Quotes from Michael Wolff

said the president in his first week in the White House during a late-night call. "It's all exaggerated. My exaggerations are exaggerated.

But the prospect of her husband's actually becoming president was, for Melania, a horrifying one. She believed it would destroy her carefully sheltered life—one sheltered, not inconsiderably, from the extended Trump family—which was almost entirely focused on her young son.

it confirmed Bannon's worst fear: Trump, in his true heart, was a marshmallow.

Trump loved to hear complain about the CIA and the haplessness of American spies, had been told by his friends that it had not been a good idea to take $45,000 from the Russians for a speech. "Well, it would only be a problem if we won," he assured them, knowing that it would therefore not be a problem.

He can't walk down steps … can't walk down hills. [He's got] mental blocks … [He] can't handle numbers … they have no meaning to him.

less a person than a collection of terrible traits.

The point could hardly have been clearer: if the president was pressuring the director because he feared that an investigation of Michael Flynn would damage him, then this was an obstruction of justice.

Others were now recruited and, despite their obvious impressions of the man, agreed to sign on. Jim Mattis, a retired four-star general, one of the most respected commanders in the U.S. armed forces; Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil; Scott Pruitt and Betsy DeVos, Jeb Bush loyalists—all of them were now focused on the singular fact that while he might be a peculiar figure, even an absurd-seeming one, he had been elected president

Here was yet another battle to be won or lost. Bannon regarded Kushner and Cohn (and Ivanka) as occupying an alternative reality that had little bearing on the real Trump revolution. Kushner and Cohn saw Bannon as not just destructive but self-destructive, and they were confident he would destroy himself before he destroyed them. In the Trump White House, observed Henry Kissinger, "it is a war between the Jews and the non-Jews.

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

And it was not only calls from friends worried about him, but staffers calling people to call him and say Simmer down. "Who do you have in there?" said Joe Scarborough in a frantic call. "Who's the person you trust? Jared? Who can talk you through this stuff before you decided to act on it?" "Well," said the president, "you won't like the answer, but the answer is me. Me. I talk to myself.

Trump's entire world was construed from what he saw on television.

you don't know what he hears because he just talks.

while he was often most influenced by the last person he spoke to, he did not actually listen to anyone. So it was not so much the force of an individual argument or petition that moved him, but rather more just someone's presence, the connection of what was going through his mind—and although he was a person of many obsessions, much of what was on his mind had no fixed view—to whomever he was with and their views.

One day, when Kushner accused Walsh of leaking about him, she challenged him back: "My phone records versus yours, my email versus yours.

Chaos was Steve's strategy," said Walsh.

For the media, Cohen was a reliable leaker about Trump and the campaign. Among senior campaign aides, he was later regarded as a central voice in NBC correspondent Katy Tur's book about the campaign,

He's supposed to be a fixer," said Trump about Cohen, "but he breaks a lot of stuff." All of Trump's people

Trump was not a politician who could parse factions of support and opprobrium; he was a salesman who needed to make a sale. "I won. I am the winner. I am not the loser," he repeated, incredulously, like a mantra.

Bannon had announced himself as Trump's brain, a boast that vastly irritated the president.

Some thought him dyslexic; certainly his comprehension was limited.

Later that evening, a concert at the Lincoln Memorial, part of an always awkward effort to import pop culture to Washington, ended up, absent any star power, with Trump himself taking the stage as the featured act, angrily insisting to aides that he could outdraw any star.

He simply hoped that difficult decisions would make themselves.

there was another rationalization: Trump was "inspirational not operational.