|
0acd4e5
|
the political antichrist, a figure of dark but buffoonish scandal,
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
147c3dc
|
Trump liked to say that one of the things that made life worth living was getting your friends' wives into bed. In pursuing a friend's wife, he would try to persuade the wife that her husband was perhaps not what she thought. Then he'd have his secretary ask the friend into his office; once the friend arrived, Trump would engage in what was, for him, more or less constant sexual banter. Do you still like having sex with your wife? How often..
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
c1bccad
|
Operatives knew the game, and so did most candidates and officeholders. But Ailes was pretty sure Trump did not.Trump was undisciplined--he had no capacity for any game plan. He could not be a part of any organization, nor was he likely to subscribe to any program or principle. In Ailes's view, he was "a rebel without a cause." He was simply "Donald"--as though nothing more need be said."
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
85ca1bb
|
It would be hard to imagine someone who expected a greater awareness of and more catering to his peculiar whims, rhythms, prejudices, and often inchoate desires. He needed special--extra special--handling. Women, he explained to one friend with something like self-awareness, generally got this more precisely than men. In particular, women who self-selected themselves as tolerant of or oblivious to or amused by or steeled against his casual ..
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
6e8abfa
|
were ready to lose with fire and fury. They were not ready to win.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
7734eb5
|
This was the peculiar and haunting consensus--not that Trump was guilty of all that he was accused of, but that he was guilty of so much else. It was all too possible that the hardly plausible would lead to the totally credible.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
86a6705
|
I now understand what it is like to be in the court of the Tudors," reflected Bannon. On the campaign trail, he recalled, Newt Gingrich "would come with all these dumb ideas. When we won he was my new best friend. Every day a hundred ideas. When"--by spring in the White House--"I got cold, when I went through my Valley of Death, I saw him one day in the lobby and he looks down, avoiding my eyes with a kind of mumbled 'Hey, Steve.' And I say..
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
e2f446b
|
Bannon, who styled himself as a kind of black hole of silence, had also become a sort of official black-hole voice, everybody's Deep Throat. He was witty, intense, evocative, and bubbling over, his theoretical discretion ever giving way to a constant semipublic commentary on the pretensions and fatuousness and hopeless lack of seriousness of most everyone else in the White House. By the second week of the Trump presidency, everybody in the ..
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
7d34a01
|
Bob Woodward's 1994 book, The Agenda, is a blow-by-blow account of the first eighteen months of the Clinton White House, most of it focused on creating the Clinton budget, with the single largest block of the president's time devoted to deep contemplation and arguments about how to allocate resources. In Trump's case, this sort of close and continuous engagement was inconceivable; budgeting was simply too small-bore for him. "The first coup..
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
efccb83
|
Trump liked to say that one of the things that made life worth living was getting your friends' wives into bed.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
b76a82e
|
The media, adopting a "shocked, shocked" morality, could not fathom how being factually wrong was not an absolute ending in itself. How could this not utterly shame him? How could his staff defend him? The facts were the facts! Defying them, or ignoring them, or subverting them, made you a liar--intending to deceive, bearing false witness. (A minor journalism controversy broke out about whether"
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
5286e15
|
What's more, Trump was receiving the censure of his friends, too. And it was not only calls from friends worried about him, but staffers calling people to call him and say Simmer down. "Who do you have in there?" said Joe Scarborough in a frantic call. "Who's the person you trust? Jared? Who can talk you through this stuff before you decided to act on it?" "Well," said the president, "you won't like the answer, but the answer is me. Me. I t..
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
0936ff3
|
Is Donald Trump an intellectual? Trust me, I'm like a smart person.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
40d2409
|
Hence, within twenty-four hours of the inauguration, the president had invented a million or so people who did not exist. He sent his new press secretary, Sean Spicer--whose personal mantra would shortly become "You can't make this shit up"--to argue his case in a media moment that turned Spicer, quite a buttoned-down political professional, into a national joke, which he seemed destined to never recover from. To boot, the president blamed ..
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
cea2e31
|
Bannon didn't much question Donald Trump's bona fides, or behavior, or electability, because, in part, Trump was just his latest rich man. The rich man is a fixed fact, which you have to accept and deal with in an entrepreneurial world--at least a lower-level entrepreneurial world. And, of course, if Trump had had firmer bona fides, better behavior, and clear electability, Bannon would not have had his chance.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
8a15d9f
|
Murdoch believed he understood better than younger men, even seventy-year-old Trump, that political power was fleeting. (This was in fact the same message he had imparted to Barack Obama.) A president really had only, max, six months to make an impact on the public and set his agenda, and he'd be lucky to get six months. After that it was just putting out fires and battling the opposition. This was the message whose urgency Bannon himself h..
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
3d35210
|
Almost everybody in the campaign, still an extremely small outfit, thought of themselves as a clear-eyed team, as realistic about their prospects as perhaps any in politics. The unspoken agreement among them: not only would Donald Trump not be president, he should probably not be. Conveniently, the former conviction meant nobody had to deal with the latter issue.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
f181816
|
Early on, before getting down to attacking each other, Bannon and Kushner were united in their separate offensives against Priebus. Kushner's preferred outlet was Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski's Morning Joe, one of the president's certain morning shows. Bannon's first port of call was the alt-right media ("Bannon's Breitbart shenanigans," in Walsh's view). By the end of the first month in the White House, Bannon and Kushner had each b..
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
307cbc4
|
son-in-law Kushner had been marked not just for ignominy, but for slow torture by ridicule, contempt, and ever-more amusing persiflage. These people are nothing. They are media debris. For goodness' sake!
