Quotes About President

we could confidently call some of the most peculiar remarks ever delivered by an American president. "I know a lot about West Point, I'm a person who very strongly believes in academics. Every time I say I had an uncle who was a great professor at MIT for 35 years, who did a fantastic job in so many ways academically—he was an academic genius—and then they say, Is Donald Trump an intellectual? Trust me, I'm like a smart person.

We serve at the president's displeasure,

you just had to go with the president's whims. As for the president, it was quite clear that deciding between contradictory policy approaches was not his style of leadership. He simply hoped that difficult decisions would make themselves.

Much of the president's daily conversation was a repetitive rundown of what various anchors and hosts had said about him.

The next day Kellyanne Conway, her aggressive posture during the campaign turning more and more to petulance and self-pity, asserted the new president's right to claim "alternative facts." As it happened, Conway meant to say "alternative information," which at least would imply there might be additional data. But as uttered, it certainly sounded like the new administration was claiming the right to recast reality. Which, in a sense, it was.

The president, on the verge of starting a war with the FBI, the DOJ, and many in Congress, was going rogue.

Everyone, in his or her own way, struggled to express the baldly obvious fact that the president did not know enough, did not know what he didn't know, did not particularly care, and, to boot, was confident if not serene in his unquestioned certitudes. There was now a fair amount of back-of-the-classroom giggling about who had called Trump what.

Walsh, sitting within sight of the Oval Office, was located at something like the ground zero of the information flow between the president and his staff. As Trump's primary scheduler, her job was to ration the president's time and organize the flow of information to him around the priorities that the White House had set. In this, Walsh became the effective middle person among the three men working hardest to maneuver the president—Bannon, Kushner, and Priebus.

The first woman president, Ivanka entertained, would not be Hillary Clinton, it would be Ivanka Trump.

Cohn's derisive contempt for Kushner as well as the president was even greater. In return, the president heaped more abuse on Cohn—the former president of Goldman Sachs was now a "complete idiot, dumber than dumb.

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

this was another—and to some quite the ultimate—example of how difficult it was for the president to function in a literal, definitional, lawyerly, cause-and-effect political world.

It was a process of suggesting, in throw-it-against-the-wall style, what the president might want, and hoping he might then think that he had thought of this himself

They take everything I've ever said and exaggerate it," said the president in his first week in the White House during a late-night call. "It's all exaggerated. My exaggerations are exaggerated.

If Ryan could be counted on to handle Congress, thought the president, well, phew, that takes care of that.

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 Mexican president refused to construct a pretense for paying for the wall, a pretense that might have redounded to his vast advantage (without his having to actually pay for the wall).

Almost everybody in the campaign, still an extremely small outfit, thought of themselves as a clear-eyed team, as realistic about their prospects as perhaps any in politics. The unspoken agreement among them: not only would Donald Trump not be president, he should probably not be. Conveniently, the former conviction meant nobody had to deal with the latter issue.

McConnell's contempt for Trump was boundless. He was not just the stupidest president McConnell had ever dealt with, he was the stupidest person McConnell had ever met in politics—and that was saying something. He and his wife, Elaine Chao, the secretary of transportation, regularly mocked and mimicked Trump, a set piece they would perform for friends.

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.

The DOJ," the president's source told him, "was filled with women who hated him.

When the president got on the phone after dinner, it was often a rambling affair. In paranoid or sadistic fashion, he'd speculate on the flaws and weaknesses of each member of his staff.

The president's worst impulses seem to run through Conway without benefit of a filter.

In 2014, when he first seriously began to consider running for president, Melania was one of the few who thought it was possible he could win. It was a punch line for his daughter, Ivanka, who had carefully distanced herself from the campaign. With a never-too-hidden distaste for her stepmother, Ivanka would say to friends: All you have to know about Melania is that she thinks if he runs he'll certainly win.