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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 7bc3e6a | The unspoken agreement among them: not only would Donald Trump not be president, he should probably not be. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 1c8cab3 | Other than Trump himself, Bannon was certainly the oldest inexperienced person ever to work in the White House. | Michael Wolff | ||
| a8c86a4 | Anyone studying the position would conclude that a stronger chief of staff is better than a weaker one, and a chief of staff with a history in Washington and the federal government is better than an outsider. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 8f2cc40 | Donald Trump and his tiny band of campaign warriors were ready to lose with fire and fury. They were not ready to win. | Michael Wolff | ||
| ace2d53 | In politics somebody has to lose, but invariably everybody thinks they can win. And you probably can't win unless you believe that you will win--except in the Trump campaign. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 15d5946 | the world needs borders--or the world should return to a time when it had borders. When America was great. Trump had become the platform for that message. | Michael Wolff | ||
| f1f868b | It's just a conspiracy theory." And, he added, the Trump team wasn't capable of conspiring about anything." -- | Michael Wolff | ||
| 445e353 | Elon Musk, in Trump Tower, pitched Trump on the new administration's joining him in his race to Mars, which Trump jumped at. | Michael Wolff | ||
| d6b8629 | On May 17, twelve days after FBI director Comey was fired, without consulting the White House or the attorney general, Rosenstein appointed former FBI director Robert Mueller to oversee the investigation of Trump's, his campaign's, and his staff's ties to Russia. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 4343a2e | What has he gotten himself into with the Russians?" pressed Ailes. "Mostly," said Bannon, "he went to Russia and he thought he was going to meet Putin. But Putin couldn't give a shit about him. So he's kept trying." "He's Donald," said Ailes. "It's a magnificent thing," said Bannon, who had taken to regarding Trump as something like a natural wonder, beyond explanation." | Michael Wolff | ||
| d61e12f | But Ailes was convinced that Trump had no political beliefs or backbone. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 7c78ee6 | How's the kid?" asked Ailes, referring to Trump's son-in-law and paramount political adviser, thirty-six-year-old Jared Kushner. "He's my partner," said Bannon, his tone suggesting that if he felt otherwise, he was nevertheless determined to stay on message. "Really?" said a dubious Ailes. "He's on the team." "He's had lot of lunches with Rupert." "In fact," said Bannon, "I could use your help here." Bannon then spent several minutes trying.. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 0449adf | On the most basic level, he simply could not link cause and effect. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 54fa4e5 | At points on the day's spectrum of adverse political developments, he could have moments of, almost everyone would admit, irrationality. When that happened, he was alone in his anger and not approachable by anyone. His senior staff largely dealt with these dark hours by agreeing with him, no matter what he said. And if some of them occasionally tried to hedge, Hope Hicks never did. She agreed absolutely with all of it. | Michael Wolff | ||
| b23af85 | Bannon, for instance, even driven by his imperative just to get things done, did not use a computer. How did he do anything? Katie Walsh wondered. But that was the difference between big visions and small. Process was bunk. Expertise was the last refuge of liberals, ever defeated by the big picture. The will to get big things done was how big things got done. "Don't sweat the small stuff" was a pretty good gist of Donald Trump's--and Steve .. | Michael Wolff | ||
| d0e066d | Jared and Ivanka had made an earnest deal between themselves: if sometime in the future the time came, she'd be the one to run for president (or the first one of them to take the shot). | Michael Wolff | ||
| c9bba79 | Flynn was "a colonel in a general's uniform," according to one senior intelligence figure.)" | Michael Wolff | ||
| e1e36db | It was nearly incomprehensible to him that the same people--that is, the media--who had violently criticized him for saying he might dispute the election result were now calling him illegitimate. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 4ee24b3 | Not only did the president-elect wear his deep and bitter grievances on his sleeve, but it was now clear that the fact of having been elected president would not change his unfiltered, apparently uncontrollable, utterly shoot-from-the-hip display of wounds, resentments, and ire. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 4aad71b | Frank Sinatra was wrong," said David Bossie, one of Trump's longtime political advisers. "If you can make it in New York, you can't necessarily make it in Washington." | Michael Wolff | ||
| ac04355 | He would never be able to untangle his holdings and interests--including big investments in the Middle East--in a way that would satisfy ethics watchdogs. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 9bf60ee | In politics somebody has to lose, but invariably everybody thinks they can win. And you probably can't win unless you believe that you will win - except for the Trump campaign. | Michael Wolff | ||
| bbb2455 | Among Trump's first moves as president was to have a series of inspirational photographs in the West Wing replaced with images of big crowd scenes at his inaugural ceremony. | Michael Wolff | ||
