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The Pre-Election Presidential Transition Act of 2010 established funding for presidential nominees to start the process of vetting thousands of candidates for jobs in a new administration, codifying policies that would determine the early actions of a new White House, and preparing for the handoff of bureaucratic responsibilities on January 20. During the campaign, New Jersey governor Chris Christie, the nominal head of the Trump transition..
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Michael Wolff |
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The fact that Trump had become the ultimate avatar of Fox's angry common man was another sign that we were living in an upside-down world.
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Michael Wolff |
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just worry about who's jerking whose chain.
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Michael Wolff |
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His sons, Don Jr. and Eric--jokingly behind their backs known to Trump insiders as Uday and Qusay, after the sons of Saddam Hussein--
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Michael Wolff |
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Christie had sent Jared's father, Charles Kushner, to jail in 2005. Charlie Kushner, pursued by the feds for an income tax cheat, set up a scheme with a prostitute to blackmail his brother-in-law, who was planning to testify against him. Various accounts, mostly offered by Christie himself, make Jared the vengeful hatchet man in Christie's aborted Trump administration career. It was a kind of perfect sweet-revenge story: the son of the wron..
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Michael Wolff |
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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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Bannon and Kushner were therefore more than a little irritated to discover that the unimposing 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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While the Trump administration has made hostility to the press a virtual policy, it has also been more open to the media than any White House in recent memory.
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Michael Wolff |
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Several decades as a grasping entrepreneur without a satisfying success story doesn't smooth the hustle in hustler.
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Michael Wolff |
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Bob and Rebekah Mercer, who had set themselves up as almost professional fools.
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Michael Wolff |
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I was in Russia years ago with the Ms. Universe contest--did very very well--I tell everyone be careful, because you don't want to see yourself on television--cameras all over the place. And again, not just Russia, all over. So would anyone really believe that story? I'm also very much of a germaphobe, by the way. Believe me.
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Michael Wolff |
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now Bannon's Zeitgeist moment had arrived. Everywhere there was a sudden sense of global self-doubt. Brexit in the UK, waves of immigrants arriving on Europe's angry shores, the disenfranchisement of the workingman, the specter of more financial meltdown, Bernie Sanders and his liberal revanchism--everywhere was backlash. Even the most dedicated exponents of globalism were hesitating. Bannon believed that great numbers of people were sudden..
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Michael Wolff |
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The kids"--Jared and Ivanka--exhibited an increasingly panicked sense that the FBI and DOJ were moving beyond Russian election interference and into family finances. "Ivanka is terrified," said a satisfied Bannon."
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Michael Wolff |
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They take everything I've ever said and exaggerate it," said the president in his first week in the White House during a late-night call. "It's all exaggerated. My exaggerations are exaggerated."
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Michael Wolff |
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His callers, largely because they found his conversation peculiar, alarming, or completely contrary to reason and common sense, often overrode what they might otherwise have assumed to be the confidential nature of the calls and shared the content with someone else. Hence news about the inner workings of the White House went into free circulation. Except it was not so much the inner workings of the White House--although it would often be re..
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Michael Wolff |
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If the new right had elected Trump, it was the older Fortune 100 executives who most pleased him
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Michael Wolff |
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Donald Trump became a symbol of the media's own self-loathing: the interest in and promotion of Donald Trump was a morality tale about the media.
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Michael Wolff |
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Bannon's entire political career, such as it was, had been in political media. It was also in Internet media--that is, media ruled by immediate response. The Breitbart formula was to so appall the liberals that the base was doubly satisfied, generating clicks in a ricochet of disgust and delight. You defined yourself by your enemy's reaction. Conflict was the media bait--hence, now, the political chum. The new politics was not the art of th..
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Michael Wolff |
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Speaker Boehner." (John Boehner had been the Speaker of the House until he was forced out in a Tea Party putsch in 2011.)"
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Michael Wolff |
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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. Bannon was disloyal (not to mention he always looks like shit). Priebus was weak (not to mention he was short--a midget). Kushner was a suck-up. Spicer was stupid (and looks terrible too). Conway was a crybaby. Jared and Ivanka should never have come to Was..
