A biography for Rick Wilsonhasn’t been written yet.
“We were a family of incredible talkers, readers, arguers.”
“I think Trump is so dangerous because the people that he appeals to the most have this sense of despair and oppression that has become a central defining characteristic of their lives. And they feel like only he is their avatar; only he will fight for them; only he will keep the wolf from the proverbial door.”
“In 1974, Democrats gained 49 House seats and four Senate seats. It wasn't just the Watergate scandal that drove Democratic wins, but the sense that Republicans had defended corruption and criminality in the White House.”
“Almost every culture has a cognitive bias for the tough guy, the alpha, the winner.”
“Before the GOP became the party of Trump's gangster capitalism, they weren't perfect capitalists, but they at least paid lip service to the power of markets and capitalism.”
“Richard Nixon is typically considered the modern exemplar of a dark and vindictive president. President Trump would be Nixon minus the keen intellect and work ethic.”
“It's become a cliche to stare in mute horror at Donald Trump's endless stream of Twitter vomit, wondering what chthonic god finds pleasure in watching us writhe as Trump brings out the very worst in his followers and new levels of willful ignorance from Republicans determined to see no evil, no matter how in their face that evil is.”
“If Trump claimed something was the most luxurious, it was likely a dank, low-end casino in Atlantic City.”
“Because Donald Trump has to destroy everything in his path, why not the true history of 9/11?”
“All the fantasies of Trump-Bannon nationalism require a vastly expanded state, with greater powers over the economy and society.”
“The delta between who I am on Twitter and in real life is zero.”
“I'm not a squishy liberal Republican.”
“Stay away from national polls. They are always an illusion. They will always trick you into stupid political behavior.”
“For Trump, there's always a dark conspiracy arrayed against him. Someone is always doing him an injustice by not treating him with the required deference.”
“If you think Barr's Justice Department will take a single step to confront Trump or his cronies with any kind of challenge, think again. His hyper-maximalist vision of executive power borders on the fetishistic.”
“Even as an empiricist, I have to say that I believe in luck. I've seen it too many times in politics to let it pass by unnoticed.”
“For Donald Trump, any opposition, either personal, ideological, or political is treason. Anyone who stands in his path betrays the Great Leader. Anyone who fails to take the knee is a traitor.”
“Trump's inability to relate actions to consequences, his profound intellectual ambivalence about history, strategy and facts, in addition to his notoriously delicate ego, combine to create a risk we've never seen in a President during a nuclear crisis.”
“I believed that the donor class would cringe at the vast threat Donald Trump poses to the entire Republican Party, its brand, its prospects for expansion, and the nation.”
“Our leaders ranged from bad to extraordinary. But through it all, the GOP was the one party even vaguely amenable to limited-government conservatism, to at least some adherence to the Constitution over the social preferences of the moment, and to the constraints on government power that our Founding Fathers so cherished.”