Top 80 Michael Wolff Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Later that evening, a concert at the Lincoln Memorial, part of an always awkward effort to import pop culture to Washington, ended up, absent any star power, with Trump himself taking the stage as the featured act, angrily insisting to aides that he could outdraw any star.”

— Michael Wolff

52. “By Sunday evening, a feeling perhaps most reminiscent of election night 2016, desolate and confounded, spread through the mainstream media, the liberal establishment, and among all those who were confident that they had surrounded Donald Trump and left him nowhere to run. This was – and there could hardly be any better illustration – defeat snatched from the jaws of victory.”

— Michael Wolff

53. “There was no happenstance news, in Trump’s view. All news was manipulated and designed, planned and planted. All news was to some extent fake – he understood that very well, because he himself had faked it so many times in his career. This was why he had so naturally cottoned to the “fake news” label. “I’ve made stuff up forever, and they always print it,” he bragged.”

— Michael Wolff

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

— Michael Wolff

55. “The campaign staff, now suddenly in a position to snag West Wing jobs – career- and history-making jobs – had to see this odd, difficult, even ridiculous, and, on the face of it, ill-equipped person in a new light.”

— Michael Wolff

56. “Trump’s extemporaneous moments were always existential, but more so for his aides than for him. He spoke obliviously and happily, believing himself to be a perfect pitch raconteur and public performer, while everyone with him held their breath. If a wackadoo moment occurred on the occasions – the frequent occasions – when his remarks careened in no clear direction, his staff had to go into intense method-acting response. It took absolute discipline not to acknowledge what everyone could see.”

— Michael Wolff

57. “And it was not only calls from friends worried about him, but staffers calling people to call him and say Simmer down. “Who do you have in there?” said Joe Scarborough in a frantic call. “Who’s the person you trust? Jared? Who can talk you through this stuff before you decided to act on it?” “Well,” said the president, “you won’t like the answer, but the answer is me. Me. I talk to myself.”

— Michael Wolff

58. “By the second week of the Trump presidency, everybody in the White House seemed to be maintaining their own list of likely leakers and doing their best to leak before being leaked about.”

— Michael Wolff

59. “Who can talk you through this stuff before you decided to act on it?” “Well,” said the president, “you won’t like the answer, but the answer is me. Me. I talk to myself.”

— Michael Wolff

60. “Trump talked nonstop and constantly repeated himself. “Here’s the deal,” a close Trump associate told Priebus. “In an hour meeting with him you’re going to hear fifty-four minutes of stories and they’re going to be the same stories over and over again. So you have to have one point to make and you have to pepper it in whenever you can.”

— Michael Wolff

61. “He was the ultimate antiliberal: an authoritarian who was the living embodiment of resistance to authority.”

— Michael Wolff

62. “Trump’s key supporters worked for him because nobody else would have them.”

— Michael Wolff

63. “If he was not having his six-thirty dinner with Steve Bannon, then, more to his liking, he was in bed by that time with a cheeseburger, watching his three screens and making phone calls –.”

— Michael Wolff

64. “The charge that Trump colluded with the Russians to win the election, which he scoffed at, was, in the estimation of some of his friends, a perfect example of his inability to connect the dots.”

— Michael Wolff

65. “They were all concerned that Trump did not understand what he was up against. That there was simply not enough method to his madness.”

— Michael Wolff

66. “Bannon described Trump as a simple machine. The On switch was full of flattery, the Off switch full of calumny.”

— Michael Wolff

67. “But Ailes was convinced that Trump had no political beliefs or backbone. The fact that Trump had become the ultimate avatar of Fox’s angry common man was another sign that we were living in an upside-down world. The joke was on somebody – and Ailes thought it might be on him.”

— Michael Wolff

68. “Time spent with Trump on the campaign plane was often an epic dissing experience: everybody around him was an idiot.”

— Michael Wolff

69. “There was no real up-and-down structure, but merely a figure at the top and then everyone else scrambling for his attention. It wasn’t task-based so much as response-oriented – whatever captured the boss’s attention focused everybody’s attention.”

— Michael Wolff

70. “Bannon described Trump as a simple machine. The On switch was full of flattery, the Off switch full of calumny. The flattery was dripping, slavish, cast in ultimate superlatives, and entirely disconnected from reality: so-and-so was the best, the most incredible, the ne plus ultra, the eternal. The calumny was angry, bitter, resentful, ever a casting out and closing of the iron door.”

— Michael Wolff

71. “He was postliterate – total television.”

— Michael Wolff

72. “It was an operatic unraveling. So mortifying was this development that when Reince Priebus, the RNC head, was called to New York from Washington for an emergency meeting at Trump Tower, he couldn’t bring himself to leave Penn Station. It took two hours for the Trump team to coax him across town. “Bro,” said a desperate Bannon, cajoling Priebus on the phone, “I may never see you again after today, but you gotta come to this building and you gotta walk through the front door.”

— Michael Wolff

73. “One day, when Kushner accused Walsh of leaking about him, she challenged him back: “My phone records versus yours, my email versus yours.”

— Michael Wolff

74. “Trump liked to portray his business as an empire, it was actually a discrete holding company and boutique enterprise, catering more to his peculiarities as proprietor and brand representative than to any bottom line or other performance measures.”

— Michael Wolff

75. “Trump didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. If it was print, it might as well not exist. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semiliterate.”

— Michael Wolff

76. “But Thiel, who gave a speech supporting Trump at the Republican Convention in Cleveland, reported back that, even having been forewarned, he absolutely was certain of Trump’s sincerity when he said they’d be friends for life – only never to basically hear from him again or have his calls returned.”

— Michael Wolff

77. “He would come out of this campaign, Trump assured Ailes, with a far more powerful brand and untold opportunities. “This is bigger than I ever dreamed of,” he told Ailes in a conversation a week before the election. “I don’t think about losing because it isn’t losing. We’ve totally won.” What’s more, he was already laying down his public response to losing the election: It was stolen!”

— Michael Wolff

78. “Early in the campaign, in a Producers-worthy scene, Sam Nunberg was sent to explain the Constitution to the candidate: “I got as far as the Fourth Amendment before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head.”

— Michael Wolff

79. “As Walsh saw it, Steve Bannon was running the Steve Bannon White House, Jared Kushner was running the Michael Bloomberg White House, and Reince Priebus was running the Paul Ryan White House. It was a 1970s video game, the white ball pinging back and forth in the black triangle.”

— Michael Wolff

80. “The Trump White House stood less for government and the push-pull of competing interests and developing policies, and more, in a brand-savvy world, as a fixed and unpopular cultural symbol.”

— Michael Wolff

81. “In early February, an Obama administration lawyer friendly with Sally Yates remarked with some relish and considerable accuracy: “It certainly is an odd circumstance if you live your life without regard for being elected and then get elected – and quite an opportunity for your enemies.”

— Michael Wolff

82. “In a way, Robert Mueller had come to accept the dialectical premise of Donald Trump – that Trump is Trump. It was circular reasoning to hold the president’s essential character against him. Put another way, confronted by Donald Trump, Bob Mueller threw up his hands. Surprisingly, he found himself in agreement with the greater White House: Donald Trump was the president, and, for better or for worse, what you saw was what you got – and what the country voted for.”

— Michael Wolff

83. “Trump’s entire world was construed from what he saw on television.”

— Michael Wolff

84. “Chaos was Steve’s strategy,” said Walsh.”

— Michael Wolff