The Man Who Sold America Quotes

“Donald Trump in the White House has caused us to stand up and say no,” Jean-Pierre said of the American majority who consistently disapprove of Trump by wide margins. The sense that “there’s a madman in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” particularly among the marginalized communities that feel they are under attack, has sparked a tremendous level of political engagement, inspiring a wave of new aspirants to office who might have sat out the process with a more conventional president in the White House.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“The good news—if there is good news—is that most Americans know it.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“Right now, rather than figuring out how to emerge into that future as a stable, functioning, participatory, multiracial democracy, we’re arguing about whether gangs of rapists are storming our southern border and fighting among ourselves in serial episodes of the Trump Show.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“Whatever becomes of Trump—whether he is impeached and removed or serves out his term; whether he is ever held to legal account by prosecutors in Washington or New York; whether his family business survives and grows, or the Trump brand withers; and whether he can build up another wave of anger, resentment, and fear and ride it to four more years in the White House, the Trump era’s danger signs are sure to outlast him.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“given that he was rewarded for it politically and feels like his base actually loves and enjoys that, it doesn’t surprise me that he has moved so aggressively, policy-wise.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“Trump’s presidency is the quiet part out loud,” said Faiz Shakir, who was an aide to Democratic majority leader Harry Reid until the senator retired. Shakir, who was born in Florida to Pakistani immigrant parents, agreed that Trump is unearthing the sentiments many on the right have quietly harbored for decades, but never felt “it was politically smart to talk about.” Trump “opened that door wide, and said, ‘I’m going to talk about [those things] loudly and proudly. I’m going to bash Muslims. I’m going to bash immigrants. I’m going to bash the trans community. I’m going to bash low-income women who go to Planned Parenthood.’ It was just explicit. And”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“400 million in contracts from the Department of Homeland Security.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“Since Donald Trump’s inauguration, two private prison companies—GEO Group and CoreCivic—have taken in approximately”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“vow to extinguish Obamacare and take the health coverage of tens of millions of Americans—including his own followers—down with it, there seemed to be little chance that many of the Trumpist faithful would vote against him. And if he is reelected in 2020, Steele says, “Trump will conclude that, wait, you [in the media and ‘the establishment’] threw everything at me, and the people didn’t buy it, and they reelected me anyway? In his mind, at that point, he’s unstoppable. So that episode at CPAC will be a daily occurrence. That’s one of the hallmarks of an authoritarian,” says Steele. “They love the sound of their own voice.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“Steele worries that Democrats fail to understand how powerful that is, and how much it augurs the real potential for Trump’s reelection, no matter how low his poll numbers go. Even if he made good on his”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“Could you imagine the first black president standing on a stage, cursing and ranting for two hours? Every Republican I know would have been out of their minds. Donald Trump is doing and becoming everything Republicans accused Barack Obama of being and doing. He is acting like the autocrat he’s always wanted to be.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“Every Republican I know would have been out of their minds. Donald Trump is doing and becoming everything Republicans accused Barack Obama of being and doing. He is acting like the autocrat he’s always wanted to be.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“Bruce Bartlett, the former Reagan-Bush official, believes that in a fundamental way, the rich have always feared democracy. “Their fear is the de facto French Revolution where the people are in control. Of course, they’re quite right when they point to the Founding Fathers as sharing this view. The Electoral College, for example, is the most anti-democratic institution you can think of next to the U.S. Senate,” which until 1913 and the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution, was elected by state legislatures.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“Noting that America’s economic growth, particularly since the Great Recession of 2007 and 2008, had delivered its overwhelming benefits to the very rich, and that “Wall Street got bailouts while working Americans saw their jobs shipped overseas or outsourced to contractors,” and that “the top 400 taxpayers earn an average of $97,000 an hour, while people are arrested for protesting because they can’t survive on $7.25 an hour, the minimum that Washington requires,” Barber named what he called the “four diseases, all connected, [that] now threaten the nation’s social and moral health: racism, poverty, environmental devastation, and the war economy—sanctified by the heresy of Christian nationalism.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“Sutton concluded by saying that, “Seems like the Klan would be welcome to raid the gated communities up there” in Washington, D.C., adding, “truly they are the ruling class.” Asked by the Montgomery Advertiser to defend his written comments, Sutton said, “If we could get the Klan to go up there and clean out D.C., we’d all been better off,” adding that if not, “we’ll get the hemp ropes out, loop them over a tall limb and hang all of them.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“seeming to call for a Klan raid on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., and warning that “Democrats in the Republican Party and Democrats are plotting to raise taxes in Alabama.” The editorial was bizarre, even alleging that some freed slaves “borrowed their former masters’ robes and horses and rode through the night to frighten some evildoer”15 as would-be Klansmen themselves. And Sutton blamed Democratic presidents for getting the United States into World War I, World War II, and the Korean War, darkly warning of the creep of socialism.