A Year at the Circus Quotes

“This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked’ quotation. It was the stand-out phrase from the four hundred plus pages. But how to report it on the news? He used an expletive? He used the F word? Well, ladies and gentleman, I made broadcast history that evening by being the first person in BBC News to use the word ‘fucked’ on the flagship Ten O’Clock News.”
― Jon Sopel, A Year At The Circus: Inside Trump's White House

“when Sessions told the President that a Special Counsel had been appointed, the President slumped back in his chair and said, ‘Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.’ The President became angry and lambasted the Attorney General for his decision to recuse from the investigation, stating, ‘How could you let this happen, Jeff?”
― Jon Sopel, A Year At The Circus: Inside Trump's White House

“To summarise, a former head of the Trump campaign, his deputy, a foreign policy advisor, the national security advisor and Trump’s personal lawyer had all been found guilty. And that is not to mention the pile of indictments against various Russians who had sought to interfere in the election.”
― Jon Sopel, A Year At The Circus: Inside Trump's White House

“Trump answered the question directly of whether he had worked for the Russians: ‘I never worked for Russia,’ he told the gathered media on the South Lawn of the White House. In the history of the United States of America has a president ever had to deny being an asset of a foreign adversary?”
― Jon Sopel, A Year At The Circus: Inside Trump's White House

“In the copious output of the Trump Twitter feed you will find attacks on anyone and everyone – allies like Theresa May, Justin Trudeau, Macron and Merkel. You will even see him piling into cabinet colleagues if he feels they’ve fallen short; he goes after sports stars and TV personalities. Even Meryl Streep was told she was an overrated actress by the President after she had said something disobliging. And, of course, he goes after political enemies with a rare gusto. But Vladimir Putin? Try to find a critical word that he’s ever said about him. You won’t: there isn’t one.”
― Jon Sopel, A Year At The Circus: Inside Trump's White House

“President Trump was asked if he believed his own intelligence agencies or the Russian president when it came to the allegations of meddling in the US presidential elections. ‘President Putin says it’s not Russia. I don’t see any reason why it would be,’ he replied. In other words, given a straight choice between accepting the unanimous assessment of the CIA, FBI and the director of National Intelligence, Donald Trump chose the word of the Russian leader. It caused a furore back in Washington. In a strongly worded statement, the Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan said Mr Trump ‘must appreciate that Russia is not our ally’. Senator John McCain weighed in too: ‘No prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant.”
― Jon Sopel, A Year At The Circus: Inside Trump's White House

“At the beginning of 2019 there was an extraordinary leak of his daily schedules. What they showed, if you were being unkind, is that this president does next to no work. If you were being generous, you would say he allows himself to benefit from plenty of unstructured thinking time. ‘Executive time’ is the euphemism that is used. And a lot of each day is ring-fenced executive time. If anyone doubts this, just after the leak of these schedules there was a faintly hilarious episode where one of the cable news anchors accused Trump of being the laziest president ever. Within 45 seconds of the presenter saying this, Trump went onto Twitter to say, ‘No president ever worked harder than me.’ He hadn’t thought this through.”
― Jon Sopel, A Year At The Circus: Inside Trump's White House

“And journalists could play rough. When John Quincy Adams went swimming in the nude in the Potomac River, it’s reported that Washington’s first woman reporter stole his clothes and would not give them back until the President answered her questions. More recently, Lyndon B. Johnson famously (and somewhat ruefully) said, ‘If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read, “President Can’t Swim”.”
― Jon Sopel, A Year At The Circus: Inside Trump's White House

“After a long silence, Tillerson would eventually pull the curtains back a touch on what life had been like in Trumpworld. ‘What was challenging for me coming from the disciplined, highly process-oriented ExxonMobil corporation,’ Tillerson told the CBS network months after his firing, ‘was to go to work for a man who is pretty undisciplined, doesn’t like to read, doesn’t read briefing reports, doesn’t like to get into the details of a lot of things, but rather just says, “This is what I believe.”
― Jon Sopel, A Year At The Circus: Inside Trump's White House

“One other thing about the Trump team was just how incredibly wealthy it was. It was flush with billionaires, multi-millionaires – oh, and a smattering of generals. It was the richest group ever assembled. The joke was you either needed to have bread or braid to get into a Trump cabinet. Presumably the military men were the poorest of those who sat round the famous table, but it should be recorded that none of them was caught up in any of these scandals.”
― Jon Sopel, A Year At The Circus: Inside Trump's White House

“Certainly none of the interventions had quite the impact of the Treasury Secretary, William Windom at the end of the nineteenth century, as he spoke on a subject dear to this president’s heart, trade: ‘As a poison in the blood permeates arteries, veins, nerves, brain and heart, and speedily brings paralysis or death, so does a debased or fluctuating currency permeate all arteries of trade, paralyze all kinds of business and brings disaster to all classes of people.’ After that elegantly crafted peroration Windom sat down, lit a cigar, took a sip of water – and suffered a fatal heart attack.”
― Jon Sopel, A Year At The Circus: Inside Trump's White House

“TRUMP: Thank you, very much. Thank you. Thank you all very much. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. Thank you very much. Well, Socratic dialogue it wasn’t.”
― Jon Sopel, A Year At The Circus: Inside Trump's White House

“In the room each cabinet chair bears a brass plate with name, position and dates of service. When a cabinet member departs, the tradition is that their cabinet chair is bought by the staff and presented to them as a gift. In which case, since Donald Trump’s election, cabinet chair makers and the brass plaque manufacturers of Washington DC must be enjoying something of a boom.”
― Jon Sopel, A Year At The Circus: Inside Trump's White House

“In 1844 the 10th US president, John Tyler, invited members of his cabinet aboard a new warship called the Princeton for a cruise on the Potomac, the river that runs through Washington and leads out into the Chesapeake Bay. The ship had a 12-inch cannon aboard, which someone had seen fit to call the Peacemaker. And throughout this happy little voyage, the big gun was fired ceremoniously to the delight of onlookers lining the banks of the river. Drink was consumed, and there was an atmosphere of celebration. After several hours, and several toasts, the captain of the ship, one Robert F. Stockton, was persuaded to fire the cannon one last time – only for the gun to explode, sending white hot metal scattering across the deck and killing eight people including two cabinet members, Secretary of State Abel Upshur and Navy Secretary Thomas Gilmer. Tyler, who was below deck at the time, was unhurt. Well, that’s one way to create the need for a cabinet reshuffle.”
― Jon Sopel, A Year At The Circus: Inside Trump's White House

“This is a tale of two Kims, and it is instructive on a wider level. North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, the leader of one of the most brutal regimes in the world today, with the worst human rights record, where citizens have been starved to death, is venerated for his toughness and wiliness; Kim Darroch, lifelong public servant, drawing a government salary from Europe’s most enduring democracy, is to be torn to shreds. Leaders from the old democracies and America’s historic partners and allies seem to fare a lot worse under this president than strong-men dictators and tyrants.”
― Jon Sopel, A Year At The Circus: Inside Trump's White House