"A Higher Loyalty, by far the most consequential book yet in the literature of the Trump presidency, is arriving as political conflict roils every aspect of that presidency. Former FBI Director James Comey's scathing review will not settle the arguments about President Trump, nor will it calm the controversy over its author. But it will furnish mountains of ammunition for combatants on all sides. Comey fires countless fusillades against the president who fired him in May 2017, summing up at the end: "[T]his president is unethical, and untethered to truth and institutional values." Trump's leadership, Comey says, is "transactional, ego driven and about personal loyalty. He compares Trump's insistence on a "silent circle of assent" to the code observed in the Mafia crime family that Comey helped bust as a young prosecutor in New York City."
"Making this more problematic, Trump isn't someone who played close to the line a time or two, or once did a shady deal. He may well be the single most corrupt major business figure in the United States of America. He ran scams like Trump University to con struggling people out of their money. He lent his name to pyramid schemes. He bankrupted casinos and still somehow made millions while others were left holding the bag. He refused to pay vendors. He exploited foreign workers. He used illegal labor. He discriminated against African-American renters. He violated antitrust laws. He did business with the mob and with Eastern European kleptocrats. His properties became the go-to vehicle for Russian oligarchs and mobsters to launder their money."
"So it was no accident that when he ran for president, the people who joined him in his quest were also a collection of grifters, liars, and crooks — people like Paul Manafort. Those were the kind of operators Trump has attracted all his life. Honest, upright people with a deep respect for the law don't go to work for Donald Trump."
"You’ve heard the tapes. Now put your pussy grabbing skills to the ultimate test."
"What’s behind that impulse to delete? When it comes to acts of violence, taking down profiles may help stem the impulse to try and build a logical case for an act where logic played no role. Distancing a platform from a senseless act of violence may be a public relations move, or a matter of taste, or maybe meant to discourage a profile from becoming a shrine for copycats. But the act has rare precedence in less recent history, and even carries negative connotations with non-online examples — say, if no one were allowed to read the Unabomber’s letters."
"Norms around social media are still evolving, and the urge to delete the profiles of wrongdoers has evolved over time. Surprisingly, the Twitter account of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the two brothers who bombed the Boston Marathon in 2013, was never taken down, even after he received the death penalty in 2015."
"For President Trump, it’s all about the 1970s. That bleak decade saw the nation turn against most of the institutions that had been central since World War II. The quagmire in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal that forced Richard Nixon’s resignation turned many Americans, on the left and the right, against the federal government. The post-Nixonian presidency came to be viewed as an office whose holders should not be trusted. When President Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon in September 1974 for any crimes that he might have committed, all hope of healing the nation went right out the window. Jimmy Carter’s campaign in 1976 revolved around the basic promise that voters could trust him. Though Congress looked good at the height of the Watergate investigation in 1973, polls showed public confidence in the legislative branch falling thereafter. The number of Americans who trusted the federal government to do the right thing most of the time declined from almost 80 percent in 1964 to 25 percent when Reagan took office in 1981."
“How could one of the most experienced politicians in history lose to the most unfit candidate ever?” Trump asked reporters. “Crooked Hillary lost on purpose because she wanted me to be impeached.”
Explaining Clinton’s motives for intentionally sabotaging her quest for an office she had coveted for decades, Trump said, “Hillary Clinton is more than a nasty woman. She is an evil woman, and her sick mind is capable of anything.”
Trump said that instead of reporting the “fake story” of his campaign’s collusion with the Russians, the media should focus on Clinton’s “diabolical scheme to lose the election.”