Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Donald Trump's campaign is good at two things; hoovering up hundreds of millions of dollars from MAGA fans and spending them to move his poll numbers... nowhere.
Richard Nixon is typically considered the modern exemplar of a dark and vindictive president. President Trump would be Nixon minus the keen intellect and work ethic.
Trump would rather submerge himself in the lake of fire for a thousand years than talk about Russia again. It's the subject he can never avoid, never fully wash out.
I believed that the donor class would cringe at the vast threat Donald Trump poses to the entire Republican Party, its brand, its prospects for expansion, and the nation.
Before the GOP became the party of Trump's gangster capitalism, they weren't perfect capitalists, but they at least paid lip service to the power of markets and capitalism.
Trump devotees don't care about shrinking the size and scope of government. They don't care about the Constitution. They're not Republicans, except as a flag of convenience.
I've knocked out any number of Democrats using ads associating them with the brand toxicity of Reid, Pelosi, and Obama, and before that Ted Kennedy, Barney Frank, and others.
Trump's 2016 effort could afford to be a shambolic circus; nothing was on the line. He never expected to win and so the rotating cast of campaign managers didn't really matter.
Con artists specialize in finding what people need, and Trump knows the media craves variety, scandal, secrets, and he-said-she-said stories, even of the most dubious provenance.
Donald Trump, like many cult leaders, understands the power his words will have over the minds and actions of his followers... but few cult leaders have a pet media infrastructure.
Part of the sales pitch for the Trump campaign is their unique, esoteric secret sauce based on a rabid cult following motivated by Facebook, Twitter, and other social media manipulation.
For Donald Trump, any opposition, either personal, ideological, or political is treason. Anyone who stands in his path betrays the Great Leader. Anyone who fails to take the knee is a traitor.
Obama was referred to in terms so glowing, so fulsome, so toadying that it was easy to pin down the journalist class of 2008 as a group of fangirls squeeing and fainting at his every utterance.
If there's one thing no one will ever mistake Ted Cruz for, it's a charismatic cult leader. Cruz scans more as the accountant for the charismatic cult leader than the guy ladling out the Kool Aid.
Like all alchemists, Trump seeks to convert dross into gold, to toss a broth of his incompetence, denial, delay, deception, and failure into some supernatural alembic and extract political advantage.
We should tell the honest, painful stories of 9/11 because it dishonors the memory of heroes to invent a phony cast of villains when the actual terrorists were terrible enough to tear open this nation's heart.
Trump would have us revise and edit our historical memory of 9/11, turning it from a unifying narrative of heroism, tragedy, and war and recast it to serve the political ends of a man unworthy of the presidency.
If you think Barr's Justice Department will take a single step to confront Trump or his cronies with any kind of challenge, think again. His hyper-maximalist vision of executive power borders on the fetishistic.
As consequential and as deadly as the coronavirus pandemic has been, and will continue to be, the Trump media machine can't stop and won't stop its relentless propagandizing and historical revision. Trump is the hero.
In 1974, Democrats gained 49 House seats and four Senate seats. It wasn't just the Watergate scandal that drove Democratic wins, but the sense that Republicans had defended corruption and criminality in the White House.
There's an unspoken rule post-Cold War American Presidents have used when describing the awesome power of our nuclear arsenal; the more devastating the ability to destroy the enemy, the more restrained the language should be.
Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and others who raced to the microphones at the slightest hint of Obama overstepping the lines were damn quiet as Trump wildly colored outside the lines of any rational version of executive power.
Free-market capitalism doesn't pick economic winners and losers based on the president's economic nostalgia, and limited-government conservatism isn't marked a top-down ideological conformity strictly enforced by state media organs.
In politics, Victory Disease comes when a majority believes their position is so secure and immune from challenge that they forget the lessons of the past and can't imagine an outcome that isn't in their favor. Neither party is inoculated against it.
Trump's inability to relate actions to consequences, his profound intellectual ambivalence about history, strategy and facts, in addition to his notoriously delicate ego, combine to create a risk we've never seen in a President during a nuclear crisis.
