Quotes from Michael Wolff

Trump—almost never voluntarily alone, and absolutely never alone and awake without the television on—retreated into his bedroom cabin in silence.

Kushner was the driver of the Trump doctrine. His test cases were China, Mexico, Canada, and Saudi Arabia. He offered each country the opportunity to make his father-in-law happy.

Priebus had an agenda of his own: heeding Senate leader Mitch McConnell's prescription that "this president will sign whatever is put in front of him," while also taking advantage of the White House's lack of political and legislative experience and outsourcing as much policy as possible to Capitol Hill.

It's worse than you can imagine. An idiot surrounded by clowns. Trump won't read anything—not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored. And his staff is no better. Kushner is an entitled baby who knows nothing. Bannon is an arrogant prick who thinks he's smarter than he is. Trump is less a person than a collection of terrible traits.

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 failed to pardon, and so did Dinesh D'Souza, the right-wing author. Martha Stewart was a possibility. So was the corrupt former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, who was brazen and overweening

China is where Nazi Germany was in 1929 to 1930. The Chinese, like the Germans, are the most rational people in the world, until they're not. And they're gonna flip like Germany in the thirties. You're going to have a hypernationalist state, and once that happens you can't put the genie back in the bottle.

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).

Lewandowski and Hannity actually thought that the House might be hours away from voting articles of impeachment.

Bill Burck, for instance, represented Don McGahn, Steve Bannon, and Reince Priebus. As a consequence, all three men could communicate under the seal of their lawyer's privilege.

Trump, who referred to the Chinese leader as "Mr. X-i"; the president was told to think of him as a woman and call him "she.")

At points on the day's spectrum of adverse political developments, he could have moments of, almost everyone would admit, irrationality. When that happened, he was alone in his anger and not approachable by anyone. His senior staff largely dealt with these dark hours by agreeing with him, no matter what he said. And if some of them occasionally tried to hedge, Hope Hicks never did. She agreed absolutely with all of it.

the time Bannon and Priebus were back in Washington, three blue-chip firms had said no. All of them were afraid they would face a rebellion among the younger staff if they represented Trump, afraid Trump would publicly humiliate them if the going got tough, and afraid Trump would stiff them for the bill. In the end, nine top firms turned them down.

He had no ability to distinguish the important from the less important. There seemed to be no such thing as objective reality.

Trump, as almost anyone who had ever worked for him appreciated, was, despite what you hoped he might be, Trump—and he would invariably sour on everyone around him.

Jared Kushner in quite a short period of time—rather less than a year—had crossed over from the standard Democratic view in which he was raised, to an acolyte of Trumpism, bewildering many friends and, as well, his own brother, whose insurance company, Oscar, funded with Kushner-family money, was destined to be shattered by a repeal of Obamacare.

the political antichrist, a figure of dark but buffoonish scandal,

Bannon, in a public statement, declared: "You are either with Trump or against him.

his view, that he should say nothing—it was not his fault or responsibility, and he certainly didn't want to give a speech that might imply it was;

No national emergency, no solution, no offer, no progress. Trump was, for the entire nation to see, trapped.

If Trump cared about something, he usually already had a fixed view based on limited information. If he didn't care, he had no view and no information.

Bannon was, once again, gobsmacked. "When Ivanka and the Mooch can talk the commander in chief of the United States into thinking that people will believe that you had a double negative problem, you've left the Cartesian universe.

Finally, there was a new rationale that Flynn should be fired not because of his Russian contacts, but because he had lied about them to the vice president. This was a convenient invention of a chain of command: in fact, Flynn did not report to Vice President Pence, and he was arguably a good deal more powerful than Pence.

Almost everybody in the campaign, still an extremely small outfit, thought of themselves as a clear-eyed team, as realistic about their prospects as perhaps any in politics. 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.

Bypassing lawyers, regulators, and the agencies and personnel responsible for enforcing it, President Trump—with Bannon's low, intense voice behind him, offering a rush of complex information—signed what was put in front of him.