How the Hell Did This Happen? Quotes

“I endorse Hillary Clinton for president. She is the second-worst thing that could happen to America. Dorothy and Toto’s house fell on Hillary. I endorse her. Munchkins endorse her. Donald Trump is a flying monkey. Except that what the flying monkeys have to say—“oreoreoreo”—makes more sense than Trump’s pronouncements.”
― P.J. O'Rourke, How the Hell Did This Happen?: The Election of 2016

“Americans appreciate bad taste or America wouldn’t look the way America does.”
― P. J. O'Rourke, How the Hell Did This Happen?: A Cautionary Tale of American Democracy

“Maybe Rand should have said, “Being a social liberal and a fiscal conservative means wanting to get high and have sex while saving money.”
― P.J. O'Rourke, How the Hell Did This Happen?: The Election of 2016

“And crazy old people will be to blame for whichever spawn of Satan slithers its way into the Oval Office.”
― P.J. O'Rourke, How the Hell Did This Happen?: The Election of 2016

“And, Donald, the end of your necktie belongs up around your belt buckle, not between your knees and your nuts. Trump’s haircut makes Kim Jong Un laugh.”
― P.J. O'Rourke, How the Hell Did This Happen?: The Election of 2016

“I was talking to syndicated newspaper columnist and Fox News commentator Charles Krauthammer just after Clinton’s final e-mail scandal broke. I said, “The secretary of state uses her personal e-mail to send top-secret State Department documents to her weird personal assistant who is married to Anthony Weiner who is so crazy that he’s destroyed his political career twice by sending lewd Tweets and Instagram photos to random women and who is now under investigation for sexting with an underage girl. And the top-secret State Department documents wind up on his computer. How much worse can things get?” Charles said, “What if the ‘underage girl’ speaks Russian?”
― P.J. O'Rourke, How the Hell Did This Happen?: The Election of 2016

“There was a terrible outbreak of “mansplaining” on the campaign trail—all of it done by a woman. Hillary Clinton was the person with the patronizing and prolix explications.”
― P.J. O'Rourke, How the Hell Did This Happen?: The Election of 2016

“And yet the debate was highly informative—if you turned the sound off. The event was broadcast with a split screen so that each presidential candidate was visible while the other candidate was talking. The talk was insipid, but the expressions on the candidates’ faces were fascinating. Trump was serious of mien. He concentrated intently on what Hillary was saying. Sometimes there was a little twitch of annoyance; sometimes, a small frown of disagreement. But mostly he looked deeply thoughtful. (Where he got that look is anyone’s guess. Maybe he purchased it at the same strange haberdashery where Hillary buys her Hillary costume.) Clinton is supposed to be the one with the deep thoughts. But there she was thoughtlessly making rude grimaces whenever Trump was speaking. Mom always said, “You shouldn’t make faces—your face may get stuck that way.” Hillary’s face got stuck that way. She spent the whole evening with a wipe-that-look-off-your-face look on her face. She”
― P.J. O'Rourke, How the Hell Did This Happen?: The Election of 2016

“People who work in the news media do not watch The Apprentice because of what’s been happening in the news media for a number of years, causing all of us who work in it to never want to hear the words “You’re fired” again. This was a mistake. Donald Trump, the actor who plays “Donald Trump,” appeared on The Apprentice for eleven years. At its peak, the show had 20 million viewers. And Trump is a good actor. Donald Trump is almost as good as Alec Baldwin at being Donald Trump.”
― P.J. O'Rourke, How the Hell Did This Happen?: The Election of 2016

“The war is not between Republicans and Democrats or between conservatives and progressives. The war is between the frightened and what they fear. It is being fought by the people who perceive themselves as controlling nothing. They are besieging the people they perceive as controlling everything. We are in the midst of a Perception Insurrection, or, depending on how you perceive it, a Loser Mutiny. The revolt against the elites targets all manner of preeminence—political elites, business elites, media elites, institutional elites, and, kind reader, you.”
― P.J. O'Rourke, How the Hell Did This Happen?: The Election of 2016

