Quotes from Michael Wolff

Here was a perfect example of an essential Trump paradigm: he acceded to anyone who seemed to know more about any issue he didn't care about, or simply one whose details he couldn't bring himself to focus on closely. Great! he would say, punctuating every statement with a similar exclamation and regularly making an effort to jump from his chair.

Pecker was often mocked by Trump as "Little Pecker," and his mustache was the target of derisive and obscene remarks. (Curiously, Pecker bore a resemblance to Trump's father, who also wore a mustache.)

We serve at the president's displeasure,

He's a guy who really hated school," said Bannon. "And he's not going to start liking it now.

He's not only crazy," declared Tom Barrack to a friend, "he's stupid.

Trump added another tic, a lifelong sense that people were constantly taking unfair advantage of him.

That was the way to crush the liberals: make them crazy and drag them to the left.

His was a zero-sum ecosystem. In the world of Trump, anything that he deemed of value either accrued to him or had been robbed from him.

you just had to go with the president's whims. As for the president, it was quite clear that deciding between contradictory policy approaches was not his style of leadership. He simply hoped that difficult decisions would make themselves.

company built around the instincts, impulses, and gambles of its leader?

Communication of this message required a coordinated effort. Each person's willingness to talk to Woodward was cross-checked against the willingness of several others to talk to him. This was part of Woodward's standard method of establishing a critical mass of inside sources: he created a kind of in-group, and this also suggested that if you failed to participate, you would not only lose your opportunity to be part of the in-group but lose your place in history

But the point really was that Trump had wanted to confront and humiliate the FBI director. Cruelty was a Trump attribute.

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.

He clearly did not understand that what conservative media elevated, liberal media would necessarily take down.

As often as not, he surprised himself. "What did I say?" he would ask after getting severe blowback.

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 greater White House wholly believed that the story was an invented construct of weak if not preposterous narrative threads, with a mind-boggling thesis: We fixed the election with the Russians, OMG! The anti-Trump world, and especially its media—that is, the media—believed that there was a high, if not overwhelming, likelihood that there was something significant there, and a decent chance that it could be brought home.

I can't say, 'I want to put a Protestant on the Court for better representation.' No, you can't say that. But I should be able to. You should be able to have the main religion in this country represented on the Supreme Court.

Much of the president's daily conversation was a repetitive rundown of what various anchors and hosts had said about him.

Trump needed to surround himself with the dysfunctional and the inept, because he was dysfunctional and inept.

It was the first presidential instance of what the campaign regulars had learned over many months: on the most basic level, Trump just did not, as Spicer later put it, give a fuck. You could tell him whatever you wanted, but he knew what he knew, and if what you said contradicted what he knew, he simply didn't believe you.

On May 17, twelve days after FBI director Comey was fired, without consulting the White House or the attorney general, Rosenstein appointed former FBI director Robert Mueller to oversee the investigation of Trump's, his campaign's, and his staff's ties to Russia.

He reprimanded the housekeeping staff for picking up his shirt from the floor: "If my shirt is on the floor, it's because I want it on the floor." Then he imposed a set of new rules: nobody touch anything, especially not his toothbrush. (He had a longtime fear of being poisoned, one reason why he liked to eat at McDonald's—nobody knew he was coming and the food was safely premade.)

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 of course there was Trump himself, who didn't want to relinquish power to anyone.