Quotes from Michael Wolff

In the world of Trump, anything that he deemed of value either accrued to him or had been robbed from him.

Trump was the one variable that, in management terms, simply could not be controlled. He was like a recalcitrant two-year-old. If you tried to control him, it would only have the opposite effect.

Donald Trump produced on a daily basis an astonishing, can't-stop-following-it narrative.

Bannon and Kushner were therefore more than a little irritated to discover that the unimposing Priebus had an agenda of his own: heeding Senate leader Mitch McConnell's prescription that "this president will sign whatever is put in front of him," while also taking advantage of the White House's lack of political and legislative experience and outsourcing as much policy as possible to Capitol Hill.

Everyone, in his or her own way, struggled to express the baldly obrious fact that the president did not know enough, did not know what he didn't know, did not particularly care, and, to boot, was confident if not serene in his unquestioned certitudes.

By the time Bannon and Priebus were back in Washington, three blue-chip firms had said no. All of them were afraid they would face a rebellion among the younger staff if they represented Trump, afraid Trump would publicly humiliate them if the going got tough, and afraid Trump would stiff them for the bill. In the end, nine top firms turned them down.

The Best and the Brightest. (One of the

The other aspect of NATO summits he found irritating was that they were group meetings. He was almost invariably enthusiastic about one-on-one world leader meetings—no matter the subject, no matter the leader—and agitated about collective gatherings. He worried about being ganged up on; he suspected that plots had been laid to trick him.

the president-elect wore what some around him had taken to calling his golf face: angry and pissed off, shoulders hunched, arms swinging, brow furled, lips pursed. This had become the public Trump—truculent Trump.

While the Trump administration has made hostility to the press a virtual policy, it has also been more open to the media than any White House in recent memory.

There was, in the space of little more than an hour, in Steve Bannon's not unamused observation, a befuddled Trump morphing into a disbelieving Trump and then into a quite horrified Trump. But still to come was the final transformation: suddenly, Donald Trump became a man who believed that he deserved to be and was wholly capable of being the president of the United States.

Clark, forty-five, was a Wesleyan graduate (possibly the only graduate from the famously liberal school to work for Trump or even vote for him) and a close associate of Bill Stepien's. He had become a kind of self-appointed sheriff, trying to keep the grifters, kooks, and obvious self-dealers out of Trumptown—and away from the campaign's money.