Flynn was a colonel in a general’s uniform, according to one senior intelligence figure.)
Yet discover the charm and wisdom of Donald Trump. Where past presidents might have spent portions of their day talking about the needs, desires, and points of leverage among various members of Congre...
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...
The president’s views of foreign policy and the world at large were among its most random, uninformed, and seemingly capricious aspects.
The president-elect spoke with little information and frequently no factual basis, while the frame the media has chosen to embrace is that everything the man does is, by default, unconstitutional or a...
Success of the speech confirmed the Jared and Ivanka strategy: look for common ground. It also confirmed Ivanka’s understanding of her father: he just wanted to be loved. And, likewise, it confirmed B...
Military figures like James Mattis, H. R. McMaster, and John Kelly: they found themselves working in an administration that was in every way inimical to basic command principles.
He had no interest in personnel problems, since they put the emphasis on other people.
Few in the thin ranks of Trump’s inner circle, with their overnight responsibility for assembling a government, had almost any relevant experience. Nobody had a political background. Nobody had a poli...
Chronic naysayer, he viewed each member of his inner circle as a problem child whose fate he held in his hand. We are sinners and he is God was one view; We serve at the president’s displeasure, anoth...
Alarm signals first went off among his new campaign staff: he seemed to lack the ability to take in third-party information. Or maybe he lacked the interest; whichever, he seemed almost phobic about h...
With his misspellings and his use of 1970s lingo—wire tapping called up an image of FBI agents crouched in a van on Fifth Avenue—it seemed kooky and farcical. Of the many tweets that Trump had seemed...
Trump’s standard operating procedure—conflict, insults, reversals, dismissals—is still reported with breathless surprise. The most obvious man on earth is yet, to the media, always astonishing. Whose...
Trump’s repeated brags about his relationship with Vladimir Putin and the nature of Trump’s relationship with the Kremlin.
Trump’s key supporters worked for him because nobody else would have them.
Trump, who referred to the Chinese leader as Mr. X-i; the president was told to think of him as a woman and call him she.)
Trump was impetuous and yet did not like to make decisions, at least not ones that seemed to corner him into having to analyze a problem.
This was the peculiar and haunting consensus—not that Trump was guilty of all that he was accused of, but that he was guilty of so much else.
Then he imposed a set of new rules: nobody touch anything, especially not his toothbrush. (He had a longtime fear of being poisoned, one reason why he liked to eat at McDonald’s—nobody knew he was com...
The organization therefore needed a set of internal rationalizations that would allow it to trust a man who, while he knew little, was entirely confident of his own gut instincts and reflexive opinion...