The president was speaking as if the U.S. military was a mercenary force for hire. If a country wouldn’t pay us to be there, then we didn’t want to be there. As if there were no American interests in...
In another discussion with the president, Cohn unveiled a Commerce Department study showing the U.S. absolutely needed to trade with China. If you’re the Chinese and you want to really just destroy us...
Sean, Mattis finally said, I’ve killed people for a living. If you call me again, I’m going to fucking send you to Afghanistan. Are we clear?
Sometimes,doing nothing is the best reaction.
I think people are smart enough to sort it out. They know when they're watching one of these food fight shows where journalists sit around and yell and scream at each other, versus serious issue repor...
What do you mean? Trump asked. Just run the presses—print money.
When Trump called Mexicans rapists in the speech announcing his candidacy on June 16, 2015, Priebus called him and said, You can’t talk like that. We’ve been working really hard to win over Hispanics.
After Nixon resigned in 1974, he engaged in a very aggressive war with history, attempting to wipe out the Watergate stain and memory. Happily, history won, largely because of Nixon's tapes.
Paris was one of the justifications the Obama administration used as part of the regulatory record to justify the cost and benefits of the Clean Power Plan. That was an Obama-era 460-page rule to lowe...
NAFTA was another enduring Trump target. The president had said for months he wanted to leave NAFTA and renegotiate. The only way to get a good deal is to blow up the old deal. When I blow it up, in t...
Trump liked signing. It meant he was doing things, and he had an up-and-down penmanship that looked authoritative in black Magic Marker.
McMaster said that he believed Mattis and Tillerson had concluded that the president and the White House were crazy. As a result, they sought to implement and even formulate policy on their own withou...
Trump had no understanding of how government functioned. At times he would just start drafting orders himself or dictating. The basic tactic Porter had employed from the Priebus days until now was to...
Nearly all economists disagreed with Trump, but he found an academic economist who hated free trade as much as he did. He brought him to the White House as both director of trade and industrial policy...
It seems clear that many of the president’s senior advisers, especially those in the national security realm, are extremely concerned with his erratic nature, his relative ignorance, his inability to...
Another State Department representative noted that the central government lacked legitimacy in the eyes of the Afghan public, the lowest in 10 years, according to polling done in the country. He obser...
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