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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| d022847 | The point could hardly have been clearer: if the president was pressuring the director because he feared that an investigation of Michael Flynn would damage him, then this was an obstruction of justice. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 1ffcd00 | we could confidently call some of the most peculiar remarks ever delivered by an American president. "I know a lot about West Point, I'm a person who very strongly believes in academics. Every time I say I had an uncle who was a great professor at MIT for 35 years, who did a fantastic job in so many ways academically--he was an academic genius--and then they say, Is Donald Trump an intellectual? Trust me, I'm like a smart person." | Michael Wolff | ||
| e62df7f | In the early days of Trump's presidency, the situation seemed clear to everybody: three men were fighting to run the White House, to be the real chief of staff and power behind the Trump throne. And of course there was Trump himself, who didn't want to relinquish power to anyone. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 91c2e32 | Alas, politics itself has more and more become a discrete business. Its appeal is B-to-B--business-to-business. The real swamp is the swamp of insular, inbred, incestuous interests. This isn't corruption so much as overspecialization. It's a wonk's life. Politics has gone one way, the culture another. The left-right junkies might pretend otherwise, but the great middle doesn't put political concerns at the top of their minds. | Michael Wolff | ||
| ceee2c2 | he lied about his height to keep from having a body mass index that would label him as obese), | Michael Wolff | ||
| 03942f2 | The president's worst impulses seem to run through Conway without benefit of a filter. | Michael Wolff | ||
| d3b98a2 | Hence, she and everyone else was translating a set of desires and urges into a program, a process that required a lot of guess work. It was, said Walsh, "like trying to figure out what a child wants." | Michael Wolff | ||
| 40834df | calamity of their own making. | Michael Wolff | ||
| b1325a8 | 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. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 36a27e6 | hurry. * * * Bannon had delved deeply into the nature | Michael Wolff | ||
| 03ae6d0 | McConnell and the president were barely on speaking terms. From his August "working holiday" in Bedminster, the president's staff had tried to organize a makeup meeting with McConnell, but McConnell's staff had sent back word that it wouldn't be possible because the Senate leader would be getting a haircut." | Michael Wolff | ||
| ba7eb1a | The face-off quickly escalated into an existential confrontation between the two sides of the White House--two sides on a total war footing. "You don't know what you're doing," shouted a livid Bannon at Hicks, demanding to know who she worked for, the White House or Jared and Ivanka. "You don't know how much trouble you are in," he screamed, telling her that if she didn't get a lawyer he would call her father and tell him he had better get .. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 3988069 | The Kushner position was not helped by the fact that the president had been gleefully telling multiple people that Jared could solve the Middle East problem because the Kushners knew all the crooks in Israel.) | Michael Wolff | ||
| 8d8743f | The Best and the Brightest | Michael Wolff | ||
| 8b7bdf7 | Trump for dinner every night, or at least made himself available--one bachelor there for the effective other bachelor. (Priebus would observe that in the beginning everyone would try to be part of these dinners, but within a few months, they had become a torturous duty to be avoided.) Part of Jared and Ivanka's calculation about the relative power and influence of a formal job in the West Wing versus an outside advisory role was the knowled.. | Michael Wolff | ||
| fed8410 | But if Halberstam defined the presidential mien, Trump defied it--and defiled it. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 5747e71 | The less likely a presidential candidate is, the more unlikely, and, often, inexperienced, his aides are--that is, an unlikely candidate can attract only unlikely aides, as the likely ones go to the more likely candidates. When an unlikely candidate wins--and as outsiders become ever more the quadrennial flavor of the month, the more likely an unlikely candidate is to get elected--ever more peculiar people fill the White House. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 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 |