Quotes About Leadership

López Obrador, a left-wing populist poised to challenge Trump, the right-wing populist.

this was the fundamental hypothesis of the senior staff, shared by Walsh and everyone else: Trump must know what he was doing, his intuition must be profound.

the organizational premise of the Trump White House: the family would always prevail.

He was a clown-prince version of Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Trump believed, offering catnip to deep American ire and resentment, that one man could be bigger than the system.

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 leaders because he is bored. And his staff is no better. Kushner is an entitled baby who knows nothing. Bannon is an arrogant prick who thinks he's smarter than he is. Trump is less a person than a collection of terrible traits.

At points on the day's spectrum of adverse political developments, he could have moments of, almost everyone would admit, irrationality. When that happened, he was alone in his anger and not approachable by anyone. His senior staff largely dealt with these dark hours by agreeing with him, no matter what he said. And if some of them occasionally tried to hedge, Hope Hicks never did. She agreed absolutely with all of it.

the time Bannon and Priebus were back in Washington, three blue-chip firms had said no. All of them were afraid they would face a rebellion among the younger staff if they represented Trump, afraid Trump would publicly humiliate them if the going got tough, and afraid Trump would stiff them for the bill. In the end, nine top firms turned them down.

Trump, as almost anyone who had ever worked for him appreciated, was, despite what you hoped he might be, Trump—and he would invariably sour on everyone around him.

No national emergency, no solution, no offer, no progress. Trump was, for the entire nation to see, trapped.

Bypassing lawyers, regulators, and the agencies and personnel responsible for enforcing it, President Trump—with Bannon's low, intense voice behind him, offering a rush of complex information—signed what was put in front of him.

Trump quite profoundly seemed unable to distinguish between his political advantage and his personal needs—he thought emotionally, not strategically.

If the new right had elected Trump, it was the older Fortune 100 executives who most pleased him

Whitestone became what everyone around Trump had to become—long-suffering—because Trump was always ready to explode with anger. "It's not your fault," said Whitestone. "It's just your turn, was how we put it." "How's the weather?" was the code for the boss's mood.

Bannon averred: "When you take out all the never-Trump guys who signed all those letters and all the neocons who got us in all these wars … it's not a deep bench.

They weren't operatives, they were believers, which is what Trump wanted them to be.

most of the leaks, certainly the juiciest ones, were coming from the higher-ups—not to mention from the person occupying the topmost echelon. The president couldn't stop talking.

Kushner was going to pursue as his first leadership mark a meeting with the Mexican president, whom his father-in-law had threatened and insulted throughout the campaign.

chronic naysayer, he viewed each member of his inner circle as a problem child whose fate he held in his hand. "We are sinners and he is God" was one view; "We serve at the president's displeasure," another.

The president's worst impulses seem to run through Conway without benefit of a filter.

Jared and Ivanka had made an earnest deal between themselves: if sometime in the future the time came, she'd be the one to run for president (or the first one of them to take the shot).

Sean Spicer, whose job was literally to explain what people did and why, often simply could not—because nobody really had a job, because nobody could do a job.

Trump did not want a White House that ran by any method other than to satisfy his desires.

David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest.

Flynn was "a colonel in a general's uniform," according to one senior intelligence figure.)