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Michael Wolff |
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The country built on the virtue and the character and the strength of the American workingman circa 1955-65 was the ideal he meant to defend and restore: trade agreements, or trade wars, that supported American manufacturing; immigration policies that protected American workers (and, hence, American culture, or at least America's identity from 1955 to 1965); and an international isolation that would conserve American resources and choke off..
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Michael Wolff |
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Well," said the president, "you won't like the answer, but the answer is me. Me. I talk to myself."
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Michael Wolff |
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you don't really have to know all that much yourself; you just do it differently than it was done before.
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Michael Wolff |
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One instance of his revisionism, and of the new stature he now seemed to assume as president, involved the lowest point of the campaign--the Billy Bush tape. His explanation, in an off-the-record conversation with a friendly cable anchor, was that it "really wasn't me." The anchor acknowledged how unfair it was to be characterized by a single event. "No," said Trump, "it wasn't me. I've been told by people who understand this stuff about ho..
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Michael Wolff |
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This was the job Bannon a week later.
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Michael Wolff |
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For whatever reason, almost everyone I contacted--senior members of the White House staff as well as dedicated observers of it--shared large amounts of time with me and went to great effort to help shed light on the unique nature of life inside the Trump White House. In the end, what I witnessed, and what this book is about, is a group of people who have struggled, each in their own way, to come to terms with the meaning of working for Dona..
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Michael Wolff |
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Pushing a proffered glass of wine away--"I don't drink"--"
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Michael Wolff |
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Bannon, Conway, and Hicks--along with an assortment of more or less peculiar ideologues that had attached themselves to Trump and, of course, his family, all people without clearly monetizable reputations before their association with Trump--were, for better or worse, hitched to him.
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Michael Wolff |
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But most of the leaks, certainly the juiciest ones, were coming from the higher-ups--not to mention from the person occupying the topmost echelon.
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Michael Wolff |
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He's not only crazy," declared Tom Barrack to a friend, "he's stupid."
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Michael Wolff |
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Here's the deal," a close Trump associate told Priebus. "In an hour meeting with him you're going to hear fifty-four minutes of stories and they're going to be the same stories over and over again. So you have to have one point to make and you have to pepper it in whenever you can."
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Michael Wolff |
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The DOJ," the president's source told him, "was filled with women who hated him."
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Michael Wolff |
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Kushner saw the chance to convert the issue of the wall into a bilateral agreement addressing immigration--
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Michael Wolff |
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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.
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Michael Wolff |
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In Trump's 2011 CPAC address he specifically calls for a relaxation of immigration restrictions for Europeans . . . that we should re-create an America that was far more stable and more beautiful. . . . No other conservative politician would say those things . . . but on the other hand pretty much everyone thought it . . . so it's powerful to say it. . . . Clearly [there's] a normalization process going on.
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Michael Wolff |
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National Policy Institute, which is sometimes described as a "white supremacist think tank,"
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Michael Wolff |
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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. If Trump's ascent
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Michael Wolff |
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and the almost samizdat sharing, or gobsmacked retelling, of otherwise private and deep-background conversations
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Michael Wolff |
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c834781
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His strategic belief was that there was no reason not to heap excessive puffery on a prospect. But if the prospect was ruled out as a buyer, there was no reason not to heap scorn and lawsuits on him or her.
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Michael Wolff |
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Donald Trump believed he had vastly more power, authority, and control than in fact he had, and he believed his talent for manipulating people and bending and dominating them was vastly greater than it was. Pushing this line of reasoning just a little further: 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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elevated, liberal media would necessarily take down. Trump, goaded by Bannon, would continue to do the things that would delight conservative media and incur the wrath of liberal media. That was the program. The more your supporters loved you, the more your antagonists hated you. That's how it was supposed to work. And that's how it was working.
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Michael Wolff |
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Bannon was curiously able to embrace Trump while at the same time suggesting he did not take him entirely seriously. He had first met Trump, the on-again off-again presidential candidate, in 2010; at a meeting in Trump Tower, Bannon had proposed to Trump that he spend half a million dollars backing Tea Party-style candidates as a way to further his presidential ambitions.
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Michael Wolff |
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The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.
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Michael Wolff |
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47248b8
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The dream, long differed, of the Trump pivot, might actually happen without
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Michael Wolff |