When authority is total, so too is the madness of the man who declares it, and the potential for abuse of power.
Rick Wilson
There's a reason most Republicans and a vast majority of voters loathe Donald Trump: his vulgarity, his blistering ignorance, his constant dishonesty, his venality, and his utter lack of the knowledge, judgment, or temperament to be president of the United States.
As much as progressives hate the Electoral College - and we can argue its flaws all day long - in 2020, the Electoral College is the only game in town. There's not going to be some miracle where it's not the rule book. The winner of the Electoral College is president. Doesn't matter how many popular votes you get.
Trump has learned over his long career as a lying liar who lies that none of his stories have to be true.
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.
Part of the sales pitch for the Trump campaign is their unique, esoteric secret sauce based on a rabid cult following motivated by Facebook, Twitter, and other social media manipulation.
Every re-election campaign is a referendum on the incumbent. Every. Single. One.
Donald Trump is an idiot and a moron and just a kook of the first order, but he is surrounded by a bunch of guys like me, who are ride-or-die for him. They don't love him ideologically, but they're stuck. And they're very smart. And they're very determined and they will do anything to win.
Donald Trump, like many cult leaders, understands the power his words will have over the minds and actions of his followers... but few cult leaders have a pet media infrastructure.
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.
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.
Trump will never, ever do the right or decent thing, and his consultants certainly won't. He will make outrageous, unsupported claims.
The purpose of nuclear weapons is to deter. The mission of deterrence to make all parties in possession of nuclear weapons never, ever use them.
Extinction isn't pretty, especially when you know it's coming and do nothing about it.
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.
America once used the words 'treason' and 'traitors' only in cases of actual betrayal of our nation's most vital secrets or interests.
I've written about this before, but the sad truth is this: There are only a handful of Trump true believers in the Senate. The rest are chugging a toxic slurry of cowardice, ambition, and opportunism that has led members of the upper house of a co-equal branch of government to relinquish their power and prerogatives.
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.
Trump-era name-calling is just as tiresome and juvenile as it is nonsensical.
Trump is a masterful con man, he's always trying to squeeze a little more juice out of his marks.
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.
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.
Trump, like any good Stalinist, knows that one death is a tragedy but 100,000 is a statistic.
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.
I've knocked out any number of Democrats using ads associating them with the brand toxicity of Reid, Pelosi, and Obama, and before that Ted Kennedy, Barney Frank, and others.
Democrats are holistically bad at politics. They don't know how to fight in the way Republicans do.
Trump 'accomplishments' are ephemeral, coincidental and accidental.
Almost every culture has a cognitive bias for the tough guy, the alpha, the winner.
Donald Trump's racism is of course an ongoing feature, not a bug.
I was born in Florida. My first political campaign was as a field director for George Herbert Walker Bush in 1988.
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.
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.
I said Donald Trump could never be elected, confidently fueled by the empirical data of professional polling, a certainty in the vital necessity of field operations, and the knowledge his own campaign team (even on the night of the election) was ratting out the shambolic train wreck his campaign had been. I was wrong.
No bully - and Trump is the apotheosis of every bully, ever - is ever satisfied with just one day's worth of your lunch money.
Barack Obama basically ran as a liberal suburban Republican.
Only a fool would believe Trump would draw a sharp, bright line between his personal and family financial interests and the interests of the nation.
In a depressing twist, many members of my party and ideological persuasion have become advocates for Donald Trump on a scale that ranges from grudging to toadying, for a simple reason that seems to overwhelm all other factors: He attacks the media. Many are willing to forgive almost any sin because of it.
There are no points for civility or decency when it comes to prosecuting the campaign against Donald Trump.
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.
What really hits Trump is when you prove to people that Trump isn't for you - that Trump is about Trump.
Clintons lie with facility, intent, and design.
Disasters happen. Nature refuses to cooperate with the best-laid plans of kings and lesser men alike.
Long sentence or short, everything Trump touches dies - even his most loyal henchman.
Donald Trump's campaign is good at two things; hoovering up hundreds of millions of dollars from MAGA fans and spending them to move his poll numbers... nowhere.
The first two weeks of Donald Trump's Presidency made it clear: Trump's Gonna Trump. No newfound dignity for him.
As consequential and as deadly as the coronavirus pandemic has been, and will continue to be, the Trump media machine can't stop and won't stop its relentless propagandizing and historical revision. Trump is the hero.
Trump's 2016 effort could afford to be a shambolic circus; nothing was on the line. He never expected to win and so the rotating cast of campaign managers didn't really matter.
If Trump claimed something was the most luxurious, it was likely a dank, low-end casino in Atlantic City.
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 fans convinced of his strategic genius are welcome to their view, but they're wrong.
