Quotes About Influence

just when you felt on top of the world in the Trump administration, you could probably count on getting cut down. That was the pattern and price of one-man leadership—insecure-man leadership.

charisma in the Christian sense.

just worry about who's jerking whose chain.

People who had the money to bribe, who fundamentally believed that anyone could be bribed, and who had outsize influence on the legal structures that might otherwise restrict bribery, had become major foreign policy players in key parts of the world.

Like the entire Saudi leadership, MBS had, practically speaking, no education.

president might have been involved usually became

The Tea Party movement, with Trump as its remarkable face and voice, had come to power—something like total power. It owned the Republican Party. Publicly breaking Paul Ryan was the obvious and necessary step.

Almost everybody in the White House followed Trump's thinking by tracking whom he had called the night before.)

it was the Jarvanka idea to try to trade off amnesty for the border wall.

In an age when all successful political candidates are surrounded by, if not at the beck and call of, difficult, even sociopathic, rich people pushing the bounds of their own power—and the richer they were, the more difficult, sociopathic, and power-mad they might be—

But Ailes was convinced that Trump had no political beliefs or backbone.

Media is personal. It is a series of blood scores. The media in its often collective 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—a law Hillary Clinton was not able to circumvent. The media has the last word.

His sons, Don Jr. and Eric—behind their backs known to Trump insiders as Uday and Qusay, after the sons of Saddam Hussein—wondered if there couldn't somehow be two parallel White House structures, one dedicated to their father's big-picture views, personal appearances, and salesmanship and the other concerned with day-to-day management issues.

The Kushner position was not helped by the fact that the president had been gleefully telling multiple people that Jared could solve the Middle East problem because the Kushners knew all the crooks in Israel.)

Bannon and Kushner were therefore more than a little irritated to discover that the unimposing Priebus had an agenda of his own: heeding Senate leader Mitch McConnell's prescription that "this president will sign whatever is put in front of him," while also taking advantage of the White House's lack of political and legislative experience and outsourcing as much policy as possible to Capitol Hill.

The Best and the Brightest. (One of the

The Best and the Brightest

His son-in-law and daughter hoped—they were even confident—that they could speak to DJT's better self, or at least balance Republican needs with progressive rationality, compassion, and good works.

Bob and Rebekah Mercer, who had set themselves up as almost professional fools.

the three men working hardest to maneuver the president—Bannon, Kushner, and Priebus.

Still, power provides its own excuses for social lapses.

Meanwhile, new ideas crept like a damp stain into the very fabric of Tang culture, casting a shadow across the world of the old aristocratic clans that had survived.

All propaganda has to be popular and has to adapt its spiritual level to the perception of the least intelligent of those towards whom it intends to direct itself." —Adolf Hitler

It doesn't require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires to people's minds." —Samuel Adams Naumann