“It is astonishing that Donald Trump managed to eke out a victory over Donald Trump at the polls. It is amazing how narrow the margin was by which Hillary Clinton defeated Hillary Clinton.”
― P.J. O'Rourke, How the Hell Did This Happen?: The Election of 2016

“The world’s richest man pulled Microsoft out of his butt. All Bill Gates exploited was a line of 0s and 1s as long as a piece of string. Now Microsoft employs 118,000 people. Number six on the rich list, Mark Zuckerberg, created Facebook out of less than that. All Mark had was a dumb idea that all the stupid people want to tell every stupid thing about their lives to all the other stupid people. Current net worth of the person with that dumb idea, $11.2 billion.”
― P.J. O'Rourke, How the Hell Did This Happen?: The Election of 2016

“If we take all the money away from every billionaire and divide that $6.5 trillion by the world’s population of 7.125 billion, we each get a check for $912.28. I just searched auto.com. You can get a 1998 Chevy Lumina with 180,000 miles for $999 in beige (although the door color does not seem to match the fender). But everybody knows that all the money in the world”
― P.J. O'Rourke, How the Hell Did This Happen?: The Election of 2016

“According to the magazine there are currently 1,810 billionaires. Their combined net worth is $6.5 trillion. The proposed 2017 U.S. federal budget is $4.2 trillion. All the billionaires on earth put together could—if Washington is careful not to have any budget overruns—keep America going for eighteen months.”
― P.J. O'Rourke, How the Hell Did This Happen?: The Election of 2016

“And if there’s a libertarian moment in the future it won’t be while moderates are in charge. Because there are three basic tenets to libertarianism: Liberty of the individual Dignity of the individual Responsibility of the individual And everybody hates at least one of them. This year everybody hated all of them. Liberty”
― P.J. O'Rourke, How the Hell Did This Happen?: The Election of 2016

“Cherubim perhaps, take practice shots with the Big Bang. I would have preferred to write a book about the course of actions taken during this election campaign and how that course of actions led to certain results. But there was no discernable course. The course might as well have been at Trump University. And the results might as well have been determined by a pair of twelve-sided dice used by stoned Bernie Sanders supporters in a game of Dungeons & Dragons. (Dungeons & Dragons being a not-bad alternative title for what you hold in your hands.) Anyway, if my book lacks a coherent narrative it’s because I couldn’t find one.”
― P.J. O'Rourke, How the Hell Did This Happen?: The Election of 2016

“Political pundits are under professional obligation to regard the obvious as being too obvious.”
― P. J. O'Rourke, How the Hell Did This Happen?: A Cautionary Tale of American Democracy

“Only a little more than a quarter of eligible voters cast ballots in Democratic or Republican primaries and caucuses. More than half of the Republicans and nearly half of the Democrats supported candidates other than the two we got.”
― P.J. O'Rourke, How the Hell Did This Happen?: The Election of 2016

“Trump’s grandfather, a German immigrant, changed the family name from Drumpf to Trump.”
― P.J. O'Rourke, How the Hell Did This Happen?: The Election of 2016

“We common folk may not be able to match Trump’s piggy bank, but even the most high-minded and charitable among us can match his piggishness.”
― P.J. O'Rourke, How the Hell Did This Happen?: The Election of 2016

“Perhaps in that flight of birds . . . the leader was not really a bold spirit trusting to its own initiative and hypnotizing the flock to follow it in its deliberate gyrations. Perhaps the leader was the blindest, the most dependent of the swarm, pecked into taking wing before the others, and then pressed and chased and driven by a thousand hissing cries and fierce glances whipping it on.” —George Santayana, The Last Puritan ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Sometime early in 2016 I was at a cocktail party with my editor and publisher Morgan Entrekin who, for his sins, has commissioned every book I’ve published. I”
― P.J. O'Rourke, How the Hell Did This Happen?: The Election of 2016

