Quotes About Leadership

The president did not truly listen to anybody. The more you talked, the less he listened.

the Trump bubble. Trump was incapable of admitting vulnerability—any at all.

Pelosi, Bannon felt, saw the greater truth: the Trump administration would undo itself.

The issue was not that he might act precipitously and recklessly because he didn't understand the consequences of doing so. The issue was that he could not comprehend the actual choices that needed to be made in order to act; indeed, he could not even stay in the room long enough to decide on a course of action. For Trump, the fog of war would waylay him before the first command could be given.

Trump demanded subservience, but when he got it he was suspicious of the person providing it.

Confused to find that the power of the presidency had limitations, he came to see the limitations as his own

Trump was Trump—careless, capricious, disloyal, far beyond any sort of control.

better understand the rules: they worked for Donald Trump, not for the president of the United States.

His departure would return the Trump organization to pure family control—the family and its functionaries, without an internal rival for brand meaning and leadership. From the family's point of view, it would also—at least in theory—help facilitate one of the most implausible brand shifts in history: Donald Trump to respectability.

he could yet make a case for a straight line from Nixon to Trump.

His advisers didn't know whether he was an isolationist or a militarist, or whether he could distinguish between the two.

In politics, the smart move is not to say no and to know how to finesse yes.

He had little to no experience in foreign policy, but he had no respect for the experts,

We serve at the president's displeasure," another.

Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the Egyptian strongman, ably stroked the president and said, "You are a unique personality that is capable of doing the impossible." (To Sisi, Trump replied, "Love your shoes. Boy, those shoes. Man.…")

Nixon, Trump announced, was the greatest president.

It was the chaos of just doing things that actually got things done. Except, even if you assumed that not knowing how to do things didn't much matter if you just did them, it was still not clear who was going to do what you wanted to do.

Trump was a cold war president and China was his enemy

Who, among the right-minded and reasonably competent, would willingly work with Rudy?

As for the looming defeat itself, she shrugged it off: it was Reince Priebus's fault, not hers.

On March 27, the Office of American Innovation was created and Kushner was put in charge. Its stated mission was to reduce federal bureaucracy—that is, to reduce it by creating more of it, a committee to end committees.

As always, Trump's regard or scorn was infectious. If you were in favor, then whatever and whomever he associated with you was also in favor. If you weren't, then everything associated with you was poisonous.

unspoken agreement among them: not only would Donald Trump not be president, he should probably not be. Conveniently, the former conviction meant nobody had

he had no interest in personnel problems, since they put the emphasis on other people.