Quotes from Bob Woodward

Bossie said he had a roadmap. "It's the conservative movement. Tea Party comes and goes. Populism comes and goes. The conservative movement has been a bedrock since Goldwater.

It's not what we did for the country," Cohn said privately. "It's what we saved him from doing.

the real battle was going to be over tariffs, where Trump had the most rigid views and where he could do the most damage to the U.S. and world economies.

was apparent the president was aware of the criticism he was receiving about his handling of the coronavirus. After surviving the 22-month-long Mueller investigation and the third impeachment trial in United States history, the real dynamite behind the door was the virus. The lives and livelihoods of tens of millions of Americans hung in the balance with every decision he made in dealing with the coronavirus.

excessive anger against authority, vindictiveness and temper tantrums. As far as she was concerned, that described the press.

His theory of negotiation was that to get to yes, you first had to say no.

The president maintained his upbeat rhetoric in the early weeks of the virus had been deliberate. "I wanted to always play it down," Trump told me, as I reported earlier in this book. "I still like playing it down, because I don't want to create a panic.

Trump just loved to pit people against each other.

Trump was always asking everyone their opinions of everyone else, seeking a report card. It was corrosive and could become self-fulfilling— undermining and eating at the reputations and status of anyone and everyone.

This is going to be fun, Bannon thought, as Mattis made the case that the organizing principles of the past were still workable and necessary. There it was—the beating heart of the problem, Bannon thought.

The World Trade Organization is the worst organization ever created!" Trump said.

An executive order signed in 1981 by President Reagan stated, "No person employed by or acting on behalf of the U.S. government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.

conservative lawyer John Yoo at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught. Yoo had sterling credentials in conservative legal circles. An alum of George W. Bush's Justice Department, he was the author of the "torture memos," which provided a legal basis for torturing detainees in the war on terror and had also been a Supreme Court law clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas.

A missile from North Korea would take 38 minutes to reach Los Angeles.

For years the CIA had run a 3,000-man top secret covert army in Afghanistan. The CTPT, short for Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams, were Afghans paid, trained and controlled by the CIA. They were the best Afghan fighters, the cream of the crop. They killed or captured Taliban insurgents and often went into tribal areas to eliminate them. They conducted dangerous and highly controversial cross-border operations into neighboring Pakistan.

The September 5, 2017, draft letter to the South Korean president withdrawing from the trade agreement.

Trump was a guy who "never went to class. Never got the syllabus. Never took a note. Never went to a lecture. The night before the final, he comes in at midnight from the fraternity house, puts on a pot of coffee, takes your notes, memorizes as much as he can, walks in at 8 in the morning and gets a C. And that's good enough. He's going to be a billionaire.

Mike, this is not right!" Trump said

The White House argument would be strong. Ziegler and St. Clair would pound away at the ghastly spectacle of a President on trial in a courtroom. There seemed to be some reasonableness to the position they would probably take. What would the President do if someone started a nuclear war - ask for a recess?

Suppose," I asked, "Donald Trump was on the Supreme Court, how would he vote on this? I don't see you voting against freedom for more people—" "I don't want to comment," he said. I

Next, Cohn repeated what everyone was saying: Interest rates were going to go up over the foreseeable future. I agree, Trump said. "We should just go borrow a lot of money right now, hold it, and then sell it and make money." Cohn was astounded at Trump's lack of basic understanding. He tried to explain. If you as the federal government borrow money through issuing bonds, you are increasing the U.S. deficit.

With the release of the transcripts Nixon had allowed America into the ugliness of his mind - as of he wanted the world to participate in the despoliation of the myth of presidential behavior. The transcripts, Garment thought, were an invasion of the public's privacy, of its right not to know. That was the truly impeachable offense: letting everyone see.

four principles: simplification of the tax code, tax relief for middle-income families, job creation and wage growth, and bringing back and taxing the trillions of corporate dollars stashed overseas.

It's also more deadly than even your strenuous flus.