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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 1a00990 | Trump did not enjoy his own inauguration. He had hoped for a big blowout. | Michael Wolff | ||
| de8ffa4 | Convinced he knew the direction of success, keenly aware of his own age and finite opportunities, and--if for no clear reason--seeing himself as a talented political infighter, Bannon sought to draw the line between believers and sell-outs, being and nothingness. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 286aa82 | After the bill had been pulled that Friday, Katie Walsh, feeling both angry and disgusted, told Kushner she wanted out. Outlining what she saw as the grim debacle of the Trump White House, she spoke with harsh candor about bitter rivalries joined to vast incompetence and an uncertain mission. | Michael Wolff | ||
| e228657 | It was during Trump's early intelligence briefings, held soon after he captured the nomination, that 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. He stonewalled every written page and balked at every explanation. "He's a guy who really hated school,".. | Michael Wolff | ||
| a0c0c60 | Do nothing" had long been viewed as an unacceptable position of helplessness by American foreign policy experts. The instinct to do something was driven by the desire to prove you were not limited to nothing. You couldn't do nothing and show strength. But Bannon's approach was very much "A pox on all your houses," it was not our mess, and judging by all recent evidence, no good would come of trying to help clean it up. That effort would cos.. | Michael Wolff | ||
| a3e0c42 | The Oval Office itself had been used by prior occupants as the ultimate power symbol, a ceremonial climax. But as soon as Trump arrived, he moved in a collection of battle flags to frame him sitting at his desk, and the Oval immediately became the scene of a daily Trump cluster-fuck. It's likely that more people had easy access to this president than any president before. Nearly all meetings in the Oval with the president were invariably su.. | Michael Wolff | ||
| ae67866 | You defined yourself by your enemy's reaction. Conflict was the media bait--hence, now, the political chum. The new politics was not the art of the compromise but the art of conflict. | Michael Wolff | ||
| bdf6eba | But not only didn't he read, he didn't listen. He preferred to be the person talking. And he trusted his own expertise--no matter how paltry or irrelevant--more than anyone else's. What's more, he had an extremely short attention span, even when he thought you were worthy of attention. | Michael Wolff | ||
| c3df967 | Trump's home in Beverly Hills | Michael Wolff | ||
| bc6ec6c | 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 | ||
| 7e9b709 | most of all don't let him piss off the intel community," said one national Republican figure to Kushner. "If you fuck with the intel community they will figure out a way to get back at you and you'll have two or three years of a Russian investigation, and every day something else will leak out." | Michael Wolff | ||
| 41ab97a | But 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. 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 h.. | Michael Wolff | ||
| a958cc9 | Trump's repeated brags about his relationship with Vladimir Putin and the nature of Trump's relationship with the Kremlin. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 6e09d44 | Bannon's strategic view of government was shock and awe. Dominate rather than negotiate. Having daydreamed his way into ultimate bureaucratic power, he did not want to see himself as a bureaucrat. He was of a higher purpose and moral order. He was an avenger. He was also, he believed, a straight shooter. There was a moral order in aligning language and action--if you said you were going to do something, you do it. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 3f5af9d | 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 | ||
| c8aba2f | Having attained the unimaginable--bringing a fierce alt-right, antiliberal ethnopopulism into a central place in the White House--Bannon found himself face to face with the untenable: undermined by and having to answer to rich, entitled Democrats. | Michael Wolff | ||
| ff4e56f | 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. Further, they could support this moderation by routing a steady stream of like-minded CEOs through the Oval Office. And, indeed, the president seldom disagreed with and was often enthusiastic about the Jared and Ivanka program. "If they tell hi.. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 91666a7 | The Pre-Election Presidential Transition Act of 2010 established funding for presidential nominees to start the process of vetting thousands of candidates for jobs in a new administration, codifying policies that would determine the early actions of a new White House, and preparing for the handoff of bureaucratic responsibilities on January 20. During the campaign, New Jersey governor Chris Christie, the nominal head of the Trump transition.. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 425b04d | The fact that Trump had become the ultimate avatar of Fox's angry common man was another sign that we were living in an upside-down world. | Michael Wolff | ||
| a4a7df3 | just worry about who's jerking whose chain. | Michael Wolff | ||
| e9fce9a | His sons, Don Jr. and Eric--jokingly behind their backs known to Trump insiders as Uday and Qusay, after the sons of Saddam Hussein-- | Michael Wolff | ||
| 051ed7f | Christie had sent Jared's father, Charles Kushner, to jail in 2005. Charlie Kushner, pursued by the feds for an income tax cheat, set up a scheme with a prostitute to blackmail his brother-in-law, who was planning to testify against him. Various accounts, mostly offered by Christie himself, make Jared the vengeful hatchet man in Christie's aborted Trump administration career. It was a kind of perfect sweet-revenge story: the son of the wron.. | Michael Wolff | ||
