The Divider Quotes

“He has betrayed our national security and he will do so again. He has compromised our elections and he will do so again. You will not change him, you cannot constrain him. He is who he is. Truth matters little to him. What’s right matters even less, and decency matters not at all. I do not ask you to convict him because truth or right or decency matters nothing to him, but because we have proven our case and it matters to you. Truth matters to you. Right matters to you. You are decent. He is not who you are.[36]”
― Peter Baker, The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021

“He would pursue vengeance against his enemies. He would politicize the courts, the Justice Department, and the military. He would challenge allies and seek common cause with autocrats. We know he would do these things because those are exactly the things that he did and said for all four years of his first term in the presidency. Even if”
― Peter Baker, The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021

“One of Giuliani’s favorite claims was the charge that anywhere between 8,000 and 30,000 dead people voted in Philadelphia. In fact, investigations would show that it was exactly two. Similarly in Georgia, he variously claimed that 800 or 6,000 or 10,515 dead people voted. There, as well, it would eventually be determined that at most it was just four. But that did not deter Giuliani. He also asserted that 65,000 or 165,000 underage people voted in Georgia, when, in fact, the number was zero. In Arizona, he said at different points that “way more than 10,000” or “32,000” or “probably about 250,000” or “a few hundred thousand” undocumented immigrants had voted illegally in the state, but investigators found no evidence that any had.[22] Not hundreds of thousands, not tens of thousands, not any.”
― Peter Baker, The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021

“It did not matter, to Trump or his followers, that not one independent authority, not one judge, not one prosecutor, not one election agency, not one official who was not a Trump partisan ever found widespread fraud. None. Even an audit in Arizona sponsored by Trump allies only confirmed the result. A federal judge described the effort to overturn the election as a “coup in search of a legal theory” and opined that Trump most likely committed conspiracy to defraud the United States and obstruct the work of Congress. A bipartisan House investigating committee concluded that Trump had committed a crime.”
― Peter Baker, The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021

“You can’t just go and just flip a switch and change the election,” Rosen responded. “I don’t expect you to do that,” Trump said. “Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.”[17] Just say it was corrupt. Even though Rosen had told him there was no evidence that it was. Much as with his campaign to get Ukraine to undermine Joe Biden, Trump was not looking for corruption, just someone to say there was so he could weaponize it.”
― Peter Baker, The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021

“After years of experience, Trump knew how to sell a big lie. He had done it many times before. As a real estate developer, he had claimed his buildings were taller than they were. As a reality television star, he had made up conflicts between contestants to juice his ratings. As a political provocateur, he had claimed without a lick of proof that the nation’s first Black president was secretly born in Africa. The trick with conspiracy theories, he had demonstrated, was repetition and conviction. “You say something enough times,” he once told Chris Christie’s wife, “and it becomes true.”
― Peter Baker, The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021

“The more Trump listened to them, the more he hardened around the notion that he had been robbed, and in the days following the election he would resolve to do what no other sitting president has done in the history of the United States—hold on to power despite the indisputable will of the voters. The next ten weeks would prove to be the most elaborate and extensive campaign to overturn a presidential election since the ratification of the Constitution, all orchestrated from the Oval Office.”
― Peter Baker, The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021

“Trump also said out loud what he had made abundantly clear in private, that his main concern was not the health of Americans at risk but what their illnesses would mean for him politically. Asked whether he would allow people to disembark from a cruise ship idling off the coast of San Francisco where nineteen crew members and two passengers had tested positive for the virus, Trump said he would rather not, since their cases would be added to the total number of infections in the United States. And that would make him look bad. “I like the numbers being where they are,” he said. “I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.”[3]”
― Peter Baker, The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021

“As for the coronavirus, Trump remained in denial mode. The president repeatedly told the public that the outbreak was “totally under control,” that it would “miraculously” disappear on its own with warmer weather, that it “will go away,” that it was comparable to the ordinary flu, that the number of cases would go “down close to zero,” that a vaccine would be available soon, and that anyone who wanted to be tested could get a test.[21] None of it was true.”
― Peter Baker, The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021

