Donald Trump and his tiny band of campaign warriors were ready to lose with fire andfury. They were not ready to win.
Crazy was a potent enemy against the establishment, but how to predict what a crazy man will do?
Conway, who continued to hold the president’s favor and to be his preferred defender on the cable news shows, had publicly declared herself the face of the administration—and for Ivanka and Jared, thi...
Communication of this message required a coordinated effort. Each person’s willingness to talk to Woodward was cross-checked against the willingness of several others to talk to him. This was part of...
Careers advance by how well you learn on the job and how well you get along with the rest of the swamp and play its game.
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...
But the prospect of her husband’s actually becoming president was, for Melania, a horrifying one. She believed it would destroy her carefully sheltered life—one sheltered, not inconsiderably, from the...
Bill Burck, for instance, represented Don McGahn, Steve Bannon, and Reince Priebus. As a consequence, all three men could communicate under the seal of their lawyer’s privilege.
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 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 and Kushner were therefore more than a little irritated to discover that the unimposing Priebus had an agenda of his own: heeding Senate leader Mitch McConnell’s prescription that this presiden...
At points on the day’s spectrum of adverse political developments, he could have moments of, almost everyone would admit, irrationality. When that happened, he was alone in his anger and not approacha...
And yet, the larger truth was that Ivanka’s relationship with her father was in no way a conventional family relationship. If it wasn’t pure opportunism, it was certainly transactional. It was busines...
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...
Almost everybody in the White House followed Trump’s thinking by tracking whom he had called the night before.)
You don’t really have to know all that much yourself; you just do it differently than it was done before.
Was shady, shoot-from-the-hip, heedless or even unaware of the rules, deceptive, and in it for himself.
The week of July 24 was a head-slammer. First, it opened the next episode in what had become a comic-opera
The political antichrist, a figure of dark but buffoonish scandal,
The central issue of the Trump presidency, informing every aspect of Trumpian policy and leadership: he didn’t process information in any conventional sense—or, in a way, he didn’t process it at all.