Quotes from Michael Wolff

Rebekah took a helicopter from their Long Island estate out to a scheduled fundraiser—with

There were too many members of the House. He couldn't remember their names. He launched into dramatic eye-rolling when told where they were from. "Flyovers," he said. "Men's shop salesmen.

yet discover the charm and wisdom of Donald Trump. Where past presidents might have spent portions of their day talking about the needs, desires, and points of leverage among various members of Congress, the president and Hicks spent a great deal of time talking about a fixed cast of media personalities, trying to second-guess the real agendas and weak spots among cable anchors and producers and Times and Post reporters.

Theory 5: The Russians, holding damaging information about Trump, were blackmailing him. He was a Manchurian Candidate.

I do know Suzanne. She's a magazine editor who has recently acquired the digital faith. While sitting with her in the Harvard Club one day in the late 1980s, I told her that personal computers would connect us all and replace media as we know it and that we would all be in the computer business before we turned forty. I was teasing, of course. [Burn Rate]

lack of discipline, focus, purpose.

Immigration was not just Trumpism's sine qua non, it was the fundamental intellectual pillar that any dope could understand.

One of Jared Kushner's many new patrons was Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, whom Kushner had gotten to know when, on the banks of the River Jordan in 2010, they both attended the baptism of Grace and Chloe Murdoch, the young daughters of Rupert Murdoch and his then wife, Wendi.

McConnell's contempt for Trump was boundless. He was not just the stupidest president McConnell had ever dealt with, he was the stupidest person McConnell had ever met in politics—and that was saying something. He and his wife, Elaine Chao, the secretary of transportation, regularly mocked and mimicked Trump, a set piece they would perform for friends.

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.

In an age when all successful political candidates are surrounded by, if not at the beck and call of, difficult, even sociopathic, rich people pushing the bounds of their own power—and the richer they were, the more difficult, sociopathic, and power-mad they might be—Bob and Rebekah Mercer were quite onto themselves.

Trump quite profoundly seemed unable to distinguish between his political advantage and his personal needs—he thought emotionally, not strategically.

Trump pardons were less judicial corrections or acts of forbearance and kindness than statements of defiance.

Lewandowski and Hope Hicks, the PR aide put on the campaign by Ivanka Trump, had an affair that ended in a public fight on the street—

lying willfully, adamantly, without distress or regret, and with absolute disregard of consequences can be a bulwark if not a fail-safe defense.

Nunberg was also a go-to, often astute, and always available source for almost every reporter covering Trump. Certainly Nunberg could be counted on to provide a confirmation of every negative story about Trump. When Trump criticized the media, he was in many instances criticizing Sam Nunberg.

On February 14, William P. Barr was sworn in as attorney general.

The daughter will take down the father," said Bannon, in a Shakespearian mood.

I think of Maggie Haberman"—the New York Times reporter covering Trump—"the way I think of my grandmother," said Nunberg. "I always go running to her.

In the early days of the transition, Bannon had encouraged the Trump team to read David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest.

If the new right had elected Trump, it was the older Fortune 100 executives who most pleased him

Media is personal. It is a series of blood scores. The media in its often collective mind decides who is going to rise and who is going to fall, who lives and who dies.

Whatever you could say by the spring of 2018 about the Trump White House, Jared had, for the most part, successfully navigated it—the only person, other than his wife, to have done so. And in the back channels of a world that he was counting on to play an essential role in securing his wealth, he had had a singular impact.

But now there seemed to be a new understanding: Donald Trump believed he had vastly more power, authority, and control than in fact he had, and he believed his talent for manipulating people and bending and dominating them was vastly greater than it was. Pushing this line of reasoning just a little further: senior staff believed the president had a problem with reality, and reality was now overwhelming him.