| bfd2bc3 | You could tell him whatever you wanted, but he knew what he knew, and if what you said contradicted what he knew, he simply didn't believe you. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 8871f8f | Bannon and Kushner were therefore more than a little irritated to discover that the unimposing 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 | ||
| f3bacb5 | While the Trump administration has made hostility to the press a virtual policy, it has also been more open to the media than any White House in recent memory. | Michael Wolff | ||
| c0329ce | Several decades as a grasping entrepreneur without a satisfying success story doesn't smooth the hustle in hustler. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 5d4f999 | Bob and Rebekah Mercer, who had set themselves up as almost professional fools. | Michael Wolff | ||
| bcbf582 | I was in Russia years ago with the Ms. Universe contest--did very very well--I tell everyone be careful, because you don't want to see yourself on television--cameras all over the place. And again, not just Russia, all over. So would anyone really believe that story? I'm also very much of a germaphobe, by the way. Believe me. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 5b7ff89 | now Bannon's Zeitgeist moment had arrived. Everywhere there was a sudden sense of global self-doubt. Brexit in the UK, waves of immigrants arriving on Europe's angry shores, the disenfranchisement of the workingman, the specter of more financial meltdown, Bernie Sanders and his liberal revanchism--everywhere was backlash. Even the most dedicated exponents of globalism were hesitating. Bannon believed that great numbers of people were sudden.. | Michael Wolff | ||
| b3ecbfd | The kids"--Jared and Ivanka--exhibited an increasingly panicked sense that the FBI and DOJ were moving beyond Russian election interference and into family finances. "Ivanka is terrified," said a satisfied Bannon." | Michael Wolff | ||
| 4530934 | They take everything I've ever said and exaggerate it," said the president in his first week in the White House during a late-night call. "It's all exaggerated. My exaggerations are exaggerated." | Michael Wolff | ||
| 5f21cd3 | His callers, largely because they found his conversation peculiar, alarming, or completely contrary to reason and common sense, often overrode what they might otherwise have assumed to be the confidential nature of the calls and shared the content with someone else. Hence news about the inner workings of the White House went into free circulation. Except it was not so much the inner workings of the White House--although it would often be re.. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 2e9346b | If the new right had elected Trump, it was the older Fortune 100 executives who most pleased him | Michael Wolff | ||
| 33f52e9 | Donald Trump became a symbol of the media's own self-loathing: the interest in and promotion of Donald Trump was a morality tale about the media. | Michael Wolff | ||
| dce2f2e | Bannon's entire political career, such as it was, had been in political media. It was also in Internet media--that is, media ruled by immediate response. The Breitbart formula was to so appall the liberals that the base was doubly satisfied, generating clicks in a ricochet of disgust and delight. You defined yourself by your enemy's reaction. Conflict was the media bait--hence, now, the political chum. The new politics was not the art of th.. | Michael Wolff | ||
| d95bb54 | Speaker Boehner." (John Boehner had been the Speaker of the House until he was forced out in a Tea Party putsch in 2011.)" | Michael Wolff | ||
| 559d479 | 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. Bannon was disloyal (not to mention he always looks like shit). Priebus was weak (not to mention he was short--a midget). Kushner was a suck-up. Spicer was stupid (and looks terrible too). Conway was a crybaby. Jared and Ivanka should never have come to Was.. | Michael Wolff | ||
| a50bae6 | The country built on the virtue and the character and the strength of the American workingman circa 1955-65 was the ideal he meant to defend and restore: trade agreements, or trade wars, that supported American manufacturing; immigration policies that protected American workers (and, hence, American culture, or at least America's identity from 1955 to 1965); and an international isolation that would conserve American resources and choke off.. | Michael Wolff | ||
| c512c91 | Well," said the president, "you won't like the answer, but the answer is me. Me. I talk to myself." | Michael Wolff | ||
| c0013c9 | you don't really have to know all that much yourself; you just do it differently than it was done before. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 9bb8d86 | One instance of his revisionism, and of the new stature he now seemed to assume as president, involved the lowest point of the campaign--the Billy Bush tape. His explanation, in an off-the-record conversation with a friendly cable anchor, was that it "really wasn't me." The anchor acknowledged how unfair it was to be characterized by a single event. "No," said Trump, "it wasn't me. I've been told by people who understand this stuff about ho.. | Michael Wolff | ||
| b20f176 | This was the job Bannon a week later. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 13b6462 | For whatever reason, almost everyone I contacted--senior members of the White House staff as well as dedicated observers of it--shared large amounts of time with me and went to great effort to help shed light on the unique nature of life inside the Trump White House. In the end, what I witnessed, and what this book is about, is a group of people who have struggled, each in their own way, to come to terms with the meaning of working for Dona.. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 99f9bb1 | Pushing a proffered glass of wine away--"I don't drink"--" | Michael Wolff |