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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 6caa1fd | Trump, in a smart move, picked up his media reputation and relocated it from a hypercritical New York to a more value-free Hollywood, becoming the star of his own reality show, The Apprentice, and embracing a theory that would serve him well during his presidential campaign: in flyover country, there is no greater asset than celebrity. To be famous is to be loved--or at least fawned over. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 269725d | Expertise was the last refuge of liberals, ever defeated by the big picture. | Michael Wolff | ||
| a16e1c1 | Donald, you can't do it. You've made your bed and Steve is in it. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 60c6943 | Some seducers are preternaturally sensitive to the signals of those they try to seduce; others indiscriminately attempt to seduce, and, by the law of averages, often succeed (this latter group of men might now be regarded as harassers). That was Trump's approach to women--pleased when he scored, unconcerned when he didn't (and, often, despite the evidence, believing that he had). And so it was with Director Comey. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 95d3584 | The president, while often a fabulist in his depiction of the world, was quite a literalist when it came to how he saw himself. | Michael Wolff | ||
| ba73b0b | Bannon invariably found some reason to study papers in the corner and then to have a last word; Priebus kept his eye on Bannon; Kushner kept constant tabs on the whereabouts of the others. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 7c17265 | trying to win without consideration, plan, or clear goals had, in the course of the administration's first nine months, resulted in almost nothing but losses. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 806126c | The president himself, absent any organizational rigor, often acted as his own chief of staff, or, in a sense, elevated the press secretary job to the primary staff job, and then functioned as his own press secretary | Michael Wolff | ||
| dda1df8 | Trump problem. He hopelessly personalized everything. He saw the world in commercial and show business terms: someone else was always trying to one-up you, someone else was always trying to take the limelight. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 47c6bcd | He had no ability to plan and organize and pay attention and switch focus; he had never been able to tailor his behavior to what the goals at hand reasonably required. | Michael Wolff | ||
| cbc6273 | Haley had courted and befriended Ivanka, and Ivanka had brought her into the family circle, where she had become a particular focus of Trump's attention, and he of hers. Haley, as had become increasingly evident to the wider foreign policy and national security team, was the family's pick for secretary of state after Rex Tillerson's inevitable resignation. (Likewise, in this shuffle, Dina Powell would replace Haley at the UN.) The president.. | Michael Wolff | ||
| cf00003 | 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 | ||
| fe4d55a | If Trump cared about something, he usually already had a fixed view based on limited information. If he didn't care, he had no view and no information. | Michael Wolff | ||
| a5983c1 | For Walsh, it was a daily process of managing an impossible task: almost as soon as she received direction from one of the three men, she would be countermanded by one or another of them. | Michael Wolff | ||
| e969ac6 | I now understand what it is like to be in the court of the Tudors," reflected Bannon." | Michael Wolff | ||
| 56fc21b | There was, curiously, general agreement in the West Wing that Donald Trump, the media president, had one of the most dysfunctional communication operations in modern White House history. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 0ff9249 | He held his face in his hands for a moment and then looked up again. "I'm pretty good at coming up with solutions, I came up with a solution for his broke-dick campaign in about a day, but I don't see this. I don't see a plan for getting through. Now, I gave him a plan, I said you seal the Oval Office, you send those two kids home, you get rid of Hope, all these deadbeats, and you listen to your legal team--Kasowitz, and Mark Dowd, and Jay .. | Michael Wolff | ||
| e312410 | it was the Jarvanka idea to try to trade off amnesty for the border wall. | Michael Wolff | ||
| bc90c3a | the president himself was unsure about where he himself stood; he kept asking people if Kelly liked him. | Michael Wolff | ||
| b95dbe1 | 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.. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 892adc3 | 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. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 485099e | the more doubts gathered around Flynn, the more certain the president became that Flynn was his all-important ally. | Michael Wolff | ||
| b482db9 | 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. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 4eb19e1 | 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 | Michael Wolff | ||
| 55c188a | Trump added another tic, a lifelong sense that people were constantly taking unfair advantage of him. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 1596200 | 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 | ||
| 72a6256 | As often as not, he surprised himself. "What did I say?" he would ask after getting severe blowback." | Michael Wolff | ||
| 7baec44 | 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 | Michael Wolff | ||
| a1ce2f5 | Trump didn't read. He didn't really even skim. If it was print, it might as well not exist. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 8c2f79e | 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." | Michael Wolff | ||
| a6192c2 | The daughter will take down the father," said Bannon, in a Shakespearian mood." | Michael Wolff | ||
| 1170448 | 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. | Michael Wolff | ||
| d08743b | 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. | Michael Wolff | ||
| c2d5a4f | 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.. | Michael Wolff | ||
| e4e6037 | 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.. | Michael Wolff | ||
| ea50bf0 | The president did not truly listen to anybody. The more you talked, the less he listened. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 8d40221 | 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. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 2976dce | 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. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 065bdfa | 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. | Michael Wolff | ||
| db46ef1 | senior staff believed the president had a problem with reality, and reality was now overwhelming him. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 1390602 | 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 .. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 7268929 | 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. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 04657ae | You could hardly find an entity more at odds with military discipline than a Trump organization. | Michael Wolff | ||
| bcf9762 | 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. | Michael Wolff |