now Bannon's Zeitgeist moment had arrived. Everywhere there was a sudden sense of global self-doubt. Brexit in the UK, waves of immigrants arriving on Europe's angry shores, the disenfranchisement of...

I was in Russia years ago with the Ms. Universe contest-did very very well-I tell everyone be careful, because you don't want to see yourself on television-cameras all over the place. And again, not...

Bob and Rebekah Mercer, who had set themselves up as almost professional fools.

Several decades as a grasping entrepreneur without a satisfying success story doesn't smooth the hustle in hustler.

While the Trump administration has made hostility to the press a virtual policy, it has also been more open to the media than any White House in recent memory.

Bannon and Kushner were therefore more than a little irritated to discover that the unimposing Priebus had an agenda of his own: heeding Senate leader Mitch McConnell's prescription that "this...

You could tell him whatever you wanted, but he knew what he knew, and if what you said contradicted what he knew, he simply didn't believe you.

Christie had sent Jared's father, Charles Kushner, to jail in 2005. Charlie Kushner, pursued by the feds for an income tax cheat, set up a scheme with a prostitute to blackmail his brother-in-law, who...

His sons, Don Jr. and Eric-jokingly behind their backs known to Trump insiders as Uday and Qusay, after the sons of Saddam Hussein

just worry about who's jerking whose chain.

The fact that Trump had become the ultimate avatar of Fox's angry common man was another sign that we were living in an upside-down world.

His son-in-law and daughter hoped-they were even confident-that they could speak to DJT's better self, or at least balance Republican needs with progressive rationality, compassion, and good works....

Having attained the unimaginable-bringing a fierce alt-right, antiliberal ethnopopulism into a central place in the White House-Bannon found himself face to face with the untenable: undermined by and...

It's worse than you can imagine. An idiot surrounded by clowns. Trump won't read anything-not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world...

Bannon's strategic view of government was shock and awe. Dominate rather than negotiate. Having daydreamed his way into ultimate bureaucratic power, he did not want to see himself as a bureaucrat. He...

Trump's repeated brags about his relationship with Vladimir Putin and the nature of Trump's relationship with the Kremlin.

most of all don't let him piss off the intel community," said one national Republican figure to Kushner. "If you fuck with the intel community they will figure out a way to get back at you and you'll...

The unspoken agreement among them: not only would Donald Trump not be president, he should probably not be. Conveniently, the former conviction meant nobody had to deal with the latter issue.

Trump's home in Beverly Hills

But not only didn't he read, he didn't listen. He preferred to be the person talking. And he trusted his own expertise-no matter how paltry or irrelevant-more than anyone else's. What's more, he had...

You defined yourself by your enemy's reaction. Conflict was the media bait-hence, now, the political chum. The new politics was not the art of the compromise but the art of conflict.

It was during Trump's early intelligence briefings, held soon after he captured the nomination, that alarm signals first went off among his new campaign staff: he seemed to lack the ability to take in...

After the bill had been pulled that Friday, Katie Walsh, feeling both angry and disgusted, told Kushner she wanted out. Outlining what she saw as the grim debacle of the Trump White House, she spoke...

Convinced he knew the direction of success, keenly aware of his own age and finite opportunities, and-if for no clear reason-seeing himself as a talented political infighter, Bannon sought to draw the...

Trump did not enjoy his own inauguration. He had hoped for a big blowout.

As it happened, Conway meant to say "alternative information," which at least would imply there might be additional data.

It was, said Walsh, like trying to figure out what a child wants.

Trump was, for Bannon, a modern-day William Jennings Bryan.

Trade it out so in the end everyone got something, and the better dealmaker got a little more.

That was almost his appeal: he was what he was. Twinkle in his eye, larceny in his soul.