208 Quotes by Michael Wolff

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

If he was not having his six-thirty dinner with Steve Bannon, then, more to his liking, he was in bed by that time with a cheeseburger, watching his three screens and making phone calls –.

This was his fundamental innovation in governing: regular, uncontrolled bursts of anger and spleen.

The charge that Trump colluded with the Russians to win the election, which he scoffed at, was, in the estimation of some of his friends, a perfect example of his inability to connect the dots.

After all, Ailes was perhaps the person most responsible for unleashing the angry-man currents of Trump’s victory: he had invented the right-wing media that delighted in the Trump character.

Here was another peculiar Trump attribute: an inability to see his actions the way most others saw them. Or to fully appreciate how people expected him to behave. The notion of the presidency as an institutional and political concept, with an emphasis on ritual and propriety and semiotic messaging – statesmanship – was quite beyond him.

They were all concerned that Trump did not understand what he was up against. That there was simply not enough method to his madness.

The information he did not get was formal information. The data. The details. The options. The analysis. He didn’t do PowerPoint. For anything that smacked of a classroom or of being lectured to – “professor” was one of his bad words, and he was proud of never going to class, never buying a textbook, never taking a note – he got up and left the room.

Trump was not a politician who could parse factions of support and opprobrium; he was a salesman who needed to make a sale. “I won. I am the winner. I am not the loser,” he repeated, incredulously, like a mantra.