Quotes About Strategy

Let Jordan take the West Bank, let Egypt take Gaza. Let them deal with it. Or sink trying. The Saudis are on the brink, Egyptians are on the brink, all scared to death of Persia . . . Yemen, Sinai, Libya . . . this thing is bad. . . . That's why Russia is so key. . . . Is Russia that bad? They're bad guys. But the world is full of bad guys." Bannon offered all this with something like ebullience—a man remaking the world.

China was the first front in a new cold war. And it had all been misunderstood

They were all concerned that Trump did not understand what he was up against. That there was simply not enough method to his madness.

Chaos was Steve's strategy," said Walsh.

there was another rationalization: Trump was "inspirational not operational.

In politics somebody has to lose, but invariably everybody thinks they can win.

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.

trying to win without consideration, plan, or clear goals had, in the course of the administration's first nine months, resulted in almost nothing but losses.

Steve Bannon was running the Steve Bannon White House, Jared Kushner was running the Michael Bloomberg White House, and Reince Priebus was running the Paul Ryan White House.

Then there was Bannon, conducting something of an alternate-universe operation,

military figures like James Mattis, H. R. McMaster, and John Kelly: they found themselves working in an administration that was in every way inimical to basic command principles.

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.

That was the way to crush the liberals: make them crazy and drag them to the left.

company built around the instincts, impulses, and gambles of its leader?

In politics somebody has to lose, but invariably everybody thinks they can win. And you probably can't win unless you believe that you will win—except in the Trump campaign.

The new politics was not the art of the compromise but the art of conflict.

success of the speech confirmed the Jared and Ivanka strategy: look for common ground. It also confirmed Ivanka's understanding of her father: he just wanted to be loved. And, likewise, it confirmed Bannon's worst fear: Trump, in his true heart, was a marshmallow.

Careers advance by how well you learn on the job and how well you get along with the rest of the swamp and play its game.

It was a process of suggesting, in throw-it-against-the-wall style, what the president might want, and hoping he might then think that he had thought of this himself

this was the fundamental hypothesis of the senior staff, shared by Walsh and everyone else: Trump must know what he was doing, his intuition must be profound.

Trade it out so in the end everyone got something, and the better dealmaker got a little more.

Trump quite profoundly seemed unable to distinguish between his political advantage and his personal needs—he thought emotionally, not strategically.

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.