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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| d5683e7 | A happy wife is a happy life," he said, echoing a popular rich-man truism." | Michael Wolff | ||
| e877833 | Bannon averred: "When you take out all the never-Trump guys who signed all those letters and all the neocons who got us in all these wars ... it's not a deep bench." | Michael Wolff | ||
| d2c3aa1 | It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything.... Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything. | Michael Wolff | ||
| df65ed5 | This required some tutoring for 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.")" | Michael Wolff | ||
| 07f65d1 | Why did we do this on a Friday when it would hit the airports hardest and bring out the most protesters? almost the entire White House staff demanded to know. "Errr ... that's why," said Bannon. "So the snowflakes would show up at the airports and riot." That was the way to crush the liberals: make them crazy and drag them to the left." | Michael Wolff | ||
| d950b36 | Much of the left--which had resoundingly and scathingly rejected the intelligence community's unambiguous assessment of Edward Snowden as a betrayer of national secrets rather than a well-intentioned whistle-blower--now suddenly embraced the intelligence community's authority in its suggestion of Trump's nefarious relationships with the Russians. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 03d1a61 | Then he imposed a set of new rules: nobody touch anything, especially not his toothbrush. (He had a longtime fear of being poisoned, one reason why he liked to eat at McDonald's--nobody knew he was coming and the food was safely premade.) Also, he would let housekeeping know when he wanted his sheets done, and he would strip his own bed. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 2ad4cce | myrmidons, | Michael Wolff | ||
| 73735e9 | Kushner became the representative in the White House of the liberal status quo. He was something like what used to be called a Rockefeller Republican and now might more properly be a Goldman Sachs Democrat. He-- | Michael Wolff | ||
| a9dcf99 | The theory, suddenly presented as just this side of a likelihood, was that the Russians had suborned Donald Trump during a trip to Moscow with a crude blackmail scheme involving prostitutes and videotaped sexual acts pushing new boundaries of deviance (including "golden showers") with prostitutes and videotaped sex acts." | Michael Wolff | ||
| afc39f3 | It's all exaggerated. My exaggerations are exaggerated. | Michael Wolff | ||
| b1b3562 | purpose of actually changing the country. Changing it quickly, radically, and truly. | Michael Wolff | ||
| bc48ff7 | Steve Bannon was running the Steve Bannon White House, Jared Kushner was running the Michael Bloomberg White House, and Reince Priebus was running the Paul Ryan White House. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 3e32d91 | We serve at the president's displeasure, | Michael Wolff | ||
| 6d246d2 | It was insidious. It was, to them, although they didn't put it this way, similar to the kind of dark Clinton-like conspiracies that Republicans were more wont to accuse liberals of--Whitewater, Benghazi, Emailgate. That is, an obsessive narrative that leads to investigations, which lead to other investigations, and to more obsessive no-escape media coverage. This was modern politics: blood-sport conspiracies that were about trying to destro.. | Michael Wolff | ||
| f4c9a99 | It was part hortatory, part personal testimony, part barstool blowhard, a rambling, disjointed, digressive, what-me-worry approach that combined aspects of cable television rage, big-tent religious revivalism, Borscht Belt tummler, motivational speaking, and YouTube vlogging. Charisma in American politics had come to define an order of charm, wit, and style--a coolness. But another sort of American charisma was more in the Christian evangel.. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 58cbbd0 | 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. Priebus, as chief of staff, had to organize meetings, schedules, and the hiring of staff; he also had to oversee the individual functions of the executive office departments. But Bannon, Kushner, Conway, and the president's daughter actually had no specific responsibilities--they co.. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 40101d4 | Rebekah took a helicopter from their Long Island estate out to a scheduled fundraiser--with | Michael Wolff | ||
| 7e69629 | 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. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 0139121 | 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. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 8d7d29a | New York, the world's largest Jewish city. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 1c9643f | 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. | Michael Wolff | ||
| d4797b1 | in a world increasingly swayed by private wealth and personal brands. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 2955996 | 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. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 8696b05 | 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." | Michael Wolff | ||
| 5f342a2 | 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." | Michael Wolff | ||
| 497e00e | 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. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 60b9ed9 | 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." | Michael Wolff | ||
| df0dc1d | 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.)" | Michael Wolff | ||
| abaf310 | 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. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 6dde41b | 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.. | Michael Wolff | ||
| d8f1359 | 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. | Michael Wolff | ||
| f28f868 | 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.. | Michael Wolff | ||
| da0355a | 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. | Michael Wolff | ||
| bbd8d25 | also be the easiest one to achieve, since virtually every Republican was already publicly committed to voting for repeal. But Bannon, | Michael Wolff | ||
| 83be9ff | 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 | Michael Wolff | ||
| 49df16d | 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. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 68e8814 | 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. | Michael Wolff | ||
| b247981 | 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." | Michael Wolff | ||
| 24f6cc0 | Trump was Trump--careless, capricious, disloyal, far beyond any sort of control. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 0ad091b | 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. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 45df601 | 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. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 211492b | Almost everybody in the White House followed Trump's thinking by tracking whom he had called the night before.) | Michael Wolff | ||
| 817ffdf | Trump, said Bannon, noting the obvious, was the least disciplined man in politics. | Michael Wolff |