Top 80 Michael Wolff Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Casualness is the enemy of pretense.”

— Michael Wolff

2. “China’s everything. Nothing else matters. We don’t get China right, we don’t get anything right. This whole thing is very simple. China is where Nazi Germany was in 1929 to 1930. The Chinese, like the Germans, are the most rational people in the world, until they’re not. And they’re gonna flip like Germany in the thirties. You’re going to have a hypernationalist state, and once that happens you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.”

— Michael Wolff

3. “The information he did not get was formal information. The data. The details. The options. The analysis. He didn’t do PowerPoint. For anything that smacked of a classroom or of being lectured to – “professor” was one of his bad words, and he was proud of never going to class, never buying a textbook, never taking a note – he got up and left the room.”

— Michael Wolff

4. “He answered emails in one word – partly a paranoia about email, but even more a controlling crypticness.”

— Michael Wolff

5. “But not only didn’t he read, he didn’t listen. He preferred to be the person talking. And he trusted his own expertise – no matter how paltry or irrelevant – more than anyone else’s. What’s more, he had an extremely short attention span, even when he thought you were worthy of attention.”

— Michael Wolff

6. “China was the first front in a new cold war. And it had all been misunderstood.”

— Michael Wolff

7. “A close Trump friend who was also a good Bill Clinton friend found them eerily similar – except that Clinton had a respectable front and Trump did not. One manifestation of this outlaw personality, for both Trump and Clinton, was their brand of womanizing – and indeed, harassing. Even among world-class womanizers and harassers, they seemed exceptionally free of doubt or hesitation.”

— Michael Wolff

8. “Jim Baker, chief of staff for both Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush and almost everybody’s model for managing the West Wing, advised Priebus not to take the job.”

— Michael Wolff

9. “With his misspellings and his use of 1970s lingo – “wire tapping” called up an image of FBI agents crouched in a van on Fifth Avenue – it seemed kooky and farcical. Of the many tweets that Trump had seemed to hoist himself by, from the point of view of the media, intelligence community, and extremely satisfied Democrats, the wiretap tweets had pulled him highest and most left him dangling in ignorance and embarrassment.”

— Michael Wolff

10. “The Breitbart formula was to so appall the liberals that the base was doubly satisfied, generating clicks in a ricochet of disgust and delight. You defined yourself by your enemy’s reaction. Conflict was the media bait – hence, now, the political chum. The new politics was not the art of the compromise but the art of conflict.”

— Michael Wolff

11. “Trump was not a politician who could parse factions of support and opprobrium; he was a salesman who needed to make a sale. “I won. I am the winner. I am not the loser,” he repeated, incredulously, like a mantra.”

— Michael Wolff

12. “There would be, in other words, one chief of staff in name – the unimportant one – and various others, more important, in practice, ensuring both chaos and Trump’s own undisputed independence. Jim Baker, chief of staff for both Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush and almost everybody’s model for managing the West Wing, advised Priebus not to take the job.”

— Michael Wolff

13. “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.”

— Michael Wolff

14. “This was the peculiar and haunting consensus – not that Trump was guilty of all that he was accused of, but that he was guilty of so much else.”

— Michael Wolff

15. “What is this ‘white trash’?” asked the model. “They’re people just like me,” said Trump, “only they’re poor.”

— Michael Wolff

16. “He is – and this is a fundamental entrepreneurial talent – a master illusionist. It’s the essential entrepreneurial skill, to convince people you are what you have yet to become.”

— Michael Wolff

17. “Trump often spoke of himself in the third person. Trump did this. The Trumpster did that. So powerful was this persona, or role, that he seemed reluctant, or unable, to give it up in favor of being president – or presidential.”

— Michael Wolff

18. “Indeed, while everybody in his rich-guy social circle knew about his wide-ranging ignorance – Trump, the businessman, could not even read a balance sheet, and Trump, who had campaigned on his deal-making skills, was, with his inattention to details, a terrible negotiator – they yet found him somehow instinctive. That was the word. He was a force of personality. He could make you believe.”

— Michael Wolff

19. “Trump, despite his disappointment at Washington’s failure to properly greet and celebrate him, was, like a good salesman, an optimist. Salesmen, whose primary characteristic and main asset is their ability to keep selling, constantly recast the world in positive terms. Discouragement for everyone else is merely the need to improve reality for them.”

— Michael Wolff

20. “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.”

— Michael Wolff

21. “Finally, it was the right-wing diva and Trump supporter Ann Coulter who took the president-elect aside and said, “Nobody is apparently telling you this. But you can’t. You just can’t hire your children.”

— Michael Wolff

22. “Bannon, Kushner, Conway, and the president’s daughter actually had no specific responsibilities – they could make it up as they went along. They did what they wanted.”

— Michael Wolff

23. “While nobody would ever say Trump was sensitive when it came to women, he had many views about how to get along with them, including a theory he discussed with friends about how the more years between an older man and a younger woman, the less the younger woman took an older man’s cheating personally.”

