Some had idly speculated about how long he would go on if he could command time as well as language. The consensus seemed to be forever. The sound of his own voice, his lack of inhibition, the fact th...
Said the president in his first week in the White House during a late-night call. It’s all exaggerated. My exaggerations are exaggerated.
Purpose of actually changing the country. Changing it quickly, radically, and truly.
Most of the leaks, certainly the juiciest ones, were coming from the higher-ups—not to mention from the person occupying the topmost echelon. The president couldn’t stop talking.
It confirmed Bannon’s worst fear: Trump, in his true heart, was a marshmallow.
If they don’t respond to sucking up, they might respond to piling on.
He had never been able to tailor his behavior to what the goals at hand reasonably required.
Fundamental Bannonism: stop thinking you can somehow get along with your enemies.
While nobody would ever say Trump was sensitive when it came to women, he had many views about how to get along with them, including a theory he discussed with friends about how the more years between...
While he wanted a job with the Trump administration, the Mooch specifically wanted one of the jobs that would give him a tax break on the sale of his business. A federal program provides for deferred...
What’s more, Trump was receiving the censure of his friends, too. And it was not only calls from friends worried about him, but staffers calling people to call him and say Simmer down. Who do you have...
What is looking like unhinged chaos is actually him in a place of comfort, tweeted Maggie Haberman, one of the Times reporters on the Trump beat. Haberman, who likes to assert a stubborn ownership of...
What has he gotten himself into with the Russians? pressed Ailes. Mostly, said Bannon, he went to Russia and he thought he was going to meet Putin. But Putin couldn’t give a shit about him. So he’s ke...
Upon publication of Woodward’s new book, it was immediately evident that one of his key sources was H. R. McMaster, the three-star general who had joined the Trump administration in February 2017 as n...
Trump, one guest noted, always more salesman than politician, seemed to have the capacity to focus only on the good news.
Trump would shortly become a Gorsuch fan. But before settling on Gorsuch, he wondered why the job wasn’t going to a friend and loyalist. In the Trump view, it was rather a waste to give the job to som...
Trump was not a politician who could parse factions of support and opprobrium; he was a salesman who needed to make a sale. I won. I am the winner. I am not the loser, he repeated, incredulously, like...
Trump was effusive in his praise for Kushner. Jared’s gotten the Arabs totally on our side. Done deal, he assured one of his after-dinner callers before leaving on the trip. It’s going to be beautiful...
Trump simply could not abide the knowledge that somebody was getting a leg up at his expense. His was a zero-sum ecosystem. In the world of Trump, anything that he deemed of value either accrued to hi...
Trump loved to hear complain about the CIA and the haplessness of American spies, had been told by his friends that it had not been a good idea to take $45,000 from the Russians for a speech. Well, it...