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.
Kushner was the driver of the Trump doctrine. His test cases were China, Mexico, Canada, and Saudi Arabia. He offered each country the opportunity to make his father-in-law happy.
Jay Sekulow then turned the points raised by the special counsel into a list of specific questions—and then leaked them, as though these were in fact the special counsel’s questions
It was a badly kept secret in foreign policy circles that Mohammed bin Salman—MBS—had a cocaine problem and could disappear for days or longer on benders, or on long and frightening (at least for othe...
In the early days of Trump’s presidency, the situation seemed clear to everybody: three men were fighting to run the White House, to be the real chief of staff and power behind the Trump throne. And o...
In early February, an Obama administration lawyer friendly with Sally Yates remarked with some relish and considerable accuracy: It certainly is an odd circumstance if you live your life without regar...
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...
If he was not having his six-thirty dinner with Steve Bannon, then, more to his liking, he was in bed by that time with a cheeseburger, watching his three screens and making phone calls—
I think of Maggie Haberman—the New York Times reporter covering Trump—the way I think of my grandmother, said Nunberg. I always go running to her.
Hyper-by-the-book Rod Rosenstein—heretofore the quintessential apolitical player—immediately became, in Washington eyes, a hopeless Trump tool. But Rosenstein’s revenge was deft, swift, overwhelming,...
He’s supposed to be a fixer, said Trump about Cohen, but he breaks a lot of stuff. All of Trump’s people
He’s not only crazy, declared Tom Barrack to a friend, he’s stupid.
Hence, she and everyone else was translating a set of desires and urges into a program, a process that required a lot of guess work. It was, said Walsh, like trying to figure out what a child wants.
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 t...
He was a clown-prince version of Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Trump believed, offering catnip to deep American ire and resentment, that one man could be bigger than the system.
He knew where this Russia stuff was coming from, and if these Obama people thought they were going to get away with it they had another think coming. He would expose them all!
From the Bannon side, Pence garnered only contempt. Pence is like the husband in Ozzie and Harriet, a nonevent, said one Bannonite. Although many saw him as a vice president who might well assume the...
For the media, Cohen was a reliable leaker about Trump and the campaign. Among senior campaign aides, he was later regarded as a central voice in NBC correspondent Katy Tur’s book about the campaign,
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 Departm...
Donald, you can’t do it. You’ve made your bed and Steve is in it.