— Michael Wolff

24. “With the inauguration of Donald Trump on January 20, 2017, the United States entered the eye of the most extraordinary political storm since at least Watergate.”

— Michael Wolff

25. “He is, and is pleased to let everybody know it, a winner-take-all businessman – the worst nightmare of sentimental, lefty intellectuals, which is exactly what so many of the Bancrofts have become.”

— Michael Wolff

26. “He just keeps going,” Ailes had marveled to a friend after the first debate with Hillary Clinton. “You hit Donald along the head, and he keeps going. He doesn’t even know he’s been hit.”

— Michael Wolff

27. “He’s supposed to be a fixer,” said Trump about Cohen, “but he breaks a lot of stuff.” All of Trump’s people.”

— Michael Wolff

28. “But Murdoch is, more accurately, not a modern journalist but the last representative from an era when a newspaper was its own advertisement, when it had to sell itself.”

— Michael Wolff

29. “Bannon didn’t promote internal debate, provide policy rationale, or deliver PowerPoint presentations; instead, he was the equivalent of Trump’s personal talk radio. Trump could turn him on at any moment, and it pleased him that Bannon’s pronouncements and views would consistently be fully formed and ever available, a bracing, unified-field narrative.”

— Michael Wolff

30. “Reince Priebus, getting ready to shift over from the RNC to the White House, noted, with alarm, how often Trump offered people jobs on the spot, many of whom he had never met before, for positions whose importance Trump did not particularly understand.”

— Michael Wolff

31. “The story of Trump was the story of how he tried to make himself a story.”

— Michael Wolff

32. “This was his fundamental innovation in governing: regular, uncontrolled bursts of anger and spleen.”

— Michael Wolff

33. “Politics had seemed to become, even well before the age of Trump, a mortal affair. It was now zero-sum: When one side profited, another lost. One side’s victory was another’s death. The old notion that politics was a trader’s game, an understanding that somebody else had something you wanted – a vote, goodwill, old-fashioned patronage – and that in the end the only issue was cost, had gone out of fashion. Now it was a battle between good and evil.”

— Michael Wolff

34. “He had somehow won the race for president, but his brain seemed incapable of performing what would be essential tasks in his new job. He had no ability to plan and organize and pay attention and switch focus; he had never been able to tailor his behavior to what the goals at hand reasonably required. On the most basic level, he simply could not link cause and effect.”

— Michael Wolff

35. “The campaign, on its face, was not designed to win anything.”

— Michael Wolff

36. “A close Trump friend who was also a good Bill Clinton friend found them eerily similar – except that Clinton had a respectable front and Trump did not.”

— Michael Wolff

37. “Once, coming back on his plane with a billionaire friend who had brought along a foreign model, Trump, trying to move in on his friend’s date, urged a stop in Atlantic City. He would provide a tour of his casino. His friend assured the model that there was nothing to recommend Atlantic City. It was a place overrun by white trash. “What is this ‘white trash’?” asked the model. “They’re people just like me,” said Trump, “only they’re poor.”

— Michael Wolff

38. “Offering forceful and dire warnings, Bannon told the president: “This Russian story is a third-tier story, but you fire Comey and it’ll be the biggest story in the world.”

— Michael Wolff

39. “Trump lived, like Hulk Hogan, as a real-life fictional character.”

— Michael Wolff

40. “Bannon had announced himself as Trump’s brain, a boast that vastly irritated the president.”

— Michael Wolff

41. “The Trump campaign had, perhaps less than inadvertently, replicated the scheme from Mel Brooks’s The Producers.”

— Michael Wolff

42. “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.”

— Michael Wolff

43. “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. On the spot, Trump eagerly agreed to let Ryan run the health care bill and to make Price the Health and Human Services secretary.”

— Michael Wolff

44. “But the prospect of her husband’s actually becoming president was, for Melania, a horrifying one. She believed it would destroy her carefully sheltered life – one sheltered, not inconsiderably, from the extended Trump family – which was almost entirely focused on her young son.”

— Michael Wolff

45. “Kushner had his personal press operation and Bannon had his. The leaking culture had become so open and overt – most of the time everybody could identify everybody else’s leaks – that it was now formally staffed.”

— Michael Wolff

46. “Trump loved to hear complain about the CIA and the haplessness of American spies, had been told by his friends that it had not been a good idea to take $45,000 from the Russians for a speech. “Well, it would only be a problem if we won,” he assured them, knowing that it would therefore not be a problem.”

— Michael Wolff

47. “The point could hardly have been clearer: if the president was pressuring the director because he feared that an investigation of Michael Flynn would damage him, then this was an obstruction of justice.”

— Michael Wolff

48. “Trump usually avoided: he had no interest in personnel problems, since they put the emphasis on other people.”

— Michael Wolff

49. “Some thought him dyslexic; certainly his comprehension was limited.”

— Michael Wolff

50. “He simply hoped that difficult decisions would make themselves.”

— Michael Wolff