Quotes from Michael Wolff

33,000 emails she deemed "personal" remained unaccounted for. Bannon, along with many other Republicans, suspected that in this cache of emails was a clear road map of how Bill and Hillary were funding the Clinton Foundation, trading, they suspected, on her position in the Obama administration for cash contributions.

His senior staff largely dealt with these dark hours by agreeing with him, no matter what he said.

Trump was impetuous and yet did not like to make decisions, at least not ones that seemed to corner him into having to analyze a problem.

the Khashoggi debacle provided yet another example of the bizarre and inexplicable relationships that Trump and his family had formed with bad guys around the world,

success of the speech confirmed the Jared and Ivanka strategy: look for common ground. It also confirmed Ivanka's understanding of her father: he just wanted to be loved. And, likewise, it confirmed Bannon's worst fear: Trump, in his true heart, was a marshmallow.

Of the many Trump gashes in modern major-power governing, you could certainly drive a Trojan horse through his lack of foreign policy particulars and relationships.

Careers advance by how well you learn on the job and how well you get along with the rest of the swamp and play its game.

The first woman president, Ivanka entertained, would not be Hillary Clinton, it would be Ivanka Trump.

He had no interest in precision, or even any ability to be precise.

Cohn's derisive contempt for Kushner as well as the president was even greater. In return, the president heaped more abuse on Cohn—the former president of Goldman Sachs was now a "complete idiot, dumber than dumb.

Why? You've already done enough for him. You're the best piece of tail he'll ever have," sending Hicks running from the room.

Donald Trump was a step up—and early in the 2016 race, Trump became the Breitbart totem. (Many of Trump's positions in the campaign were taken from the Breitbart articles he had printed out for him.) Indeed, Bannon began to suggest to people that he, like Ailes had been at Fox, was the true force behind his chosen candidate.

The unspoken agreement among them: not only would Donald Trump not be president, he should probably not be. Conveniently, the former conviction meant nobody had to deal with the latter issue.

He wasn't going to win! Or losing was winning.

If you fuck with the intel community they will figure out a way to get back at you and you'll have two or three years of a Russian investigation, and every day something else will leak out.

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.

This intelligence, it was rumored, consisted of spreadsheets kept by Susan Rice that listed the Trump team's Russian contacts; borrowing a technique from WikiLeaks, the documents were secreted on a dozen servers in different places. Before this broad distribution, when the information was

Bannon didn't much question Donald Trump's bona fides, or behavior, or electability, because, in part, Trump was just his latest rich man. The rich man is a fixed fact, which you have to accept and deal with in an entrepreneurial world—at least a lower-level entrepreneurial world. And, of course, if Trump had had firmer bona fides, better behavior, and clear electability, Bannon would not have had his chance.

Hicks, sponsored by Ivanka and ever loyal to her, was in fact thought of as Trump's real daughter, while Ivanka was thought of as his real wife.

It was insidious. It was, to them, although they didn't put it this way, similar to the kind of dark Clinton-like conspiracies that Republicans were more wont to accuse liberals of—Whitewater, Benghazi, Emailgate. That is, an obsessive narrative that leads to investigations, which lead to other investigations, and to more obsessive no-escape media coverage. This was modern politics: blood-sport conspiracies that were about trying to destroy people and careers.

It was a process of suggesting, in throw-it-against-the-wall style, what the president might want, and hoping he might then think that he had thought of this himself

this was not a problem to address, this was a person to focus on:

Trump problem. He hopelessly personalized everything. He saw the world in commercial and show business terms: someone else was always trying to one-up you, someone else was always trying to take the limelight.

That was almost his appeal: he was what he was. Twinkle in his eye, larceny in his soul.