Quotes About Leadership

He puts natural predators at the table," Priebus said later. "Not just rivals—predators.

What a mess. Dowd shrugged his shoulders at the waste of time, but he saw the full nightmare. It was quite a sight seeing the president of the United States fuming like some aggrieved Shakespearean king.

Should I resign?" he asked Colin Powell, who had been the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1989 to 1993 under President George H. W. Bush. "Fuck no!" Powell said. "I told you never to take the job. You never should have taken the job. Trump's a fucking maniac.

Hillary Clinton spent her entire adult life getting ready for this moment. Trump hasn't spent a second getting ready for this moment.

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." But government lawyers had concluded that a military strike on a leader's command-and-control headquarters during hostilities would not violate the assassination ban.

Quarles accepted. Dowd thought he and Quarles worked well together. They could meet and talk, whereas Mueller was so rigid, he sometimes seemed like marble.

Barbara Tuchman's book The Guns of August

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Trump just loved to pit people against each other.

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.

Mike, this is not right!" Trump said

I'll just tell you," Mattis said, "the country I would most be willing to fight would be one whose entire officer corps had never heard a shot fired at them. War is so different from training that a shock wave will go through them. I've got—probably 80 percent of my officers have been shot at in one form or another. But I'd prefer not to put them through another war.

Trump was not dormant.

as long as you don't hit one of his third rails—immigration and the press are the two big ones. If you hit one, he is liable to go off on a tangent and not come back for a long time.

Bob Woodward

gather all the points of view, the data, integrate them if possible and present the president with some options, get a decision and develop an implementation plan.

That set the stage for a change agent. Hillary was the past. It was that clear.