Trump Era (2016-2021) Quotes about Trump(ism)

This is a curated subset of the main quotes page. Everything here is there too, but not vice-versa.

Quotes on this topic will continue, but additions to this range of dates will probably be rare. So this constitutes my collection for these years.

There are three sections:

1. Winning & Losing — An introduction
2. By Name — Specifically mentioning Trump
3. By Ism — About politics of the time.

There are only a few quotes of Trump, that is a separate task.

• “I think I’m much more humble than you would understand.”
  — Donald J. Trump, 60 Minutes, ≈ 18 July 2016
  
  

Winning & Losing

• “Trump knows how to be the loser’s idea of a winner.”
  — Paul Berman, Tablet, 7 December 2015
  
  
• “[Trump is] a poor person’s idea of a rich person.”
  — Fran Lebowitz, quoted in Vanity Fair 20 Oct 2016
  
  
• “Trump is a winner with the soul of a loser...”
  — Adrian Woolridge, NY Times, 28 Jan 2018
  
  
• “[Trump is] a weak person’s idea of a strong person...”
  — George F. Will, Washington Post, 24 Mar 2018
  
  
• “[Trump] is the poor man’s caricature of a rich man.”
  — Michael Weiss, NY Review of Books, 2 Aug 2018
  
  
• “Trump has adopted the weak man’s view of what strength looks like, the small man’s view of what greatness looks like, the coward’s conception of heroism.”
  — Michael Gerson, Washington Post, 16 Dec 2019
  
  

By Name

• “Trump has an adolescent’s contempt for the suffering of others.”
  — Richard Cohen, Washington Post, 22 Feb 2016
  
  
• “In the broadest sense, the Trump supporter might best be understood as a guy who wakes up one day...from a dream...and then mistakes the dream for the past.”
  — George Saunders, The New Yorker, 11 & 18 July 2016
  
  
• “There is a universal metaphor that states are locations in space: you can enter a state, be deep in some state, and come out that state. If you enter a café and then leave the café , you will be in the same location as before you entered. But that need not be true of states of being. But that was the metaphor used with Brexit; Britons believe that after leaving the EU, things would be as before when the entered the EU. They were wrong. Things changed radically while they were in the EU. That same metaphor is being used by Trump: Make America Great Again. Make America Safe Again. And so on. As if there was some past ideal state that we can go back to just by electing Trump.”
  — George Lakoff, Huffington Post, 24 July 2016
  
  
• “The only thing I’ve ever liked about Donald Trump, the only saving grace, is that he’s not Jewish...Because he’s an anti-Semite’s idea of a Jew.”
  — Fran Lebowitz, quoted in Vanity Fair 20 Oct 2016
  
  
• “A message to my doomed colleagues in the American media... [Trump] owns you. He understands perfectly well that he is the news. You can’t ignore him. You’re always playing by his rules — which he can change at any time without any notice.”
  — Alexey Kovalev, The Huffington Post, 12 Jan 2017
  
  
• “Mr. Trump, as someone just talking rather than artfully communicating ideas, has no sense of the tacit understanding that a politician’s utterances are more signals than statements, vehicles meant to convey larger messages.”
  — John McWhorter, NY Times, 22 Jan 2017
  
  
• “[H]e who is devoid of morality is immune to demoralization.”
  — Charles M. Blow, NY Times, 26 Jan 2017
  
  
• “Other countries now need dual sets of policies for everything. The policy that you would have if Donald Trump understood things. And the policy that you have to have if Donald Trump gets mad and lashes out at you.”
  — Yael Eisenstat, quoted in HuffPost 29 Mar 2017
  
  
• “Trump has the intellectual depth of a coat of paint.”
  — Charles M. Blow, NY Times, 1 May 2017
  
  
• “[W]atching Trump govern has been like watching a teenager learn how to drive a stick shift.”
  — Jason Linkins, Huffington Post, 10 May 2017
  
  
• “Trump won because he whines.”
  — Charles M Blow, NY Times, 7 Aug 2017
  
  
• “Barack Obama delivered to black people the hoary message that if they work twice as hard as white people, anything is possible. But Trump’s counter is persuasive: Work half as hard as black people, and even more is possible...It is as if the white tribe united in demonstration to say, ‘If a black man can be president, then any white man — no matter how fallen — can be president.’”
  — Ta-Nehisi Coates, 2017 October, The Atlantic
  
