Confidence Man Quotes

“It was as clear a guiding ethos for his life as Trump seemed to have: hate should be a civic good.”
― Maggie Haberman, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America

“Trump seemed to have learned a lesson from his travails: his personal brand mattered more than what was on his balance sheet, the projection of strength and success was more significant than any actual fact set underneath.”
― Maggie Haberman, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America

“News consumers were equally fascinated and horrified, like watching a car wreck where the victims repeatedly tried to hurt themselves more instead of accepting medical help.”
― Maggie Haberman, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America

“As the pandemic wore on, Trump consistently lagged Biden, only briefly rising above 45 percent in poll averages during the early pandemic weeks before he began participating in daily Coronavirus Task Force briefings. (At no point during Trump’s presidency did a majority of Americans approve of the job he was doing,”
― Maggie Haberman, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America

“narcissistic drama-seeker who covered a fragile ego with a bullying impulse and, this time, took American democracy to the brink.”
― Maggie Haberman, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America

“[White House Chief of Staff and Four-Star General John] Kelly shared with [Mick} Mulvaney {who was appointed when Kelly resigned] his view that Trump was the most flawed person he had ever met.”
― Maggie Haberman, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America

“Trump is to business what professional wrestling is to sports: part of it, certainly, but also a cartoonish parody of it.”
― Maggie Haberman, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America

“When the tide sank, all boats were lowered. Trump had proven that the majority of Washington Republicans who had initially opposed him were exactly as craven as he had said they were, as he bent them to his will because they saw personal opportunity or necessity for survival, even after the Capitol riot.”
― Maggie Haberman, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America

“Esper had not directly criticized the commander in chief, but his predecessor, Jim Mattis, finally delivered the rebuke of Trump he had held in for years. “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us,” Mattis told the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, before invoking “the Nazi slogan for destroying us . . . ‘Divide and Conquer.’ “We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort,” Mattis went on. “We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society.”
― Maggie Haberman, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America

“(During the same period, Trump also sent four-figure donations to California attorney general Kamala Harris, a Democrat. Her office ultimately took no action against Trump University even as it went after other for-profit educational entities.)”
― Maggie Haberman, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America

“Kelly declined for years after he left to be openly critical of the commander in chief except for occasional remarks amid extreme circumstances. But several people who spoke with him said he described Trump as a “fascist,” uninterested in history or geography, and uniquely unfit for the job of leading a constitutional democracy.”
― Maggie Haberman, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America

“few people took Trump’s ambition to run for president as seriously as he took himself. When I later asked a longtime acquaintance why Trump had finally decided to run after so many prior feints, the person responded without hesitation, “He’s gotten crazier.”
― Maggie Haberman, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America

“All present a chance for him to vent or test reactions or gauge how his statements are playing or discover how he is feeling. He works things out in real time in front of all of us. Along the way, he reoriented an entire country to react to his moods and emotions. I spent the four years of his presidency getting asked by people to decipher why he was doing what he was doing, but the truth is, ultimately, almost no one really knows him. Some know him better than others, but he is often simply, purely opaque, permitting people to read meaning and depth into every action, no matter how empty they may be. Donald Trump was born in Queens in 1946, the second youngest of Fred and Mary Trump’s five children.”
― Maggie Haberman, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America

“Trump loyalists quickly began trying to tear down Hutchinson’s credibility. Yet even as some contradicted specific elements in her testimony, she had painted a familiar portrait of Trump, one that dozens of people who worked for his company, political campaigns, and government tried masking over four decades: a narcissistic drama-seeker who covered a fragile ego with a bullying impulse and, this time, took American democracy to the brink.”
― Maggie Haberman, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America

“Giuliani was never paid for his work beyond some expenses, at Trump’s insistence; the former mayor’s associate and radio cohost, Maria Ryan, tried unsuccessfully to set up a large daily fee for Giuliani, who Trump said shouldn’t be paid “a dime” unless there was success, and later sought a consulting fee for herself, as well as for Trump to grant the Presidential Medal of Freedom and, most significantly, a “general pardon” to Giuliani.”
― Maggie Haberman, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America

“He is incredibly suggestable, skimming ideas and thoughts and statements from other people and repackaging them as his own; campaign aides once called him a “sophisticated parrot.” He has shown a willingness both to believe anything is true, and to say anything is true. He has a few core ideological impulses, but is often willing to suppress them when it’s useful for another purpose. He makes vague statements that allow people to project what they want onto his words, so two sides of the same issue could claim his support. More often than not, Trump is reacting to something instead of having an active plan, but because he so disorients people, they believe there must be a grander strategy or secret scheme at play. Whatever he’s up to is often part of what he sees as a game, whose rules and objectives make sense only to him.”
― Maggie Haberman, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America

