Quotes from Stuart Stevens

As the magazine The American Conservative notes, "Agricultural subsidies are one of the most important examples of corporate welfare—money handed out to businesses based on political connections.

I worked in the Bush campaign, and some of us would darkly joke, "Anybody can become president when you get more votes. To lose by half a million and become president takes professionals." It seemed funny at the time. Less so now.

In the Trump years, Republicans have sent a message that lying is useful and productive, racism is acceptable, the press is the enemy, and a strong-man authoritarian head of government is the ideal.

The reason African Americans overwhelmingly reject Republicans isn't based on word choices or phrasing. It's based on policy. It isn't how Republicans are talking to black voters that results in 90 percent or more of those voters refusing to vote for Republicans. It's what the Republicans are doing, once elected.

Whatever Trump's policy legacy ends up being, his presidency has been a disaster in the realm of norms. It has coarsened our culture, given permission for bullying, complicated the moral formation of children, undermined standards of public integrity, and encouraged cynicism about the political enterprise

He is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see. —Ayn Rand1

As a way of trying to justify voter-suppression steps, the Republican Party has invested heavily in the myth of voter fraud. The fraud is trying to convince the public there is voter fraud of any significance. I've worked in campaigns since 1978, and I don't know of a single race in which illegal voters were remotely a factor.

But anger and racism and fear of the future have always lurked beneath the surface of the Christian right, like a menacing shark disturbing a calm ocean.

The Roy Moore race was a perfect test to see if there really was any decency left in the national Republican Party, and the answer came back clearly: not very much.

even fifteen-year-old girls. But mostly it shows an ability of many conservative voters to live in a self-reinforcing bubble that has little to do with objective truth.

From denials of child molesting and sexual harassment to the overwhelming science of global warming, an element of American conservatism has grown over decades in an environment distinct from the rest of the country (and reality), nurtured by an ever-growing ecosphere of alternative truth.

They broke a basic bond of trust that those handed a role of power in a functioning democracy would treat the gift as both priceless and fragile, what Abraham Lincoln called "the legacy bequeathed to us.

Collectively, they are the indolent children of inherited wealth, removed by generations from those who last made the fortune—the Greatest Generation—and too self-absorbed and selfish to consider what they in turn might leave for the next generations.

In this restrained and scholarly presentation is a screaming headline that, yes, Republicans have gone crazy and here's proof.

All indications are overwhelmingly yes. 5 MACHINERY OF DECEPTION He is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see. —Ayn Rand1 Years

The Republican decision to exploit the race issue and abandon the option of becoming a party of reform manifested itself in the 1961 speech in Atlanta by Barry Goldwater to a gathering of Southern Republicans. "We're not going to get the Negro vote as a bloc in 1964 and 1968, so we ought to go hunting where the ducks are," he declared.

Today, in the age of Donald Trump, the most openly racist president since Andrew Johnson or his hero Andrew Jackson (to the extent a know-nothing narcissist is capable of having a hero), many Republicans who find Trump repulsive or at least consider him abrasive and uncouth hark back to Reagan as the standard compared with whom Trump is woefully inadequate.

The Republican Congress now represents a party with very few significant defining principles other than the promotion of the president's impulses at that moment. —Republican former senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire

The day I sat down to write this chapter, The New York Times broke the story that Donald Trump for over a decade had managed to lose more money than any other American and, in some years, twice as much as any other American.

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" to a Republican president who responds to Vladimir Putin like a stray dog, eager to follow him home.

The day I sat down to write this chapter, The New York Times broke the story that Donald Trump for over a decade had managed to lose more money than any other American and, in some years, twice as much as any other American. This is the man Republicans chose because of his business smarts and success:

And so, year after year, Mr. Trump appears to have lost more money than nearly any other individual taxpayer, according to the I.R.S. information on high earners—a publicly available database with taxpayers' identifying details removed. Indeed, in 1990 and 1991, his core businesses lost more than $250 million each year—more than double those of the nearest taxpayers in the sampling for those years.2

Party has been running a similar scam on voters. Trump claims to be a great businessman who was wildly successful, while in fact he was one of the greatest failures in modern American business history.

Every critic, every detractor, will have to bow down to President Trump. —Omarosa Manigault