Quotes from Michael Wolff

Trump believed he would never be proven guilty; therefore, he was innocent. And he carried the total confidence and even serenity of the innocent—or at least of someone who knows how difficult it is to establish the guilt of a person capable of admitting nothing, of never wavering.

A happy wife is a happy life," he said, echoing a popular rich-man truism.

For Walsh, it was a daily process of managing an impossible task: almost as soon as she received direction from one of the three men, she would be countermanded by one or another of them.

Donald Trump, whose cruelties, always great even when they were casual, were unbearable when he truly turned against you.

Whitestone became what everyone around Trump had to become—long-suffering—because Trump was always ready to explode with anger. "It's not your fault," said Whitestone. "It's just your turn, was how we put it." "How's the weather?" was the code for the boss's mood.

Bannon averred: "When you take out all the never-Trump guys who signed all those letters and all the neocons who got us in all these wars … it's not a deep bench.

He had little doubt that Trump was guilty of most of what he was accused of. "How did he get the dough for the primary and then for the general with his 'liquidity' issues?" asked Bannon with his hands out and his eyebrows up. "Let's not dwell.

They weren't operatives, they were believers, which is what Trump wanted them to be.

Trump's repeated brags about his relationship with Vladimir Putin and the nature of Trump's relationship with the Kremlin.

But, as Bannon emphasized, he was never going to get the facts right, nor was he ever going to acknowledge that he got them wrong, so therefore he was not going to get that approval. This meant, next best thing, that he had to be aggressively defended against the media's disapproval.

most of the leaks, certainly the juiciest ones, were coming from the higher-ups—not to mention from the person occupying the topmost echelon. The president couldn't stop talking.

Most members of Mueller's staff were already planning their exits. The once collegial mood among the nineteen attorneys who had worked on the investigation had turned, at best, sullen. Two years of investigation and internal debate had reduced the special counsel's broad mandate to a prudent, carefully defined pair of issues.

everybody understanding that nine-tenths of what came out of his mouth was blah-blah

Kushner was going to pursue as his first leadership mark a meeting with the Mexican president, whom his father-in-law had threatened and insulted throughout the campaign.

The DOJ," the president's source told him, "was filled with women who hated him.

When the president got on the phone after dinner, it was often a rambling affair. In paranoid or sadistic fashion, he'd speculate on the flaws and weaknesses of each member of his staff.

chronic naysayer, he viewed each member of his inner circle as a problem child whose fate he held in his hand. "We are sinners and he is God" was one view; "We serve at the president's displeasure," another.

The president's worst impulses seem to run through Conway without benefit of a filter.

On June 9, 2016, Don Jr., Jared, and Paul Manafort met with a movieworthy cast of dubious characters in Trump Tower after having been promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton. Don Jr., encouraged by Jared and Ivanka, was trying to impress his father that he had the stuff to rise in the campaign.

Jared and Ivanka had made an earnest deal between themselves: if sometime in the future the time came, she'd be the one to run for president (or the first one of them to take the shot).

they were unable to hire a law firm with a top-notch white-collar government practice. By 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.

Sean Spicer, whose job was literally to explain what people did and why, often simply could not—because nobody really had a job, because nobody could do a job.

Although the Republicans in the 2018 congressional races were looking, according to Bannon's numbers, at a 15-point deficit, it was Bannon's belief that the more extreme the right-wing challenge appeared, the more likely the Democrats would field left-wing nutters even less electable than right-wing nutters.

Trump did not want a White House that ran by any method other than to satisfy his desires.