Quotes from Michael Wolff

purpose of actually changing the country. Changing it quickly, radically, and truly.

I was in Russia years ago with the Ms. Universe contest—did very very well—I tell everyone be careful, because you don't want to see yourself on television—cameras all over the place. And again, not just Russia, all over. So would anyone really believe that story? I'm also very much of a germaphobe, by the way. Believe me.

The leitmotif for Trump about his own campaign was how crappy it was and how everybody involved in it was a loser.

Trump could bring Trumpism down...

But Trump was a simple machine. Whitestone understood his singular interests—sports and girls—and learned they could be used as reliable distractions.

Bannon invariably found some reason to study papers in the corner and then to have a last word; Priebus kept his eye on Bannon; Kushner kept constant tabs on the whereabouts of the others.

trying to win without consideration, plan, or clear goals had, in the course of the administration's first nine months, resulted in almost nothing but losses.

And then there was the harsh fact that the world of Manhattan and particular its living voice, the media, seemed to cruelly reject them. The media long ago turned on Donald Trump as a wannabe and lightweight, and wrote him off for that ultimate sin—anyway, the ultimate sin in media terms—of trying to curry favor with the media too much. His fame, such as it was, was actually reverse fame—he was famous for being infamous. It was joke fame.

Do nothing" had long been viewed as an unacceptable position of helplessness by American foreign policy experts. The instinct to do something was driven by the desire to prove you were not limited to nothing. You couldn't do nothing and show strength.

Good management reduces ego. But in the Trump White House, it could often seem that nothing happened, that reality simply did not exist, if it did not happen in Trump's presence.

Steve Bannon was running the Steve Bannon White House, Jared Kushner was running the Michael Bloomberg White House, and Reince Priebus was running the Paul Ryan White House.

Then there was Bannon, conducting something of an alternate-universe operation,

military figures like James Mattis, H. R. McMaster, and John Kelly: they found themselves working in an administration that was in every way inimical to basic command principles.

The president himself, absent any organizational rigor, often acted as his own chief of staff, or, in a sense, elevated the press secretary job to the primary staff job, and then functioned as his own press secretary

To everyone working in media in New York, Donald Trump represented the ultimate shame of working in media in New York: you might have to write about Donald Trump. Not writing about him, or certainly not taking him at face value, became a moral stand.

He was postliterate—total television.

If I told Trump that, he might have the job.

The real swamp is the swamp of insular, inbred, incestuous interests.

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 say I had an uncle who was a great professor at MIT for 35 years, who did a fantastic job in so many ways academically—he was an academic genius—and then they say, Is Donald Trump an intellectual? Trust me, I'm like a smart person.

To Trump, he was just up against Sally Yates, who was, he steamed, "such a cunt.

But most of the leaks, certainly the juiciest ones, were coming from the higher-ups—not to mention from the person occupying the topmost echelon.

These powerful figures tried to

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 presidency someday, he was also perceived as the weakest vice president in decades and, in organizational terms, an empty suit who was useless in the daily effort to help restrain the president and stabilize the West Wing.

What is looking like unhinged chaos is actually him in a place of comfort," tweeted Maggie Haberman, one of the Times reporters on the Trump beat. Haberman, who likes to assert a stubborn ownership of the Trump story, implies something approximating presidential strategy and point of view.