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
40a0dd4
|
The president couldn't stop talking. He was plaintive and self-pitying, and it was obvious to everyone that if he had a north star, it was just to be liked. He was ever uncomprehending about why everyone did not like him, or why it should be so difficult to get everyone to like him. He might be happy throughout the day as a parade of union steel workers or CEOs trooped into the White House, with the president praising his visitors and them ..
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
853ec78
|
Shortly after eight o'clock that evening, when the unexpected trend--Trump might actually win--seemed confirmed, Don Jr. told a friend that his father, or DJT, as he called him, looked as if he had seen a ghost. Melania, to whom Donald Trump had made his solemn guarantee, was in tears--and not of joy.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
8566339
|
The Trump campaign had, perhaps less than inadvertently, replicated the scheme from Mel Brooks's The Producers. In
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
df91d2e
|
Bannon veered from "Mad Dog" Mattis--the retired four-star general whom Trump had nominated as secretary of defense--to a long riff on torture, the surprising liberalism of generals, and the stupidity of the civilian-military bureaucracy. Then it was on to the looming appointment of Michael Flynn--a favorite Trump general who'd been the opening act at many Trump rallies--as the National Security Advisor. "He's fine. He's not Jim Mattis and ..
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
afed1c8
|
Few people who knew Trump had illusions about him. That was almost his appeal: he was what he was. Twinkle in his eye, larceny in his soul.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
677bf94
|
In fact, up close, Trump was not the bombastic and pugilistic man who had stirred rabid crowds on the campaign trail. He was neither angry nor combative. He may have been the most threatening and frightening and menacing presidential candidate in modern history, but in person he could seem almost soothing. His extreme self-satisfaction rubbed off. Life was sunny. Trump was an optimist--at least about himself. He was charming and full of fla..
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
82beee6
|
Salesmen, whose primary characteristic and main asset is their ability to keep selling, constantly recast the world in positive terms. Discouragement for everyone else is merely the need to improve reality for them.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
48dd3eb
|
He was a rebel, a disruptor, and, living outside the rules, contemptuous of them. A close Trump friend who was also a good Bill Clinton friend found them eerily similar--except that Clinton had a respectable front and Trump did not.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
7bc3e6a
|
The unspoken agreement among them: not only would Donald Trump not be president, he should probably not be.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
1c8cab3
|
Other than Trump himself, Bannon was certainly the oldest inexperienced person ever to work in the White House.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
a8c86a4
|
Anyone studying the position would conclude that a stronger chief of staff is better than a weaker one, and a chief of staff with a history in Washington and the federal government is better than an outsider.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
8f2cc40
|
Donald Trump and his tiny band of campaign warriors were ready to lose with fire and fury. They were not ready to win.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
ace2d53
|
In politics somebody has to lose, but invariably everybody thinks they can win. And you probably can't win unless you believe that you will win--except in the Trump campaign.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
15d5946
|
the world needs borders--or the world should return to a time when it had borders. When America was great. Trump had become the platform for that message.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
f1f868b
|
It's just a conspiracy theory." And, he added, the Trump team wasn't capable of conspiring about anything." --
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
445e353
|
Elon Musk, in Trump Tower, pitched Trump on the new administration's joining him in his race to Mars, which Trump jumped at.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
d6b8629
|
On May 17, twelve days after FBI director Comey was fired, without consulting the White House or the attorney general, Rosenstein appointed former FBI director Robert Mueller to oversee the investigation of Trump's, his campaign's, and his staff's ties to Russia.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
4343a2e
|
What has he gotten himself into with the Russians?" pressed Ailes. "Mostly," said Bannon, "he went to Russia and he thought he was going to meet Putin. But Putin couldn't give a shit about him. So he's kept trying." "He's Donald," said Ailes. "It's a magnificent thing," said Bannon, who had taken to regarding Trump as something like a natural wonder, beyond explanation."
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
d61e12f
|
But Ailes was convinced that Trump had no political beliefs or backbone.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
7c78ee6
|
How's the kid?" asked Ailes, referring to Trump's son-in-law and paramount political adviser, thirty-six-year-old Jared Kushner. "He's my partner," said Bannon, his tone suggesting that if he felt otherwise, he was nevertheless determined to stay on message. "Really?" said a dubious Ailes. "He's on the team." "He's had lot of lunches with Rupert." "In fact," said Bannon, "I could use your help here." Bannon then spent several minutes trying..
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
0449adf
|
On the most basic level, he simply could not link cause and effect.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
54fa4e5
|
At points on the day's spectrum of adverse political developments, he could have moments of, almost everyone would admit, irrationality. When that happened, he was alone in his anger and not approachable by anyone. His senior staff largely dealt with these dark hours by agreeing with him, no matter what he said. And if some of them occasionally tried to hedge, Hope Hicks never did. She agreed absolutely with all of it.
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
b23af85
|
Bannon, for instance, even driven by his imperative just to get things done, did not use a computer. How did he do anything? Katie Walsh wondered. But that was the difference between big visions and small. Process was bunk. Expertise was the last refuge of liberals, ever defeated by the big picture. The will to get big things done was how big things got done. "Don't sweat the small stuff" was a pretty good gist of Donald Trump's--and Steve ..
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
d0e066d
|
Jared and Ivanka had made an earnest deal between themselves: if sometime in the future the time came, she'd be the one to run for president (or the first one of them to take the shot).
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |
|
c9bba79
|
Flynn was "a colonel in a general's uniform," according to one senior intelligence figure.)"
|
|
|
Michael Wolff |