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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 1e29448 | His departure would return the Trump organization to pure family control--the family and its functionaries, without an internal rival for brand meaning and leadership. From the family's point of view, it would also--at least in theory--help facilitate one of the most implausible brand shifts in history: Donald Trump to respectability. | Michael Wolff | ||
| e9e2200 | His advisers didn't know whether he was an isolationist or a militarist, or whether he could distinguish between the two. | Michael Wolff | ||
| d51b5e6 | He had little to no experience in foreign policy, but he had no respect for the experts, | Michael Wolff | ||
| df4d8bb | Trump would shortly become a Gorsuch fan. But before settling on Gorsuch, he wondered why the job wasn't going to a friend and loyalist. In the Trump view, it was rather a waste to give the job to someone he didn't even know. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 579a4e5 | Indeed, the protesters who believed they were seeing the company's relationship with Trump in political terms were actually seeing this in conventional brand terms and zooming in on the disconnect. Uber's customer base is strongly young, urban, and progressive, and therefore out of sync with the Trump base. Brand-conscious millennials saw this as beyond policy dickering and as part of an epic identity clash. The Trump White House stood less.. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 7ccdc8b | I am in a constant state of shock and horror. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 7bba2f9 | he thought emotionally, not strategically. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 24f4ebc | Dina relied on Ivanka to offer regular assurances that not everyone named Trump was completely crazy. | Michael Wolff | ||
| dc4b942 | For anything that smacked of a classroom or of being lectured to--"professor" was one of his bad words, and he was proud of never going to class, never buying a textbook, never taking a note--he got up and left the room." | Michael Wolff | ||
| 2e6dc4e | The leaking culture had become so open and overt--most of the time everybody could identify everybody else's leaks--that it was now formally staffed. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 8892930 | 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." -- | Michael Wolff | ||
| d56a183 | Then there was Bannon, conducting something of an alternate-universe operation, | Michael Wolff | ||
| 74c5df5 | He was postliterate--total television. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 6eddc32 | Here was a perfect example of an essential Trump paradigm: he acceded to anyone who seemed to know more about any issue he didn't care about, or simply one whose details he couldn't bring himself to focus on closely. Great! he would say, punctuating every statement with a similar exclamation and regularly making an effort to jump from his chair. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 2c27fba | you just had to go with the president's whims. As for the president, it was quite clear that deciding between contradictory policy approaches was not his style of leadership. He simply hoped that difficult decisions would make themselves. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 9fe23b1 | Bannon's deconstruction of the administrative state meant to take with it media, academic, and not-for-profit institutions. | Michael Wolff | ||
| b4fdefd | A pro wrestling fan who became a World Wrestling Entertainment supporter and personality (inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame), Trump lived, like Hulk Hogan, as a real-life fictional character. | Michael Wolff | ||
| eee1d6b | The new politics was not the art of the compromise but the art of conflict. | Michael Wolff | ||
| ca926b1 | Indeed, health care, a no-fun issue--suddenly becoming much less fun, if, as seemed increasingly possible, Ryan couldn't deliver--palled before the clarity of Comey, and the fury, enmity, and bitterness Trump, and Trump's relatives, now bore him. | Michael Wolff | ||
| e47e5c4 | coming | Michael Wolff | ||
| bb3cba0 | 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. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 76a7a27 | 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 | ||
| c195f62 | By ten weeks in, Steve Bannon's mastery of the Trump agenda, or at least of Trump himself, appeared to have crumbled. His current misery was both Catholic in nature--the self-flagellation of a man who believed he lived on a higher moral plane than all others--and fundamentally misanthropic. As an antisocial, maladjusted, post-middle-aged man, he had to make a supreme effort to get along with others, an effort that often did not go well. Mos.. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 6eddfba | There was no competition in Trump Tower for being the brains of the operation. Of the dominant figures in the transition, neither Kushner, Priebus, nor Conway, and certainly not the president-elect, had the ability to express any kind of coherent perception or narrative. | Michael Wolff | ||
| f69230a | president might have been involved usually became | Michael Wolff | ||
| df448f1 | In mutually codependent fashion, Ivanka relied on Dina to suggest management tactics that would help her handle her father and the White House, while Dina relied on Ivanka to offer regular assurances that not everyone named Trump was completely crazy. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 69615c4 | Walter Isaacson, the CEO of the Aspen Institute, | Walter Isaacson | ||
| 4ca5a84 | Trump was effusive in his praise for Kushner. "Jared's gotten the Arabs totally on our side. Done deal," he assured one of his after-dinner callers before leaving on the trip. "It's going to be beautiful." "He believed," said the caller, "that this trip could pull it out, like a twist in a bad movie." | Michael Wolff | ||
| adaa957 | 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 the first year but his family. I hate the work, but feel I need.. | Michael Wolff | ||
| cb90245 | For Trump, as for many showmen or press release entrepreneurs, the enemy of everything is complexity and red tape, and the solution for everything is cutting corners. Bypass or ignore the difficulties; just move in a straight line to the vision, which, if it's bold enough, or grandiose enough, will sell itself. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 07feb23 | Trump's standard operating procedure--conflict, insults, reversals, dismissals--is still reported with breathless surprise. The most obvious man on earth is yet, to the media, always astonishing. Whose fault is that? Covering a train wreck requires different skills from covering politics. But political reporters continue to apply the hyperrationality of political life and its heightened sense of cause and effect to Trump and his White House.. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 293467a | What is looking like unhinged chaos is actually him in a place of comfort," tweeted Maggie Haberman, one of the Times reporters on the Trump beat. Haberman, who likes to assert a stubborn ownership of the Trump story, implies something approximating presidential strategy and point of view." | Michael Wolff | ||
| b43a335 | He was, after all, Donald Trump, however much you shined him up. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 6206b1d | Theory 5: The Russians, holding damaging information about Trump, were blackmailing him. He was a Manchurian Candidate. | Michael Wolff | ||
| a6e7628 | The real question, of course, was how Bannon, the fuck-the-system populist, had ever come to think that he might get along with Donald Trump, the use-the-system-to-his-own-advantage billionaire | Michael Wolff | ||
| 514d6b2 | Donald Trump's marriage was perplexing to almost everybody around him--or it was, anyway, for those without private jets and many homes. He and Melania spent relatively little time together. They could go days at a time without contact, even when they were both in Trump Tower. Often she did not know where he was, or take much notice of that fact. Her husband moved between residences as he would move between rooms. Along with knowing little .. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 34535b8 | 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. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 9e9092c | We serve at the president's displeasure," another." | Michael Wolff | ||
| 5692d6a | 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 | ||
| 6b1f130 | Clinton. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 7343942 | some had idly speculated about how long he would go on if he could command time as well as language. The consensus seemed to be forever. The sound of his own voice, his lack of inhibition, the fact that linear thought and presentation turned out not at all to be necessary, the wonder that this random approach seemed to command, and his own replenishing supply of free association--all this suggested that he was limited only by everyone else'.. | Michael Wolff | ||
| b01afeb | There was some argument about this, because he could read headlines and articles about himself, or at least headlines on articles about himself, | Michael Wolff | ||
| 3be1b61 | But not only didn't he read, he didn't listen. He preferred to be the person talking. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 599ba9c | She treated her father with some lightness, even irony, and in at least one television interview she made fun of his comb-over. She often described the mechanics behind it to friends: an absolutely clean pate--a contained island after scalp reduction surgery--surrounded by a furry circle of hair around the sides and front, from which all ends are drawn up to meet in the center and then swept back and secured by a stiffening spray. | Michael Wolff |