Quotes About Strategy

Jared and Ivanka had made an earnest deal between themselves: if sometime in the future the time came, she'd be the one to run for president (or the first one of them to take the shot).

Bannon's strategic view of government was shock and awe. Dominate rather than negotiate. Having daydreamed his way into ultimate bureaucratic power, he did not want to see himself as a bureaucrat. He was of a higher purpose and moral order. He was an avenger. He was also, he believed, a straight shooter. There was a moral order in aligning language and action—if you said you were going to do something, you do it.

David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest.

His strategic belief was that there was no reason not to heap excessive puffery on a prospect. But if the prospect was ruled out as a buyer, there was no reason not to heap scorn and lawsuits on him or her.

Pelosi, Bannon felt, saw the greater truth: the Trump administration would undo itself.

The issue was not that he might act precipitously and recklessly because he didn't understand the consequences of doing so. The issue was that he could not comprehend the actual choices that needed to be made in order to act; indeed, he could not even stay in the room long enough to decide on a course of action. For Trump, the fog of war would waylay him before the first command could be given.

fundamental Bannonism: stop thinking you can somehow get along with your enemies.

His advisers didn't know whether he was an isolationist or a militarist, or whether he could distinguish between the two.

In politics, the smart move is not to say no and to know how to finesse yes.

In practice, the new foreign policy, an effective Trump doctrine, was to reduce the board to three elements: powers we can work with, powers we cannot work with, and those without enough power whom we can functionally disregard or sacrifice. It was cold war stuff. And, indeed, in the larger Trump view, it was during the cold war that time and circumstance gave the United States its greatest global advantage. That was when America was great.

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

He believed he could spook the other side.

he thought emotionally, not strategically.

You defined yourself by your enemy's reaction. Conflict was the media bait—hence, now, the political chum. The new politics was not the art of the compromise but the art of conflict.

Almost everybody in the White House followed Trump's thinking by tracking whom he had called the night before.)

It didn't exactly surprise Bannon when Trump flipped; Bannon understood how easy it was to bullshit a bullshitter.

it was the Jarvanka idea to try to trade off amnesty for the border wall.

His sons, Don Jr. and Eric—behind their backs known to Trump insiders as Uday and Qusay, after the sons of Saddam Hussein—wondered if there couldn't somehow be two parallel White House structures, one dedicated to their father's big-picture views, personal appearances, and salesmanship and the other concerned with day-to-day management issues.

Bannon and Kushner were therefore more than a little irritated to discover that the unimposing Priebus had an agenda of his own: heeding Senate leader Mitch McConnell's prescription that "this president will sign whatever is put in front of him," while also taking advantage of the White House's lack of political and legislative experience and outsourcing as much policy as possible to Capitol Hill.

The Best and the Brightest. (One of the

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 for the Trump campaign.

It certainly is an odd circumstance if you live your life without regard for being elected and then get elected—and quite an opportunity for your enemies.

This was the job Bannon a week later.

the three men working hardest to maneuver the president—Bannon, Kushner, and Priebus.