And the almost samizdat sharing, or gobsmacked retelling, of otherwise private and deep-background conversations
You could tell him whatever you wanted, but he knew what he knew, and if what you said contradicted what he knew, he simply didn’t believe you.
Trump needed to surround himself with the dysfunctional and the inept, because he was dysfunctional and inept.
The theory, suddenly presented as just this side of a likelihood, was that the Russians had suborned Donald Trump during a trip to Moscow with a crude blackmail scheme involving prostitutes and videot...
The president, on the verge of starting a war with the FBI, the DOJ, and many in Congress, was going rogue.
The leaking culture had become so open and overt—most of the time everybody could identify everybody else’s leaks—that it was now formally staffed.
The Best and the Brightest. (One of the
Still, Sean Hannity had 5.8 million viewers on the night of the Blasey Ford–Kavanaugh hearing. That’s a lot of fucking hobbits, said Bannon.
In the world of Trump, anything that he deemed of value either accrued to him or had been robbed from him.
His strategic belief was that there was no reason not to heap excessive puffery on a prospect. But if the prospect was ruled out as a buyer, there was no reason not to heap scorn and lawsuits on him o...
He wasn’t a tough guy. He was a big warm-hearted monkey, said Bannon, with rather faint praise.
He just keeps going, Ailes had marveled to a friend after the first debate with Hillary Clinton. You hit Donald along the head, and he keeps going. He doesn’t even know he’s been hit.
He had little to no experience in foreign policy, but he had no respect for the experts,
For Trump, as for many showmen or press release entrepreneurs, the enemy of everything is complexity and red tape, and the solution for everything is cutting corners. Bypass or ignore the difficulties...
The Khashoggi debacle provided yet another example of the bizarre and inexplicable relationships that Trump and his family had formed with bad guys around the world,
He acceded to anyone who seemed to know more about any issue he didn’t care about,
Also be the easiest one to achieve, since virtually every Republican was already publicly committed to voting for repeal. But Bannon,
They take everything I’ve ever said and exaggerate it, said the president in his first week in the White House during a late-night call. It’s all exaggerated. My exaggerations are exaggerated.
The country built on the virtue and the character and the strength of the American workingman circa 1955–65 was the ideal he meant to defend and restore: trade agreements, or trade wars, that supporte...
So clear was his inability to take any criticism or to participate in any honest argument about policy that the attempt was almost never made.