Quotes from Michael Wolff

Donald Trump and his tiny band of campaign warriors were ready to lose with fire and fury. They were not ready to win. *

But not only didn't he read, he didn't listen. He preferred to be the person talking.

The Trump campaign had, perhaps less than inadvertently, replicated the scheme from Mel Brooks's The Producers. In

The fact that Trump had become the ultimate avatar of Fox's angry common man was another sign that we were living in an upside-down world.

just when you felt on top of the world in the Trump administration, you could probably count on getting cut down. That was the pattern and price of one-man leadership—insecure-man leadership.

The President didn't seem to realize that in order to make sound decisions there needed to be at least one adult in the room.

The New York real estate deals were dirty, the Atlantic City ventures were dirty, the Trump airline was dirty, Mar-a-Lago, the golf courses, and the hotels all dirty. No reasonable candidate could have survived a recounting of even one of these deals. But somehow a genial amount of corruption had been figured into the Trump candidacy- that, after all, was the platform he was running on. I'll do for you what a tough businessman does for himself.

he had never been able to tailor his behavior to what the goals at hand reasonably required.

Operatives knew the game, and so did most candidates and officeholders. But Ailes was pretty sure Trump did not.Trump was undisciplined—he had no capacity for any game plan. He could not be a part of any organization, nor was he likely to subscribe to any program or principle. In Ailes's view, he was "a rebel without a cause." He was simply "Donald"—as though nothing more need be said.

the firing of FBI director James Comey may be the most consequential move ever made by a modern president acting entirely on his own.

charisma in the Christian sense.

He wasn't a tough guy. He was "a big warm-hearted monkey," said Bannon, with rather faint praise.

Trump craved media approval. 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.

the president was likely a fool and certainly a liar.

Few people who knew Trump had illusions about him. That was almost his appeal: he was what he was. Twinkle in his eye, larceny in his soul.

Almost all the professionals who were now set to join him were coming face to face with the fact that it appeared he knew nothing.

Trump's wounded feelings—his sense of being shunned and unloved on the very day he became president—helped send that message. When he came off the podium after delivering his address, he kept repeating, "Nobody will forget this speech." George W. Bush, on the dais, supplied what seemed likely to become the historic footnote to the Trump address: "That's some weird shit.

He believed he could spook the other side.

just worry about who's jerking whose chain.

The two prosecutors also delved into the president's personal life. How often did he cheat on his wife? With whom? How were trysts arranged? What were the president's sexual interests?

She treated her father with some lightness, even irony, and in at least one television interview she made fun of his comb-over. She often described the mechanics behind it to friends: an absolutely clean pate—a contained island after scalp reduction surgery—surrounded by a furry circle of hair around the sides and front, from which all ends are drawn up to meet in the center and then swept back and secured by a stiffening spray.

Almost all the professionals who were now set to join him were coming face to face with the fact that it appeared he knew nothing. There was simply no subject, other than perhaps building construction, that he had substantially mastered.

Well," said the president, "you won't like the answer, but the answer is me. Me. I talk to myself.

I am in a constant state of shock and horror.