  
• “Pence is a reminder that no one can have sustained transactions with Trump without becoming too soiled for subsequent scrubbing.”
  — George F. Will, Washington Post, 13 Oct 2017
  
  
• “Trump appears Nixonian in his disregard for democratic norms, Clintonian in his personal recklessness and beyond Reaganesque in his distance from the details of policy.”
  — Carlos Lozada, Washington Post, 21 Dec 2007
  
  
• “The thing to fear from the Trump presidency is not ... the deployment of state power to intimidate dissidents, but the incitement of private violence to radicalize supporters.”
  — David Frum, Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic, 2018
  
  
• “[Trump] has learned that he can just show up and run his mouth, and he’ll be adored regardless. Some suppose Mr. Trump started talking down deliberately in order to portray folksiness... More likely, Mr. Trump has simply taken the path of least resistance.”
  — John McWhorter, NY Times, 6 Feb 2018
  
  
• “[T]o speak of, say, a sincere sofa is to commit what philosophers call a ‘category mistake’ — sofas are incapable of sincerity — and to speak of this president’s convictions (or plans, or policies) about this or that is a category mistake.”
  — George F. Will, Washington Post, 24 Mar 2018
  
  
• “We tend to believe that bad things that happen to people in our ingroup are bum luck, while bad things that happen to people in outgroups are evidence of a just universe...Whatever else Trumpism may be, it is the systematic organization of resentment against outgroups...[I]t has given permission for the public expression of shameful sentiments.”
  — Michael Gerson, Washington Post, 17 May 2018
  
  
• “[Trump] buries the signal of his bigotries in the noise of his syntax.”
  — Bret Stephens, NY Times, 18 May 2018
  
  
• “Trump is a walking, talking permission slip for the white supremacist.”
  — Charles M. Blow, NY Times, 31 May 2018”
  
  
• “Bush [W] wanted to remake the world. President Trump, by contrast, just wants to make it up as he goes along.”
  — Carlos Lozada, Washington Post, 13 July 2018
  
  
• “Trump has such a short-term worldview that if something calamitous does not happen immediately after he does something, it bolsters his assumption that he’s bulletproof.”
  — Daniel W. Drezler, Washington Post, March 2018
  
  
• “A map of Trump country would look a lot like a map of the various regions and counties from which young people with the best opportunities have consistently chosen to flee.”
  — Thomas Chatterton Williams, NY Times, 27 Aug 2018
  
  
• “[Trump] is the head-of-state counterpart of the demoralized American worker who responds to the challenges of industrial decline by choosing drug addiction.”
  — Paul Berman, Tablet, 18 June 2018
  
  
• “Con men traditionally skip town. He's [Trump] working the same town.”
  — Bill Maher, 2018-09-14
  
  
• “Like many Trump tweets, it reads like a clumsy translation from the original Russian (‘great patriot farmers’?).”
  — Paul Krugman, NY Times, 11 June 2019
  
  
• “Ivanka and Jared typify the belief that altitude is achievement...”
  — Frank Bruni, NY Times, 3 July 2019
  
  
• “Trump — and many of his supporters and defenders — spew their racism and tell themselves that it is perfectly acceptable when it is read back to them, in much the same way that a dog will eat its own vomit.”
  — Charles Blow, NY Times, 15 July 2019
  
  
• “Most men grow after becoming president; Trump has not only shrunk but has also miniaturized party elders with him.”
  — Nicholas Kristof, NY Times, 21 July 2019
  
  
• “[Trump] is not merely in the way. He is the problem.”
  — Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post, 5 Aug 2019
  
  
• “President Trump projects so much that it’s a wonder he hasn’t gotten a job in a movie theater.”
  — Max Boot, Washington Post, 11 Aug 2019
  
  
• “The difference between Nixon and Trump is that Nixon talked about his crimes on secret tapes and Trump tweets about them.”
  — Dan Pfeiffer, Twitter, 29 Aug 2019
  
  
• “When you use people like Kleenex, eventually the Kleenex is filled with snot, and you throw it out. That’s the way Trump treats everyone.”
  — Tony Schwartz, quoted by Ashley Parker and Philip Rucker, Washington Post, 11 September 2019
  