“When are voters in both political parties going to realize that politics is a two-way street? The politician creates a powerful, huge, heavy, and unstoppable Monster Truck of a government. Then supporters of that politician become shocked and weepy when another politician, whom they detest, gets behind the wheel, turns the truck around, and runs them over.”
― P.J. O'Rourke, How the Hell Did This Happen?: The Election of 2016

“If Melania had come out and said, “According to my husband, I should be very pretty to get what I want in life,” that would have been news. Well, not news exactly, but candid enough to be newsworthy.”
― P.J. O'Rourke, How the Hell Did This Happen?: The Election of 2016

“Indeed, it costs more. CNN reports that Hillary and Bill collected $153 million in speaking fees between 2001 and 2015. Ken Starr, according to the Government Accounting Office, spent only $6.2 million preparing his case for the impeachment of the adulterous then-president. But”
― P.J. O'Rourke, How the Hell Did This Happen?: The Election of 2016

“A road trip with Richard Nixon would seem like gum surgery on wheels. But Hunter S. Thompson actually went on a road trip with Nixon—or, anyway, on a car ride—in New Hampshire during the 1968 presidential campaign. Hunter described it in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72: There were only two of us in the back: just me and Richard Nixon, and we were talking football in a serious way. . . . It was a very weird trip; probably one of the weirdest things I’ve ever done, and especially weird because both Nixon and I enjoyed it. What’s weirder yet is that Nixon might have had greater success than Kennedy as president. He”
― P.J. O'Rourke, How the Hell Did This Happen?: The Election of 2016

“For, behold, the day cometh, that shall burn as an oven: and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble. —Malachi 4:1”
― P.J. O'Rourke, How the Hell Did This Happen?: The Election of 2016

“Clinton was an ancient monument of liberalism. If Washington were Pharaonic Egypt—and sometimes it is—Hillary would be the Sphinx. With the exception that she never shuts up. And she’s hardly immobile. For the past quarter of a century she’s been everywhere we looked. So there was the monumental Hillary out in the American electoral desert surrounded by a Republican horde of . . . of whatever small, feckless, puny fauna Egypt has. I’ve Googled the matter. Yes, there it is exactly—“Giza gerbils.”
― P.J. O'Rourke, How the Hell Did This Happen?: The Election of 2016

“There isn’t, incidentally, any such thing as an ancient Chinese curse saying, “May you live in interesting times.” The phrase seems to be a piece of invented Orientalist folklore coined in the 1930s by First Lord of the Admiralty Sir Austen Chamberlain, half-brother of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain who went off to Munich to appease Hitler. And let’s not be silly and forget that the Chamberlain brothers lived in much more accursedly interesting times than our own. What I thought was going on in the 2016 election cycle was a mere fight to the death between two fundamental American political ideologies.”
― P.J. O'Rourke, How the Hell Did This Happen?: The Election of 2016

“(Dr. Carson, being a neurosurgeon, probably favors a physiological and biochemical model of brain dysfunction over a Freudian model. This means he was a shoo-in for the presidential nomination if Republicans stayed on their meds. Which they didn’t.)”
― P.J. O'Rourke, How the Hell Did This Happen?: The Election of 2016

“Democrats are liberals, and—to their profound embarrassment—liberalism is an old, white European male political philosophy. Liberalism is based on the thought of John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Paine, and—oh, the shame of it—slave-owning, woman-exploiting Thomas Jefferson. Liberalism is deeply confusing to liberals. America’s first great liberal populist was Andrew Jackson, perpetrator of the genocidal Trail of Tears and annihilator of the Second Bank of the United States and hence of centralized economic control. (Sadly, Jackson put an end to the Second Bank of the United States before Hillary Clinton had a chance to claim large lecture fees for speaking to its executives.) Plus, liberalism is painfully unhip. Say “Great Society” to today’s with-it young Democratic voters and they hear air quotes around the “Great.” LBJ”
― P.J. O'Rourke, How the Hell Did This Happen?: The Election of 2016