Donald Trump believed he had vastly more power, authority, and control than in fact he had, and he believed his talent for manipulating people and bending and dominating them was vastly greater than i...
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...
China is where Nazi Germany was in 1929 to 1930. The Chinese, like the Germans, are the most rational people in the world, until they’re not. And they’re gonna flip like Germany in the thirties. You’r...
But not only didn’t he read, he didn’t listen. He preferred to be the person talking. And he trusted his own expertise—no matter how paltry or irrelevant—more than anyone else’s. What’s more, he had a...
But most of the leaks, certainly the juiciest ones, were coming from the higher-ups—not to mention from the person occupying the topmost echelon.
But from the start it also was apparent that the Trump administration could just as easily turn into a country club Republican or a Wall Street Democrat regime. Or just a constant effort to keep Donal...
Bannon’s strategic view of government was shock and awe. Dominate rather than negotiate. Having daydreamed his way into ultimate bureaucratic power, he did not want to see himself as a bureaucrat. He...
Bannon’s entire political career, such as it was, had been in political media. It was also in Internet media—that is, media ruled by immediate response. The Breitbart formula was to so appall the libe...
Bannon was curiously able to embrace Trump while at the same time suggesting he did not take him entirely seriously. He had first met Trump, the on-again off-again presidential candidate, in 2010; at...
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...
As often as not, he surprised himself. What did I say? he would ask after getting severe blowback.
And then there was the harsh fact that the world of Manhattan and particular its living voice, the media, seemed to cruelly reject them. The media long ago turned on Donald Trump as a wannabe and ligh...
Although the Republicans in the 2018 congressional races were looking, according to Bannon’s numbers, at a 15-point deficit, it was Bannon’s belief that the more extreme the right-wing challenge appea...
Alas, politics itself has more and more become a discrete business. Its appeal is B-to-B—business-to-business. The real swamp is the swamp of insular, inbred, incestuous interests. This isn’t corrupti...
A twelve-year-old in a man’s body, all he does is takedowns of people based on their physical appearance—short, fat, bald, whatever it is. There weren’t producers who could say, Don’t say that … We wo...
Almost everybody in the White House followed Trump’s thinking by tracking whom he had called the night before.)
You just had to go with the president’s whims. As for the president, it was quite clear that deciding between contradictory policy approaches was not his style of leadership. He simply hoped that diff...
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.
Television host directing the president to do whatever might most compel a television audience—took the game a big step further.