  
• “[Trump] speaks as if going to the polls is, above all, a great way for people to earn his love.”
  — Amy Davidson Sorkin, The New Yorker, 18 Sep 2019
  
  
• “Everything President Trump accuses his opponents of doing can be understood in one of two ways: as projection or a confession...Trump’s extreme solipsism means he cannot really conceive of anyone who’d behave any differently than he does...he cannot conceive of anyone acting in good faith — with regard to anything.”
  — Elizabeth Spiers, Washington Post, 24 Sep 2019
  
  
• “Trump is television in human form.”
  — Troy Patterson, The New Yorker, 4 Oct 2019, summarizing Audience of One by James Poniewozik
  
  
• “Trump is truly the little man behind the curtain.”
  — Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post, 12 Oct 2019
  
  
• “[Trump’s] defense has gone from ‘If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit’ to ‘Give me back my glove!’”
  — Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, ca. 17 Oct 2019
  
  
• “In the Trumpist vision, the 2016 election stands apart from all others. It’s no longer a grant of constitutionally-bounded authority. It becomes a kind of coronation...”
  — Jamelle Bouie, NY Times, 30 Oct 2019
  
  
• “[Trump] did not come to Washington to clean up the tainted system; he came to bathe in it.”
  — Maureen Dowd, NY Times, 15 Dec 2019
  
  
• “[D]oes it seem like Trump went through all the stages of grief in one tweet? It was like denial (‘I can’t believe I’m getting impeached’), anger (‘I did nothing wrong’), depression (‘This is a terrible thing’), acceptance (‘I guess we can only pray’).”
  — Trevor Noah, The Daily Show, 18 Dec 2019
  
  
• “[Trump’s letter to Pelosi of 17 Dec 2019] reads like a junior high school kid’s break up note...this is apparently something he worked on for days. Frankly, that alone should be an impeachable offense.”
  — Heather Digby Parton, Salon, 18 Dec 2019
  
  
• “[Trump] became president, after all, to ensure the news centered on him.”
  — Jim Newell, Slate, 2020-06-01
  
  
• “...Trump is obsessed with a pseudo-history in which the past exists only as prelude to his own greatness and to the unique evil of his enemies...In this demented solipsism, the entire American past is shrink-fitted so that it hugs Trump’s own ample figure, cleaving both to his greatness and to his victimhood as an object of unparalleled persecution.”
  — Fintan O'Toole, NY Review of Books, 2020-07-23
  
  
• “If consistency is a virtue, it’s as close as Trump gets to having one.”
  — Roger Cohen, NY Times, 2020-07-04
  
  
• “[The Trump team’s] guiding philosophy [is] that there is no problem so great that it cannot be solved by knowing less about it.”
  — Alexandra Petri, Washington Post, 2020-07-16
  
  
• “[A]ny Trump accusation should be presumed to be a confession.”
  — Amanda Marcotte, Salon, 2020-09-01
  
  
• “Trump reminds one of someone trying to fake fluency in a foreign language. Over and over, he makes glaring errors because he has no idea what he is talking about.”
  — Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post, 2020-09-08
  
  
• “Mitch McConnell [is] a man possessed by the same lust for power and moral turpitude as Trump, but not hobbled by Trump's stupidity or short-sightedness.”
  — Amanda Marcotte, Salon, 2020-09-21
  
  
• “Like most such men [abusive fathers], Trump finds the very idea of equality humiliating. He can only abide supremacy.”
  — Lili Loofbourow, Slate, 2020-09-30
  
  
• “I really think we should see Trump getting COVID as the epidemiological equivalent of a mass shooting, where the shooter opens fire on the crowd and then turns the gun on himself.”
  — Naomi Klein, Democracy Now interview, 2020-09-02
  
  
• “I’m back because I’m a perfect physical specimen and I’m extremely young...I’m a senior. I know you don’t know that. Nobody knows that.”
  — Donald J. Trump on drugs, 2020-09-08
  
  
• “[D]isplays are essential to the strongman because, unlike democratic leaders, he does not merely represent the will of the people but claims to embody their highest aspirations.”
  — Ruth Ben-Ghiat, 2020-10-13
  
  
• “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time?...It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20.”
  — Senior Republican official, q. Washington Post, 2020-11-09
  
