More bonkers stuff from the book:
an hour ago
Another useful reminder, not of new information but of a story that it's easy to forget. Remember when, in his first act after becoming president, Trump headed to the CIA to try and make friends with them but ended up throwing away his prepared remarks and talking about his intellect? Wolff quotes the remarks, referring to them as "some of the most peculiar remarks ever delivered by an American president":
I know a lot about West Point, I'm a person who very strongly believes in academics. Every time I say I had an uncle who was a great professor at MIT for 35 years, who did a fantastic job in so many ways academically – he was an academic genius – and then they say, Is Donald Trump an intellectual? Trust me, I'm like a smart person.
...
You know when I was young. Of course I feel young – I feel like I was 30... 35... 39... Somebody said, Are you young? I said, I think I'm young. I was stopping in the final months of the campaign, four stops, five stops, seven stops – speeches, speeches in front of twenty-five, thirty thousand people... fifteen, nineteen thousand. I feel young – I think we're all so young. When I was young we were always winning things in this country. We'd win with trade, we'd win with wars – at a certain age I remembering hearing from one of my instructors, the United States has never lost a war. And then, after that, it's like we haven't won anything. You know the old expression, to the victor belongs the spoils. You remember I always say, keep the oil.
"Who should keep the oil?", Wolff reports a bewildered CIA employee saying at the back of the room.