Quotes about Trump

After all, Ailes was perhaps the person most responsible for unleashing the angry-man currents of Trump's victory: he had invented the right-wing media that delighted in the Trump character.

Here was another peculiar Trump attribute: an inability to see his actions the way most others saw them. Or to fully appreciate how people expected him to behave. The notion of the presidency as an institutional and political concept, with an emphasis on ritual and propriety and semiotic messaging—statesmanship—was quite beyond him.

Ailes had a suggestion: "Speaker Boehner." (John Boehner had been the Speaker of the House until he was forced out in a Tea Party putsch in 2011.) "Who's that?" asked Trump.

it confirmed Bannon's worst fear: Trump, in his true heart, was a marshmallow.

The conundrum was that conservative media saw Trump as its creature, while Trump saw himself as a star, a vaunted and valued product of all media, one climbing ever higher. It was a cult of personality, and he was the personality. He was the most famous man in the world. Everybody loved him—or ought to.

Trump craved media approval. But, as Bannon emphasized, he was never going to get the facts right, nor was he ever going to acknowledge that he got them wrong, so therefore he was not going to get that approval.

You could hardly find an entity more at odds with military discipline than a Trump organization.

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.