The three senior guys in the campaign, an incredulous Bannon went on, thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the twenty-fifth floor—w...
The president couldn’t stop talking. He was plaintive and self-pitying, and it was obvious to everyone that if he had a north star, it was just to be liked. He was ever uncomprehending about why every...
The less likely a presidential candidate is, the more unlikely, and, often, inexperienced, his aides are—that is, an unlikely candidate can attract only unlikely aides, as the likely ones go to the mo...
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...
The first woman president, Ivanka entertained, would not be Hillary Clinton, it would be Ivanka Trump.
The fact that he had stayed out of jail showed, impressively for many, how easily the system could be played. Seen from this point of view, he really might be a genius.
The fact that Trump had become the ultimate avatar of Fox’s angry common man was another sign that we were living in an upside-down world.
The fabulous, incomprehensible irony that the Trump family had, despite the media’s distaste, despite everything the media knows and understands and has said about them, risen to a level not only of u...
The Trump campaign had, perhaps less than inadvertently, replicated the scheme from Mel Brooks’s The Producers. In
The Russia story was—just two weeks into the new presidency—a dividing line with each side viewing the other as pushing fake news.
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...
The Mexican president refused to construct a pretense for paying for the wall, a pretense that might have redounded to his vast advantage (without his having to actually pay for the wall).
Sheriff Joe Arpaio, an anti-immigration figure and Trump supporter, got a pardon. So did Scooter Libby, the Bush administration leaker whom President Bush, a frequent target of Trump derision, had fai...
Sean Spicer, whose job was literally to explain what people did and why, often simply could not—because nobody really had a job, because nobody could do a job.
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.
National Policy Institute, which is sometimes described as a white supremacist think tank,
Most members of Mueller’s staff were already planning their exits. The once collegial mood among the nineteen attorneys who had worked on the investigation had turned, at best, sullen. Two years of in...