Quotes About Trump

In the trial and throughout Trump's presidency, there was never any doubt about his character or his conduct—his dishonesty, his arrogance, his ignorance, and his narcissism.

The White House released the military aid to Ukraine after allegations of the link to the Biden investigation became public. In other words, the Trump administration released the aid only because it was caught linking the aid to the quest for political dirt.

Trump did, in short, exactly what Mueller said he did. The two men—president and prosecutor—were like photo negatives of each other. Trump could not tell the truth, and Mueller could not tell a lie.

In the early 1990s, Trump made a disastrous foray into the gambling business in Atlantic City, and his empire nearly collapsed in multiple bankruptcies.

The Trump of The Apprentice—steely, decisive, well versed in the ways of business and of the world—was a creation of the producers of the program.

But Trump responded to the coronavirus with the same belligerent dishonesty that characterized his treatment of Mueller and impeachment. In the critical early days of the pandemic, when it might have been contained, he behaved with characteristic self-obsession, preferring to hound his enemies on Twitter rather than to learn the facts about the virus and protect the American people.

This was especially true in the months leading up to the 2016 election, when the FBI conducted two politically explosive investigations: the first, about Hillary Clinton's email practices at the State Department, became widely known, while the second, about possible Russian infiltration of the Trump campaign, never became public before Election Day.

But Comey and company came to realize—as others would soon learn in the crucible of Donald Trump's presidency—that they had no idea of the magnitude of his flaws, of his narcissism, sociopathy, and ignorance. Trump's only concern was his feral self-interest, his only belief was that those around him existed to serve him.

On June 18, 2013, just after Trump announced that the Miss Universe pageant would take place in Russia, he tweeted, with a kind of desperate giddiness, "Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow—if so, will he become my new best friend?

As a presidential candidate, Trump continued working on a plan to build in Russia.

By 2018, the world had become largely inured to Trump's tweets—even with their racism and misogyny, their mindless belligerence, norm-shattering impropriety, and constant lies.

Certainly, Mueller found abundant evidence that Trump and his campaign wanted to collude and conspire with Russia, but they hadn't been able to close the deal.

Mueller had uncovered extensive evidence that Trump committed the crime of obstruction of justice—repeatedly.

It wasn't that Mueller was unable to reach a conclusion about whether Trump committed a crime but that under the circumstances he chose not to do so. In other words, Quarles said, Mueller could reach a determination, but he would not.

The president and first lady arrived a few minutes later, and Trump immediately walked up to Hutson, ogled her up and down, and said to Giuliani, "Great job, Rudy!" (Melania Trump, disgusted by her husband's leering, walked off and refused to pose for photographs.)

In personal and political terms, Trump was incapable of empathy. Dirt on his political opponents was "big stuff"; the American national interest, as well as the lives of Ukrainians at war, was not. There was no need for a more complicated explanation for the root of the scandal that would soon engulf the president.

Still, the whistle-blower served Trump's need for an enemy—a target for his wrath and blame. If Trump had accomplices—people like Nunes who were willing to sanction his lying and bullying—that was so much the better.

The Mueller Report spelled it out clearly. Trump told Comey to lay off Michael Flynn; when Comey didn't, Trump fired Comey. Trump tried to undermine Mueller, and then he ordered McGahn to oust the prosecutor; then Trump told McGahn to lie about it. These were illegal acts—in conception and execution. These were crimes, even if Mueller stopped short of saying that they were.

Trump neither knew nor cared about the distinction between his personal lawyer and the attorney general of the United States.

the phone call was the linchpin of the impeachment case against Trump, it was far from the only evidence

Trump sometimes bantered about Vietnam with radio host Howard Stern. He referred to trying to avoid sexually transmitted diseases on the dating scene as "my personal Vietnam." "It's pretty dangerous out there," he said in 1993. "It's like Vietnam.

At every turn, Mueller chose public service over private gain; Trump did the opposite.

Mueller and his team were disciplined, restrained, and orderly; they avoided publicity, and their presentations to the public—especially the Mueller Report, which closed their work—hewed scrupulously to provable facts. Trump was in every way their opposite, and his public statements were medleys of invective and falsehood.

With regard to Ukraine, Giuliani steered Trump to disaster, in probably the greatest failure of lawyering in the history of presidential scandals. In other words, no Giuliani, no impeachment.