“Over time, Trump wanted the wall to be painted black so that the skin of immigrants trying to scale it would burn when they touched it, with spikes on top, and a moat dug along it. He asked whether border agents could shoot migrants attempting to cross. Some agents, responding to Trump’s demand for “extreme action,” suggested using a machine capable of emitting heat, or loud noises that would damage migrants’ ears. Nielsen resisted these proposals, some of which violated the law.”
― Maggie Haberman, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America

“Trump was the only modern president who had never met most of his senior advisers and cabinet appointees before he won the presidency; his three top White House aides—Priebus, Bannon, and Kushner—had never served in government either. He approached the new bureaucracy in much the same way he had a family-run business, demanding that employees sign agreements that would prevent them from ever speaking publicly about the experience. The White House counsel made clear to some staff that the contracts were not enforceable.”
― Maggie Haberman, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America

“Even as Trump eagerly asked aides to relay information from newspaper headlines, including whether his name was mentioned, he had never shown much interest in books. A cabinet next to his bedside contained a book that Ivana later said she saw him occasionally leafing through: an anthology of Adolf Hitler’s speeches called My New Order. (“It was my friend Marty Davis from Paramount who gave me a copy of Mein Kampf, and he’s a Jew,” Trump claimed when pressed about it by journalist Marie Brenner.”
― Maggie Haberman, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America

“realized then and there that if you let people treat you how they want, you’ll be made a fool,” Trump told Blum. “I realized then and there something I would never forget: I don’t want to be made anybody’s sucker.”
― Maggie Haberman, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America

“me,”
― Maggie Haberman, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America

“of me, I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.” By the late 1970s, a reform movement”
― Maggie Haberman, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America

“history. Decades of migration by”
― Maggie Haberman, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America

“Albert Camus, which Esposito pointed to during a negotiation: “Don’t walk behind me, I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me, I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.”
― Maggie Haberman, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America

“The occasion was the nomination of Trump’s third appointee to the Supreme Court, the young federal appeals judge Amy Coney Barrett. She replaced liberal Ruth Bader Ginsburg, an eighty-seven-year-old who had been in and out of hospitals for much of Trump’s term before succumbing to cancer. For weeks, when the subject of Supreme Court justices came up in meetings, Trump would clasp his hands together and look skyward, “Please God. Please watch over her. Every life is precious.” Then, almost winking, he would quickly look at his aides and say, “How’s she doing?” When another visitor came to the Oval Office, Trump asked, “She gonna make it? How much longer you think she has?”
― Maggie Haberman, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America

“Ultimately, thousands of children were separated from adults in the span of a month between May and June, typically one of the higher months for border crossings. Hundreds would remain separated from their parents for years, incurring incalculable psychological damage.”
― Maggie Haberman, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America

“Trump rarely sounded as comfortable as he did in the New York studio of bawdy shock jock Howard Stern, sometimes bringing along his children Ivanka and Don Jr. to join him on air as they became more active on The Apprentice. In one exchange, Trump raised no objections when Stern referred to Ivanka Trump as a “piece of ass.” To Stern, Trump talked about how much he loved sex, the number of partners he had at a single time, the way he liked to wander backstage at his beauty pageants while the contestants were getting dressed. “You see these incredible looking women, and so, I sort of get away with things like that,” he said of his behavior at the pageants.”
― Maggie Haberman, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America

“With Fred’s death came the eventual carving up of his estate by his children and the squeezing out of Freddie’s kids, Mary and Fred III, by Fred Trump’s surviving children. When Freddie’s children went to court to argue for a greater share of the estate, Donald and his siblings cut off medical funding for Fred III’s son, William, who had cerebral palsy. Donald Trump and his siblings would later be accused of misrepresenting how much the estate was worth during that court fight, which had paved the way for a toxic family dispute that haunted Trump nearly two decades later.”
― Maggie Haberman, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America

“Earlier that day, former president George W. Bush, who had remained largely silent during Trump’s presidency, condemned domestic “extremism” and the “malign forces” in the country. “So much of our politics has become a naked appeal to anger, fear and resentment,” he said in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, near where one of four hijacked planes had crashed into a field on September 11. He never mentioned Trump directly.”
― Maggie Haberman, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America

“A Marine to the end, Kelly declined for years after he left to be openly critical of the commander in chief except for occasional remarks amid extreme circumstances. But several people who spoke with him said he described Trump as a “fascist,” uninterested in history or geography, and uniquely unfit for the job of leading a constitutional democracy.”
― Maggie Haberman, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America