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“Hatred of taxation is particularly strong in the South, as demonstrated on the extreme end by a shocking Valentine’s Day 2019 editorial in an Alabama newspaper, The Democrat-Reporter, that during the 1990s had attracted Pulitzer Prize talk and widespread praise for its coverage of local corruption. The editorial, written by Goodloe Sutton, publisher and editor and the son of the newspaper’s founder, who was hailed in a 1998 congressional citation as “one of Alabama’s finest and most ethical journalists,”14 called for “the KKK to night ride [sic] again,”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“In the United States, the states with the highest levels of income inequality tend to be high-population states and the states in the South.13 The central and western states, where Republicans have held near-absolute power for decades, and those in the South, where the party seized total control in the midterm election routs of 2010 and 2014, are characterized by low wages, broken or non-existent unions, low or even no state taxes, and paltry funding for public schools.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“Internationally, America is ranked fortieth (out of 150 countries) with the highest levels of income inequality, about the same levels of inequality as Russia. The rich in both countries control approximately equal shares of the wealth and income. America, in a very real sense, has its own oligarchs.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“As of 2019, Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, America’s richest man as of 2019, with a net worth of $137 billion, earns nearly three times the average American wage earner’s income every minute of his life, even while he’s asleep.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“million in 2012, was secretly recorded telling a small group of wealthy donors during a Boca Raton, Florida, fundraiser, that there are “47 percent” of Americans “who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to healthcare, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for [President Obama’s reelection] no matter what . . . These are people who pay no income tax.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor and presidential candidate whose net worth was estimated by Forbes at $230”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“Nancy MacLean, in her book Democracy in Chains, chronicles the generations-long quest by the superrich to hobble democracy in their own interest. She said the Republicans who lined up behind Trump, their paymasters, and even some socially liberal members of the financial elite have used their wealth to bend the levers of government to their will, to reduce taxation on themselves, and to strip as many benefits from ordinary Americans as politicians will bear. And they’ve used a pointed, often racialized communications strategy to convince nonwealthy, white voters to go along.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“American voter participation has been anemic for decades, particularly among younger Americans, unmarried women, and Hispanics (who tend to be young relative to the rest of the population), as well as those of lower incomes. Research has found a direct correlation between household income and voting likelihood.3 A 2012 study by the largest private salary survey company, Payscale, found that the 70 percent of Americans earning less than $70,000 were significantly more likely to vote Democratic, while the 30 percent earning more than $70,000 were more likely to vote Republican.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“people vote, and if billionaires are allowed to spend unlimited money on campaigns.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“So, this is the Democrats’ plan to ‘restore democracy,’” he sniffed, deriding the legislation as “the Democrat Politician Protection Act” and claiming federal workers would use the paid holiday to “go out and work on [Democratic] campaigns.” McConnell’s remarks were quite a reveal of his true intentions, and he was roundly denounced. How, after all, could making it easier for American citizens to vote be a “power grab”? And a power grab by whom—voters who might take advantage of increased access to the polls? McConnell seemed to be acknowledging that the only way his party can win elections is if fewer”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“2020, remaining majority leader, and seating conservative judges who would remain on the bench for decades and cement his legacy as a legislative hero of the Christian far right. For that, he needed a Republican president.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“Mitch McConnell. The Senate majority leader stood foursquare in the way of passing any legislation that would ease voting for those groups that tended to favor Democrats. He had long made his priorities clear: winning reelection in”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“admired. What Republican in Congress would dare oppose him now?”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“Did you think Trump was a bad, dangerous president before March 24, 2019?” Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch wrote in the days following the Barr letter. “You ain’t seen nothing yet. Emboldened by the Barr-fed Total Exoneration Myth, an energized Trump is acting exactly like the autocrat so many feared on the night he was elected.” Indeed, despite still facing more than a dozen ongoing investigations at the federal and state level, including pending matters in his home state of New York, and an open question of whether a counterintelligence investigation of the president remained ongoing, Donald Trump’s appetite for destruction and revenge was only growing. What would he order his “Roy Cohn” to do next? Investigate Hillary Clinton? Literally “lock her up”? Jail those who contributed to the investigation of his campaign? Surely, he was now free to openly bond the United States to Russia, North Korea, and the other authoritarian states he”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story