Donald Trump Didn't Want to Be President (Excerpt from Michael Wolff's book)

[DonViejo]

Election Night: It “looked as if he had seen a ghost.”

One year ago: the plan to lose, and the administration’s shocked first days.

By MICHAEL WOLFF
Illustrations By JEFFREY SMITH

January 3, 2018 11:53 am

On the afternoon of November 8, 2016, Kellyanne Conway settled into her glass office at Trump Tower. Right up until the last weeks of the race, the campaign headquarters had remained a listless place. All that seemed to distinguish it from a corporate back office were a few posters with right-wing slogans.

Conway, the campaign’s manager, was in a remarkably buoyant mood, considering she was about to experience a resounding, if not cataclysmic, defeat. Donald Trump would lose the election — of this she was sure — but he would quite possibly hold the defeat to under six points. That was a substantial victory. As for the looming defeat itself, she shrugged it off: It was Reince Priebus’s fault, not hers.

She had spent a good part of the day calling friends and allies in the political world and blaming Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee. Now she briefed some of the television producers and anchors whom she had been carefully courting since joining the Trump campaign — and with whom she had been actively interviewing in the last few weeks, hoping to land a permanent on-air job after the election.

Even though the numbers in a few key states had appeared to be changing to Trump’s advantage, neither Conway nor Trump himself nor his son-in-law, Jared Kushner — the effective head of the campaign — ­wavered in their certainty: Their unexpected adventure would soon be over. Not only would Trump not be president, almost everyone in the campaign agreed, he should probably not be. Conveniently, the former conviction meant nobody had to deal with the latter issue.

more
https://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/01/michael-wolff-fire-and-fury-book-donald-trump.html?utm_source=nym_press

[Eliot Rosewater]

1. Grab your 12 year old son and ask him if he wants to be in charge of paying the

mortgage from now on.

Same thing.

DT has never paid a bill or worked one minute of his life.

Of course he didnt want the most responsible and hardest fucking job on the planet, hard if you do it right, like Clinton did, Obama, JFK, LBJ, Carter and more.

[kentuck]

2. Yep.

"Not only did Trump disregard the potential conflicts of his own business deals and real-estate holdings, he audaciously refused to release his tax returns. Why should he? Once he lost, Trump would be both insanely famous and a martyr to Crooked Hillary. His daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared would be international celebrities. Steve Bannon would become the de facto head of the tea-party movement. Kellyanne Conway would be a cable-news star. Melania Trump, who had been assured by her husband that he wouldn’t become president, could return to inconspicuously lunching. Losing would work out for everybody. Losing was winning."

[bettyellen]

3. But I also think theyre spinning it so their treason didnt have intent they just wanted points-

Not a win... so they’ll
Say it’s not treason if they didn’t play to win. They didn’t know what Russia was doing. Putin wanted it, not Trump.

[politicaljunkie41910]

4. Obviously Putin came through for him in spite of his not wanting the job. I'm still pissed that no

one has ever checked the voting machines even in the three states where he won by a hair, in spite of the exit polling which were showing Hillary as being ahead, and winning.

[underpants]

5. I duped you

I looked. I really did. Incredible article

[progree]

6. Whos that? asked Trump

Ailes, a veteran of the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush 41 administrations, tried to impress on Trump the need to create a White House structure that could serve and protect him. “You need a son of a bitch as your chief of staff,” he told Trump. “And you need a son of a bitch who knows Washington. You’ll want to be your own son of a bitch, but you don’t know Washington.” Ailes had a suggestion: John Boehner, who had stepped down as Speaker of the House only a year earlier.

“Who’s that?” asked Trump.

“Here’s the deal,” a close Trump associate told Priebus. “In an hour meeting with him, you’re going to hear 54 minutes of stories, and they’re going to be the same stories over and over again. So you have to have one point to make, and you pepper it in whenever you can.”

more
https://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/01/michael-wolff-fire-and-fury-book-donald-trump.html?utm_source=nym_press

[Xolodno]

7. Long read...but a good look inside.

No one has a clue.

[underpants]

8. Kick. A MUST READ