Top 70 Michael Wolff Quotes

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.

One of the annoyances of working for The Guardian is that, obsessed as the organisation is with its digital and social media presence and its own sense of singular importance, editors would militantly try to edit your tweets.

Unlike financial impropriety, which needs to be proven, a charge of sexual loutishness and aggressiveness in and of itself can finish you off. Does the man match the charge? To be the kind of man who would be accused of being so gross is guilt enough.

I have known Boris Johnson since 2004. I wrote the first big profile about him in the American press. I’ve been edited by him when he ran the Spectator. I know his family.

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.

For decades, Trump had no life independent from the media. He became a figure in the nation, and his a monitisable name – albeit quite a ludicrous one – because of his nonstop, relentless, shameless and often embarrassing courtship of the media.

At a particularly dicey moment in my own love life when I was interviewing Rupert Murdoch a number of years ago, I tried to get some advice from him about, well, about anything a man with three wives, the latest the age of his children, might offer.

How advertising is handled has always been a key distinction between low and high order publishing. The higher you stood, the more separate you were from advertising, and, in the logic of snobbery, the greater a premium price the top brands would pay to be in your company.

With obvious irony, many of the left-leaning privacy advocates who might cheer Apple’s stand against the government’s intrusion into its system, are now, as transparency advocates, on the side of the leakers of the Panama Papers.

The emerging notion of the Eighties was that publicity was a currency. The old view was that if you had a currency – your talent or your product – publicity might draw attention to it. The new view was that publicity in itself, highlighting you, bestowed value.

The hold on power always ends. While death will surely break it, someone else usually grabs it before then.

I’ve said many times: I’m not a Washington reporter.

Alan Rusbridger is, to many, among the most admired newspaper editors of our time.

Being the governor of New York is a mighty job because of the city of New York. You would not want to be the governor of just upstate.

The rise of Donald Trump established a new ground zero for liberal media, requiring no pretence of balance – better yet, with a kind of political brain haemorrhage, everybody seemed to have lost the ability to be balanced.

A particular modern problem is that megalomania, especially when it involves real estate development, is the disturbance of many faceless men. And a faceless man is a difficult enemy.

If the president of the United States comes after you, you feel concerned.

Brexit and Trump are a generational revenge. This may partly be against millennial certainty and superiority, and, indeed, ageism; and it may be a natural part of population dynamics – not only are more people getting far older than ever before, but they are older for longer than they are young.

Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W Bush (and, in their image, Tony Blair) bitterly annoyed their antagonists because they were – at least until the Iraq war caught up with Blair and Bush – Teflon. David Cameron is in this model.

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.

More than any other president, save perhaps John F Kennedy, whose father ran a film studio, and Ronald Reagan, a leading man and governor of California, Trump is on a buddy basis with media moguls, a speed dialer with the heads of studios and media conglomerates.

What’s wrong with politics in the celebrity billionaire analysis is politicians. Populism is not so much a cry for economic equality, or even a disdain for elites, but a mass revulsion against the inauthenticity of politicians. Celebrities are real celebrities, politicians are fake ones.

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.

Politics is a literal game. Every word must represent a strict view – or be so abstract as to be meaningless.

Trump is a man who, for better or worse, stands in opposition to the institutions that dominate American political life.

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.

Running for office, or suggesting you might, is no longer about being a politician but being an independent opinion or sensibility entrepreneur. You’re looking for an audience to identify with you. Rather than trying to convince a majority of the electorate, you’re looking to cull your particular following.

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

Trump’s election was dispiriting and confounding to most traditional political players – perhaps nobody more so than Murdoch. Still, Murdoch did what he has always done: made sure he had maximum influence with the new president.

In the litany of issues that separate the two Americas – one more conservative and one more liberal, increasingly as opposed and intractable and opaque to each other as the Palestinians and Israelis – none is so fierce, precise, inviolable and confounding to the other side as guns.

If institutions don’t grow, they… well, I don’t know what happens to them, because they always grow. I suppose the point is that we forget about the ones that don’t.

I mean, can Donald Trump get elected again in 2020 without Steve Bannon? I would say no.

It’s not implausible that Donald Trump could have been a successful President.

If you run for president and lose, you promote yourself into all sorts of more lucrative, possibly more influential and surely more fun media opportunities.

In a career of trying to pry secrets, gossip, specificity and truth out of media executives, Ailes has been the most forthcoming, personal, compelling and honest I’ve ever dealt with.

One of the great business virtues of high publishing was that it was a difficult business to enter. You had to stand for something.

Rusbridger’s curious success, especially for a temperamentally remote figure, has been to give a reasonable face to the Guardian’s quite quixotic mission.

Before even getting to David Cameron’s father here’s a starting-point question about the Panama Papers: how is the desire to break the anonymity of Panama banking secrecy different from the FBI’s interest in breaking Apple’s encryption of the iPhone?

I have never heard the word brand used so often as I did around The Guardian. Brand was the magical word, particularly as it was uttered by Alan Rusbridger, that would transform the paper and the goal that everyone was working toward.

Indeed, Rusbridger has finessed for the Guardian a certain willing suspension of disbelief and is able to credibly maintain conceits and moral standards to which his own behaviour hardly conforms.

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.

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

A President of the United States cannot restrain anything from publication.

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

The Snowden story, which won the Guardiana Pulitzer Prize, became the realisation of Rusbridger’s dream of a brand-building, left-wing-uniting, global and viral story.

Journalism has become a form of idealism. It is no longer, first and foremost, function, craft, service – it is mission.

In one sense, newspaper editor is an appropriate job for an out-of-work politician; politicians live the news cycle as intensely as editors.

This American right to bear arms with, practically, a Muslim fierceness, sometimes seems as if it must be age-old, an ancient tradition from a tenacious frontier holdover.

Voters seem to enjoy voting for what experts believe they won’t vote for.

I’m not a daily reporter. I’m not a newspaper reporter, I’m not a political reporter.

Fame, in Trumpian fashion, is war. You are expected to defend your fame; many people want to take it from you.