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.
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.
Bannon, for instance, even driven by his imperative just to get things done, did not use a computer. How did he do anything? Katie Walsh wondered. But that was the difference between big visions and s...
Bannon was making his first official pubic appearance of the Trump presidency,
Bannon learned about the piece when fact-checkers from the magazine called him for comment about Scaramucci’s accusation that he sucked his own cock.)
Bannon averred: When you take out all the never-Trump guys who signed all those letters and all the neocons who got us in all these wars … it’s not a deep bench.
Almost everybody in the campaign, still an extremely small outfit, thought of themselves as a clear-eyed team, as realistic about their prospects as perhaps any in politics. The unspoken agreement amo...
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.
We could confidently call some of the most peculiar remarks ever delivered by an American president. I know a lot about West Point, I’m a person who very strongly believes in academics. Every time I s...
This was another—and to some quite the ultimate—example of how difficult it was for the president to function in a literal, definitional, lawyerly, cause-and-effect political world.
The world needs borders—or the world should return to a time when it had borders. When America was great. Trump had become the platform for that message.
Less a person than a collection of terrible traits.
Elevated, liberal media would necessarily take down. Trump, goaded by Bannon, would continue to do the things that would delight conservative media and incur the wrath of liberal media. That was the p...
And even Trump treated him rather like a dog who kept creeping back into the house.
Walsh, sitting within sight of the Oval Office, was located at something like the ground zero of the information flow between the president and his staff. As Trump’s primary scheduler, her job was to...
Trump did not want a White House that ran by any method other than to satisfy his desires.
Trump did not enjoy his own inauguration. He had hoped for a big blowout.
Trump as the man nearly everyone knew him to be: erratic, unfocused, impetuous, likely not of sound mind.
Trump added another tic, a lifelong sense that people were constantly taking unfair advantage of him.
There were too many members of the House. He couldn’t remember their names. He launched into dramatic eye-rolling when told where they were from. Flyovers, he said. Men’s shop salesmen.