Michael Wolff

“Along with Trump, there are few people, on either the right or the left, who would defend the system. The system is, everyone believes, broken: it's an insider's game; it's totally fixed; it serves itself. Trump codified this into a simple and vivid idea: the swamp.”

“I've said many times: I'm not a Washington reporter.”

“One of the anomalies of digital journalism is a lack of clarity between high and low. That's the historic distinction in publishing, mass from class, the vulgar from the refined, tabloid from broadsheet, the penny press from papers costing a nickel.”

“As much as any other producer in the modern movie age, Harvey Weinstein has been a subject of media fascination. The grossness, the bullying, the unbridled exercising of personal power, the craven appetites, the awards and his good taste in films fed that fascination.”

“Politics is ultimately not that complicated a profession; it's where the mediocre distinguish themselves.”

“The most important virtue in politics was once thought to be likeability. But in Corbyn, dislikeable was king. Actually, dislikeability reached its apotheosis in Donald Trump, who exhibited sourness, truculence and negativity in every step and tweet.”

“Politics, which really is about the art of expression, ought to be a logical profession for writers (it's very hard to explain to politics- and policy-addicted people that language is the basis of all ideas - if you can't say it, you can't think it), instead of a refuge for lawyers and apparatchiks.”

“The Clintons are one of the most closed political organisations operating in America today. It is a kind of secret society.”

“Curiously, many Democrats have acceded to Clintonism not because of their cold practicality and political professionalism, but because the Clintons are the sworn enemy of the right. The Clintons, in other words, while hardly being left, have been defined as the opposite of being right - the enemy of my enemy being my friend.”

“Two opposite and instructive figures in U.S. journalism during the Trump years are Gerard Baker, editor of the Wall Street Journal, and Martin Baron, editor of the Washington Post.”

“Rusbridger had risen at the Guardian through the years when it not only had the support and fail-safe mechanism of the Scott Trust, but guaranteed operating income from public-service advertising. Nobody had to sell anything.”

“Rusbridger's intelligence, personal sense of higher calling and almost other-worldly self-absorption have played no small part in the stories that have most defined the Guardian and that, under another sort of steward, might have had a much more sceptical reception.”

“If you are identified with certain opinions and an ability to express them, and if you can build yourself an audience, a partisan fan base - measured through social media - then you are an official opinionator, monetizable through books, television contracts and the speaking circuit.”

“If politics is a game of shrewd and knowing men, Trump has ruined it.”

“President Donald J Trump and the U.S. media appear now to be split by deep doctrinal differences - of the constitutional crisis kind. But, virtually up until the split, Trump and the media were as one - a perfect symbiosis.”

“Donald Trump has been both a peculiar and characteristic American figure for more than three decades. Inheriting a small New York real-estate development company from his father, he parlayed it not so much into a big real-estate company, but himself into a fantasy of a big real-estate developer.”

“The Apple imperative is to build a system that is 100 per cent resistant to any government warrant. The data on your iPhone, no matter how swarmy, corrupt, or dangerous you are, is supposedly safe. That's also the proposition of Panamanian banking laws.”

“Brexit and Trump had upended the fundamental establishment viewpoint that politics was aspirational, that good politics promised progress, generational betterment and ever-expanding world reach.”

“The more power you have, the more surely it will be taken from you before you are ready to give it up.”

“One of the secrets of Fox News' outsized success - it's the most profitable news organisation in the U.S. and, quite likely, the world - is that it saw the country full of liberal occupiers and Fox News' viewers as the heroic resistance.”