Quotes About Trust

And it was not only calls from friends worried about him, but staffers calling people to call him and say Simmer down. "Who do you have in there?" said Joe Scarborough in a frantic call. "Who's the person you trust? Jared? Who can talk you through this stuff before you decided to act on it?" "Well," said the president, "you won't like the answer, but the answer is me. Me. I talk to myself.

One day, when Kushner accused Walsh of leaking about him, she challenged him back: "My phone records versus yours, my email versus yours.

He's supposed to be a fixer," said Trump about Cohen, "but he breaks a lot of stuff." All of Trump's people

But Thiel, who gave a speech supporting Trump at the Republican Convention in Cleveland, reported back that, even having been forewarned, he absolutely was certain of Trump's sincerity when he said they'd be friends for life—only never to basically hear from him again or have his calls returned.

He reprimanded the housekeeping staff for picking up his shirt from the floor: "If my shirt is on the floor, it's because I want it on the floor." Then he imposed a set of new rules: nobody touch anything, especially not his toothbrush. (He had a longtime fear of being poisoned, one reason why he liked to eat at McDonald's—nobody knew he was coming and the food was safely premade.)

His senior staff largely dealt with these dark hours by agreeing with him, no matter what he said.

Men who demand the most loyalty tend to be the least loyal pricks,

this was the fundamental hypothesis of the senior staff, shared by Walsh and everyone else: Trump must know what he was doing, his intuition must be profound.

the time Bannon and Priebus were back in Washington, three blue-chip firms had said no. All of them were afraid they would face a rebellion among the younger staff if they represented Trump, afraid Trump would publicly humiliate them if the going got tough, and afraid Trump would stiff them for the bill. In the end, nine top firms turned them down.

Trump, as almost anyone who had ever worked for him appreciated, was, despite what you hoped he might be, Trump—and he would invariably sour on everyone around him.

I think of Maggie Haberman"—the New York Times reporter covering Trump—"the way I think of my grandmother," said Nunberg. "I always go running to her.

most of the leaks, certainly the juiciest ones, were coming from the higher-ups—not to mention from the person occupying the topmost echelon. The president couldn't stop talking.

Trump admired her not because she had the political skills to protect him, but for her pliant dutifulness. Her job was to devote herself to his care and feeding.

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

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

This was why he had so naturally cottoned to the "fake news" label. "I've made stuff up forever, and they always print it," he bragged.

Fooling some of the people all of the time defined Trump's hard-core base.

the president was likely a fool and certainly a liar.

just worry about who's jerking whose chain.

Nobody now believed that firing Comey was a good idea;

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

You could tell him whatever you wanted, but he knew what he knew, and if what you said contradicted what he knew, he simply didn't believe you.

It didn't exactly surprise Bannon when Trump flipped; Bannon understood how easy it was to bullshit a bullshitter.

The organization therefore needed a set of internal rationalizations that would allow it to trust a man who, while he knew little, was entirely confident of his own gut instincts and reflexive opinions, however frequently they might change.