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
ab4d23c
|
Trump simply could not abide the knowledge that somebody was getting a leg up at his expense. 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.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
165e869
|
Trump didn't read. He didn't really even skim. If it was print, it might as well not exist...He was postliterate -- total television.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
5766104
|
Mitch McConnell's prescription that "this president will sign whatever is put in front of him."
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
a26849e
|
It didn't exactly surprise Bannon when Trump flipped; Bannon understood how easy it was to bullshit a bullshitter.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
a171bb9
|
It's worse than you can imagine. An idiot (Trump) 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.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
fa96919
|
And that evening, the president traveled to West Virginia to deliver a speech before the Boy Scouts of America. Once more, his speech was totally at odds with time, place, and good sense. It prompted an immediate apology from the Boy Scouts to its members, their parents, and the country at large.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
e0a6eda
|
Trump was the one variable that, in management terms, simply could not be controlled. He was like a recalcitrant two-year-old. If you tried to control him, it would only have the opposite effect.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
b09275f
|
Against this background (North Korea missile threats), almost no one paid attention to the announcement by the Trump supporter and American neo-Nazi Richard Spencer that he was organizing a protest at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville, over the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. "Unite the Right," the theme of the rally called for Saturday, August 12, was explicitly designed to link Trump's politics with white nationalism."
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
7941872
|
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.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
325c866
|
On the afternoon of November 8, 2016, Kellyanne Conway--Donald Trump's campaign manager and a central, indeed starring, personality of Trumpworld--settled into her glass office at Trump Tower. Right up until the last weeks of the race, the Trump campaign headquarters had remained a listless place. All that seemed to distinguish it from a corporate back office were a few posters with right-wing slogans. Conway now was in a remarkably buoyant..
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
4089f15
|
Everyone, in his or her own way, struggled to express the baldly obrious 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 certitudes.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
7ec4169
|
The Russia story was--just two weeks into the new presidency--a dividing line with each side viewing the other as pushing fake news.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
011c381
|
The greater White House wholly believed that the story was an invented construct of weak if not preposterous narrative threads, with a mind-boggling thesis: We fixed the election with the Russians, OMG! The anti-Trump world, and especially its media--that is, the media--believed that there was a high, if not overwhelming, likelihood that there was something significant there, and a decent chance that it could be brought home.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
a81958e
|
If the media, self-righteously, saw it as the Holy Grail and silver bullet of Trump destruction, and the Trump White House saw it, with quite some self-pity, as a desperate effort to concoct a scandal, there was also a range of smart money in the middle.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
91945cf
|
And yet, the larger truth was that Ivanka's relationship with her father was in no way a conventional family relationship. If it wasn't pure opportunism, it was certainly transactional. It was business. Building the brand, the presidential campaign, and now the White House--it was all business.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
ea0c8f8
|
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 certitudes. There was now a fair amount of back-of-the-classroom giggling about who had called Trump what.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
1ad9a09
|
He would come out of this campaign, Trump assured Ailes, with a far more powerful brand and untold opportunities. "This is bigger than I ever dreamed of," he told Ailes in a conversation a week before the election. "I don't think about losing because it isn't losing. We've totally won." What's more, he was already laying down his public response to losing the election: It was stolen! Donald Trump and his tiny band of campaign warriors were ..
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
6397423
|
Trump, as almost anyone who had ever worked for him appreciated, was, despite what you hoped he might be, Trump--and he would invariably sour on everyone around him.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |