Quotes About Trump

The Trump campaign had, perhaps less than inadvertently, replicated the scheme from Mel Brooks's The Producers. In

The fact that Trump had become the ultimate avatar of Fox's angry common man was another sign that we were living in an upside-down world.

The New York real estate deals were dirty, the Atlantic City ventures were dirty, the Trump airline was dirty, Mar-a-Lago, the golf courses, and the hotels all dirty. No reasonable candidate could have survived a recounting of even one of these deals. But somehow a genial amount of corruption had been figured into the Trump candidacy- that, after all, was the platform he was running on. I'll do for you what a tough businessman does for himself.

Operatives knew the game, and so did most candidates and officeholders. But Ailes was pretty sure Trump did not.Trump was undisciplined—he had no capacity for any game plan. He could not be a part of any organization, nor was he likely to subscribe to any program or principle. In Ailes's view, he was "a rebel without a cause." He was simply "Donald"—as though nothing more need be said.

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. This meant, next best thing, that he had to be aggressively defended against the media's disapproval.

Few people who knew Trump had illusions about him. That was almost his appeal: he was what he was. Twinkle in his eye, larceny in his soul.

Trump's wounded feelings—his sense of being shunned and unloved on the very day he became president—helped send that message. When he came off the podium after delivering his address, he kept repeating, "Nobody will forget this speech." George W. Bush, on the dais, supplied what seemed likely to become the historic footnote to the Trump address: "That's some weird shit.

Sooner or later, Trump felt contempt for anyone who showed him too much devotion.

His sons, Don Jr. and Eric—jokingly behind their backs known to Trump insiders as Uday and Qusay, after the sons of Saddam Hussein—

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.

Trump's home in Beverly Hills

He was a rebel, a disruptor, and, living outside the rules, contemptuous of them. A close Trump friend who was also a good Bill Clinton friend found them eerily similar—except that Clinton had a respectable front and Trump did not.

Trump, said Bannon, noting the obvious, was the least disciplined man in politics.

Trump didn't read. He didn't really even skim. If it was print, it might as well not exist...He was postliterate -- total television.

Trump, trying to move in on his friend's date, urged a stop in Atlantic City. He would provide a tour of his casino. His friend assured the model that there was nothing to recommend Atlantic City. It was a place overrun by white trash. "What is this 'white trash'?" asked the model. "They're people just like me," said Trump, "only they're poor.

Other than Trump himself, Bannon was certainly the oldest inexperienced person ever to work in the White House.

Even though Trump liked to portray his business as an empire, it was actually a discrete holding company and boutique enterprise,

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

While he wanted a job with the Trump administration, the Mooch specifically wanted one of the jobs that would give him a tax break on the sale of his business. A federal program provides for deferred payment of capital gains in the event of a sale of property to meet ethical requirements. Scaramucci needed a job that would get him a "certificate of divestiture," which is what an envious Scaramucci knew Gary Cohn had received for the sale of his Goldman stock.

The contrast between the two men, Comey and Trump, was in essence the contrast between good government and Trump himself. Comey came across as precise, compartmentalized, scrupulous in his presentation of the details of what transpired and the nature of his responsibility—he was as by-the-book as it gets. Trump, in the portrait offered by Comey, was shady, shoot-from-the-hip, heedless or even unaware of the rules, deceptive, and in it for himself.

few in the thin ranks of Trump's inner circle, with their overnight responsibility for assembling a government, had almost any relevant experience. Nobody had a political background. Nobody had a policy background. Nobody had a legislative background.

Trump certainly ran his business as though it were a criminal enterprise.

In the world of Trump, anything that he deemed of value either accrued to him or had been robbed from him.

Trump was the one variable that, in management terms, simply could not be controlled. He was like a recalcitrant two-year-old. If you tried to control him, it would only have the opposite effect.