Quotes about Politics

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.

Still, Sean Hannity had 5.8 million viewers on the night of the Blasey Ford—Kavanaugh hearing. "That's a lot of fucking hobbits," said Bannon.

In politics somebody has to lose, but invariably everybody thinks they can win. And you probably can't win unless you believe that you will win—except in the Trump campaign.

What has he gotten himself into with the Russians?" pressed Ailes. "Mostly," said Bannon, "he went to Russia and he thought he was going to meet Putin. But Putin couldn't give a shit about him. So he's kept trying." "He's Donald," said Ailes. "It's a magnificent thing," said Bannon, who had taken to regarding Trump as something like a natural wonder, beyond explanation.

The first woman president, Ivanka entertained, would not be Hillary Clinton, it would be Ivanka Trump.

Most especially, he was miserable because of Donald Trump, whose cruelties, always great even when they were casual, were unbearable when he truly turned against you.

Lewandowski and Hannity actually thought that the House might be hours away from voting articles of impeachment.

Trump, who referred to the Chinese leader as "Mr. X-i"; the president was told to think of him as a woman and call him "she.")

At points on the day's spectrum of adverse political developments, he could have moments of, almost everyone would admit, irrationality. When that happened, he was alone in his anger and not approachable by anyone. His senior staff largely dealt with these dark hours by agreeing with him, no matter what he said. And if some of them occasionally tried to hedge, Hope Hicks never did. She agreed absolutely with all of it.

Bannon, in a public statement, declared: "You are either with Trump or against him.

Almost everybody in the campaign, still an extremely small outfit, thought of themselves as a clear-eyed team, as realistic about their prospects as perhaps any in politics. The unspoken agreement among them: not only would Donald Trump not be president, he should probably not be. Conveniently, the former conviction meant nobody had to deal with the latter issue.

In an age when all successful political candidates are surrounded by, if not at the beck and call of, difficult, even sociopathic, rich people pushing the bounds of their own power—and the richer they were, the more difficult, sociopathic, and power-mad they might be—Bob and Rebekah Mercer were quite onto themselves.