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September 10 - September 27, 2020
“He’s not qualified to be president,” Samantha said. “I’m a political science student and I know more about how the world works than he does. What does he know about the United Nations or NATO or nuclear weapons? Nothing is what he knows. I’m literally more qualified than him and I’m twenty-one-years old.”
but he’d done no preparation for the simple reason that he never prepares for anything, ever.
Trump was always prone to listen to the last person who spoke to him, frequently the advisor floating the worst and most destructive idea, and in those days, Lewandowski was often that person.
“You’ve called women you don’t like fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals,” Kelly said to Trump. Sure enough, Trump went nuts, displaying the temperament that now passes for presidential.
as two old white male sexual predators decided how Megyn Kelly’s life would play out, or not, which personified so much of what was fundamentally wrong about the campaign that I was cheering for so ardently.
Trump didn’t run for office with a coherent ideology, other than his Archie Bunker-like Queens reactionary worldview and a will to power,
he came to see that Russia could potentially be a great ally—not for the United States, but for him personally, a distinction that was starting to blur.
Steven Bannon loved to portray himself as an evil genius—and he truly was an evil, racist human being, like the character Al Pacino played in The Devil’s Advocate who was actually the antichrist—but
Trump had long experience benefitting from ill-gotten Russian largesse, selling luxury condos to many oligarchs and their minions.
Everyone other than the ruling class on the earth was like an ant, to his way of thinking, their lives meaningless and always subject to the whims of the true rulers of the world.
the world saw in the brutal killing of Jamal Khashoggi, a crime that has had precisely zero impact on American foreign policy with the Saudis.
the Moscow project was like the Doral deal a few years earlier, with Ivanka granting herself control over the fun aspects of the deal while I was left with the miserable work of trying to get Felix Sater to deliver.
By ingratiating himself with Putin, and hinting at changes in American sanctions policy against the country under a Trump Presidency, the Boss was trying to nudge the Moscow Trump Tower project along.
Lewandowski was pushing a story that their marriage was in deep trouble. Worse, Lewandowski said that Jared was gay and that Ivanka was having an affair. Imagine the stupidity of spreading that kind of ridiculous and scurrilous nonsense and not expecting it to come back to bite you in the ass. But that was Lewandowski: idiotic to the last drop.
Trump actually hated firing people and facing personal confrontation, despite his fame for barking “you’re fired” on The Apprentice. He had others do his dirty work for him, often delighting in the details about how humiliated or badly treated the victim of his firings were.
The mainstream media would then write disapproving articles about the made-up story, but they’d always repeated the slander, providing yet more free press
reassurance that appealed to white suburban moms turned off by Trump but willing to hold their noses and vote for him, partly out of dislike for Clinton’s sense of entitlement but also because of the promise of Supreme Court justices who would make abortion illegal.
what had started as a lark and a PR stunt had turned into a triumph.
The plane rides, the lavish dinners, even purchasing clothes—Trump’s entire life was one giant, or huuuuggggeeee tax deduction, I knew.
He had long accused others of doing the very things he did; that was a central element of his modus operandi. If Trump claimed you cheated or lied or stole, you could be sure that he’d done those things himself;
she had a very poor appreciation of how to take the measure of people, especially men. In other words, she was way, way, way over her head
like any good fixer dealing in the world as he and I did, Keith was very attentive to his cell phone.
the way Trump thought: blame came first, and then the facts, although that’s not really accurate, because the facts were always so distorted that it was impossible to communicate reality to him.
I was doing what everyone at Trump Organization was always supposed to do: stick with the narrative. Deny, deny, deny. Accuse, accuse, accuse. Never, ever, ever concede defeat or admit weakness.
Trump lacked intimates and true friends, so he had nowhere to turn in his hour of need, a reality I now see playing out on the nightly news as he gets more and more isolated as president.
All of this would have blown over then, no doubt, in that eventuality. But the Gods and James Comey had another outcome in mind, as we all know.
the internal polls showed the race tightening at a rapid rate after James Comey announced his renewed investigation into Hillary Clinton, looking for all the world like he was deliberately throwing the election for Trump. That was how it looked inside the campaign.
Trump never, ever prepared or studied or planned, instead trusting his instincts, a practice that seemed certifiably insane to me.
Kushner, an aristocratic man-child possessed of supreme arrogance and a completely amoral will to power, like his father-in-law and wife,
Trump was suddenly in charge of the largest favor factory in the history of the world
There was no amount of this that was too much for him, never a time when he recognized he was being stroked and flattered for transparently self-serving reasons; he never rolled his eyes, or yawned, no matter how preposterous or sycophantic the supplicant.
Russian interference, the nonstop lying and racism and nativism, the outrageous, over-the-top gloating, the schadenfreude, the Electoral College, the tax cuts for the rich, the Supreme Court justices, the constant, unceasing bullying, all the outrages.
But the premise of my explanation left obvious questions: why would a lawyer, any lawyer, pay a client’s expenses, without their knowledge? Was that legal? Ethical? Rational?
the opposite of Occam’s Razor: instead of the simplest explanation being the likeliest, this strategy involved complicating the narrative, throwing sand in the eyes of the onlooker, claiming that transparently implausible stories were true unless proven otherwise, and even then denying the obvious truth.
Here’s an idea: why don’t I spare you all the nonsense involving Michael Avenatti and me? I hope the reviewers will take note of this tender mercy.
the mesmerizing effect of being around Trump: for all the bullshit and bluster, he really was running the world, and I really was an incredible, unbelievably, insanely powerful attorney and fixer, on an intergalactic plane of existence.
the Southern District had made it clear that they were going to freeze and move for forfeiture of all my assets, to the tune of more than $50 million. If I wanted to proceed, I needed to immediately wire $1 million to Petrillo’s escrow account as a retainer.
My lawyers had continually stated that they didn’t see any charges coming, but the truth in this country is that if federal prosecutors want to get you, they will. No matter who you are.
It was prison, but if you’re going to be in prison, it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.
It felt like Barr’s sudden amendment of the rules was aimed at me, at the direction of President Trump, which speaks volumes about the nature of the rule of law in this age.
No words ring more true for me than when Michelle Obama stated, “Being President doesn’t change who you are, it reveals who you are. . .
There is a serious danger that Donald Trump will not leave office easily, and there is a real chance of not having a peaceful transition.
The document was amateurish, with elisions and bad grammar, and it generally looked like it had been thrown together at the last moment.
“I make the finding that the purpose of transferring Mr. Cohen from furlough to home confinement to jail is retaliatory,” the judge said.
