Home > Work > Siege: Trump Under Fire
61 " the Khashoggi debacle provided yet another example of the bizarre and inexplicable relationships that Trump and his family had formed with bad guys around the world, "
― Michael Wolff , Siege: Trump Under Fire
62 " So clear was his inability to take any criticism or to participate in any honest argument about policy that the attempt was almost never made. "
63 " López Obrador, a left-wing populist poised to challenge Trump, the right-wing populist. "
64 " Trump pardons were less judicial corrections or acts of forbearance and kindness than statements of defiance. "
65 " They weren’t operatives, they were believers, which is what Trump wanted them to be. "
66 " The more acute the stress, the more active the leakers, the bigger the story. "
67 " resisters, working in the Trump White House, who had come to see themselves as patriots protecting the country from the president they worked for. "
68 " Real estate was the world’s favorite money-laundering currency, "
69 " Trump as the man nearly everyone knew him to be: erratic, unfocused, impetuous, likely not of sound mind. "
70 " and even Trump treated him rather like a dog who kept creeping back into the house. "
71 " Fooling some of the people all of the time defined Trump’s hard-core base. "
72 " To have worked anywhere near him is to be confronted with the most extreme and disorienting behavior possible. That is hardly an overstatement. Not only is Trump not like other presidents, he is not like anyone most of us have ever known. "
73 " son. The aide went on giddily talking about the special bond golfing dads have with their sons until it was clear that he was getting the Trump freeze—an ability to pretend you didn’t exist while at the same time intimating that he might kill you if you did. By contrast, Melania’s singular focus was her son. Together, mother and son occupied a bubble inside the Trump bubble. She assiduously protected Barron from his father’s remoteness. Ever cold-shouldered by Trump’s adult children, Melania "
74 " People who had the money to bribe, who fundamentally believed that anyone could be bribed, and who had outsize influence on the legal structures that might otherwise restrict bribery, had become major foreign policy players in key parts of the world. "
75 " Trump saw the world through the filter of other people’s weaknesses. "
76 " He defended himself by ridiculing others. "
77 " Trump certainly ran his business as though it were a criminal enterprise. "
78 " The Kushner family’s desperate need for cash was turning U.S. foreign policy into an investment banking scheme dedicated to the refinancing of the Kushner family debt. "
79 " For Trump and his most dedicated confederates there was only one truly reliable issue: illegal immigration. In Trump’s short political history, the issue had never failed to inspire and activate core voters. "
80 " He had little doubt that Trump was guilty of most of what he was accused of. “How did he get the dough for the primary and then for the general with his ‘liquidity’ issues?” asked Bannon with his hands out and his eyebrows up. “Let’s not dwell. "