Quotes from Michael Wolff

Look, Kasowitz has known him for twenty-five years. Kasowitz has gotten him out of all kinds of jams. Kasowitz on the campaign—what did we have, a hundred women? Kasowitz took care of all of them. And now he lasts, what, four weeks? He's in the mumble tank. This is New York's toughest lawyer, broken. Mark Corallo, toughest motherfucker I ever met, just can't do it.

The conundrum was that conservative media saw Trump as its creature, while Trump saw himself as a star, a vaunted and valued product of all media, one climbing ever higher. It was a cult of personality, and he was the personality. He was the most famous man in the world. Everybody loved him—or ought to.

Media is personal. It is a series of blood scores. The media in its often collectively mind decides who is going to rise and who is going to fall, who lives and who dies. If you stay around long enough in the media eye, your fate, like that of a banana republic despot, is often an unkind one of a law Hillary Clinton was not able to circumvent. The media was the last word.

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.

Kushner had his personal press operation and Bannon had his. The leaking culture had become so open and overt—most of the time everybody could identify everybody else's leaks—that it was now formally staffed.

Trump often spoke of himself in the third person. Trump did this. The Trumpster did that. So powerful was this persona, or role, that he seemed reluctant, or unable, to give it up in favor of being president—or presidential.

There would be, in other words, one chief of staff in name—the unimportant one—and various others, more important, in practice, ensuring both chaos and Trump's own undisputed independence. Jim Baker, chief of staff for both Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush and almost everybody's model for managing the West Wing, advised Priebus not to take the job.

He had somehow won the race for president, but his brain seemed incapable of performing what would be essential tasks in his new job. He had no ability to plan and organize and pay attention and switch focus; he had never been able to tailor his behavior to what the goals at hand reasonably required. On the most basic level, he simply could not link cause and effect.

He was the ultimate antiliberal: an authoritarian who was the living embodiment of resistance to authority.

In politics somebody has to lose, but invariably everybody thinks they can win.

For Trump, as for many showmen or press release entrepreneurs, the enemy of everything is complexity and red tape, and the solution for everything is cutting corners. Bypass or ignore the difficulties; just move in a straight line to the vision, which, if it's bold enough, or grandiose enough, will sell itself.

It's just a conspiracy theory." And, he added, the Trump team wasn't capable of conspiring about anything.

Bannon, Conway, and Hicks—along with an assortment of more or less peculiar ideologues that had attached themselves to Trump and, of course, his family, all people without clearly monetizable reputations before their association with Trump—were, for better or worse, hitched to him.

In this regard, Bannon was not so much an entrepreneur of vision or even business discipline, he was more simply following the money - or trying to separate a fool from his money. He could not have done better than Bob and Rebekah Mercer.

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.

the week of July 24 was a head-slammer. First, it opened the next episode in what had become a comic-opera

In a continuing sign of Trump's Rashomon effect—his speeches inspiring joy or horror—witnesses would describe his reception at the CIA as either a Beatles-like emotional outpouring or a response so confounded and appalled that, in the seconds after he finished, you could hear a pin drop.

Murdoch is a brilliant and manipulative bastard; Evans is a brilliant and easily manipulated man of taste and honor.

Elon Musk, in Trump Tower, pitched Trump on the new administration's joining him in his race to Mars, which Trump jumped at.

if they don't respond to sucking up, they might respond to piling on.

The president, while often a fabulist in his depiction of the world, was quite a literalist when it came to how he saw himself.

You could hardly find an entity more at odds with military discipline than a Trump organization.

But if Halberstam defined the presidential mien, Trump defied it—and defiled it.

The less likely a presidential candidate is, the more unlikely, and, often, inexperienced, his aides are—that is, an unlikely candidate can attract only unlikely aides, as the likely ones go to the more likely candidates. When an unlikely candidate wins—and as outsiders become ever more the quadrennial flavor of the month, the more likely an unlikely candidate is to get elected—ever more peculiar people fill the White House.