208 Quotes by Michael Wolff

Kushner had his personal press operation and Bannon had his. The leaking culture had become so open and overt – most of the time everybody could identify everybody else’s leaks – that it was now formally staffed.

Once, coming back on his plane with a billionaire friend who had brought along a foreign model, Trump, trying to move in on his friend’s date, urged a stop in Atlantic City. He would provide a tour of his casino. His friend assured the model that there was nothing to recommend Atlantic City. It was a place overrun by white trash. “What is this ‘white trash’?” asked the model. “They’re people just like me,” said Trump, “only they’re poor.

Some thought him dyslexic; certainly his comprehension was limited.

Who can talk you through this stuff before you decided to act on it?” “Well,” said the president, “you won’t like the answer, but the answer is me. Me. I talk to myself.

But Ailes was convinced that Trump had no political beliefs or backbone. The fact that Trump had become the ultimate avatar of Fox’s angry common man was another sign that we were living in an upside-down world. The joke was on somebody – and Ailes thought it might be on him.

What is this ‘white trash’?” asked the model. “They’re people just like me,” said Trump, “only they’re poor.

By Sunday evening, a feeling perhaps most reminiscent of election night 2016, desolate and confounded, spread through the mainstream media, the liberal establishment, and among all those who were confident that they had surrounded Donald Trump and left him nowhere to run. This was – and there could hardly be any better illustration – defeat snatched from the jaws of victory.

Bannon described Trump as a simple machine. The On switch was full of flattery, the Off switch full of calumny.

Early in the campaign, in a Producers-worthy scene, Sam Nunberg was sent to explain the Constitution to the candidate: “I got as far as the Fourth Amendment before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head.