He clearly did not understand that what conservative media elevated, liberal media would necessarily take down.
For anything that smacked of a classroom or of being lectured to—professor was one of his bad words, and he was proud of never going to class, never buying a textbook, never taking a note—he got up an...
Few people who knew Trump had illusions about him. That was almost his appeal: he was what he was. Twinkle in his eye, larceny in his soul.
Everyone, in his or her own way, struggled to express the baldly obvious fact that the president did not know enough, did not know what he didn’t know, did not particularly care, and, to boot, was con...
Donald Trump, whose cruelties, always great even when they were casual, were unbearable when he truly turned against you.
David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest.
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 if Halberstam defined the presidential mien, Trump defied it—and defiled it.
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...
Bob and Rebekah Mercer, who had set themselves up as almost professional fools.
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...
As for the looming defeat itself, she shrugged it off: it was Reince Priebus’s fault, not hers.
An overriding characteristic of the Trump presidency was the fact that almost all conflicts became personalized.
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...
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...
Flynn was a colonel in a general’s uniform, according to one senior intelligence figure.)
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...
They were unable to hire a law firm with a top-notch white-collar government practice. By the time Bannon and Priebus were back in Washington, three blue-chip firms had said no. All of them were afrai...