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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 165e869 | Trump didn't read. He didn't really even skim. If it was print, it might as well not exist...He was postliterate -- total television. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 5766104 | Mitch McConnell's prescription that "this president will sign whatever is put in front of him." | Michael Wolff | ||
| a26849e | It didn't exactly surprise Bannon when Trump flipped; Bannon understood how easy it was to bullshit a bullshitter. | Michael Wolff | ||
| a171bb9 | It's worse than you can imagine. An idiot (Trump) 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. | Michael Wolff | ||
| fa96919 | And that evening, the president traveled to West Virginia to deliver a speech before the Boy Scouts of America. Once more, his speech was totally at odds with time, place, and good sense. It prompted an immediate apology from the Boy Scouts to its members, their parents, and the country at large. | Michael Wolff | ||
| e0a6eda | Trump was the one variable that, in management terms, simply could not be controlled. He was like a recalcitrant two-year-old. If you tried to control him, it would only have the opposite effect. | Michael Wolff | ||
| b09275f | Against this background (North Korea missile threats), almost no one paid attention to the announcement by the Trump supporter and American neo-Nazi Richard Spencer that he was organizing a protest at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville, over the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. "Unite the Right," the theme of the rally called for Saturday, August 12, was explicitly designed to link Trump's politics with white nationalism." | Michael Wolff | ||
| 7941872 | Many of Trump's positions in the campaign were taken from the Breitbart articles he had printed out for him.) Indeed, Bannon began to suggest to people that he, like Ailes had been at Fox, was the true force behind his chosen candidate. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 325c866 | On the afternoon of November 8, 2016, Kellyanne Conway--Donald Trump's campaign manager and a central, indeed starring, personality of Trumpworld--settled into her glass office at Trump Tower. Right up until the last weeks of the race, the Trump campaign headquarters had remained a listless place. All that seemed to distinguish it from a corporate back office were a few posters with right-wing slogans. Conway now was in a remarkably buoyant.. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 4089f15 | Everyone, in his or her own way, struggled to express the baldly obrious 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 certitudes. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 7ec4169 | The Russia story was--just two weeks into the new presidency--a dividing line with each side viewing the other as pushing fake news. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 011c381 | The greater White House wholly believed that the story was an invented construct of weak if not preposterous narrative threads, with a mind-boggling thesis: We fixed the election with the Russians, OMG! The anti-Trump world, and especially its media--that is, the media--believed that there was a high, if not overwhelming, likelihood that there was something significant there, and a decent chance that it could be brought home. | Michael Wolff | ||
| a81958e | If the media, self-righteously, saw it as the Holy Grail and silver bullet of Trump destruction, and the Trump White House saw it, with quite some self-pity, as a desperate effort to concoct a scandal, there was also a range of smart money in the middle. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 91945cf | And yet, the larger truth was that Ivanka's relationship with her father was in no way a conventional family relationship. If it wasn't pure opportunism, it was certainly transactional. It was business. Building the brand, the presidential campaign, and now the White House--it was all business. | Michael Wolff | ||
| ea0c8f8 | 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 certitudes. There was now a fair amount of back-of-the-classroom giggling about who had called Trump what. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 1ad9a09 | He would come out of this campaign, Trump assured Ailes, with a far more powerful brand and untold opportunities. "This is bigger than I ever dreamed of," he told Ailes in a conversation a week before the election. "I don't think about losing because it isn't losing. We've totally won." What's more, he was already laying down his public response to losing the election: It was stolen! Donald Trump and his tiny band of campaign warriors were .. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 6397423 | Trump, as almost anyone who had ever worked for him appreciated, was, despite what you hoped he might be, Trump--and he would invariably sour on everyone around him. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 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 |