| f0d7082 | Trump craved media approval. But, as Bannon emphasized, he was never going to get the facts right, nor was he ever going to acknowledge that he got them wrong, so therefore he was not going to get that approval. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 1878cff | Just doing things became a Bannon principle, the sweeping antidote to bureaucratic and establishment ennui and resistance. 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. Or, a corollary, because nobody in the Trump administration really knew how to do a.. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 78ab81a | Trump, perhaps not yet appreciating the difference between becoming president and elevating his social standing, | Michael Wolff | ||
| 4660c9f | This intelligence, it was rumored, consisted of spreadsheets kept by Susan Rice that listed the Trump team's Russian contacts; borrowing a technique from WikiLeaks, the documents were secreted on a dozen servers in different places. Before this broad distribution, when the information was | Michael Wolff | ||
| eb66961 | Even before there was reason to suspect Sally Yates, they suspected her. The transition report said Trump wouldn't like the fifty-six-year-old Atlanta-born University of Georgia career Justice Department lawyer slated to step up to acting attorney general. There was something about a particular kind of Obama person. Something about the way they walked and held themselves. Superiority. And about a certain kind of woman who would immediately .. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 4088ac6 | Finally, there was a new rationale that Flynn should be fired not because of his Russian contacts, but because he had lied about them to the vice president. This was a convenient invention of a chain of command: in fact, Flynn did not report to Vice President Pence, and he was arguably a good deal more powerful than Pence. | Michael Wolff | ||
| b5992ba | Bypassing lawyers, regulators, and the agencies and personnel responsible for enforcing it, President Trump--with Bannon's low, intense voice behind him, offering a rush of complex information--signed what was put in front of him. | Michael Wolff | ||
| fff589c | Pivoting from Trump himself, Bannon plunged on with the Trump agenda. "Day one we're moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. Netanyahu's all in. Sheldon"--Sheldon Adelson, the casino billionaire, far-right Israel defender, and Trump supporter--"is all in. We know where we're heading on this." "Does Donald know?" asked a skeptical Ailes. Bannon smiled--as though almost with a wink--and continued: "Let Jordan take the West Bank, let Egypt take .. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 901ac63 | Indeed, in his first weeks in the White House, an inattentive Trump was already trying to curtail his schedule of meetings, limit his hours in the office, and keep his normal golf habits. | Michael Wolff | ||
| f316117 | Many of the accounts of what has happened in the Trump White House are in conflict with one another; many, in Trumpian fashion, are baldly untrue. | Michael Wolff | ||
| e272f4b | Day one we're moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. Netanyahu's all in. | Michael Wolff | ||
| dd6f318 | Trump craved media approval. But, as Bannon emphasized, he was never going to get the facts right, nor was he ever going to acknowledge that he got them wrong, so therefore he was not going to get that approval. This meant, next best thing, that he had to be aggressively defended against the media's disapproval. | Michael Wolff | ||
| d0e93f9 | 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. | Michael Wolff | ||
| acc4f3a | He was the winner and now expected to be the object of awe, fascination, and favor. He expected this to be binary: a hostile media would turn into a fannish one. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 64289ac | Even though Trump liked to portray his business as an empire, it was actually a discrete holding company and boutique enterprise, | Michael Wolff | ||
| ad59795 | the president-elect spoke with little information and frequently no factual basis, while "the frame the media has chosen to embrace is that everything the man does is, by default, unconstitutional or an abuse of power." | Michael Wolff | ||
| a5a403b | Media is personal. It is a series of blood scores. The media in its often collective mind decides who is going to rise and who is going to fall, who lives and who dies. If you stay around long enough in the media eye, your fate, like that of a banana republic despot, is often an unkind one--a law Hillary Clinton was not able to circumvent. The media has the last word. | Michael Wolff | ||
| aee5605 | And then there was the harsh fact that the world of Manhattan and particular its living voice, the media, seemed to cruelly reject them. The media long ago turned on Donald Trump as a wannabe and lightweight, and wrote him off for that ultimate sin--anyway, the ultimate sin in media terms--of trying to curry favor with the media too much. His fame, such as it was, was actually reverse fame--he was famous for being infamous. It was joke fame.. | Michael Wolff | ||
| bbd500d | To everyone working in media in New York, Donald Trump represented the ultimate shame of working in media in New York: you might have to write about Donald Trump. Not writing about him, or certainly not taking him at face value, became a moral stand. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 08d0042 | He reprimanded the housekeeping staff for picking up his shirt from the floor: "If my shirt is on the floor, it's because I want it on the floor." 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.)" | Michael Wolff | ||
| bf8e034 | Walsh, sitting within sight of the Oval Office, was located at something like the ground zero of the information flow between the president and his staff. As Trump's primary scheduler, her job was to ration the president's time and organize the flow of information to him around the priorities that the White House had set. In this, Walsh became the effective middle person among the three men working hardest to maneuver the president--Bannon,.. | Michael Wolff |