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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Miles Taylor
Read between
July 28 - July 29, 2023
In truth, there were no heroes inside the Trump administration, only survivors.
America continues to pay a steep price for giving Trump the opportunity in the first place.
Trumpism is a political philosophy that seeks to achieve far-right, populist goals by defying democratic institutions and misusing government power for partisan purposes. It has spread like a disease, infecting a rising generation of copycats.
It wasn’t just that Trump was hostile to GOP orthodoxy; he was breathtakingly ignorant about the rule of law, the Constitution, and the democratic system.
The Oval Office wasn’t the highly controlled environment I remembered from the Bush years. It was a crowded New York bagel shop.
Trump wanted to cooperate on anti-hacking with the very same man who’d just hacked the 2016 vote in the United States.
He systematically sidelined or eliminated anyone who objected to his agenda or sought to restrain his impulses. By the end of four years, only the sycophants remained.
“We have a system of checks and balances,” he said. “We can survive bad policy, but we can’t survive bad people.”
The Next Trump will bring aides into government who lack character, experience, or both—and are ready for retribution.
It’s about what he’s doing to us. He’s dividing us, destroying us. We can’t let him. We need to heed John McCain’s words and put country over party, before it’s too late.
Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.
the president suggested firing missiles into Mexico to annihilate the criminal groups.
“The briefings to him and Clinton were fundamentally different,” the official explained. “With him, it was like elementary school.” More specifically, the briefers presented the information to Trump in such a way that—if he leaked it—the damage to U.S. operations around the world would be minimized.
Republican leaders have shown newfound scorn toward once-venerated American institutions.
Washington was populated by children wearing big people clothes who also hid under their beds from bullies.
He is the most flawed person I have ever met in my life.”
he is uninterested in governing, that he is motivated only by his self-interests, and that the United States of America is less secure with him in the Oval Office.
in the eyes of some rabid supporters, Donald Trump had turned me into a hunting trophy.
in the five years after Donald Trump was elected in 2016, the number of recorded threats against members of Congress increased more than 400 percent, to 9,625 in 2021.
Lawmakers told news outlets that they were living in a state of fear and some were changing their votes for safety reasons.
The MAGA movement’s embrace of antigovernment rhetoric and violence toward public officials is elevating the risk of political assassinations.
“If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence,” he offered, “I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon’s, but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition, and ignorance on the other.”
If a domestic terror attack on Congress wasn’t enough to wake up the GOP and the country, it would happen once more.
The Trump presidency pitted GOP figures against one another, ruining many friendships and straining others. Some in our group had opposed the New Yorker from the start, while many had hoped to help the man govern. A few had been true believers until the shock of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. None of them wanted to experience another four years like it again.
In Congress, representatives who were terrified of Trump’s impact on the party decided to cheer him on anyway. In the White House, the president’s aides warned about his corrupt behavior behind closed doors yet waxed about his “genius” to the press.
the reluctance of people to stand against extremism is putting our republic in danger.
To save democracy from the Next Trump, we must avoid anonymity and the blowback that comes with it. Authoritarians thrive on chasing their rivals into the dark, which is why nothing is so caustic to an autocrat as a critic who stands unmovable in the light. Truth is the final guardrail of our collective democracy, and we each individually control its fate.