  
• “One thing has become clear these last few days, I am the American People’s ALL-TIME favorite President.”
  — Donald J. Trump, message to mailing list, 2020-11
  
  
• “Trump is a living illustration of why authoritarians worship power so much — because only power can imbue a buffoon as ridiculous as Donald Trump with importance.”
  — Amanda Marcotte, Salon, 2020-12-03
  
  
• “Our country needs somebody to say [to me], ‘You’re right.’”
  — Donald J. Trump, Facebook speech, 2020-12-03 [Again confusing himself and the country]
  
  
• “[T]he typical Trump supporter...sees himself as in on the con. Indeed, the easiest way to hoodwink someone is to convince them that...they’re the ones getting one over on someone else.”
  — Amanda Marcotte, Salon, 2020-12-22
  
  
• “A confidence man prospers only because of the fundamental dishonesty of his victim.”
  — David Maurer, The Big Con, 1940
  
  
• “Trump’s troubling mental state and habitual mendacity ... erode any discernible boundary between falsehood and delusion.”
  — Jeannie Suk Gerson, The New Yorker, 2021-01-04
  
  
• “Everyone loved my phone call.”
  — Donald J. Trump, Speech in Dalton GA, 2021-01-04
  
  
• “[Trump’s] vision never went further than a mirror.”
  — Timothy Snyder, NY Times, 2021-01-10
  
  
• “[W]hile Trump is indeed an ignoramus, his ugly behavior is largely motivated by malice, not stupidity.”
  — Amanda Marcotte, Salon, 2021-01-12
  
  
• “[Trump is] the most masculine person, I think, to ever hold the White House.”
  — Hogan Gidley, campaign spokesman, Fox News, 2021-01-1?
  
  
• “[T]he archipelago of dots constituting Trump decision-making.”
  — John Bolton, Washington Post, 2021-01-24
  
  
• “[Trump supporters] want their ‘news’ to affirm them rather than inform them.”
  — Frank Luntz, quoted in Washington Post, 2021-02-03
  
  

Not By Name

• “[T]he more representative the body the less well it is able to deliberate...”
  — Jill Lepore, The New Yorker, 4 July 2016
  
  
• “Americans have been busy demonizing and disempowering political professionals and parties, which is like spending decades abusing and attacking your own immune system. Eventually, you will get sick.”
  — Jonathan Rauch, The Atlantic, July/August 2016
  
  
• “But soon [Ted] Cruz began to seem like the guy who comes to your book party and starts brandishing his own book.”
  — Maureen Dowd, NY Times, 21 July 2016
  
  
• “To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country. This is the origin of nationalism.”
  — Umberto Eco, NY Review of Books, 22 June 1995
  
  
• “Americans today often speak of racial prejudice as a thing that simply exists—like air—with no nod to the actual work it takes to create and maintain systems based upon prejudice.”
  — Annette Gordon-Reed, NY Review of Books, 19 Jan 2017
  
  
• “What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the evergrowing masses of our century.”
  — Hannah Arendt, find citation
  
  
• “Please do not interpret what I’m saying tonight to mean anything.”
  — Sean Hannity, Fox TV show, 23 May 2017
  
  
• “Pay any attention to modern right-wing discourse...and you find deep hostility to any notion that some problems require collective action beyond shooting people and blowing things up.”
  — Paul Krugman, NY Times, 2 June 2017
  
  
• “The American myth of meritocracy allows them to attribute their position to their brilliance and diligence, rather than to luck or a rigged system. At least posh people in England have the decency to feel guilty.”
  — Richard V. Reeves, NY Times, 10 June 2017
  
  
• “[Nazi] followers sought to destroy the despised present in order to recapture an idealized past in an imaginary future.”
  — Fritz Stern, quoted by Michelle Goldberg, NY Times, 29 September 2017
  
  
• “Illusion is the first of all pleasures.”
  — Voltaire, La Pucelle d’Orléans, 1756
  
  
• “Democrats, by and large, want their politicians held accountable. Republicans, by contrast, just want Democratic politicians held accountable.”
  — Michelle Goldberg, NY Times, 7 Dec 2017
  
  
• “[I]narticulate fury, once expressed, does not automatically find its true target and become productive. To the contrary, it is specifically prone to being harnessed by smoother tongues to yet more furious, hateful, and divisive ends.”
  — Rebecca Mead, The New Yorker, 6 Feb 2018
  
