He had no ability to distinguish the important from the less important. There seemed to be no such thing as objective reality.
Coming
This was his fundamental innovation in governing: regular, uncontrolled bursts of anger and spleen.
There was a plot against him.
The first couple of times when I went to the White House, someone had to say, This is Mick Mulvaney, he’s the budget director, said Mulvaney. And in Mulvaney’s telling Trump was too scattershot to eve...
The leitmotif for Trump about his own campaign was how crappy it was and how everybody involved in it was a loser.
You don’t know what he hears because he just talks.
Son-in-law Kushner had been marked not just for ignominy, but for slow torture by ridicule, contempt, and ever-more amusing persiflage. These people are nothing. They are media debris. For goodness’ s...
Trump’s need for constant affirmation and his almost complete inability to talk about anything but himself.
This was the job Bannon a week later.
These powerful figures tried to
The contrast between the two men, Comey and Trump, was in essence the contrast between good government and Trump himself. Comey came across as precise, compartmentalized, scrupulous in his presentatio...
I now understand what it is like to be in the court of the Tudors, reflected Bannon. On the campaign trail, he recalled, Newt Gingrich would come with all these dumb ideas. When we won he was my new b...
For each of his enemies—and, actually, for each of his friends—the issue for him came down, in many ways, to their personal press plan. The media was the battlefield. Trump assumed everybody wanted hi...
But the point really was that Trump had wanted to confront and humiliate the FBI director. Cruelty was a Trump attribute.
Calamity of their own making.
While the Trump administration has made hostility to the press a virtual policy, it has also been more open to the media than any White House in recent memory.
Trade it out so in the end everyone got something, and the better dealmaker got a little more.
This—insulting Donald Trump’s intelligence—was both the thing you could not do and the thing—drawing there-but-for-the-grace-of-God guffaws across the senior staff—that everybody was guilty of. Everyo...
Men who demand the most loyalty tend to be the least loyal pricks,