Michael Wolff's explosive book on the Trump white house was released four days early, and here are some of the juicer tidbits that have already come out:
Shortly after the election, Trump's friend Ailes told him, with some urgency, “You’ve got to get right on Russia.” Even exiled from Fox News, Ailes still maintained a fabled intelligence network. He warned Trump of potentially damaging material coming his way.- telling him, “You need to take this seriously, Donald.” Trump happily replied: “Jared has this. It’s all worked out.”
Ivanka often described the mechanics behind [her father's hair] to friends: an absolutely clean pate—a contained island after scalp reduction surgery—surrounded by a furry circle of hair around the sides and front, from which all ends are drawn up to meet in the center and then swept back and secured by a stiffening spray. The color, she would point out to comical effect, was from a product called Just for Men—the longer it was left on, the darker it got. Impatience resulted in Trump’s orange-blond hair color.
Trump had a longtime fear of being poisoned, one reason why he liked to eat at McDonald’s — nobody knew he was coming and the food was safely pre-made.
Trump didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. If it was print, it might as well not exist. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semiliterate. (There was some argument about this, because he could read headlines and articles about himself, or at least headlines on articles about himself, and the gossip squibs on the New York Post’s Page Six.) Some thought him dyslexic; certainly his comprehension was limited. Others concluded that he didn’t read because he just didn’t have to, and that in fact this was one of his key attributes as a populist. He was post-literate—total television.
Trump had little or no interest in the central Republican goal of repealing Obamacare. An overweight seventy-year-old man with various physical phobias (for instance, he lied about his height to keep from having a body mass index that would label him as obese), he personally found health care and medical treatments of all kinds a distasteful subject. The details of the contested legislation were, to him, particularly boring; his attention would begin wandering from the first words of a policy discussion. During one particular health care discussion, Trump reportedly asked of his aides: “Why can’t Medicare simply cover everybody?”
In their efforts to “influence the president and undermine” one another, Bannon, Priebus and Kushner created a kind of “paralysis” within the White House that led each of the advisers to turn to the media. The constant leaking was often blamed on lower minions and permanent executive branch staff, culminating in late February with an all-hands meeting of staffers called by Sean Spicer—cell phones surrendered at the door—during which the press secretary issued threats of random phone checks and admonitions about the use of encrypted texting apps. Everybody was a potential leaker; everybody was accusing everybody else of being a leaker. The reality is that everybody ended up being a leaker.
In a series of tweets in early 2017, Trump accused former President Barack Obama of surveilling him, offering no evidence to support the claim. It was a turning point. Until now, Trump’s inner circle had been mostly game to defend him. But after the wiretap tweets, everybody, save perhaps Hope Hicks, moved into a state of queasy sheepishness, if not constant incredulity. Sean Spicer, for one, kept repeating his daily, if not hourly, mantra: “You can’t make this shit up.”
The president’s plan to back out of the Paris agreement, announced in early June 2017, was the move Ivanka Trump “had campaigned hardest against in the White House.” Bannon, who had fought repeatedly against Kushner and Ivanka Trump’s White House influence, had supported the withdrawal. “Score,” Bannon said. “The bitch is dead.”
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