The Tea Party movement, with Trump as its remarkable face and voice, had come to power—something like total power. It owned the Republican Party. Publicly breaking Paul Ryan was the obvious and necess...
Some seducers are preternaturally sensitive to the signals of those they try to seduce; others indiscriminately attempt to seduce, and, by the law of averages, often succeed (this latter group of men...
So frustrating that they just want to get the deal done—get their fee and get out. If the client won’t acknowledge the rituals in a highly ritualized situation…if people don’t listen, if they can’t li...
Several decades as a grasping entrepreneur without a satisfying success story doesn’t smooth the hustle in hustler.
Sean Spicer, whose job was literally to explain what people did and why, often simply could not—because nobody really had a job, because nobody could do a job. Priebus, as chief of staff, had to organ...
Scaramucci also took on Steve Bannon: I’m not Steve Bannon. I’m not trying to suck my own cock. (In fact, Bannon learned about the piece when fact-checkers from the magazine called him for comment abo...
One particularly profitable transaction with the president was to bring him new, ever harsher criticism of his chief strategist, or reports of other people criticizing him. It was important to know no...
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...
On June 9, 2016, Don Jr., Jared, and Paul Manafort met with a movieworthy cast of dubious characters in Trump Tower after having been promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton. Don Jr., enco...
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...
Not only did the president-elect wear his deep and bitter grievances on his sleeve, but it was now clear that the fact of having been elected president would not change his unfiltered, apparently unco...
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...
Jared Kushner in quite a short period of time—rather less than a year—had crossed over from the standard Democratic view in which he was raised, to an acolyte of Trumpism, bewildering many friends and...
It’s worse than you can imagine. An idiot 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 world leade...
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 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.
His advisers didn’t know whether he was an isolationist or a militarist, or whether he could distinguish between the two.