Quotes from Joy Reid

We are not, in some fundamental ways, a single country. The map of that vast red swatch of states and rural counties that voted for Trump, and the blue coastal edges and scattered urban centers where Clinton won, are a pictograph of mutual contempt.

For decades, the GOP has faithfully served the rich, corporations, polluters and purveyors of pure, unadulterated greed, and brought blue-collar white voters along for the ride with promises of cultural revival.

When he ran for president in 2008, Mr. Obama was the candidate of the young and the demographically ascendant. He eventually attracted strong majorities among African-Americans, Hispanics, Asian-Americans and voters under 30.

Votes for president have long been a kind of social signifier. People will proudly boast that they voted for JFK; while it's harder to find those eager to claim having supported Richard Nixon.

Trump's cabinet picks seem designed to unwind government itself, leaving the average citizen completely exposed and vulnerable to full exploitation by corporate interests.

In fundamental ways, the 2016 Democratic primary has been a litigation of the Obama years, and of whether the president's 2008 campaign vow of 'change we can believe in' succeeded or failed.

From jazz, the blues, country and rock to Hollywood movies, culture has in many ways been our greatest export (or our most obnoxious one, depending on your point of view).

Obama has presided over sweeping cultural advances, particularly in the rights of gay and lesbian Americans.

Dwight Eisenhower presented a face of America that was heroic and resolute; Ronald Reagan represented a return to confidence and glamour after the weary Carter years.

America is, in many ways, as much an idea as it is a country. And Americans have long marketed that idea around the world through our popular culture.

Popularity has always been the key currency in choosing a president.

American populist politics has a long tradition, from Andrew Jackson to Huey Long to Joseph McCarthy. But the politician Trump is most like could be George Wallace.

To be sure, the Trump administration is shot through with corruption.

The one woman Trump does seem to totally respect is his daughter from his first marriage, Ivanka, on whom he heaps constant, effusive, at-times borderline creepy praise and physical affection.

We Americans think quite highly of ourselves, and nothing makes us think more of ourselves than our romantic view of our presidents.

Even at its most outrageous early moments, the Tea Party movement was treated to sober and at times breathless media coverage, to the point of being invited to co-host a presidential debate.

In the 1950s, the black men and women and their white allies who fought for civil rights and basic human dignity could look to the federal government. If the racist sheriff and his troops beat them with batons or sprayed them and their children with water cannons, the attorney general would act.

To be white in America is to assume, with total self-confidence and little afterthought, the personal ownership of public spaces.

Trump's real Achilles heel, and the thing most likely to keep him out of the White House, is his brazen contempt for women (plus his lack of impulse control and inability to stay off his Android phone).

Bill Clinton had a hell of a first 24 months, even though he, like Trump, enjoyed a congressional majority. Scandal after scandal befell the White House, including the failure of Hillary Clinton-led healthcare reform. But Clinton's scandals, from 'filegate' to 'travelgate' to a brouhaha over a haircut, were petty, personal and domestic.

The goal of the eight Benghazi committees, one of which produced and nurtured 'emailgate,' has been clear from the start: to prevent Hillary Clinton from becoming president of the United States.

There is a twinge of abandonment that comes with being a member of the African Diaspora. But 'Black Panther' fearlessly introduces and then complicates this and other deeply held albeit rarely expressed emotions; that indeed is what makes this film so profoundly innovative.

A major loss by a Democratic prosecutor at the hands of the BLM movement could alter the political landscape in a way that might actually change the way prosecutors, and ultimately police departments, operate.

Protest is, at its core, designed to move policy.