  
• “Perhaps the hardest thing for humans to do is to imagine the world as it is imagined by others.”
  — Masha Gessen, The New Yorker, 20 Feb 2018
  
  
• “[T]yrants thrive on cliché, on language that declares itself beyond questioning.”
  — Gary Greenberg, The New Yorker, 2 Apr 2018
  
  
• “Post-truth is pre-fascism.”
  — Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny, 2017
  
  
• “Actions are held [by nationalists] to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side...”
  — George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism, 1945
  
  
• “Political or military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any mistake, because their more devoted followers do not look to them for an appraisal of the facts but for the stimulation of nationalistic loyalties.”
  — George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism, 1945
  
  
• “The general uncertainty as to what is really happening makes it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs. Since nothing is ever quite proved or disproved, the most unmistakable fact can be impudently denied.”
  — George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism, 1945
  
  
• “People generally do not vote on how well the government is dealing with a future problem...”
  — Hall, McDonnell, O'Neill, Superbugs, 2018
  
  
• “A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best.”
  — Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny, 2017
  
  
• “However cautious and determined people are when they begin [gambling], their good judgment goes out the window once they start to win.”
  — Nathan H. Lents, Human Errors, 2018
  
  
• “The problem isn’t that our national character is too invested in civility. It’s that a certain segment of our population is desperate to be freed from it.”
  — Lili Loofbourow, Slate, 19 Aug 2018
  
  
• “Democracy is a hard-won, easily rolled back state of affairs from which many secretly yearn to be released.”
  — Uki Goñi, NY Review of Books, 20 Aug 2018
  
  
• “Just as most soldiers believe bullets will hit only others, not themselves, most citizens like to think that their own minds and thought processes are invulnerable.”
  — Margaret Singer, Idea, 19 Jan 1996
  
  
• “I guess the irony of being a great nation is the only power who can bring you down is yourself.”
  — Col. Mark Mykleby, quoted by Thomas L. Friedman, NY Times, 2 Oct 2018
  
  
• “[Lindsey Graham] rushes to [TV cameras] the way a toddler chases soap bubbles.”
  — Frank Bruni, NY Times, 6 Oct 2018
  
  
• “[A]t root, any dictatorship appeals to the lowest instincts of the governed: fear, aggressiveness toward one’s neighbors, bootlicking. Terror most effectively excites such instincts...”
  — Ryszard Kapuscinski, Shah of Shahs, 1982
  
  
• “The idea that the president should not be diagnosed from afar only underscores the point that the president needs to be evaluated up close.”
  — James Hamblin, The Atlantic, 3 Jan 2018
  
  
• “I have a sense of ethics that is as high as anybody you can imagine.”
  — Rudy Giuliani, quoted by Isaac Chotiner in The New Yorker, 21 Jan 2019
  
  
• “Ivanka is white, wealthy, and beautiful, and these attributes often pass as moral virtues.”
  — Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker, 29 Nov 2016
  
  
• “Orwell’s ‘1984’ had the ‘Two Minutes Hate.’ Fox’s hate lasts for hours.”
  — Max Boot, Washington Post, 11 Apr 2019
  
  
• “Hatred has the unique quality, among the emotions, of being discursive. You can be happy or melancholy or heartbroken without saying so. But to hate is to vent.”
  — Paul Berman, Tablet, 27 Jan 2019
  
  
• “[A] huge advantage of fiction over truth has to do with the handicap principle, which says that reliable signals must be costly to the signaler. Otherwise, they can easily be faked by cheaters...If political loyalty is signaled by believing a true story, anyone can fake it. But believing ridiculous and outlandish stories exacts greater cost, and is therefore a better signal of [reliable] loyalty.”
  — Yuval Noah Harari, NY Times, 24 May 2019
  
  
• “[The ‘Billy Graham rule’ is] rather like a thief sanctimoniously announcing that he brings a parole officer every time he goes to the bank to make sure he doesn’t rob it. Good for you, dude, for knowing your own limitations — but it doesn’t make you better than the rest of us, who manage to regularly not steal things even when we’re completely alone.”
  — Monica Hesse, Washington Post, 11 July 2019
  
  
• “What cannot be easily explained is answered by convenient untruths.”
  — Charley Warzel, NY Times, 11 Aug 2019
  
