359 Quotes by Bob Woodward

Sometimes, the more you protect your force, the less secure you may be. Sometimes, the more force is used, the less effective it is.

Trump was always asking everyone their opinions of everyone else, seeking a report card. It was corrosive and could become self-fulfilling— undermining and eating at the reputations and status of anyone and everyone.

Trump is the wrong man for the job.

But in the man and his presidency Dowd had seen the tragic flaw. In the political back-and-forth, the evasions, the denials, the tweeting, the obscuring, crying “Fake News,” the indignation, Trump had one overriding problem that Dowd knew but could not bring himself to say to the president: “You’re a fucking liar.

Cohn and Porter worked together to derail what they believed were Trump’s most impulsive and dangerous orders. That document and others like it just disappeared. When Trump had a draft on his desk to proofread, Cohn at times would just yank it, and the president would forget about it. But if it was on his desk, he’d sign it. “It’s not what we did for the country,” Cohn said privately. “It’s what we saved him from doing.

He’s a fucking moron,” Tillerson said so everyone heard.

Cohn offered one more argument against steel tariffs. "We're not a steel-producing nation. We're a good-producing nation. If we increase the price of steel, out goods become overprices and we can't compete

Number one,” Bannon went on, “we’re going to stop mass illegal immigration and start to limit legal immigration to get our sovereignty back. Number two, you are going to bring manufacturing jobs back to the country. And number three, we’re going to get out of these pointless foreign wars.

The reality was that the United States in 2017 was tethered to the words and actions of an emotionally overwrought, mercurial and unpredictable leader. Members of his staff had joined to purposefully block some of what they believed were the president’s most dangerous impulses. It was a nervous breakdown of the executive power of the most powerful country in the world.