Quotes About Politics

The nation's leaders keep throwing out the word "Washington" as a vulgar abstraction. Nothing new here: the anti-Washington reflex in American politics has been honed for centuries, often by candidates who deride the capital as a swamp, only to settle into the place as if it were a soothing whirlpool bath once they get elected. The city exists to be condemned.

The president's stump speeches could carry the forced air of a Van Halen reunion tour with Sammy Hagar in for David Lee Roth.

God could not be reached for comment. But let us at least agree that He is quite obviously attuned to the doings of politics and media. That is why so many would-be leaders say they are being "called upon" to run for president, and why eulogists lean so heavily on the trope that God runs an HR department that recruits people like Sunday hosts and yachtsmen into heaven.

Cynicism is idealism turned inside out. It stems from an expectation unrealized and a promise perverted. That is so much of Washington today in a nutshell.

You know you've made it in D.C. when someone says that--"It isn't clear what he does"--about you.

the capital commandments of self-interest, self-importance, self-enrichment, and self-perpetuation.

Trumpism is, at heart, not a philosophy but an enemies list.

Nunes's once-promising career in Congress had been given over fully to being a house organ for Trump.

GOP voters were the opposite of Trump's kryptonite; they were his superpower.

The founding fathers, whose infinite wisdom gave us a Constitution and form of government well nigh perfect, located the seat of that government in a stinking, steaming swamp.

We had a Muslim president for seven and a half years,

The I Told You So impulse was strong. "And, while we're at it," Kevin Williamson wrote in National Review, "maybe turning your party over to Generalissimo Walter Mitty, his hideous scheming spawn, and the studio audience from Hee-Haw was not just absolutely aces as a political strategy.

Expecting a Republican to do the tough and right and uncomfortable thing in the face of Donald Trump was like betting on the Washington Generals.

contempt for anyone who voted for him.

Everyone marveled--between courses at The Palm--at how out of touch Mittens was.

This Republican party dances to whatever tunes come into Mr. Trump's head," wrote Edward Luce of the Financial Times.

The party did not bother to even produce a new platform, for the first time since 1856.

As Jonathan V. Last wrote in The Bulwark on October 8, "Go write this down: after November 3, the price of GOP politics is going to be an insistence that, actually, Donald Trump did win the election and/or would have won if it hadn't been stolen/rigged.

The Founding Fathers are always spinning in their graves over something, as is Ronald Reagan, or FDR. Edward R. Murrow is a perennial grave spinner in the news business (though in fact, Murrow was cremated).

Don't worry, Malcolm," President Obama told his Australian counterpart, Malcolm Turnbull, when the latter expressed concern to him about Trump's early GOP primary successes. "The American people will never elect a lunatic to sit in this office.

Trump, too, would pass, like a kidney stone.

Bottom line: any ambivalence Graham had over Trump's conduct (for example, for trashing his best friend to the grave and beyond) was eclipsed by his desperation to remain a U.S. senator.

a mantra she attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt: women in politics, she said, "need to develop skin as tough as a rhinoceros hide.

ALL THE PRESIDENT'S YES-MEN—AND THEIR MASCARA!)