Quotes About Communication

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.

if they don't respond to sucking up, they might respond to piling on.

Bannon invariably found some reason to study papers in the corner and then to have a last word; Priebus kept his eye on Bannon; Kushner kept constant tabs on the whereabouts of the others.

He was postliterate—total television.

To Trump, he was just up against Sally Yates, who was, he steamed, "such a cunt.

Communication of this message required a coordinated effort. Each person's willingness to talk to Woodward was cross-checked against the willingness of several others to talk to him. This was part of Woodward's standard method of establishing a critical mass of inside sources: he created a kind of in-group, and this also suggested that if you failed to participate, you would not only lose your opportunity to be part of the in-group but lose your place in history

As often as not, he surprised himself. "What did I say?" he would ask after getting severe blowback.

The Russia story was—just two weeks into the new presidency—a dividing line with each side viewing the other as pushing fake news.

Here's the deal," a close Trump associate told Priebus. "In an hour meeting with him you're going to hear fifty-four minutes of stories and they're going to be the same stories over and over again. So you have to have one point to make and you have to pepper it in whenever you can.

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.

So clear was his inability to take any criticism or to participate in any honest argument about policy that the attempt was almost never made.

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.

Melania sometimes spoke Slovenian with Barron, particularly when her parents were around—and they were frequently around—infuriating Trump and causing him to bolt from any room they were in.

Bill Burck, for instance, represented Don McGahn, Steve Bannon, and Reince Priebus. As a consequence, all three men could communicate under the seal of their lawyer's privilege.

Trump, who referred to the Chinese leader as "Mr. X-i"; the president was told to think of him as a woman and call him "she.")

Bannon was, once again, gobsmacked. "When Ivanka and the Mooch can talk the commander in chief of the United States into thinking that people will believe that you had a double negative problem, you've left the Cartesian universe.

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.

everybody understanding that nine-tenths of what came out of his mouth was blah-blah

Kushner was going to pursue as his first leadership mark a meeting with the Mexican president, whom his father-in-law had threatened and insulted throughout the campaign.

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

Sean Spicer, whose job was literally to explain what people did and why, often simply could not—because nobody really had a job, because nobody could do a job.

It was, said Walsh, "like trying to figure out what a child wants.

As it happened, Conway meant to say "alternative information," which at least would imply there might be additional data.

The aide went on giddily talking about the special bond golfing dads have with their sons until it was clear that he was getting the Trump freeze—an ability to pretend you didn't exist while at the same time intimating that he might kill you if you did.