Carol Leonnig > Quotes

“What few realized was that clusters of agents, including some on Trump’s detail, were openly rooting for Trump, a fact hiding in plain sight. On Facebook and other forums, some of these public servants who promised to be above party were promoting Trump’s debunked conspiracy theories”
― Carol Leonnig, Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service

“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us,” Mattis wrote, also in The Atlantic.”
― Carol Leonnig, I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year

“Mr. President,” Milley said, “there are two hundred seventy-six cities in America with over one hundred thousand people in them. We track this all the time.” In the last twenty-four hours, Milley said, there were only two cities with violent protests so large that local authorities might have needed reinforcements. Otherwise, he said, “there was some vandalism and some rioting, but they were handled by local police.” Then he turned back to Miller. “Stephen, that’s not burning the country down,” he said.”
― Carol Leonnig, I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year

“The Secret Service was still overwhelmingly an agency of cops who preferred long prison sentences for bad guys rather than sentencing reform, who, like Trump, tended to speak dismissively about women, minorities, and immigrants. A large number of the Service’s agents and officers, unlike so many other career civil servants in Washington, were pleased to see the man who spoke their language step onto the White House’s North Portico on Inauguration Day to enter his new home.”
― Carol Leonnig, Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service

“One Secret Service officer called the armed protesters “patriots” seeking to undo an illegitimate election, and falsely claimed to her friends that disguised Antifa members had started the violence.”
― Carol Leonnig, Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service

“Trump’s rash and retaliatory dismissal of Maguire would compel retired Admiral William McRaven, who oversaw the Navy SEALs raid that killed Osama bin Laden, to write: “As Americans, we should be frightened—deeply afraid for the future of the nation. When good men and women can’t speak the truth, when facts are inconvenient, when integrity and character no longer matter, when presidential ego and self-preservation are more important than national security—then there is nothing left to stop the triumph of evil.”
― Carol Leonnig, I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year

“My fellow Americans,” he declared, “our long national nightmare is over….Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule.”
― Carol Leonnig, Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service

“A student of history, Milley saw Trump as the classic authoritarian leader with nothing to lose. He described to aides that he kept having this stomach-churning feeling that some of the worrisome early stages of twentieth-century fascism in Germany were replaying in twenty-first-century America. He saw parallels between Trump’s rhetoric of election fraud and Adolf Hitler’s insistence to his followers at the Nuremberg rallies that he was both a victim and their savior. “This is a Reichstag moment,” Milley told aides.”
― Carol Leonnig, I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year

“He displayed his ignorance, his rash temper, his pettiness and pique, his malice and cruelty, his utter absence of empathy, his narcissism, his transgressive personality, his disloyalty, his sense of victimhood, his addiction to television, his suspicion and silencing of experts, and his deception and lies.”
― Carol Leonnig, I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year

“The pain of preparation is much less than the pain of regret,”
― Carol Leonnig, I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year

“(What the Secret Service didn't know was that Melania Trump was also using the delay for leverage and personal financial gain; she wanted to renegotiate her prenuptial agreement with Trump to sweeten the settlement she'd receive in a divorce and secure a future role for her son in Trump's company.)”
― Carol Leonnig, Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service

“House complex describing the incident as “a”
― Carol Leonnig, Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service

“President Trump contracted the virus, a security failure as well,”
― Carol Leonnig, Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service

“Kushner’s group was mocked more derisively; “that whizbang crew of numb nuts”
― Carol Leonnig, I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year

“They’re just reflecting the will of the people.”
― Carol Leonnig, I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year

“hung in the balance.”
― Carol Leonnig, Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service

“SAICs—special agents in charge,”
― Carol Leonnig, Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service

“Alex Jones,”
― Carol Leonnig, Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service

“American public,” the president said. “This is an”
― Carol Leonnig, I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year

“Ortega’s friends traced his troubles to about a year earlier, when he had become agitated watching an antigovernment film. The movie, called The Obama Deception, was written and produced by Alex Jones, a Texas-based conspiracy theorist and talk show host. It claimed that a cluster of wealthy families were engaged in a conspiracy with President Obama and had installed him in the White House to use the government to surveil and hurt the interests of most Americans. Soon Ortega bought a powerful rifle and began practicing his aim.”
― Carol Leonnig, Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service

“Prostitution was legal there,”
― Carol Leonnig, Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service

“He wasn’t interested in the boring work of governing, to ensure the agency’s long-term health, and instead the employees of the Secret Service took a major hit for Trump. Rather than get the boost of money the previous administration and members of Congress had pledged, the Service—which turned 155 years old in 2020—was stuck on the same hamster wheel, its staff racing to keep up with Trump’s jaunts, its agents waiting months to get paid for their extra sweat, its essential security system repairs delayed yet again.”
― Carol Leonnig, Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service

“The application for injunctive relief presented to Justice Alito and by him referred to the Court is denied,”
― Carol Leonnig, I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year

“maybe this COVID thing is a good thing because I don’t have to shake hands with people,” the germaphobe president said, according to Troye. “I was a businessperson in New York and I shook a lot of hands, but when you’re a politician, you really have to shake a lot more hands. I have to shake hands with these disgusting people. It’s disgusting. And now I don’t”
― Carol Leonnig, I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year

“acquiesced.”
― Carol Leonnig, Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service

“We should approve all these products that the media say work.”
― Carol Leonnig, I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year

“If President Trump wouldn’t have tweeted out anything and would have stayed silent, we would have stayed silent as well.”
― Carol Leonnig, I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year

“Special Agents in Charge”
― Carol Leonnig, Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service

“The Pritzker family, one of America’s wealthiest, founded and developed the Hyatt hotel chain,”
― Carol Leonnig, I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year

“in honor of his success as a business owner”
― Carol Leonnig, Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service