Quotes from Michael Wolff

But if Halberstam defined the presidential mien, Trump defied it—and defiled it.

The leitmotif for Trump about his own campaign was how crappy it was and how everybody involved in it was a loser.

Trump could bring Trumpism down...

But Trump was a simple machine. Whitestone understood his singular interests—sports and girls—and learned they could be used as reliable distractions.

Good management reduces ego. But in the Trump White House, it could often seem that nothing happened, that reality simply did not exist, if it did not happen in Trump's presence.

The real swamp is the swamp of insular, inbred, incestuous interests.

Here was a perfect example of an essential Trump paradigm: he acceded to anyone who seemed to know more about any issue he didn't care about, or simply one whose details he couldn't bring himself to focus on closely. Great! he would say, punctuating every statement with a similar exclamation and regularly making an effort to jump from his chair.

We serve at the president's displeasure,

company built around the instincts, impulses, and gambles of its leader?

Communication of this message required a coordinated effort. Each person's willingness to talk to Woodward was cross-checked against the willingness of several others to talk to him. This was part of Woodward's standard method of establishing a critical mass of inside sources: he created a kind of in-group, and this also suggested that if you failed to participate, you would not only lose your opportunity to be part of the in-group but lose your place in history

Being a Trump staffer had become an existential predicament: even if you wanted to get out, and almost all of them did, there was nowhere to go.

The greater White House wholly believed that the story was an invented construct of weak if not preposterous narrative threads, with a mind-boggling thesis: We fixed the election with the Russians, OMG! The anti-Trump world, and especially its media—that is, the media—believed that there was a high, if not overwhelming, likelihood that there was something significant there, and a decent chance that it could be brought home.