The Oval Office itself had been used by prior occupants as the ultimate power symbol, a ceremonial climax. But as soon as Trump arrived, he moved in a collection of battle flags to frame him sitting a...
Rebekah took a helicopter from their Long Island estate out to a scheduled fundraiser—with
Pushing a proffered glass of wine away—I don’t drink—
Other than Trump himself, Bannon was certainly the oldest inexperienced person ever to work in the White House.
On the most basic level, he simply could not link cause and effect.
On the afternoon of November 8, 2016, Kellyanne Conway—Donald Trump’s campaign manager and a central, indeed starring, personality of Trumpworld—settled into her glass office at Trump Tower. Right up...
No national emergency, no solution, no offer, no progress. Trump was, for the entire nation to see, trapped.
Men who demand the most loyalty tend to be the least loyal pricks,
In a way, Robert Mueller had come to accept the dialectical premise of Donald Trump—that Trump is Trump. It was circular reasoning to hold the president’s essential character against him. Put another...
If the media, self-righteously, saw it as the Holy Grail and silver bullet of Trump destruction, and the Trump White House saw it, with quite some self-pity, as a desperate effort to concoct a scandal...
If he was not having his six-thirty dinner with Steve Bannon, then, more to his liking, he was in bed by that time with a cheeseburger, watching his three screens and making phone calls—
If Trump cared about something, he usually already had a fixed view based on limited information. If he didn’t care, he had no view and no information.
I think of Maggie Haberman—the New York Times reporter covering Trump—the way I think of my grandmother, said Nunberg. I always go running to her.
His was a zero-sum ecosystem. In the world of Trump, anything that he deemed of value either accrued to him or had been robbed from him.
Here was a perfect example of an essential Trump paradigm: he acceded to anyone who seemed to know more about any issue he didn’t care about, or simply one whose details he couldn’t bring himself to f...
Hence, within twenty-four hours of the inauguration, the president had invented a million or so people who did not exist. He sent his new press secretary, Sean Spicer—whose personal mantra would short...
He was a clown-prince version of Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Trump believed, offering catnip to deep American ire and resentment, that one man could be bigger than the system.
He knew where this Russia stuff was coming from, and if these Obama people thought they were going to get away with it they had another think coming. He would expose them all!
From the Bannon side, Pence garnered only contempt. Pence is like the husband in Ozzie and Harriet, a nonevent, said one Bannonite. Although many saw him as a vice president who might well assume the...
For Trump and his most dedicated confederates there was only one truly reliable issue: illegal immigration. In Trump’s short political history, the issue had never failed to inspire and activate core...