Quotes from Michael Wolff

He came out of his first long meeting with Trump thinking it had been a disconcertingly weird experience. Trump talked nonstop and constantly repeated himself.

He had no ability to plan and organize and pay attention and switch focus; he had never been able to tailor his behavior to what the goals at hand reasonably required.

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 president will sign whatever is put in front of him," while also taking advantage of the White House's lack of political and legislative experience and outsourcing as much policy as possible to Capitol Hill.

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.

Many of the accounts of what has happened in the Trump White House are in conflict with one another; many, in Trumpian fashion, are baldly untrue.

It was a badly kept secret in foreign policy circles that Mohammed bin Salman—MBS—had a cocaine problem and could disappear for days or longer on benders, or on long and frightening (at least for other passengers) trips on his yacht. He also spent hours every day planted in front of a screen playing video games. Like Trump, he was often described as a petulant child.

In 2014, when he first seriously began to consider running for president, Melania was one of the few who thought it was possible he could win. It was a punch line for his daughter, Ivanka, who had carefully distanced herself from the campaign. With a never-too-hidden distaste for her stepmother, Ivanka would say to friends: All you have to know about Melania is that she thinks if he runs he'll certainly win.

There was no real up-and-down structure, but merely a figure at the top and then everyone else scrambling for his attention. It wasn't task-based so much as response-oriented—whatever captured the boss's attention focused everybody's attention.

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.

Ailes had a suggestion: "Speaker Boehner." (John Boehner had been the Speaker of the House until he was forced out in a Tea Party putsch in 2011.) "Who's that?" asked Trump.

Good management reduces ego. But in the Trump White House, it could often seem that nothing happened, that reality simply did not exist, if it did not happen in Trump's presence.

The campaign, on its face, was not designed to win anything.