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...
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...
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...
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 was nearly incomprehensible to him that the same people—that is, the media—who had violently criticized him for saying he might dispute the election result were now calling him illegitimate.
In 2014, when he first seriously began to consider running for president, Melania was one of the few who thought it was possible he could win. It was a punch line for his daughter, Ivanka, who had car...
His advisers didn’t know whether he was an isolationist or a militarist, or whether he could distinguish between the two.
He reprimanded the housekeeping staff for picking up his shirt from the floor: If my shirt is on the floor, it’s because I want it on the floor. Then he imposed a set of new rules: nobody touch anythi...
He defended himself by ridiculing others.
Do nothing had long been viewed as an unacceptable position of helplessness by American foreign policy experts. The instinct to do something was driven by the desire to prove you were not limited to n...
Convinced he knew the direction of success, keenly aware of his own age and finite opportunities, and—if for no clear reason—seeing himself as a talented political infighter, Bannon sought to draw the...
Clinton.
China is where Nazi Germany was in 1929 to 1930. The Chinese, like the Germans, are the most rational people in the world, until they’re not. And they’re gonna flip like Germany in the thirties. You’r...
Bypassing lawyers, regulators, and the agencies and personnel responsible for enforcing it, President Trump—with Bannon’s low, intense voice behind him, offering a rush of complex information—signed w...
But now, the new president-elect—after the most astonishing upset in American history—was on tenterhooks waiting for Murdoch.
But Trump was a simple machine. Whitestone understood his singular interests—sports and girls—and learned they could be used as reliable distractions.
But Ailes was convinced that Trump had no political beliefs or backbone.
As often as not, he surprised himself. What did I say? he would ask after getting severe blowback.
As it happened, Conway meant to say alternative information, which at least would imply there might be additional data.