208 Quotes by Michael Wolff

He had somehow won the race for president, but his brain seemed incapable of performing what would be essential tasks in his new job. He had no ability to plan and organize and pay attention and switch focus; he had never been able to tailor his behavior to what the goals at hand reasonably required. On the most basic level, he simply could not link cause and effect.

The campaign, on its face, was not designed to win anything.

By the second week of the Trump presidency, everybody in the White House seemed to be maintaining their own list of likely leakers and doing their best to leak before being leaked about.

In early February, an Obama administration lawyer friendly with Sally Yates remarked with some relish and considerable accuracy: “It certainly is an odd circumstance if you live your life without regard for being elected and then get elected – and quite an opportunity for your enemies.

With his misspellings and his use of 1970s lingo – “wire tapping” called up an image of FBI agents crouched in a van on Fifth Avenue – it seemed kooky and farcical. Of the many tweets that Trump had seemed to hoist himself by, from the point of view of the media, intelligence community, and extremely satisfied Democrats, the wiretap tweets had pulled him highest and most left him dangling in ignorance and embarrassment.

Trump liked to portray his business as an empire, it was actually a discrete holding company and boutique enterprise, catering more to his peculiarities as proprietor and brand representative than to any bottom line or other performance measures.

Trump, despite his disappointment at Washington’s failure to properly greet and celebrate him, was, like a good salesman, an optimist. Salesmen, whose primary characteristic and main asset is their ability to keep selling, constantly recast the world in positive terms. Discouragement for everyone else is merely the need to improve reality for them.

He was postliterate – total television.

In a way, Robert Mueller had come to accept the dialectical premise of Donald Trump – that Trump is Trump. It was circular reasoning to hold the president’s essential character against him. Put another way, confronted by Donald Trump, Bob Mueller threw up his hands. Surprisingly, he found himself in agreement with the greater White House: Donald Trump was the president, and, for better or for worse, what you saw was what you got – and what the country voted for.