The Man Who Sold America Quotes

“Another short-lived White House national security adviser was Sebastian Gorka, a Fox News regular who styled himself “Dr. Gorka” and claimed to be an expert on Muslim extremism and the Quran, though he didn’t speak or read Arabic and had no direct subject matter mastery. Gorka became known mostly for wearing his father’s pin from Vitézi Rend, a Hungarian organization tied to the Nazis, and for his over-the-top pronouncements about the impending end of Western civilization due to whatever liberal outrage was on his mind.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“annual report of the Anti-Defamation League, “Murder and Extremism in the United States,” found that “2018 was a particularly active year for right-wing extremist murders,” and that “every single extremist killing—from Pittsburgh to Parkland—had a link to right-wing extremism.” The annual report found that “the 50 deaths make 2018 the fourth-deadliest year on record for domestic extremist-related killings since 1970.” The report found that the perpetrators of right-wing violence in the United States, often in the form of mass shootings, were most frequently tied to white supremacist, misogynistic “involuntary celibate or incel” and anti-feminist, so-called manosphere movements and anti-Semitic ideologies.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“surge in right-wing populism, stemming from the long-unfolding effects of globalization and the movements of capital and labor that it spawned, brought a man many considered to be a racist, misogynist and xenophobe into the most powerful political office in the world . . . Trump’s run for office electrified the radical right, which saw in him a champion of the idea that America is fundamentally a white man’s country.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“One prominent Republican fundraiser said that after Trump, “the plan right now is go back to the party of Reagan and Lincoln. That’s the model that we’re working on—to just pretend that Trump was never there. Of course, it’s going to be difficult for a while to do that.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“Donald Trump may be the last president who can walk up on the line” of racism and divisiveness “and get away with it,” he said. “The Republican Party can’t stay this insane.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“Two years into Trump’s presidency, one Republican strategist who is white, worked for Trump’s election, supports his tax and healthcare policies, and has vigorously defended the president’s supporters for three years against the idea that they were motivated by racism has had a change of heart. “Donald Trump’s election was about race. Just race,” this strategist said in March 2019, calling the 2016 election a blend of resentment of Obama coupled with “a mix of racial attitude and a little hope and change.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“would be good for the country to work with him on border security, and if he doesn’t break them now, it’s going to be a terrible 2019.”32 That is what the Republican Party under Donald Trump had become. The GOP that emerged in the age of Trump was not just fully realized as the party of the angry, white man, raging against the onset of cultural, social, and racial change. They were a party of, by, and for Donald Trump. When they gathered around him in the White House, elected officials and businessmen alike submitted to lavish rituals of sycophantic praise and thanks to the president.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“In autocratic regimes, an impotent legislature often rubber-stamps the erratic demands of a petulant leader. Without them, and a loyal military, he cannot rule. The Republican Party under Donald Trump, existing at the narrow end of the inverted pyramid, had become a kind of Politburo, acting only with his permission—and it was this relationship that made Trump’s impetuous rule possible. Only the courts and a Democratic House stood in his way. No one seemed more emblematic of the shift toward learned helplessness than South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, the once-fierce Trump critic who during the 2016 primary called Trump “a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot,” but who now declared on his Twitter feed, “Declare emergency, build the wall now.” The man who once stood with Senator John McCain to lambaste dictators and autocrats around the world now said of the opposition party in his own country, “I think Democrats hate Trump so much they want him to lose even though”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“Trump’s base bonded around the ritualized pain inflicted on the brown, the foreign, and the poor. They enjoyed seeing them suffer, because it sent a message to the rest of the unwanted: “Stay away.” And it reminded Trump’s followers that at last, a president of the United States was working for them; he was putting them, the “real Americans,” first.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“Phillips told his party they didn’t need the black vote—and should actually encourage enforcement of the Civil Rights Act, since “the more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans.”29 Said Phillips: “That’s where the votes are.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“By 2016, Trump had morphed into what political analyst Jeff Greenfield called “Pat Buchanan with better timing.”13 The shift toward bare-knuckles nativism won Buchanan’s support as the Republican establishment sought to jettison the Republican nominee when weeks before the election, outtakes from the NBC entertainment show Access Hollywood surfaced showing Trump in 2005 bragging about grabbing women’s genitals as he joked with host Billy Bush. Two years later, Buchanan heaped praise on Trump’s stubborn refusal to abandon his demand that Congress fund his border wall. Trump eagerly shared the praise with his millions of Twitter followers.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“David Duke, who endorsed Trump’s candidacy during the Republican primaries, though Trump claimed not to know who he was;10 or American neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin, the Daily Stormer editor who reacted to Trump’s 2018 claim that majority-black countries are “shitholes” by claiming, “it indicates Trump is more or less on the same page as us with regards to race and immigration.