Epstein Secrets

gan his campaign for president he had almost no friends in politics. The only two actual politicians with whom Trump was close were Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie, and both men were in their own way peculiar and isolated. And to say that he knew nothing— nothing at all—about the basic intellectual foundations o

The day after the election, Trump’s close advisers—suddenly eager to be part of a process that almost everybody had ignored—immediately began blaming Christie for a lack of transition preparations. Hurriedly, the bare-bones transition team moved from downtown Washington to Trump Tower. This was certainly s

political experience. Christie, like most Trump allies, fell in and out of favor. In the final weeks of the campaign, Trump contemptuously measured Christie’s increasing distance from his losing enterprise, and then, with victory, his eagerness to get back in. Trump and Christie went back to Trump’s days t

law, carefully displacing as little air as possible: the massive and domineering older man, the reedy and pliant younger one. In the revised death-of-Chris-Christie story, it is not the deferential Jared who strikes back, but—in some sense even more satisfying for the revenge fantasy—Charlie Kushner himself who h

ction meant nobody had to deal with the latter issue. As the campaign came to an end, Trump himself was sanguine. He had survived the release of the Billy Bush tape when, in the uproar that followed, the RNC had had the gall to pressure him to quit the race. FBI director James Comey, having bizarrely hung Hi

City. And Mar-a-Lago. And Trump SoHo. Both Chris Christie and Rudy Giuliani—each a self-styled expert on th

as going to throw him in the soup. Manafort was going to roll. And it wasn’t just Russia. It was Atlantic City. And Mar-a-Lago. And Trump SoHo. Both Chris Christie and Rudy Giuliani—each a self-styled expert on the DOJ and the FBI, and ever assuring Trump of their inside sources—encouraged him to take the view t

early Trump supporter. (Meadows’s wife had a particular place of regard in the Trump camp for continuing a campaign swing across the Bible Belt over Billy Bush weekend.) Nearly as much as winning the presidency itself, removing Ryan—indeed, humiliating him—was an ultimate expression of what Bannon sought to

An Obama guy will be acting attorney general. I said you’re not going to get Rudy’—Trump had again revived a wish for his loyalists Rudy Giuliani or Chris Christie to take the job—‘“because he was on the campaign and will have to recuse himself, and Chris Christie, too, so those are masturbatory fantasies, get t

2-96, 298 chemical weapons, 183-84, 190-93, 265 Cheney, Dick, 27 China, 6-8, 39, 100, 193-94, 211, 226, 228, 258, 267, 269-70, 297 Chopra, Deepak, 80 Christie, Chris, 16, 24-25, 30-31, 210, 242, 279 Christoff, Niki, 78 Churchill, Winston, 50 Circa news website, 159, 257 Clapper, James, 41, 214-15 Clinton, B

and, 30, 76 Bannon and, 1-8, 31-32, 35, 52-53, 59-65, 93, 122, 146-47, 158, 187, 190-91, 232-37, 289, 301, 308-10 Bannon firing and, 173-83, 298-300 Billy Bush tape and, 13-14, 34 business and finances of, 17-18, 36-37, 39, 99, 100, 102, 240, 252-53, 277-79 business councils and, 87-89, 298 cabinet appointme