Quotes About Politics

But Thiel, who gave a speech supporting Trump at the Republican Convention in Cleveland, reported back that, even having been forewarned, he absolutely was certain of Trump's sincerity when he said they'd be friends for life—only never to basically hear from him again or have his calls returned.

This was the peculiar and haunting consensus—not that Trump was guilty of all that he was accused of, but that he was guilty of so much else.

In politics somebody has to lose, but invariably everybody thinks they can win.

Bannon, Conway, and Hicks—along with an assortment of more or less peculiar ideologues that had attached themselves to Trump and, of course, his family, all people without clearly monetizable reputations before their association with Trump—were, for better or worse, hitched to him.

the week of July 24 was a head-slammer. First, it opened the next episode in what had become a comic-opera

The less likely a presidential candidate is, the more unlikely, and, often, inexperienced, his aides are—that is, an unlikely candidate can attract only unlikely aides, as the likely ones go to the more likely candidates. When an unlikely candidate wins—and as outsiders become ever more the quadrennial flavor of the month, the more likely an unlikely candidate is to get elected—ever more peculiar people fill the White House.

The leitmotif for Trump about his own campaign was how crappy it was and how everybody involved in it was a loser.

Trump could bring Trumpism down...

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.

Then there was Bannon, conducting something of an alternate-universe operation,

To Trump, he was just up against Sally Yates, who was, he steamed, "such a cunt.

From the Bannon side, Pence garnered only contempt. "Pence is like the husband in Ozzie and Harriet, a nonevent," said one Bannonite. Although many saw him as a vice president who might well assume the presidency someday, he was also perceived as the weakest vice president in decades and, in organizational terms, an empty suit who was useless in the daily effort to help restrain the president and stabilize the West Wing.

He's not only crazy," declared Tom Barrack to a friend, "he's stupid.

That was the way to crush the liberals: make them crazy and drag them to the left.

But the point really was that Trump had wanted to confront and humiliate the FBI director. Cruelty was a Trump attribute.

Being a Trump staffer had become an existential predicament: even if you wanted to get out, and almost all of them did, there was nowhere to go.

He clearly did not understand that what conservative media elevated, liberal media would necessarily take down.

The Russia story was—just two weeks into the new presidency—a dividing line with each side viewing the other as pushing fake news.

He was, after all, Donald Trump, however much you shined him up.

Hyper-by-the-book Rod Rosenstein—heretofore the quintessential apolitical player—immediately became, in Washington eyes, a hopeless Trump tool. But Rosenstein's revenge was deft, swift, overwhelming, and (of course) by the book.

Alas, politics itself has more and more become a discrete business. Its appeal is B-to-B—business-to-business. The real swamp is the swamp of insular, inbred, incestuous interests. This isn't corruption so much as overspecialization. It's a wonk's life. Politics has gone one way, the culture another. The left-right junkies might pretend otherwise, but the great middle doesn't put political concerns at the top of their minds.

Still, Sean Hannity had 5.8 million viewers on the night of the Blasey Ford–Kavanaugh hearing. "That's a lot of fucking hobbits," said Bannon.

In politics somebody has to lose, but invariably everybody thinks they can win. And you probably can't win unless you believe that you will win—except in the Trump campaign.

The new politics was not the art of the compromise but the art of conflict.