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“He and his cabinet embarked on a frenzy of deregulation, unleashing polluters and corporations to dump at will into the country’s rivers and lakes. And he signed record tax cuts including a temporary gutting of the estate tax that could balloon the maximum exemption for a wealthy couple to $22.4 million, a move that could benefit his own children.2”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“Of course, they’ve also transferred their racism over to the Hispanic community as well. Again, people who are obsessed with illegal immigration, this is a code for racism, because the only immigration that they’re concerned about are brown-skinned people from the South. You never hear anybody talk about needing a wall across the Canadian border.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“Bartlett is careful to say he doesn’t believe all Republicans are racist. “But it is true that the party benefits from racism,” and that “the existence of racism in society is per se beneficial to the Republican Party. I think it’s also reasonable to say that although all Republicans are not racist, virtually all racists are Republicans today.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“the Republicans have adopted the same idea of using racism to keep poor whites from joining into an alliance with blacks. As long as they keep divided, you can keep control.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“I think that what people don’t understand is that this isn’t just about stimulating the economy. It’s obvious that the tax cuts of the Bush and Trump eras had no economic effect whatsoever. Their agenda is to destroy government, to downsize it to such a point that we have virtual anarchy.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“Bartlett now believes the modern Republican Party stands for little besides slashing taxes on the rich and gutting benefits for the poor. “Although there’s lots of disparate interest groups, anti-abortion people, gun nuts, and various other groups,” he observes, “the one issue that holds all of those people together and, particularly, the funders of the Republican Party, the ultra-wealthy, is tax cuts.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“In 2010, Florida’s Republican and independent voters rallied to narrowly elect Rick Scott, a multi-millionaire former hospital executive whose firm reached a settlement in which they agreed to pay $1.7 billion in fines for Medicare, Medicaid, and military healthcare fraud. Embracing the Tea Party, Scott vowed to never allow Obamacare in the state, despite Florida having the second- largest pool of uninsured in the country.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“the Republican rank and file has “internalized this notion that the Republicans are not the party of the rich.” Rather, “the Republicans are the party of everybody who’s not a Democrat.” And Democrats represent the black and brown, the LGBT, the feminists, and in short, “everyone who’s not a white conservative.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“Trump convinced these voters that a self-declared billionaire real estate tycoon was on their side. They didn’t even necessarily believe he could revive their town, but he would punish the people—the Mexicans or the Chinese—that they blamed for its decline.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“The Republican Party is an endangered species now in California because they got hijacked by their base and were too afraid to fight back. They were paralyzed by the fear of being ‘primaried,’ and they let the crazies take over and where did that lead them? Into a place of permanent political exile. And that’s exactly what will happen nationally.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“We’ve learned through Trump that the ability to count on the system of checks and balances is much more fragile than anybody could have imagined,” said Harvard University constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe. “Trump has exposed the danger that a Congress in which people are so obsessed with raising money and getting themselves reelected is not likely to be an effective check.” Trump, Tribe said, exacerbated the weakness, “by showing the power of a demagogue to generate a lemming-like following.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“We’ve learned through Trump that the ability to count on the system of checks and balances is much more fragile than anybody could have imagined,” said Harvard University constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe. “Trump has exposed the danger that”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell continued to shield the president. He refused to take up multiple House bills to reopen the government and vowed to only bring the president’s preferred legislation to the floor, including American tax dollars to begin building his vanity wall. Ultimately, the shutdown ended with Trump giving in—and signing a bill no different from the one presented to him in December, with no money for a wall.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“Cindy Hyde-Smith, the appointed U.S. senator whose campaign was briefly roiled by her “exaggerated expression of regard” for a supporter, about whom she said, “if he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row.” It was a jarring statement coming from the state that historically lynched more black people than any other.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“DeSantis refused to return campaign donations from a longtime supporter, Steven Alembik, who tweeted that former president Barack Obama was a “fucking Muslim nigger,” and justified it to Politico”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“Even less subtle were the nativists with whom Trump was now firmly aligned. They called these fictionalized “invaders” diseased, violent, and, in the words of Iowa congressman Steve King, in a recorded conversation obtained by the conservative Weekly Standard, literal “dirt.”29 King had previously slammed Central American migrants as a mass of drug mules with “calves the size of cantaloupes.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“Trump had launched his presidential bid with the declaration that Mexico is “sending people that have lots of problems.” He famously continued, “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”27 He later claimed the Indiana-born judge hearing the case against his sham Trump University was too biased to hear the case because of his Mexican lineage.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“Fred Trump evinced a talent for acquiring wealth, but also a studious avoidance of taxation and a driving antiblack racism, culminating in his arrest at a Klan riot in Queens, New York, in 1927.18 And a 1973 federal lawsuit accused the company run by Fred and Donald Trump of refusing to rent to black and Puerto Rican tenants.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story