Top 60 Philip Rucker Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “To be the adult in the room is to suffer the tantrum of the kid and not to take it seriously.”

— Philip Rucker

2. “Cohn had confided to his peers he had been surprised at the many gaps in Trump’s understanding of world affairs.”

— Philip Rucker

3. “Television is often the guiding force of his day, both weapon and scalpel, megaphone and news feed,” Ashley Parker and Robert Costa wrote in The Washington Post.”

— Philip Rucker

4. “Another senior administration official said, “The guy is completely crazy. The story of Trump: a president with horrible instincts and a senior-level cabinet playing Whac-A-Mole.”

— Philip Rucker

5. “The intelligence agencies were on guard in part because, as the Post reported on February 27, they had intercepted private conversations of leaders in China, Israel, Mexico, and the United Arab Emirates talking about the ease with which they could manipulate Kushner.”

— Philip Rucker

6. “This period amplified Trump’s ugliest characteristics as president. “He goes out and says crazy, horrible things, blows race whistles and sits back and watches his topic of craziness dominate cable TV for the next 24 hours,” said Mike Murphy, a Republican strategist.”

— Philip Rucker

7. “Trump was restless. He never liked life outside the bubble of his daily life – his bed, his televisions, his steaks and burgers.”

— Philip Rucker

8. “Ivanka lied to her father’s face, saying her security clearance had been downgraded as well,” a White House adviser recalled. “She told her father that Kelly had taken her clearance. It was a complete lie.”

— Philip Rucker

9. “Kim was a pariah, arguably the world’s greatest abuser of human rights, and committed to nuclear armament. But Trump threw Kim a party, showering him with respect and declaring himself honored to be in his presence. The summit was carefully staged to put both leaders on equal footing, which normalized the authoritarian Kim.”

— Philip Rucker

10. “Kushner was the classic profile of a person who would be rejected for a national security clearance, and Kelly’s move to downgrade his clearance level provided comfort to the CIA.”

— Philip Rucker

11. “He’s ruined that magic,” this aide said of Trump. “The disdain he shows for our country’s foundation and its principles. The disregard he has for right and wrong. Your fist clenches. Your teeth grate. The hair goes up on the back of your neck. I have to remind myself I said an oath to a document in the National Archives. I swore to the Constitution. I didn’t swear an oath to this jackass.”

— Philip Rucker

12. “I’m not a loser,” the president said. “I’m not going to lose this. I’m not going to look weak. I’m not going to give in.” But on January 25, Trump gave in. The master deal maker wasn’t the wizard he claimed.”

— Philip Rucker

13. “Mueller laid bare in granular detail a presidency plagued by paranoia and insecurity, depicting Trump’s inner circle as gripped by fear of the president’s spasms as he frantically pressured his aides to lie to the public and fabricate false records.”

— Philip Rucker

14. “Trump would later claim that he never asked McGahn to help him “fire” Mueller, which technically was true. He hadn’t used the word “fire.” But it was clear to McGahn what Trump wanted him to do.”

— Philip Rucker

15. “Yet when The Washington Post’s David Nakamura asked Trump in Hanoi whether he had confronted Kim about Warmbier’s death, the president said Kim was not to blame. “I don’t believe that he would’ve allowed that to happen,” Trump said. “Just wasn’t to his advantage to allow that to happen. Those prisons are rough. They’re rough places. And bad things happened. But I really don’t believe that he was – I don’t believe he knew about it.”

— Philip Rucker

16. “Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart,” he continued.”

— Philip Rucker

17. “Others who interacted with Ivanka found her to be a spoiled princess who had absorbed her father’s worst narcissistic, superficial, and self-promoting qualities. “As a twelve-year-old, she was put on the phone with CEOs, and her father told her she was the most amazing thing in the world and her opinion was valued,” one administration official explained. “She is a product of her environment.”

— Philip Rucker

18. “The haphazard and dysfunctional transition was a harbinger for the administration. Trump placed a premium on branding and image at the expense of fundamental competence. He and many of his advisers had no experience with public service, and therefore little regard for its ethics or norms.”

— Philip Rucker

19. “I’ve served the man for two years. I think he’s a long-term and immediate danger to the country,” a senior national security official told us.”

— Philip Rucker

20. “Two kinds of people went to work for the administration: those who thought Trump was saving the world and those who thought the world needed to be saved from Trump.”

— Philip Rucker

21. “The president-elect approached the ten-week transition as a casting call for a new season of The Apprentice, the NBC reality show that had made him a household name.”

— Philip Rucker

22. “Trump also asked Weingarten two questions he had been asking other attorneys in recent days: Could Trump pardon his family members? Could he pardon himself?”

— Philip Rucker

23. “Trump’s aides knew he needed to hire a seasoned member of the white-collar defense bar with experience in both law and political combat. The trouble was that most of the pros did not want to represent him.”

— Philip Rucker

24. “The White House was so broken,” one administration official later remarked, looking back on this tense period on immigration policy. “There was no process. Ideas would come to the president in a no-process method. Half-baked ideas come in to him. God knows how. It was totally disorganized. To this day, no one is in charge at the White House. No one.”

— Philip Rucker

25. “You couldn’t get a straight answer from John Kelly,” one aide recalled. “Either he was dishonest or an old man who can’t remember things.”

