It would be hard to imagine someone who expected a greater awareness of and more catering to his peculiar whims, rhythms, prejudices, and often inchoate desires. He needed special—extra special—handli...
It was, said Walsh, like trying to figure out what a child wants.
He would never be able to untangle his holdings and interests—including big investments in the Middle East—in a way that would satisfy ethics watchdogs.
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...
Bob and Rebekah Mercer, who had set themselves up as almost professional fools.
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 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...
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.
You could hardly find an entity more at odds with military discipline than a Trump organization.
Trump, said Bannon, noting the obvious, was the least disciplined man in politics.
Trump quite profoundly seemed unable to distinguish between his political advantage and his personal needs—he thought emotionally, not strategically.
Trump had no real relationship with either father or daughter. He’d had only a few conversations with Bob Mercer, who mostly talked in monosyllables; Rebekah Mercer’s entire history with Trump consist...
Trump had little or no interest in the central Republican goal of repealing Obamacare. An overweight seventy-year-old man with various physical phobias (for instance, he lied about his height to keep...
There was, curiously, general agreement in the West Wing that Donald Trump, the media president, had one of the most dysfunctional communication operations in modern White House history.
Theory 4: But then there was the those-that-know-him-best theory, some version of which most Trumpers would come to embrace. He was just star-fucking.
The two prosecutors also delved into the president’s personal life. How often did he cheat on his wife? With whom? How were trysts arranged? What were the president’s sexual interests?
The real question, of course, was how Bannon, the fuck-the-system populist, had ever come to think that he might get along with Donald Trump, the use-the-system-to-his-own-advantage billionaire
The president fundamentally wants to be liked was Katie Walsh’s analysis. He just fundamentally needs to be liked so badly that it’s always … everything is a struggle for him. This translated into a c...