Quotes from Michael Wolff

The more acute the stress, the more active the leakers, the bigger the story.

In 2014, when he first seriously began to consider running for president, Melania was one of the few who thought it was possible he could win. It was a punch line for his daughter, Ivanka, who had carefully distanced herself from the campaign. With a never-too-hidden distaste for her stepmother, Ivanka would say to friends: All you have to know about Melania is that she thinks if he runs he'll certainly win.

transmogrification

Weissmann had promised to see the investigation through to the end. But now, bitterly disappointed, he would tell friends, by how narrowly Mueller had come to focus the scope of the investigation, he wanted to stay not a moment longer.

In business meetings, observers would be nonplussed that Charlie and Jared Kushner invariably greeted each other with a kiss and that the adult Jared called his father Daddy.

In Trump's 2011 CPAC address he specifically calls for a relaxation of immigration restrictions for Europeans . . . that we should re-create an America that was far more stable and more beautiful. . . . No other conservative politician would say those things . . . but on the other hand pretty much everyone thought it . . . so it's powerful to say it. . . . Clearly [there's] a normalization process going on.

It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything.… Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.

It was all too possible that the hardly plausible would lead to the totally credible.

Dopey Don Jr. (Fredo, as Steve Bannon would dub him, in one of his frequent Godfather borrowings) was simply trying to prove he was a player and a go-to guy.

resisters, working in the Trump White House, who had come to see themselves as patriots protecting the country from the president they worked for.

Bannon learned about the piece when fact-checkers from the magazine called him for comment about Scaramucci's accusation that he sucked his own cock.)

I now understand what it is like to be in the court of the Tudors," reflected Bannon.

Real estate was the world's favorite money-laundering currency,

New York, the world's largest Jewish city.

It was, said Walsh, "like trying to figure out what a child wants.

As it happened, Conway meant to say "alternative information," which at least would imply there might be additional data.

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. If Trump's ascent

what if it was precisely the absence of intent and, instead, the swings of irrationality and mania that managed, even as his government collapsed, to hold so many people in thrall?

Bannon's strategic view of government was shock and awe. Dominate rather than negotiate. Having daydreamed his way into ultimate bureaucratic power, he did not want to see himself as a bureaucrat. He was of a higher purpose and moral order. He was an avenger. He was also, he believed, a straight shooter. There was a moral order in aligning language and action—if you said you were going to do something, you do it.

Donald Trump became a symbol of the media's own self-loathing: the interest in and promotion of Donald Trump was a morality tale about the media.

David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest.

Trump's need for constant affirmation and his almost complete inability to talk about anything but himself.

But if Halberstam defined the presidential mien, Trump defied it—and defiled it. Not a single attribute would place him credibly in the revered circle of American presidential character and power.

Kushner, in fact, now believed Bannon would do anything to destroy them. This was personal. After months of defending Bannon against liberal media innuendo, Kushner had concluded that Bannon was an anti-Semite. That was the bottom-line issue.