— Philip Rucker

26. “Through September and October, Trump’s lawyers kept telling the public that they were working with the president to complete the written answers to Mueller, but the reality is they were having significant trouble getting time with their client, even though he spent many hours a day watching television.”

— Philip Rucker

27. “Putin had developed a knack for manipulating Trump, making him believe that the two of them could get big things accomplished if they ignored their staffs and worked one-on-one.”

— Philip Rucker

28. “As the president repeatedly told Kelly when he proposed a subject briefing: “I don’t want to talk to anyone. I know more than they do. I know better than anybody else.”

— Philip Rucker

29. “The next day, November 12, Veterans’ Day was observed in the United States, but Trump opted against paying his respects at Arlington National Cemetery, a tradition for presidents – something he later acknowledged he should have done. Instead, Trump spent the holiday inside the White House sulking about the poor media coverage of his Paris trip and tweeting about “the prospect of Presidential Harassment by the Dems” once they take control of the House in January.”

— Philip Rucker

30. “For example, Barr wrote that none of Trump’s actions, “in our judgment,” were done with corrupt intent. Actually, the report’s authors had detailed four episodes in which they identified substantial evidence of Trump’s intent to thwart the probe.”

— Philip Rucker

31. “Cohen argued that Trump ran for office “to make his brand great, not to make our country great,” and that as president he has become “the worst version of himself.” Cohen described Trump as far more craven, dishonest, and racist in private than he lets on in public.”

— Philip Rucker

32. “Trump approached staffing the administration like a casting call and sought “the look,” a fixation in keeping with the beauty pageants he had once run.”

— Philip Rucker

33. “One by one, mourners celebrated elements of McCain’s epic life – basic decency and morality; common values that transcended ideology, class, or race; service to nation over self – that Trump most starkly lacked.”

— Philip Rucker

34. “The worries of intelligence and law enforcement officials mattered little to Trump, however. He was determined to grasp onto anything, even a partisan memo, to bolster his claim that the Russia investigation was a “witch hunt.”

— Philip Rucker

35. “Privately, Kelly told Mattis and other administration officials that he thought Ivanka and Kushner were “idiots” and needed to leave the White House because “we’ve just got to run this country.”

— Philip Rucker

36. “Privately, however, Trump’s top advisers were exasperated by a crisis they believed would likely recur, considering how much value this president placed in cable news musings and how little value he placed in the expertise of his own government.”

— Philip Rucker

37. “A few members of Mueller’s team wanted to be explicit in the report about the incriminating information they had found about Trump and explain that if he had not been a sitting president, he could likely have faced charges.”

— Philip Rucker

38. “Watching Pelosi challenge Trump, Bannon whispered to colleagues, “She’s going to get us. Total assassin. She’s an assassin.”

— Philip Rucker

39. “Some of these foreign leaders described Kushner as naive and easily pushed; others said his financial debts and search for refinancing for an underwater Manhattan skyscraper were one route that made him vulnerable to pressure.”

— Philip Rucker

40. “Marooned for the pre-Christmas weekend at the White House, Trump watched hours of cable news and stewed over the coverage – not only of the shutdown, but also of Mattis’s resignation. Mattis’s letter – distributed to reporters by his aides – was interpreted in the media as a scathing rebuke of Trump’s worldview.”

— Philip Rucker

41. “Few media narratives got under Trump’s skin more than the impression that his staff was managing him, and whenever this happened, Trump found a way to prove that he could not be managed. He vented about it to Corey Lewandowski, one of his trusted outside political advisers. “These guys are going to tell me how to communicate?” Trump said. “They’re going to tell me when I’m going to do a rally and when I’m not?”

— Philip Rucker

42. “On November 9, 2016, President-elect Donald Trump began to staff his administration. Because he never truly expected to win, he was unprepared.”

— Philip Rucker

43. “At a February 9 senior staff meeting, after he had issued two divergent public statements about Porter, Kelly said that he had taken action to remove Porter within forty minutes of learning that abuse allegations were credible. But many staffers said Kelly’s claim of swift action was dishonest, and it contradicted the public record.”

— Philip Rucker

44. “Some of them also harked back to the 1950s, envisioning a simpler, halcyon America in which white male patriarchs ruled the roost, decorous women kept home and hearth, and minorities were silent or subservient.”

— Philip Rucker

45. “Cobb was drawn to the challenge of representing Trump, but his firm refused to let him, largely because Trump was too toxic a client.”

— Philip Rucker

46. “Trump’s friends and advisers had long observed that he had an amazing ability to disconnect from facts and remember experiences the way it suited him at the moment, a dangerous habit when being interviewed by federal prosecutors in a criminal investigation.”

— Philip Rucker

47. “The president-elect loved to gin up the ratings, and was quick to seize on how the presidency could benefit his personal brand and his businesses.”

— Philip Rucker

48. “Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.”

— Philip Rucker

49. “For instance, the report stated, “If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment.”

— Philip Rucker

50. “Yet Trump still lacked a big-name, credible Washington attorney on his personal legal team, one with the backing of a powerhouse firm. In an all-hands-on-deck push, Trump’s advisers reached out to Ted Olson, A. B. Culvahouse Jr., Emmet Flood, Robert Giuffra, Paul Clement, and Dan Levin. All of them followed Sullivan’s lead, giving a polite no.”

— Philip Rucker