208 Quotes by Michael Wolff

With the inauguration of Donald Trump on January 20, 2017, the United States entered the eye of the most extraordinary political storm since at least Watergate.

As Walsh saw it, Steve Bannon was running the Steve Bannon White House, Jared Kushner was running the Michael Bloomberg White House, and Reince Priebus was running the Paul Ryan White House. It was a 1970s video game, the white ball pinging back and forth in the black triangle.

There was no real up-and-down structure, but merely a figure at the top and then everyone else scrambling for his attention. It wasn’t task-based so much as response-oriented – whatever captured the boss’s attention focused everybody’s attention.

The campaign staff, now suddenly in a position to snag West Wing jobs – career- and history-making jobs – had to see this odd, difficult, even ridiculous, and, on the face of it, ill-equipped person in a new light.

There was no happenstance news, in Trump’s view. All news was manipulated and designed, planned and planted. All news was to some extent fake – he understood that very well, because he himself had faked it so many times in his career. This was why he had so naturally cottoned to the “fake news” label. “I’ve made stuff up forever, and they always print it,” he bragged.

The point could hardly have been clearer: if the president was pressuring the director because he feared that an investigation of Michael Flynn would damage him, then this was an obstruction of justice.

One day, when Kushner accused Walsh of leaking about him, she challenged him back: “My phone records versus yours, my email versus yours.

But Murdoch is, more accurately, not a modern journalist but the last representative from an era when a newspaper was its own advertisement, when it had to sell itself.

He is, and is pleased to let everybody know it, a winner-take-all businessman – the worst nightmare of sentimental, lefty intellectuals, which is exactly what so many of the Bancrofts have become.