Quotes About Trump

Bannon was making his first official pubic appearance of the Trump presidency,

The conundrum was that conservative media saw Trump as its creature, while Trump saw himself as a star, a vaunted and valued product of all media, one climbing ever higher. It was a cult of personality, and he was the personality. He was the most famous man in the world. Everybody loved him—or ought to.

Trump often spoke of himself in the third person. Trump did this. The Trumpster did that. So powerful was this persona, or role, that he seemed reluctant, or unable, to give it up in favor of being president—or presidential.

It's just a conspiracy theory." And, he added, the Trump team wasn't capable of conspiring about anything.

Trump craved media approval. But, as Bannon emphasized, he was never going to get the facts right, nor was he ever going to acknowledge that he got them wrong, so therefore he was not going to get that approval.

In a continuing sign of Trump's Rashomon effect—his speeches inspiring joy or horror—witnesses would describe his reception at the CIA as either a Beatles-like emotional outpouring or a response so confounded and appalled that, in the seconds after he finished, you could hear a pin drop.

Elon Musk, in Trump Tower, pitched Trump on the new administration's joining him in his race to Mars, which Trump jumped at.

You could hardly find an entity more at odds with military discipline than a Trump organization.

But if Halberstam defined the presidential mien, Trump defied it—and defiled it.

The leitmotif for Trump about his own campaign was how crappy it was and how everybody involved in it was a loser.

Trump could bring Trumpism down...

But Trump was a simple machine. Whitestone understood his singular interests—sports and girls—and learned they could be used as reliable distractions.

Good management reduces ego. But in the Trump White House, it could often seem that nothing happened, that reality simply did not exist, if it did not happen in Trump's presence.

If I told Trump that, he might have the job.

What is looking like unhinged chaos is actually him in a place of comfort," tweeted Maggie Haberman, one of the Times reporters on the Trump beat. Haberman, who likes to assert a stubborn ownership of the Trump story, implies something approximating presidential strategy and point of view.

Here was a perfect example of an essential Trump paradigm: he acceded to anyone who seemed to know more about any issue he didn't care about, or simply one whose details he couldn't bring himself to focus on closely. Great! he would say, punctuating every statement with a similar exclamation and regularly making an effort to jump from his chair.

Pecker was often mocked by Trump as "Little Pecker," and his mustache was the target of derisive and obscene remarks. (Curiously, Pecker bore a resemblance to Trump's father, who also wore a mustache.)

Trump added another tic, a lifelong sense that people were constantly taking unfair advantage of him.

But the point really was that Trump had wanted to confront and humiliate the FBI director. Cruelty was a Trump attribute.

Being a Trump staffer had become an existential predicament: even if you wanted to get out, and almost all of them did, there was nowhere to go.

On May 17, twelve days after FBI director Comey was fired, without consulting the White House or the attorney general, Rosenstein appointed former FBI director Robert Mueller to oversee the investigation of Trump's, his campaign's, and his staff's ties to Russia.

He was, after all, Donald Trump, however much you shined him up.

If the media, self-righteously, saw it as the Holy Grail and silver bullet of Trump destruction, and the Trump White House saw it, with quite some self-pity, as a desperate effort to concoct a scandal, there was also a range of smart money in the middle.

Hyper-by-the-book Rod Rosenstein—heretofore the quintessential apolitical player—immediately became, in Washington eyes, a hopeless Trump tool. But Rosenstein's revenge was deft, swift, overwhelming, and (of course) by the book.