359 Quotes by Bob Woodward

I don’t get it,” Trump said.

There’s some things where he’s already reached the conclusion and it doesn’t matter what you say. It doesn’t matter what arguments you offer. He’s not listening.

When you hear in the tape recordings Nixon’s own voice saying, We have to stonewall, We have to lie to the Grand Jury, We have to pay burglars a million dollars, it’s all too clear the horror of what went on.

Mattis was particularly exasperated and alarmed, telling close associates that the president acted like – and had the understanding of – “a fifth or sixth grader.

Let that analysis sink in: Twenty percent of the president’s staff think they are “saving the world” from the president.

The president has no moral compass,” Mattis replied. The bluntness should have shocked Coats, but he’d arrived at his own hard truths about the most powerful man in the world. “True,” Coats agreed. “To him, a lie is not a lie. It’s just what he thinks. He doesn’t know the difference between the truth and a lie.

Having failed in efforts to control or curtail the president’s tweeting, Priebus searched for a way to have practical impact. Since the tweets were often triggered by the president’s obsessive TV watching, he looked for ways to shut off the television. But television was Trump’s default activity. Sunday nights were often the worst. Trump would come back to the White House from the weekend at one of his golf resorts just in time to catch political talk on his enemy networks, MSNBC and CNN.

Bannon recalled, “that this is the real deal. This is a guy totally unprepared. Hillary Clinton spent her entire adult life getting ready for this moment. Trump hasn’t spent a second getting ready for this moment.

As an extreme measure, Hicks, Porter, Gary Cohn and White House social media director Dan Scavino proposed they set up a committee. They would draft some tweets that they believed Trump would like. If the president had an idea for a tweet, he could write it down or get one of them in and they would vet it. Was it factually accurate? Was it spelled correctly? Did it make sense?