Unmaking the Presidency Quotes

“This is Trump’s radical proposed revision to the traditional presidency: not only that the president doesn’t need to be honest, but that he can be known to everyone as a “fucking liar”—not an occasional liar, not a calculating liar, but a pervasive, constant liar and bullshitter on all subjects at all times.”
― Susan Hennessey, Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump's War on the World's Most Powerful Office

“More generally, the erosion of American prestige, the diminishing of the confidence of its allies and the fear of its adversaries, and the lessened desire on the part of other countries to work with the United States together represent a price that, even absent a specific catastrophe, gets paid over time. It gets paid when other countries hedge their bets with China because the United States is not a reliable partner. It gets paid when other countries do not want to follow when the United States chooses to lead. And, of course, it gets paid in moments of crisis, and crises inevitably come. In crisis moments, after all, the executive is always unitary. It snaps back to that Hamiltonian form, its great virtue being the ability to act with energy. In that moment of crisis, everyone around the world will know they are dealing with a highly impulsive individual who makes decisions with proud ignorance, without consultation or regard for consequences—an individual who makes decisions that lie wholly outside traditional expectations of American behavior.”
― Susan Hennessey, Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump's War on the World's Most Powerful Office

“In a terse letter of resignation, Secretary of Defense James Mattis—the only member of Trump’s cabinet with a truly independent and bipartisan reputation—wrote, “Our strength as a nation is inextricably linked to the strength of our unique and comprehensive system of alliances and partnerships.” The storied former U.S. Marine general declared, “We must be resolute and unambiguous in our approach to those countries whose strategic interests are increasingly in tension with ours.” And he stated that his “views on treating allies with respect and also being clear-eyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors are strongly held and informed by over four decades of immersion in these issues.” He was stepping down, he concluded, because the president has “the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with” his own.”
― Susan Hennessey, Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump's War on the World's Most Powerful Office

“Thus far, Trump’s bet has paid off to an astonishing degree. Nobody has taken up his dares. Congress has done little, though it may be beginning to stir. The courts, limited by the slow pace of litigation and legitimate substantive and procedural legal barriers to action, offer little short-term relief. So far, anyway, the only real pushback has come from prosecutors and state attorneys general who have probed the conduct of his campaign and foundation. And it has come from a dogged and relentless press, which has accomplished a great deal of disclosure—disclosure that, in turn, gives rise to the possibility of political response. As other billionaires eye the presidency, it’s not hard to imagine them following the example of minimal ethical compliance and preserving their business entanglements. Contrary to former OGE director Shaub’s admonition, as far as some very rich people were concerned, divestment has, in fact, been too high a price to pay for the presidency. Now, it seems, it doesn’t need to be paid after all. As Trump has set the presidency to protecting his personal business interests and dared the polity to stop him, the polity has responded with a shrug. Perhaps a disgusted shrug, but a shrug nonetheless.”
― Susan Hennessey, Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump's War on the World's Most Powerful Office

“The biblical passage from John inscribed on the walls at Langley—that the truth shall make you free—is fitting for the CIA, in part because it does not reveal all of itself to the public. It is a selective quotation from a larger text, the very one that Swift referred to in the early eighteenth century, when he said that “the devil be the father of lies” whose creation centuries of political liars have improved upon. A few lines down from the Gospel’s proclamation that in truth lies freedom, reality sets in: “But now ye seek to kill me, a man that hath told you the truth.” Through his lies and the position of his office, Trump can obfuscate, but he cannot prevent unwelcome truths from getting out. And so he goes to war against those who would tell the truth about him—the press, which he calls “Fake News”; the intelligence community, which he calls the “Deep State”; and the FBI, which he says is on a “Witch Hunt.”
― Susan Hennessey, Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump's War on the World's Most Powerful Office

“In this way, Jefferson, more than Washington or Adams, offers the template for the way the presidency developed—mingling the capacity for deceit with some genuine civic virtue.”
― Susan Hennessey, Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump's War on the World's Most Powerful Office

“When Senator Dianne Feinstein asked Attorney General Bill Barr about Mueller’s finding that the president had pressured his White House counsel to lie in order to deflect criticism of the president, Barr glibly replied, “Well, that’s not a crime,” rendering Feinstein momentarily speechless. Through audacity and exhaustion, Trump had gotten large segments of the public to accept the notion that if a presidential lie wasn’t a crime, then it was no big deal.”
― Susan Hennessey, Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump's War on the World's Most Powerful Office

