Mitch McConnell's prescription that this president will sign whatever is put in front of him.
You don’t know what he hears because he just talks.
This was not a problem to address, this was a person to focus on:
The organizational premise of the Trump White House: the family would always prevail.
The firing of FBI director James Comey may be the most consequential move ever made by a modern president acting entirely on his own.
That looseness with the truth, if not with reality itself, are an elemental thread of the book.
Son. The aide went on giddily talking about the special bond golfing dads have with their sons until it was clear that he was getting the Trump freeze—an ability to pretend you didn’t exist while at t...
Senior staff believed the president had a problem with reality, and reality was now overwhelming him.
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...
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.
Why? You’ve already done enough for him. You’re the best piece of tail he’ll ever have, sending Hicks running from the room.
Who can talk you through this stuff before you decided to act on it? Well, said the president, you won’t like the answer, but the answer is me. Me. I talk to myself.
Well, said the president, you won’t like the answer, but the answer is me. Me. I talk to myself.
Weissmann had promised to see the investigation through to the end. But now, bitterly disappointed, he would tell friends, by how narrowly Mueller had come to focus the scope of the investigation, he...
We serve at the president’s displeasure,
Trump, as almost anyone who had ever worked for him appreciated, was, despite what you hoped he might be, Trump—and he would invariably sour on everyone around him.
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 a...
Trump was Trump—careless, capricious, disloyal, far beyond any sort of control.
Trump saw the world through the filter of other people’s weaknesses.
Trump pardons were less judicial corrections or acts of forbearance and kindness than statements of defiance.