Quotes from Michael Wolff

One of the frustrations of the Republicans is that they have been mostly unsuccessful in equating the word Clinton with Mafia, which, to them, seems so head-smackingly obvious.

The Steve Bannon I know - I locate Steve's politics as a Democrat circa 1962.

When 'Fire and Fury' came out, I thought Steve Bannon would certainly never speak to me again, and the truth is, he never stopped speaking.

I mean, can Donald Trump get elected again in 2020 without Steve Bannon? I would say no.

Rusbridger's intelligence, personal sense of higher calling and almost other-worldly self-absorption have played no small part in the stories that have most defined the Guardian and that, under another sort of steward, might have had a much more sceptical reception.

How advertising is handled has always been a key distinction between low and high order publishing. The higher you stood, the more separate you were from advertising, and, in the logic of snobbery, the greater a premium price the top brands would pay to be in your company.

Rusbridger had risen at the Guardian through the years when it not only had the support and fail-safe mechanism of the Scott Trust, but guaranteed operating income from public-service advertising. Nobody had to sell anything.

Politics is a literal game. Every word must represent a strict view - or be so abstract as to be meaningless.

Possibly the defining development of postmodern politics - naturally, an American one - is the separation of personality from ideology. If you are likeable, or at least not disagreeable, if you can strike a personal bond with the electorate, if you reassure rather than disrupt, it doesn't really matter what you stand for.

The Clintons are one of the most closed political organisations operating in America today. It is a kind of secret society.

Alan Rusbridger is, to many, among the most admired newspaper editors of our time.

More than any other president, save perhaps John F Kennedy, whose father ran a film studio, and Ronald Reagan, a leading man and governor of California, Trump is on a buddy basis with media moguls, a speed dialer with the heads of studios and media conglomerates.

The emerging notion of the Eighties was that publicity was a currency. The old view was that if you had a currency - your talent or your product - publicity might draw attention to it. The new view was that publicity in itself, highlighting you, bestowed value.

It's not implausible that Donald Trump could have been a successful President.

One of the secrets of Fox News' outsized success - it's the most profitable news organisation in the U.S. and, quite likely, the world - is that it saw the country full of liberal occupiers and Fox News' viewers as the heroic resistance.

Brexit and Trump had upended the fundamental establishment viewpoint that politics was aspirational, that good politics promised progress, generational betterment and ever-expanding world reach.

The Snowden story, which won the Guardiana Pulitzer Prize, became the realisation of Rusbridger's dream of a brand-building, left-wing-uniting, global and viral story.

President Donald J Trump and the U.S. media appear now to be split by deep doctrinal differences - of the constitutional crisis kind. But, virtually up until the split, Trump and the media were as one - a perfect symbiosis.

One of the great business virtues of high publishing was that it was a difficult business to enter. You had to stand for something.

If selling had been part of his job description, Rusbridger, who never met a pound he had to earn that didn't disgust him in some visceral way, would have been disqualified long ago. Indeed, his early enthusiasm for the Internet - and a continuing principle of faith for him - was that it was free.

Culture has no logic.

George W. Bush, on the dais, supplied what seemed likely to become the historic footnote to the Trump address: "That's some weird shit.

The Breitbart formula was to so appall the liberals that the base was doubly satisfied, generating clicks in a ricochet of disgust and delight. You defined yourself by your enemy's reaction. Conflict was the media bait—hence, now, the political chum. The new politics was not the art of the compromise but the art of conflict.

He sent his new press secretary, Sean Spicer—whose personal mantra would shortly become "You can't make this shit up"—to argue his case in a media moment that turned Spicer, quite a buttoned-down political professional, into a national joke, which he seemed destined to never recover from. To boot, the president blamed Spicer for not making the million phantom souls seem real.