“The Mueller report alone documented seventy-seven instances in which Trump and his associates lied or made false statements to the public, to Congress, or to federal investigators.”
― Susan Hennessey, Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump's War on the World's Most Powerful Office

“Trump does not just tell lies. He wields a water cannon of lies. He makes newspapers choose between cataloging his lies and giving up on accountability—newspapers he then accuses of making up sources and purveying “fake news.” He lies about policy, about ethics matters, about his enemies and opponents, and about his personal behavior. He lies, routinely, about his prior lies. Trump’s lies are so pervasive, so inherent to his presidency, that it is actually impossible to imagine his presidency without them. He is the first president in American history whose average public statement on any subject cannot be granted any kind of presumption of factual accuracy.”
― Susan Hennessey, Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump's War on the World's Most Powerful Office

“Trump wants to be head of state. His interest in being head of government is sporadic.”
― Susan Hennessey, Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump's War on the World's Most Powerful Office

“The personal nature of his presidency was a function of his imagining the presidency as a platform for his personal expression, not as an executive office whose job is actually to run things.”
― Susan Hennessey, Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump's War on the World's Most Powerful Office

“The American presidency simply doesn’t work in the absence of the good faith we have come to expect in a president. What makes Trump’s oath different is that he couldn’t even fake it credibly.”
― Susan Hennessey, Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump's War on the World's Most Powerful Office

“The problem is that the oath works only when the president actually means it. It instills a sense of duty only when the oath’s words and the solemn occasion of its delivery matters to the president and when others recognize that he means it. What if the person swearing is the sort of person who cannot credibly swear an oath?”
― Susan Hennessey, Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump's War on the World's Most Powerful Office

“The oath, they write, is thus a promise on the part of presidents “to exercise their power only when it is motivated in the public interest rather than in their private self-interest, consistent with fiduciary obligation in the private law.”
― Susan Hennessey, Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump's War on the World's Most Powerful Office

“It turns out that one doesn’t need to push the limits of executive power to become an abusive president. One need only personalize and abuse the powers the presidency indisputably holds. The Trump presidency is rethinking the institution not at its edges, but at its core, transforming it from the inside out, as it were.”
― Susan Hennessey, Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump's War on the World's Most Powerful Office

“If the Mueller report does nothing else, it portrays a person wholly lacking in the moral and temperamental and characterological attributes the traditional presidency demands.”
― Susan Hennessey, Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump's War on the World's Most Powerful Office

“George Washington had said that “virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.” John Adams had insisted that public virtue, “the only foundation of republics,” could not “exist in a nation without private” virtue. Alexander Hamilton had written that “virtue and honor” were the “foundation of confidence” that underpinned “the institution of delegated power.” The contemporary Anglo-Irish philosopher Edmund Burke had famously declared that “society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free.” Trump had said to hell with all that. And he had gotten elected anyway. It’s true that many presidents seem petty when measured against the founders. But Trump was different even from prior unsavory men who had attained the presidency. They had at least feigned that they cared about these values and expectations. Trump had campaigned against them and won on that basis.”
― Susan Hennessey, Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump's War on the World's Most Powerful Office

“A partisan press is certainly nothing new in American presidential history. The tradition of relatively apolitical news is actually comparatively recent. But a president engaged in near-constant public communication that is immediately amplified by aligned media (and attacked by hostile media) in what amounts to a public-private partnership in state propaganda is wholly new.”
― Susan Hennessey, Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump's War on the World's Most Powerful Office

“Johnson was, to put it bluntly, impeached for acting like a more restrained version of Donald Trump.”
― Susan Hennessey, Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump's War on the World's Most Powerful Office

“Populists, he argued, offer “a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than [advocates of efficient government], and … of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.”
― Susan Hennessey, Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump's War on the World's Most Powerful Office

“the only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion.”
― Susan Hennessey, Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump's War on the World's Most Powerful Office

“It is safe to say that if Donald Trump’s predecessors as president had spoken in any way as Trump speaks, the American presidency would never have developed as it did. It would have emerged as a profoundly different office from the one Trump inherited. Indeed, in no aspect of the presidential role does Trump’s performance of his job deviate more flamboyantly from traditional expectations than in the way he sounds.”
― Susan Hennessey, Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump's War on the World's Most Powerful Office