One instance of his revisionism, and of the new stature he now seemed to assume as president, involved the lowest point of the campaign—the Billy Bush tape. His explanation, in an off-the-record conve...
Of the many Trump gashes in modern major-power governing, you could certainly drive a Trojan horse through his lack of foreign policy particulars and relationships. This presented a do-over opportunit...
No one in the country, or on earth, has given less thought to health insurance than Donald, said Roger Ailes. Pressed in a campaign interview about the importance of Obamacare repeal and reform, Trump...
Murdoch believed he understood better than younger men, even seventy-year-old Trump, that political power was fleeting. (This was in fact the same message he had imparted to Barack Obama.) A president...
It’s just a conspiracy theory. And, he added, the Trump team wasn’t capable of conspiring about anything.
It's worse than you can imagine. An idiot (Trump) surrounded by clowns. Trump won't read anything - not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with w...
It was, said Walsh, like trying to figure out what a child wants.
It was yet one more example, among his many now, of the comic-absurd, movielike politician who just says whatever is on his mind. Unmediated. Crazylike.
It was during Trump’s early intelligence briefings, held soon after he captured the nomination, that alarm signals first went off among his new campaign staff: he seemed to lack the ability to take in...
In politics somebody has to lose, but invariably everybody thinks they can win. And you probably can’t win unless you believe that you will win—except in the Trump campaign.
In fact, up close, Trump was not the bombastic and pugilistic man who had stirred rabid crowds on the campaign trail. He was neither angry nor combative. He may have been the most threatening and frig...
In Trump’s 2011 CPAC address he specifically calls for a relaxation of immigration restrictions for Europeans . . . that we should re-create an America that was far more stable and more beautiful. . ....
If you fuck with the intel community they will figure out a way to get back at you and you’ll have two or three years of a Russian investigation, and every day something else will leak out.
His son-in-law and daughter hoped—they were even confident—that they could speak to DJT’s better self, or at least balance Republican needs with progressive rationality, compassion, and good works. Fu...
His callers, largely because they found his conversation peculiar, alarming, or completely contrary to reason and common sense, often overrode what they might otherwise have assumed to be the confiden...
He was the winner and now expected to be the object of awe, fascination, and favor. He expected this to be binary: a hostile media would turn into a fannish one.
He was the ultimate antiliberal: an authoritarian who was the living embodiment of resistance to authority.
He had somehow won the race for president, but his brain seemed incapable of performing what would be essential tasks in his new job. He had no ability to plan and organize and pay attention and switc...
During that first month, Walsh’s disbelief and even fear about what was happening in the White House moved her to think about quitting. Every day after that became its own countdown toward the moment...
Donald Trump and his tiny band of campaign warriors were ready to lose with fire and fury. They were not ready to win.