Siege Quotes

“the Khashoggi debacle provided yet another example of the bizarre and inexplicable relationships that Trump and his family had formed with bad guys around the world,”
― Michael Wolff, Siege: Trump Under Fire

“you don’t know what he hears because he just talks.”
― Michael Wolff, Siege: Trump Under Fire

“Trump’s key supporters worked for him because nobody else would have them.”
― Michael Wolff, Siege: Trump Under Fire

“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, Siege: Trump Under Fire

“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, Siege: Trump Under Fire

“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, Siege: Trump Under Fire

“For the media, Cohen was a reliable leaker about Trump and the campaign. Among senior campaign aides, he was later regarded as a central voice in NBC correspondent Katy Tur’s book about the campaign,”
― Michael Wolff, Siege: Trump Under Fire

“He can’t walk down steps … can’t walk down hills. [He’s got] mental blocks … [He] can’t handle numbers … they have no meaning to him.”
― Michael Wolff, Siege: Trump Under Fire

“many around Trump were surprised to record an unexpected character note: he wasn’t paranoid. He was self-pitying and melodramatic, but not on guard. Negativity and betrayal always startled him.”
― Michael Wolff, Siege: Trump Under Fire

“When he arrived in Buffalo, two weeks before the election, the local Republicans were set to charge $25 for a picture of a handshake with him at a campaign event. It was a dismal gathering, men shuffling into a small, dim meeting hall and standing around the coffee urn. These were hardworking union guys—or they once were union guys. They were smokers. Veterans. In work shirts and work boots. They looked like America the way America looked in 1965, said Bannon, sentimental at the sight of his deplorables. “I’m not going to have these people pay twenty-five bucks for my picture,” Bannon told the event organizers. “My parents would go nuts.” Instead, he said he would pay the local party organization $25 for each picture and handshake.”
― Michael Wolff, Siege: Trump Under Fire

“Bannon was, once again, gobsmacked. “When Ivanka and the Mooch can talk the commander in chief of the United States into thinking that people will believe that you had a double negative problem, you’ve left the Cartesian universe.”
― Michael Wolff, Siege: Trump Under Fire

“Trump—almost never voluntarily alone, and absolutely never alone and awake without the television on—retreated into his bedroom cabin in silence.”
― Michael Wolff, Siege: Trump Under Fire

“For all of Hannity’s flattery, for all of his zealous commitment to the president, Trump, in almost equal proportion, had become disdainful of him. This was partly standard practice. Sooner or later, Trump felt contempt for anyone who showed him too much devotion. “Hating himself, he of course comes to hate anyone who seems to love him,” analyzed Bannon.”
― Michael Wolff, Siege: Trump Under Fire

“The same person who before the election was regarded as illegitimate by, arguably, the majority of voters now demanded, stamping his feet, that he be seen as legitimate. His argument was a simple inversion: the establishment—the deep state—regards me as illegitimate and violated democratic principles to deny me the White House. But I won; hence, they, not I, are illegitimate.”
― Michael Wolff, Siege: Trump Under Fire

“Donald Trump may have done any number of things that, given good sense and the letter of the law, he should not have done. But with his short attention span, inability to manage multiple variables, exclusive focus on his own immediate needs, and general disregard of all future outcomes, the notion of pinning a grand conspiracy on him seemed like a big stretch.”
― Michael Wolff, Siege: Trump Under Fire

“The aide went on giddily talking about the special bond golfing dads have with their sons until it was clear that he was getting the Trump freeze—an ability to pretend you didn’t exist while at the same time intimating that he might kill you if you did.”
― Michael Wolff, Siege: Trump Under Fire

“Whitestone became what everyone around Trump had to become—long-suffering—because Trump was always ready to explode with anger. “It’s not your fault,” said Whitestone. “It’s just your turn, was how we put it.” “How’s the weather?” was the code for the boss’s mood.”
― Michael Wolff, Siege: Trump Under Fire

“Trump believed he would never be proven guilty; therefore, he was innocent. And he carried the total confidence and even serenity of the innocent—or at least of someone who knows how difficult it is to establish the guilt of a person capable of admitting nothing, of never wavering.”
― Michael Wolff, Siege: Trump Under Fire

“lying willfully, adamantly, without distress or regret, and with absolute disregard of consequences can be a bulwark if not a fail-safe defense.”
― Michael Wolff, Siege: Trump Under Fire

“many around Trump were surprised to record an unexpected character note: he wasn’t paranoid. He was self-pitying and melodramatic, but not on guard. Negativity and betrayal always startled him. Narcissism, really, is the opposite of paranoia: Trump thought people were and should be protecting him. He was surprised, and all the more deeply wounded, to realize that he had to look after himself.”
― Michael Wolff, Siege: Trump Under Fire

“Trump admired her not because she had the political skills to protect him, but for her pliant dutifulness. Her job was to devote herself to his care and feeding.”
― Michael Wolff, Siege: Trump Under Fire

“eager to walk back, by whatever increment possible, Trump’s hard-line immigration policies and rhetoric. Ryan and others had devised a simple method for accomplishing this kind of objective: you agreed with him and then ignored him. There was happy talk, which Trump bathed in, followed by practical steps, which bored him.”
― Michael Wolff, Siege: Trump Under Fire

“Lou Dobbs, a mainstay of Trump support and philosophy, told Bannon he could not believe how delusional Trump had become.”
― Michael Wolff, Siege: Trump Under Fire

“Trump was a cold war president and China was his enemy”
― Michael Wolff, Siege: Trump Under Fire

“Nixon, Trump announced, was the greatest president.”
― Michael Wolff, Siege: Trump Under Fire

“Bannon, in a public statement, declared: “You are either with Trump or against him.”
― Michael Wolff, Siege: Trump Under Fire

“Lewandowski and Hannity actually thought that the House might be hours away from voting articles of impeachment.”
― Michael Wolff, Siege: Trump Under Fire

“Robert Mueller, the stoic marine, had revealed himself over the course of the nearly two-year investigation to his colleagues and staff to be quite a Hamlet figure. Or, less dramatically, a cautious and indecisive bureaucrat. He had repeatedly traveled between a desire to use his full authority against Donald Trump and the nagging belief that he had no such authority. He could be, he knew, the corrective to the louche and corrupt president; at the same time, he asked himself, what right did he have to correct the country’s duly elected leader?”
― Michael Wolff, Siege: Trump Under Fire

“Trump saw the world through the filter of other people’s weaknesses. He saw people through their physical and intellectual shortcomings, or through oddities in the way they talked or dressed.”
― Michael Wolff, Siege: Trump Under Fire

“The inside joke became—echoing Karl Rove as Bush’s brain and later Steve Bannon as Trump’s brain—that now it was Sean Hannity who had become Trump’s resident genius. Trump had ended up with someone even stupider than he was. Yet this was fitting, because Trump deeply resented the implication that he ever needed to depend on someone else’s acumen or intelligence—or, really, that there could possibly be anyone who was smarter than he was. But with Hannity as his sidekick, he could feel quite certain that no one would think he was relying on someone smarter. (This, in fact, was a frequent internal debate: Who was stupider, Trump or Hannity?)”
― Michael Wolff, Siege: Trump Under Fire