Quotes About Trump

It may be an overstatement, though not much of one, to say that James Comey was responsible for both the election of Donald Trump and the appointment of Robert Mueller.

The Trump campaign was disorganized in the best of circumstances, and its policy apparatus was an especially neglected corner. ("Policy" on the campaign

The Trump campaign was disorganized in the best of circumstances, and its policy apparatus was an especially neglected corner. ("Policy" on the campaign was whatever Trump happened to say on any given day.)

As for his news conferences about the virus, Trump boasted, as thousands of his fellow citizens were dying, that "the ratings are through the roof according to, of all sources, the Failing New York Times, 'Monday Night Football, Bachelor Finale' type numbers.

The brief devoted little attention to defending Trump's actual conduct. Nor, really, did Trump's lawyers deny what he was alleged to have done.

Crossfire Hurricane was a counterintelligence operation—to find out what Russia was doing, not to find out what the Trump campaign was doing. In other words, in the summer of 2016, the FBI was investigating Russian efforts to manipulate individuals within the Trump campaign, but not the Trump campaign itself.

The closest he came to doing business in Russia was in 2007, when he signed a distribution deal for his Trump-branded vodka to be sold there. (It flopped in Russia, as it did elsewhere.)

For Trump, his presidency was more about him than what he could accomplish. For this reason, the only verdict that has ever mattered to Trump is the one rendered on Election Day.

In October 2015, a time when he had already been running for president for several months, Trump signed a nonbinding letter of intent to license the Trump name to a potential office tower in Moscow.

Trump's psychological deficits—his narcissism, his lack of empathy, his short attention span—were almost comically conspicuous, and so, too, was his tendency to project his deficits onto others.

Thanks in part to the tutelage of Roy Cohn, his first lawyer and the one he admired most, Trump approached the courtroom with his customary cynicism. All that mattered was winning, regardless of what norms, or people, he had to trample in the process.

Attorney-client privilege covered only conversations between lawyers and clients, so Jared and Ivanka's presence meant that the conversations with Trump's lawyers would not be privileged. But no one seemed to care, least of all the president.

Through sheer repetition of the Trump gloss on the Trump Tower story, it lost much of its ability to appall and outrage.

The Trump Tower meeting told the Russians a great deal about the Trump campaign, and it told the Mueller investigation a lot, too.

But Trump could never process any interest except his own, and he regarded all executive branch employees as working for him personally.

Mueller's report, if read carefully, establishes that Trump committed several acts of criminal obstruction of justice. The impeachment proceedings against both Nixon and Clinton were rooted in charges of obstruction of justice, and Trump's offenses were even more extensive and enduring.

Barr neglected to mention that the investigation that was under way when Trump took office took place because the Russian government engaged in a systematic attempt to help Trump win the election, which Trump and his staff encouraged.

Rosenstein had never been in the Oval Office or met Trump before this day, and he received a fast introduction to the president's conversational style—the meandering subject matter, the mumbled sentence fragments, the persistent aggression.

Trump finally had what he had wanted all along—an attorney general who put Trump's personal political well-being ahead of the national interest, the traditions of the Justice Department, and the rule of law.

For two years, in response to the Mueller probe of foreign involvement in the 2016 election, Trump had made his mantra "no collusion." And here was his personal attorney heading overseas to collude with Ukraine to help Trump in the 2020 election.

Mueller forfeited the opportunity to speak clearly and directly about Trump's crimes, and Barr filled the void with his sycophantic, and high-volume, exoneration.

The story of American policy in Ukraine over the next four months, from May to September 2019, demonstrated this tectonic struggle in action. Trump and Giuliani's goal in this period was straightforward—to use every lever of government policy to force Ukraine to help Trump win reelection.

In other words, by early July, Zelensky knew the price for continuation of American military aid to his country: the announcement of a Ukrainian investigation of Trump's political rivals.

On Monday, July 22, Giuliani, Volker, and Yermak had a three-way call for thirty-eight minutes where Giuliani received assurance from Yermak that Zelensky understood what was expected of him in a phone call with Trump. The investigation of the Bidens—not burden sharing with the West, not corruption in Ukraine, not saving lives from Russian bullets and bombs—was all that mattered.