Quotes About Politics

Most conservatives today are more liberal than most liberals were in the 1950s.

The origin of the modern labels of left and right can be traced to the French Assembly of 1789 on the eve of the French Revolution, in which the delegates who favored preservation of the Ancien Régime (the Old Order) of France sat on the right side of the chamber, while those who favored change sat on the left.91 Since then, the terms left and right have stood for liberalism and conservatism, respectively.

My colleague and I are journalists. ... Not of the muckraking variety, I hasten to assure you! Corruption is a necessary and time-honored concomitant of any functioning government, which we support wholeheartedly.

In any pandemic, effective leadership is critical, and the first responsibility of the president or the head of any nation is to offer accurate and up-to-date information, provided by public health experts, not agenda-oriented political operatives.

In the ancient world religion was always closely linked to politics because dominant social groups realized that religion offered an effective means to legitimize and maintain their power and dominance

George W. Bush, on the dais, supplied what seemed likely to become the historic footnote to the Trump address: "That's some weird shit.

The Breitbart formula was to so appall the liberals that the base was doubly satisfied, generating clicks in a ricochet of disgust and delight. You defined yourself by your enemy's reaction. Conflict was the media bait—hence, now, the political chum. The new politics was not the art of the compromise but the art of conflict.

He sent his new press secretary, Sean Spicer—whose personal mantra would shortly become "You can't make this shit up"—to argue his case in a media moment that turned Spicer, quite a buttoned-down political professional, into a national joke, which he seemed destined to never recover from. To boot, the president blamed Spicer for not making the million phantom souls seem real.

Politics had seemed to become, even well before the age of Trump, a mortal affair. It was now zero-sum: When one side profited, another lost. One side's victory was another's death. The old notion that politics was a trader's game, an understanding that somebody else had something you wanted—a vote, goodwill, old-fashioned patronage—and that in the end the only issue was cost, had gone out of fashion. Now it was a battle between good and evil.

Bannon described Trump as a simple machine. The On switch was full of flattery, the Off switch full of calumny.

As Walsh saw it, Steve Bannon was running the Steve Bannon White House, Jared Kushner was running the Michael Bloomberg White House, and Reince Priebus was running the Paul Ryan White House. It was a 1970s video game, the white ball pinging back and forth in the black triangle.

On the other hand, constant hysteria did have one unintended political virtue. If every new event canceled out every other event, like some wacky news-cycle pyramid scheme, then you always survived another day.

Let Jordan take the West Bank, let Egypt take Gaza. Let them deal with it. Or sink trying. The Saudis are on the brink, Egyptians are on the brink, all scared to death of Persia . . . Yemen, Sinai, Libya . . . this thing is bad. . . . That's why Russia is so key. . . . Is Russia that bad? They're bad guys. But the world is full of bad guys." Bannon offered all this with something like ebullience—a man remaking the world.

China's everything. Nothing else matters. We don't get China right, we don't get anything right. This whole thing is very simple. China is where Nazi Germany was in 1929 to 1930. The Chinese, like the Germans, are the most rational people in the world, until they're not. And they're gonna flip like Germany in the thirties. You're going to have a hypernationalist state, and once that happens you can't put the genie back in the bottle.

They were all concerned that Trump did not understand what he was up against. That there was simply not enough method to his madness.

said the president in his first week in the White House during a late-night call. "It's all exaggerated. My exaggerations are exaggerated.

it confirmed Bannon's worst fear: Trump, in his true heart, was a marshmallow.

Here was yet another battle to be won or lost. Bannon regarded Kushner and Cohn (and Ivanka) as occupying an alternative reality that had little bearing on the real Trump revolution. Kushner and Cohn saw Bannon as not just destructive but self-destructive, and they were confident he would destroy himself before he destroyed them. In the Trump White House, observed Henry Kissinger, "it is a war between the Jews and the non-Jews.

Trump was not a politician who could parse factions of support and opprobrium; he was a salesman who needed to make a sale. "I won. I am the winner. I am not the loser," he repeated, incredulously, like a mantra.

Bannon had announced himself as Trump's brain, a boast that vastly irritated the president.

Here was a perfect example of an essential Trump paradigm: he acceded to anyone who seemed to know more about any issue he didn't care about, or simply one whose details he couldn't bring himself to focus on closely. Great! he would say, punctuating every statement with a similar exclamation and regularly making an effort to jump from his chair. On the spot, Trump eagerly agreed to let Ryan run the health care bill and to make Price the Health and Human Services secretary.

Trump's key supporters worked for him because nobody else would have them.

Jim Baker, chief of staff for both Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush and almost everybody's model for managing the West Wing, advised Priebus not to take the job.

The Trump White House stood less for government and the push-pull of competing interests and developing policies, and more, in a brand-savvy world, as a fixed and unpopular cultural symbol.