Kushner became the representative in the White House of the liberal status quo. He was something like what used to be called a Rockefeller Republican and now might more properly be a Goldman Sachs Dem...
In 1996, his second wife, Marla Maples, was caught one night with a Trump bodyguard on the beach near Mar-a-Lago under the lifeguard stand. This, Bannon was aware, had been a primal blow for Trump.
His departure would return the Trump organization to pure family control—the family and its functionaries, without an internal rival for brand meaning and leadership. From the family’s point of view,...
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 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.
Haley had courted and befriended Ivanka, and Ivanka had brought her into the family circle, where she had become a particular focus of Trump’s attention, and he of hers. Haley, as had become increasin...
Dopey Don Jr. (Fredo, as Steve Bannon would dub him, in one of his frequent Godfather borrowings) was simply trying to prove he was a player and a go-to guy.
Chaos was Steve’s strategy, said Walsh.
Being a Trump staffer had become an existential predicament: even if you wanted to get out, and almost all of them did, there was nowhere to go.
All news was to some extent fake—he understood that very well, because he himself had faked it so many times in his career. This was why he had so naturally cottoned to the fake news label. I’ve made...
Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the Egyptian strongman, ably stroked the president and said, You are a unique personality that is capable of doing the impossible. (To Sisi, Trump replied, Love your shoes. Boy,...
A small man with a Mr. Magoo stature and an old-fashioned Southern accent, Sessions was bitterly mocked by the president, who drew a corrosive portrait of physical and mental weakness.
Were ready to lose with fire and fury. They were not ready to win.
Just worry about who’s jerking whose chain.
He could yet make a case for a straight line from Nixon to Trump.
Trump needed to surround himself with the dysfunctional and the inept, because he was dysfunctional and inept.
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.
Then there was Bannon, conducting something of an alternate-universe operation,
The real swamp is the swamp of insular, inbred, incestuous interests.
The president, on the verge of starting a war with the FBI, the DOJ, and many in Congress, was going rogue.