Quotes from Bob Woodward

Smith, 55, described sitting in the aisle seat in row 26 on the Alaska Airlines 5 p.m. flight out of Washington Reagan National Airport to Seattle on the day after the insurrection at the Capitol. He was surrounded by what looked like nearly 100 MAGA hat–wearing Trump supporters.

Two days after the January 6, 2021, violent assault on the United States Capitol by supporters of President Donald Trump, General Mark Milley, the nation's senior military officer and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, placed an urgent call on a top secret, back-channel line at 7:03 a.m. to his Chinese counterpart, General Li Zuocheng, chief of the Joint Staff of the People's Liberation Army.

Smith liked to think of Donald Trump as a hundred-year flood in American democracy. But he told colleagues there was nothing Congress could put into law to protect the country if a lunatic wound up in the White House. The war-making power was ceded to the president as commander in chief. The only power Congress had, in a practical sense, was to cut off the money. He believed the system for controlling the use of nuclear weapons was vulnerable.

Some 24 hours after Trump wins, we call the question on Ryan and he's finished. We take over the House of Representatives. And then we have a real revolution." Bannon was still worried, though he saw some positives

Esper had not learned how to play the necessary politics that went with the job of being Trump's secretary of defense.

Pompeo said it was turning in a direction that was perilous for the republic. "We've got to stand shoulder to shoulder," Pompeo said. "We're the last of the Mohicans.

And the fact is, I don't want him looking like an idiot. And I'm not going to sit there and let him look like an idiot. And you publish that transcript, because everything leaks in Washington, and the guys overseas are going to say, I told you he was an idiot. I told you he was a goddamn dumbbell. What

As a kid, I read a lot about the Holocaust and Germany in the 1930s, (Bernie) Sanders later told others. Germany was one of the most cultured countries in Europe. One of the most advanced countries. So how could a country of Beethoven, of so many poets and writers, and Einstein, progress to barbarianism? How does that happen? We have to tackle that question. and it's not easy.

America First often meant America Only.

not take an oath to a king, or a queen," Milley told the crowd, "to a tyrant or a dictator. We do not take an oath to an individual. No, we do not take an

Mattis once called Trump's tendency to wander off during briefings "Seattle freeway off-ramps to nowhere," where Fox News items were "more salient to him.

One of Nixon's speechwriters never deluded himself about Nixon's darker instincts, his paranoia, the capacity for hatred, the need for revenge, the will to crush anyone he perceived as an enemy.

His attention span is like a minus number. His sole purpose is to get reelected.

Fabrizio underscored his conclusion: As we have seen many times before, it isn't POTUS policies that cause the biggest problem, it is voters' reactions to his temperament and behavior.

Biden should have said, "Trump is what happens when you don't have enough Washington experience. Trump is what happens when you don't know your way around Capitol Hill like I do. For those of you who miss the Obama years, I'm your guy.

I was the Ernest Hemingway of 140 characters.

Once at Haldeman's 7:45 a.m. senior staff meeting, Moynihan grew so frustrated at the wandering discussion that he raised his clenched fist, brought it down hard on the table, and shouted, "Fuck!" There was immediate silence. Butterfield watched everyone turn to Rose Woods, the only woman at the meeting, in horror and embarrassment.

At 12:01 p.m., several Secret Service agents began reducing their setup around the estate. Trump was no longer president. No more access to the nuclear "football." The security footprint shrunk in an instant.

reducing the total vote count for Democrats. The same could potentially be activated to reduce Trump votes in Republican districts.

Meadows also worked in whispers, loving pull-asides and closed meetings. But he was not reserved. If anything, some Trump aides found him too emotional. He openly cried in the West Wing on several occasions when dealing with tricky personnel and political decisions.

K [Kissinger] called from New York all disturbed because he felt someone had been getting to the P [President] on Vietnam... Henry's concerned that the P's looking for a way to bug out and he thinks that would be a disaster now.

But overall, the theme is that they, as an authoritarian government, with all their surveillance state and their concentration camps and all that sort of thing, offer a better alternative for the world, a more efficient alternative, a kind of weird, nationalistic, technocratic alternative to the world that's better than liberal democracy.

Populism was a grassroots movement to disrupt the political status quo in favor of everyday people.

For those of you who were critical that nobody paid enough attention to the generals at the beginning of the war, has it occurred to you that you don't want to make that mistake at the end of the war? Secretary Robert Gates