Quotes from Michael Wolff

He was, after all, Donald Trump, however much you shined him up.

If the media, self-righteously, saw it as the Holy Grail and silver bullet of Trump destruction, and the Trump White House saw it, with quite some self-pity, as a desperate effort to concoct a scandal, there was also a range of smart money in the middle.

The kids"—Jared and Ivanka—exhibited an increasingly panicked sense that the FBI and DOJ were moving beyond Russian election interference and into family finances. "Ivanka is terrified," said a satisfied Bannon.

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 you have to have one point to make and you have to pepper it in whenever you can.

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, and (of course) by the book.

The next day Kellyanne Conway, her aggressive posture during the campaign turning more and more to petulance and self-pity, asserted the new president's right to claim "alternative facts." As it happened, Conway meant to say "alternative information," which at least would imply there might be additional data. But as uttered, it certainly sounded like the new administration was claiming the right to recast reality. Which, in a sense, it was.

The president, on the verge of starting a war with the FBI, the DOJ, and many in Congress, was going rogue.

Alas, politics itself has more and more become a discrete business. Its appeal is B-to-B—business-to-business. The real swamp is the swamp of insular, inbred, incestuous interests. This isn't corruption so much as overspecialization. It's a wonk's life. Politics has gone one way, the culture another. The left-right junkies might pretend otherwise, but the great middle doesn't put political concerns at the top of their minds.

Still, Sean Hannity had 5.8 million viewers on the night of the Blasey Ford–Kavanaugh hearing. "That's a lot of fucking hobbits," said Bannon.

Crazy was a potent enemy against the establishment, but how to predict what a crazy man will do?

In politics somebody has to lose, but invariably everybody thinks they can win. And you probably can't win unless you believe that you will win—except in the Trump campaign.

And yet, the larger truth was that Ivanka's relationship with her father was in no way a conventional family relationship. If it wasn't pure opportunism, it was certainly transactional. It was business. Building the brand, the presidential campaign, and now the White House—it was all business.

Bannon's deconstruction of the administrative state meant to take with it media, academic, and not-for-profit institutions.

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 other passengers) trips on his yacht. He also spent hours every day planted in front of a screen playing video games. Like Trump, he was often described as a petulant child.

There was a plot against him.

What has he gotten himself into with the Russians?" pressed Ailes. "Mostly," said Bannon, "he went to Russia and he thought he was going to meet Putin. But Putin couldn't give a shit about him. So he's kept trying." "He's Donald," said Ailes. "It's a magnificent thing," said Bannon, who had taken to regarding Trump as something like a natural wonder, beyond explanation.

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.

A pro wrestling fan who became a World Wrestling Entertainment supporter and personality (inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame), Trump lived, like Hulk Hogan, as a real-life fictional character.

Everyone, in his or her own way, struggled to express the baldly obvious fact that the president did not know enough, did not know what he didn't know, did not particularly care, and, to boot, was confident if not serene in his unquestioned certitudes. There was now a fair amount of back-of-the-classroom giggling about who had called Trump what.

Trump, perhaps not yet appreciating the difference between becoming president and elevating his social standing,

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 ration the president's time and organize the flow of information to him around the priorities that the White House had set. In this, Walsh became the effective middle person among the three men working hardest to maneuver the president—Bannon, Kushner, and Priebus.

you don't really have to know all that much yourself; you just do it differently than it was done before.

The new politics was not the art of the compromise but the art of conflict.

crowded out most other voices on the subject of whatever new crisis was engulfing the Trump administration. These quotes functioned as something like a stage whisper that Trump could pretend he didn't hear. Trump, in fact, was always desperately seeking Bannon's advice,