Rick Wilson

“All my life, the Republican Party has been my political home. Helping it succeed has been my work for decades. It was never perfect, but families never are.”

“Trump-era name-calling is just as tiresome and juvenile as it is nonsensical.”

“Donald Trump's racism is of course an ongoing feature, not a bug.”

“I will not vote for Hillary, and I will not vote for Trump. At the end of the day, I believe that President Clinton would be less damaging to the Republican Party than President Trump. Because five minutes after she's elected president, every bit of this anxiety in our party disappears instantly. We will go at the main enemy as we do.”

“In politics, Victory Disease comes when a majority believes their position is so secure and immune from challenge that they forget the lessons of the past and can't imagine an outcome that isn't in their favor. Neither party is inoculated against it.”

“Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and others who raced to the microphones at the slightest hint of Obama overstepping the lines were damn quiet as Trump wildly colored outside the lines of any rational version of executive power.”

“No bully - and Trump is the apotheosis of every bully, ever - is ever satisfied with just one day's worth of your lunch money.”

“I'm of the philosophy that you wage a campaign of full engagement and you use every tool in the toolbox.”

“Trump, like any good Stalinist, knows that one death is a tragedy but 100,000 is a statistic.”

“Like all alchemists, Trump seeks to convert dross into gold, to toss a broth of his incompetence, denial, delay, deception, and failure into some supernatural alembic and extract political advantage.”

“American populism is no stranger to our political life. From the earliest anti-Federalists to William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, and George Wallace, and many in between, we've sampled the populist temptation, often in times of national distress and dislocation.”

“Trump is always Trump, and never, ever improves.”

“It's not a secret that Ted Cruz isn't my first choice for the Republican nomination for president. His smug Poindexter affect, his smarm, sanctimony, and general derpiness all grate on me. There's no doubt he's smart, but while smart is necessary, it's not necessarily sufficient.”

“When the 2010 election swept Republicans into office in a massive tidal wave, they were part of a philosophical and ideological change. They were bound by a set of limited-government principles. To be sure, sometimes loosely and imperfectly so, but the Tea Party wave was driven by ideas, not a singular, authoritarian personality.”

“When authority is total, so too is the madness of the man who declares it, and the potential for abuse of power.”

“I really like Bobby Jindal.”

“Even as a Southerner, there's only so much corn-pone shucking and jiving about mama-and-gravy talk I can take.”

“America once used the words 'treason' and 'traitors' only in cases of actual betrayal of our nation's most vital secrets or interests.”

“We should tell the honest, painful stories of 9/11 because it dishonors the memory of heroes to invent a phony cast of villains when the actual terrorists were terrible enough to tear open this nation's heart.”

“Trump sees himself as the center of the media universe, the sun to which all eyes turn.”