How’s the kid? asked Ailes, referring to Trump’s son-in-law and paramount political adviser, thirty-six-year-old Jared Kushner. He’s my partner, said Bannon, his tone suggesting that if he felt otherw...
Here’s the deal, a close Trump associate told Priebus. In an hour meeting with him you’re going to hear fifty-four minutes of stories and they’re going to be the same stories over and over again. So y...
He wasn’t serving up these insults for effect—well, not entirely. And his behavior wasn’t carefully calculated; it was tit for tat, and he likely would have said what he’d said even if no one was left...
He was, after all, Donald Trump, however much you shined him up.
Frank Sinatra was wrong, said David Bossie, one of Trump’s longtime political advisers. If you can make it in New York, you can’t necessarily make it in Washington.
Elon Musk, in Trump Tower, pitched Trump on the new administration’s joining him in his race to Mars, which Trump jumped at.
Donald Trump produced on a daily basis an astonishing, can’t-stop-following-it narrative.
David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest.
But Ailes was convinced that Trump had no political beliefs or backbone. 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-...
Bannon’s presence on the council was just as much driven by the need to babysit the impetuous Flynn, prone to antagonizing almost everyone else in the national security community. (Flynn was a colonel...
Bannon’s deconstruction of the administrative state meant to take with it media, academic, and not-for-profit institutions.
Bannon, who styled himself as a kind of black hole of silence, had also become a sort of official black-hole voice, everybody’s Deep Throat. He was witty, intense, evocative, and bubbling over, his th...
Bannon, Conway, and Hicks—along with an assortment of more or less peculiar ideologues that had attached themselves to Trump and, of course, his family, all people without clearly monetizable reputati...
Bannon veered from Mad Dog Mattis—the retired four-star general whom Trump had nominated as secretary of defense—to a long riff on torture, the surprising liberalism of generals, and the stupidity of...
Bannon didn’t promote internal debate, provide policy rationale, or deliver PowerPoint presentations; instead, he was the equivalent of Trump’s personal talk radio. Trump could turn him on at any mome...
Bannon didn’t much question Donald Trump’s bona fides, or behavior, or electability, because, in part, Trump was just his latest rich man. The rich man is a fixed fact, which you have to accept and de...
Anyone studying the position would conclude that a stronger chief of staff is better than a weaker one, and a chief of staff with a history in Washington and the federal government is better than an o...
An overriding characteristic of the Trump presidency was the fact that almost all conflicts became personalized.
Almost all the professionals who were now set to join him were coming face to face with the fact that it appeared he knew nothing. There was simply no subject, other than perhaps building construction...
Against this background (North Korea missile threats), almost no one paid attention to the announcement by the Trump supporter and American neo-Nazi Richard Spencer that he was organizing a protest at...