Quotes from Michael Wolff

Trump did not want a White House that ran by any method other than to satisfy his desires.

In 2014, when he first seriously began to consider running for president, Melania was one of the few who thought it was possible he could win. It was a punch line for his daughter, Ivanka, who had carefully distanced herself from the campaign. With a never-too-hidden distaste for her stepmother, Ivanka would say to friends: All you have to know about Melania is that she thinks if he runs he'll certainly win.

In business meetings, observers would be nonplussed that Charlie and Jared Kushner invariably greeted each other with a kiss and that the adult Jared called his father Daddy.

It was all too possible that the hardly plausible would lead to the totally credible.

David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest.

But if Halberstam defined the presidential mien, Trump defied it—and defiled it. Not a single attribute would place him credibly in the revered circle of American presidential character and power.

Kushner, in fact, now believed Bannon would do anything to destroy them. This was personal. After months of defending Bannon against liberal media innuendo, Kushner had concluded that Bannon was an anti-Semite. That was the bottom-line issue.

calamity of their own making.

Trump as the man nearly everyone knew him to be: erratic, unfocused, impetuous, likely not of sound mind.

Acting, in his view, was the greater and more important legal skill.

The president did not truly listen to anybody. The more you talked, the less he listened.

the Trump bubble. Trump was incapable of admitting vulnerability—any at all.