The fundamental premise of nearly everybody who joined the Trump White House was, This can work. We can help make this work. Now, only three-quarters of the way through just the first year of Trump’s...
People who had the money to bribe, who fundamentally believed that anyone could be bribed, and who had outsize influence on the legal structures that might otherwise restrict bribery, had become major...
Many of the accounts of what has happened in the Trump White House are in conflict with one another; many, in Trumpian fashion, are baldly untrue.
López Obrador, a left-wing populist poised to challenge Trump, the right-wing populist.
Kushner was the driver of the Trump doctrine. His test cases were China, Mexico, Canada, and Saudi Arabia. He offered each country the opportunity to make his father-in-law happy.
Jay Sekulow then turned the points raised by the special counsel into a list of specific questions—and then leaked them, as though these were in fact the special counsel’s questions
It was an operatic unraveling. So mortifying was this development that when Reince Priebus, the RNC head, was called to New York from Washington for an emergency meeting at Trump Tower, he couldn’t br...
It was a badly kept secret in foreign policy circles that Mohammed bin Salman—MBS—had a cocaine problem and could disappear for days or longer on benders, or on long and frightening (at least for othe...
Indeed, health care, a no-fun issue—suddenly becoming much less fun, if, as seemed increasingly possible, Ryan couldn’t deliver—palled before the clarity of Comey, and the fury, enmity, and bitterness...
In the early days of Trump’s presidency, the situation seemed clear to everybody: three men were fighting to run the White House, to be the real chief of staff and power behind the Trump throne. And o...
In politics somebody has to lose, but invariably everybody thinks they can win.
In early February, an Obama administration lawyer friendly with Sally Yates remarked with some relish and considerable accuracy: It certainly is an odd circumstance if you live your life without regar...
If the new right had elected Trump, it was the older Fortune 100 executives who most pleased him
Hyper-by-the-book Rod Rosenstein—heretofore the quintessential apolitical player—immediately became, in Washington eyes, a hopeless Trump tool. But Rosenstein’s revenge was deft, swift, overwhelming,...
Here’s the deal, a close Trump associate told Priebus. In an hour meeting with him you’re going to hear fifty-four minutes of stories and they’re going to be the same stories over and over again. So y...
He wasn’t serving up these insults for effect—well, not entirely. And his behavior wasn’t carefully calculated; it was tit for tat, and he likely would have said what he’d said even if no one was left...
He held his face in his hands for a moment and then looked up again. I’m pretty good at coming up with solutions, I came up with a solution for his broke-dick campaign in about a day, but I don’t see...
For the media, Cohen was a reliable leaker about Trump and the campaign. Among senior campaign aides, he was later regarded as a central voice in NBC correspondent Katy Tur’s book about the campaign,
For Walsh, it was a daily process of managing an impossible task: almost as soon as she received direction from one of the three men, she would be countermanded by one or another of them.
Finally, there was a new rationale that Flynn should be fired not because of his Russian contacts, but because he had lied about them to the vice president. This was a convenient invention of a chain...