  
• “[I]]t has also been clear since the Obama years that a fair number of the superrich aren’t satisfied with being immensely wealthy; they also want adulation. They expect to be praised as heroic job creators and are enraged at any suggestion that some of their number may have behaved badly, let alone that they may have benefited from a rigged system.”
  — Paul Krugman, NY Times, 13 Aug 2019
  
  
• “It is impossible that the whistleblower is a hero and I’m not. And I will be the hero! These morons — when this is over, I will be the hero...Anything I did should be praised.”
  — Rudy Giuliani, quoted by Elaina Plott, The Atlantic, 26 Sep 2019
  
  
• “[I]n America, a sociopath will beat a socialist seven days a week and twice on Sunday.”
  — Steve Schmidt, quoted in New York Magazine, 26 Oct 2019
  
  
• “[A] middle-aged white male wearing a tie and saying anything with some conviction will be believed by at least 55 percent of people, especially if they already want to believe it.”
  — Bill Oakley, Washington Post, 14 Nov 2019
  
  
• “People may see hypocrisy and cynicism all around them, but...they believe their own views and actions...are righteous and principled.”
  — John F. Harris, Politico, 9 Jan 2020
  
  
• “Like common law, the moral imagination works by precedent and example. We are all equipped with an inherited archive of historical events that serves as the background for everything that occurs.”
  — Peter E. Gordon, NY Review of Books, 7 Jan 2020
  
  
• “The troll simply has a couple of strategic advantages that liberals don’t have: Shamelessness and amorality.”
  — Amanda Marcotte, Salon, 2020-04-29
  
  
• “The most courageous thing that [Tucker] Carlson has ever done was to wear a bow tie on the air.”
  — Max Boot, NY Times, 2020-07-13
  
  
• “Trolling liberals...has replaced pious posturing as the lingua franca of American conservatives.”
  — Amanda Marcotte, Salon, 2020-08-11
  
  
• “White conservatives get to claim self-defense, no matter how clearly they instigate violence, because they view the rest of us as inherently threatening.”
  — Amanda Marcotte, Salon, 2020-09-01
  
  
• “[A]longside near-miraculous advances in science come near-unbelievable examples of human irrationality.”
  — Max Boot, NY Times, 2020-12-22
  
  
• “The plural of anecdote is not data.”
  — Research this one
  
  
• “Post-truth is pre-fascism...When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place.”
  — Timothy Snyder, NY Times, 2021-01-10
  
  
• “The force of a big lie resides in its demand that many other things must be believed or disbelieved...It brings with it, of necessity, a conspiracy theory: Imagine all the people who must have been in on such a plot and...the cover-up.”
  — Timothy Snyder, NY Times, 2021-01-10
  
  
• “A joint statement [Sen. Ted] Cruz issued...nicely captured the post-truth aspect of the whole: It never alleged that there was fraud, only that there were allegations of fraud. Allegations of allegations, allegations all the way down.”
  — Timothy Snyder, NY Times, 2021-01-10
  
  
• “[E]vil can just start with bad jokes and nihilistic behavior that is fueled by positive reinforcement on various platforms.”
  — Andrew Gauthier, quoted by Ben Smith, NY Times, 2021-01-10
  
  
• “[I]t’s not clear to what extent [right-wingers] actually believe that this election was rigged, as opposed to being enraged that this time the usual vote-rigging didn’t work.”
  — Paul Krugman, NY Times, 2021-01-11
  
  
• “Members of white mobs do not have to mask their faces...Being part of a white mob has rarely been a crime...A white mob views itself as an extension of the law, not a repudiation of it.”
  — Victor Luckerson, The New Yorker, 2021-01-15
  
  
• “Violence has become the central act through which the far right understands political agency...”
  — Suzanne Schneider, Washington Post, 2021-01-15
  
  
• “[Marco Rubio is] worried that the impeachment trial is a pesky distraction from what Republicans really want to focus on — which is obstructing Biden’s agenda.”
  — Max Boot, Washington Post, 2021-02-11
  
  
• “Cruz understood that calling someone a “snowflake” is an insult...Then he named his own dog Snowflake. That’s like a normal person naming his dog Ted Cruz.”
  — Joel Stein, Washington Post, 2021-02-20