Quotes from Michael Wolff

She was a nonevent on the campaign. She became a White House staffer and that's when people suddenly realized she's dumb as a brick. A little marketing savvy and has a look, but as far as understanding actually how the world works and what politics is and what it means—nothing. Once you expose that, you lose such credibility. Jared just kind of flits in and does the Arab stuff.

Confused to find that the power of the presidency had limitations, he came to see the limitations as his own

Trump was Trump—careless, capricious, disloyal, far beyond any sort of control.

The mantra was simple: if there was no Wall, there was no Trump. Stopping immigration was the Trump story.

better understand the rules: they worked for Donald Trump, not for the president of the United States.

the president's views of foreign policy and the world at large were among its most random, uninformed, and seemingly capricious aspects.

This required some tutoring for 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.")

Convinced he knew the direction of success, keenly aware of his own age and finite opportunities, and—if for no clear reason—seeing himself as a talented political infighter, Bannon sought to draw the line between believers and sell-outs, being and nothingness.

His departure would return the Trump organization to pure family control—the family and its functionaries, without an internal rival for brand meaning and leadership. From the family's point of view, it would also—at least in theory—help facilitate one of the most implausible brand shifts in history: Donald Trump to respectability.

that looseness with the truth, if not with reality itself, are an elemental thread of the book.

hurry. * * * Bannon had delved deeply into the nature

The president could fire the special counsel directly and justify that action by arguing that the special counsel regulations are unconstitutional insofar as they limit his ability to fire the special counsel.

he could yet make a case for a straight line from Nixon to Trump.

After the bill had been pulled that Friday, Katie Walsh, feeling both angry and disgusted, told Kushner she wanted out. Outlining what she saw as the grim debacle of the Trump White House, she spoke with harsh candor about bitter rivalries joined to vast incompetence and an uncertain mission.

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The first couple of times when I went to the White House, someone had to say, This is Mick Mulvaney, he's the budget director," said Mulvaney. And in Mulvaney's telling Trump was too scattershot to ever be of much help, tending to interrupt planning with random questions that seem to have come from someone's recent lobbying or by some burst of free association.

fundamental Bannonism: stop thinking you can somehow get along with your enemies.

Lou Dobbs, a mainstay of Trump support and philosophy, told Bannon he could not believe how delusional Trump had become.

His advisers didn't know whether he was an isolationist or a militarist, or whether he could distinguish between the two.

The real question, of course, was how Bannon, the fuck-the-system populist, had ever come to think that he might get along with Donald Trump, the use-the-system-to-his-own-advantage billionaire

His callers, largely because they found his conversation peculiar, alarming, or completely contrary to reason and common sense, often overrode what they might otherwise have assumed to be the confidential nature of the calls and shared the content with someone else.

Donald Trump may have done any number of things that, given good sense and the letter of the law, he should not have done. But with his short attention span, inability to manage multiple variables, exclusive focus on his own immediate needs, and general disregard of all future outcomes, the notion of pinning a grand conspiracy on him seemed like a big stretch.

Having attained the unimaginable—bringing a fierce alt-right, antiliberal ethnopopulism into a central place in the White House—Bannon found himself face to face with the untenable: undermined by and having to answer to rich, entitled Democrats.

In politics, the smart move is not to say no and to know how to finesse yes.