Quotes About Authority

I have to keep her in line somehow or she'll think she's the boss of everything.

She would never feel conspiratorial with a male in authority, and there were moments when therapist and client needed to feel they were sharing a conspiracy.

A team effort is a lot of people doing what I say

There was no real up-and-down structure, but merely a figure at the top and then everyone else scrambling for his attention. It wasn't task-based so much as response-oriented—whatever captured the boss's attention focused everybody's attention.

Bannon, Kushner, Conway, and the president's daughter actually had no specific responsibilities—they could make it up as they went along. They did what they wanted.

He answered emails in one word—partly a paranoia about email, but even more a controlling crypticness.

Here was a perfect example of an essential Trump paradigm: he acceded to anyone who seemed to know more about any issue he didn't care about, or simply one whose details he couldn't bring himself to focus on closely. Great! he would say, punctuating every statement with a similar exclamation and regularly making an effort to jump from his chair. On the spot, Trump eagerly agreed to let Ryan run the health care bill and to make Price the Health and Human Services secretary.

He was the ultimate antiliberal: an authoritarian who was the living embodiment of resistance to authority.

You could hardly find an entity more at odds with military discipline than a Trump organization.

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.

These powerful figures tried to

We serve at the president's displeasure,

He reprimanded the housekeeping staff for picking up his shirt from the floor: "If my shirt is on the floor, it's because I want it on the floor." Then he imposed a set of new rules: nobody touch anything, especially not his toothbrush. (He had a longtime fear of being poisoned, one reason why he liked to eat at McDonald's—nobody knew he was coming and the food was safely premade.)

In the early days of Trump's presidency, the situation seemed clear to everybody: three men were fighting to run the White House, to be the real chief of staff and power behind the Trump throne. And of course there was Trump himself, who didn't want to relinquish power to anyone.

The president, on the verge of starting a war with the FBI, the DOJ, and many in Congress, was going rogue.

His senior staff largely dealt with these dark hours by agreeing with him, no matter what he said.

Trump was impetuous and yet did not like to make decisions, at least not ones that seemed to corner him into having to analyze a problem.

Bypassing lawyers, regulators, and the agencies and personnel responsible for enforcing it, President Trump—with Bannon's low, intense voice behind him, offering a rush of complex information—signed what was put in front of him.

But now there seemed to be a new understanding: Donald Trump believed he had vastly more power, authority, and control than in fact he had, and he believed his talent for manipulating people and bending and dominating them was vastly greater than it was. Pushing this line of reasoning just a little further: senior staff believed the president had a problem with reality, and reality was now overwhelming him.

For Walsh, it was a daily process of managing an impossible task: almost as soon as she received direction from one of the three men, she would be countermanded by one or another of them.

most of the leaks, certainly the juiciest ones, were coming from the higher-ups—not to mention from the person occupying the topmost echelon. The president couldn't stop talking.

chronic naysayer, he viewed each member of his inner circle as a problem child whose fate he held in his hand. "We are sinners and he is God" was one view; "We serve at the president's displeasure," another.

Trump did not want a White House that ran by any method other than to satisfy his desires.

Flynn was "a colonel in a general's uniform," according to one senior intelligence figure.)