Quotes About Perception

There was no happenstance news, in Trump's view. All news was manipulated and designed, planned and planted. All news was to some extent fake—he understood that very well, because he himself had faked it so many times in his career. This was why he had so naturally cottoned to the "fake news" label. "I've made stuff up forever, and they always print it," he bragged.

Media is personal. It is a series of blood scores. The media in its often collectively mind decides who is going to rise and who is going to fall, who lives and who dies. If you stay around long enough in the media eye, your fate, like that of a banana republic despot, is often an unkind one of a law Hillary Clinton was not able to circumvent. The media was the last word.

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

The president, while often a fabulist in his depiction of the world, was quite a literalist when it came to how he saw himself.

Good management reduces ego. But in the Trump White House, it could often seem that nothing happened, that reality simply did not exist, if it did not happen in Trump's presence.

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

To Trump, he was just up against Sally Yates, who was, he steamed, "such a cunt.

From the Bannon side, Pence garnered only contempt. "Pence is like the husband in Ozzie and Harriet, a nonevent," said one Bannonite. Although many saw him as a vice president who might well assume the presidency someday, he was also perceived as the weakest vice president in decades and, in organizational terms, an empty suit who was useless in the daily effort to help restrain the president and stabilize the West Wing.

He clearly did not understand that what conservative media elevated, liberal media would necessarily take down.

As often as not, he surprised himself. "What did I say?" he would ask after getting severe blowback.

The Russia story was—just two weeks into the new presidency—a dividing line with each side viewing the other as pushing fake news.

He was, after all, Donald Trump, however much you shined him up.

Everyone, in his or her own way, struggled to express the baldly obvious fact that the president did not know enough, did not know what he didn't know, did not particularly care, and, to boot, was confident if not serene in his unquestioned certitudes. There was now a fair amount of back-of-the-classroom giggling about who had called Trump what.

this was another—and to some quite the ultimate—example of how difficult it was for the president to function in a literal, definitional, lawyerly, cause-and-effect political world.

Hicks, sponsored by Ivanka and ever loyal to her, was in fact thought of as Trump's real daughter, while Ivanka was thought of as his real wife.

They take everything I've ever said and exaggerate it," said the president in his first week in the White House during a late-night call. "It's all exaggerated. My exaggerations are exaggerated.

he lied about his height to keep from having a body mass index that would label him as obese),

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.

He had no ability to distinguish the important from the less important. There seemed to be no such thing as objective reality.

Trump, as almost anyone who had ever worked for him appreciated, was, despite what you hoped he might be, Trump—and he would invariably sour on everyone around him.

Bannon was, once again, gobsmacked. "When Ivanka and the Mooch can talk the commander in chief of the United States into thinking that people will believe that you had a double negative problem, you've left the Cartesian universe.

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

Media is personal. It is a series of blood scores. The media in its often collective mind decides who is going to rise and who is going to fall, who lives and who dies.

everybody understanding that nine-tenths of what came out of his mouth was blah-blah