As a Republican governor, a senator, or member of Congress, or as a Republican candidate, let me remind you: You're known by the company you keep. By associating yourself with or endorsing Trump, you own Trump's toxic radioactivity with voters outside his base.
American populism is no stranger to our political life. From the earliest anti-Federalists to William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, and George Wallace, and many in between, we've sampled the populist temptation, often in times of national distress and dislocation.
There's a reason most Republicans and a vast majority of voters loathe Donald Trump: his vulgarity, his blistering ignorance, his constant dishonesty, his venality, and his utter lack of the knowledge, judgment, or temperament to be president of the United States.
I believed that the numbers and processes of modern campaigning that revolve around the meticulous use of data would matter in 2016. I believed Trump was merely a spectacle, a political sideshow who would be dispatched by the well-funded and the well-staffed major campaigns.
It's not a secret that Ted Cruz isn't my first choice for the Republican nomination for president. His smug Poindexter affect, his smarm, sanctimony, and general derpiness all grate on me. There's no doubt he's smart, but while smart is necessary, it's not necessarily sufficient.
Donald Trump is an idiot and a moron and just a kook of the first order, but he is surrounded by a bunch of guys like me, who are ride-or-die for him. They don't love him ideologically, but they're stuck. And they're very smart. And they're very determined and they will do anything to win.
With every product, the delta between the brand and the reality determines its power over the minds of consumers, and with Trump, that delta is always broad. If Trump said it was the best, it was average. If he said something was the finest, it typically included a spray-painted gold veneer.
In a depressing twist, many members of my party and ideological persuasion have become advocates for Donald Trump on a scale that ranges from grudging to toadying, for a simple reason that seems to overwhelm all other factors: He attacks the media. Many are willing to forgive almost any sin because of it.
McConnell is the most talented majority leader in a generation. He has complete control of his caucus and understands and exploits their weaknesses, ambitions, and desires. In an impeachment trial where his members knew Trump's guilt was absolute and unequivocal, he bribed and browbeat them into submission.
I think Trump is so dangerous because the people that he appeals to the most have this sense of despair and oppression that has become a central defining characteristic of their lives. And they feel like only he is their avatar; only he will fight for them; only he will keep the wolf from the proverbial door.
As much as progressives hate the Electoral College - and we can argue its flaws all day long - in 2020, the Electoral College is the only game in town. There's not going to be some miracle where it's not the rule book. The winner of the Electoral College is president. Doesn't matter how many popular votes you get.
I've written about this before, but the sad truth is this: There are only a handful of Trump true believers in the Senate. The rest are chugging a toxic slurry of cowardice, ambition, and opportunism that has led members of the upper house of a co-equal branch of government to relinquish their power and prerogatives.
I said Donald Trump could never be elected, confidently fueled by the empirical data of professional polling, a certainty in the vital necessity of field operations, and the knowledge his own campaign team (even on the night of the election) was ratting out the shambolic train wreck his campaign had been. I was wrong.
Our leaders ranged from bad to extraordinary. But through it all, the GOP was the one party even vaguely amenable to limited-government conservatism, to at least some adherence to the Constitution over the social preferences of the moment, and to the constraints on government power that our Founding Fathers so cherished.
Every man who has sat in the Oval Office has felt the short, sharp shock when an ordinary day in the highest office in the land shifts from pomp and ceremony to urgent briefings, immediate choices, crucial decisions where lives are on the line. It's not something that may happen to a president. It's something that will happen.
When the 2010 election swept Republicans into office in a massive tidal wave, they were part of a philosophical and ideological change. They were bound by a set of limited-government principles. To be sure, sometimes loosely and imperfectly so, but the Tea Party wave was driven by ideas, not a singular, authoritarian personality.
It's become a cliche to stare in mute horror at Donald Trump's endless stream of Twitter vomit, wondering what chthonic god finds pleasure in watching us writhe as Trump brings out the very worst in his followers and new levels of willful ignorance from Republicans determined to see no evil, no matter how in their face that evil is.
I will not vote for Hillary, and I will not vote for Trump. At the end of the day, I believe that President Clinton would be less damaging to the Republican Party than President Trump. Because five minutes after she's elected president, every bit of this anxiety in our party disappears instantly. We will go at the main enemy as we do.