“It is midnight in Washington,” Schiff began. “The lights are finally going out in the Capitol after a long day in the impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump.” Over the course of the next twenty-five minutes, he said it was not enough to let voters decide because if the Senate were to let Trump off, he would be free to use his power to advantage himself with impunity in the election. “He has done it before, he will do it again,” Schiff warned.”
― Peter Baker, The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021

“Pompeo and his explosive temper. Pompeo would curse and yell even at early-morning staff meetings with his top advisers. He often vented about leaks. Women were a particular target, especially Lisa Kenna, the career diplomat who served as his executive secretary. His tirades at her, described by three senior officials who observed them directly, were blistering. “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen such sustained abuse in my life,” one senior official said about Pompeo’s treatment of Kenna.”
― Peter Baker, The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021

“Mattis had a line to explain what was happening: Trump was so out of his depth that he had decided to drain the pool. Once it got shallow enough, he must have figured, he would not be underwater anymore.”
― Peter Baker, The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021

“To Trump, talking with Murdoch was more important than just about anything. No one played a more central role in Trump’s media world than the Australian-born impresario of conservative journalism who owned Fox News, Fox Business, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and other”
― Peter Baker, The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021

“Trump was often just one yes-man away from doing what he wanted. One attorney general. One military commander. One vice president.”
― Peter Baker, The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021

“But it would be a tendentious argument, they believed, not one an experienced prosecutor would take to a real court with a real jury. The only meaningful debate was about the Trump Tower meeting—some prosecutors thought they did not need to make a big deal out of it since it turned out to be so inconsequential, while others argued that even if not criminal it was still a deeply troubling episode that belonged in their final report.”
― Peter Baker, The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021

“The decision about Russia, in the end, was not a hard one for the Mueller team. They had conclusive intelligence proving that Moscow conducted a wide-ranging operation to interfere in the 2016 election with the goal of electing Trump. They also had plenty of evidence that the Trump campaign had extensive contacts with various Russians and intermediaries, welcomed Moscow’s help, and profited from it. What they did not have, the prosecutors agreed, was enough evidence to prove in a court of law beyond a reasonable doubt that there was a criminal conspiracy on the part of the president or members of his staff. As an intellectual matter, they thought they could string together the disparate episodes and connections to make a technical case as if it were a law school exercise. There were an awful lot of “coincidences” there.”
― Peter Baker, The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021

“Both sides in the internal American feud, meanwhile, were suspicious of America’s ally South Korea, fearing that the government of President Moon Jae-in had staked its political future on a deal and was actually working in concert with the North Koreans to box in Trump.”
― Peter Baker, The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021

“Trump often pulled out the “love letters” as he called the correspondence he had received from the North Korean leader, and showed them to random Oval Office visitors, not seeming to recognize that they were just typical diplomatic pabulum mixed with saccharine flattery.”
― Peter Baker, The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021

“Where is the server? I want to know, where is the server and what is the server saying?”
― Peter Baker, The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021

“You’re a very shallow person,” Michael Bailkin, an attorney who negotiated a hotel project for Trump, once told him. “Of course,” Trump replied, “that’s one of my strengths.”[15] Plenty of other presidents had come”
― Peter Baker, The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021

“The notion of making his daughter vice president was, of course, preposterous.”
― Peter Baker, The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021

“Trump was checked in his ability to do what he was tempted to do in the early weeks of the administration, which was to cut a deal and simply give them Ukraine,” Fried recalled. “They were blocked by Congress.” In July of 2017, Congress passed a version of the measure that McConnell had threatened, the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, broadened to include Iran and North Korea as well as Russia.”
― Peter Baker, The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021

“And then he decided. “Fuck that shit,” he told his staff. “I’ll just fight him.”
― Peter Baker, The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021

“to see the real Trump. “Anyone who’s ever played with”
― Peter Baker, The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021

“2 Timothy 47.”
― Peter Baker, The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021