Top 60 Joy Reid Quotes

Trump channeled ethno-populist rage as naturally and charismatically as George Wallace had during the 1960s, while seating a billionaire cabinet.

I always want to be doing something – going somewhere, doing a project, teaching a class, writing an article. I try to use up my day. You have a limited time on this planet – try to use as much of it as you can for productive purposes.

Who in the GOP would complain if Trump federalizes ‘stop and frisk’ or encourages its proliferation in states using the power of the Justice Department purse?

Obama has presided over sweeping cultural advances, particularly in the rights of gay and lesbian Americans.

To be white in America is to assume, with total self-confidence and little afterthought, the personal ownership of public spaces.

When I was 15 years old, my sister and I went on a trip to Europe. We went on scholarship because my mother didn’t have the money to pay the full fare for the two of us, which ran into the thousands of dollars.

Trump’s trade and immigration policies will deliver an economic shock to states like Texas where trade produces a substantial share of the jobs, and which depend on high oil prices.

If politics were a high school movie, Republicans would be the jocks and mean girls locking hapless freshmen inside their lockers and threatening to call in their rich parents if the teachers complain – plus the broke kids who are always willing to strong-arm homework for them from the nerds.

The work of anti-racism can only take place inside each individual soul, where we all try to grow into better people. There is no national tonic or instant cure.

American populist politics has a long tradition, from Andrew Jackson to Huey Long to Joseph McCarthy. But the politician Trump is most like could be George Wallace.

We are not, in some fundamental ways, a single country. The map of that vast red swatch of states and rural counties that voted for Trump, and the blue coastal edges and scattered urban centers where Clinton won, are a pictograph of mutual contempt.

From jazz, the blues, country and rock to Hollywood movies, culture has in many ways been our greatest export (or our most obnoxious one, depending on your point of view).

Democrats may want working-class white Rust Belters to have good jobs at high wages with pensions and health benefits, but they can’t make them vote that way.

Trump has humbled our country under the shadow of China‘s autocrat Xi Jinping.

What stalwart Republican would stop Trump from profiteering for his businesses from the White House the way he’s gamed his companies and the tax code for decades, or prevent him from letting his adult children milk their father‘s position to benefit his supposed ‘blind trust?’

America is, in many ways, as much an idea as it is a country. And Americans have long marketed that idea around the world through our popular culture.

Even without the euphoria of ‘yes we can,’ Hillary Clinton is to white women what Barack Obama was to African-Americans. She represents the opportunity to see a like image in the Oval Office for the first time.

Hillary Clinton’s time in the Senate indicates she is happier being a policy workhorse than a show horse.

If you are Black or Brown, or a liberal or immigrant or Democrat, or a woman unwilling to quietly submit, then Ailes was the ultimate villain. You were the object of mockery and scorn – sometimes overt, often subtle. You were the thing to be gawked at, pawed at, jeered at, propositioned or feared.

The criminal justice system in the United States is designed to do two things really well: to railroad black and brown bodies into prison, and to keep police officers out of it.

The evidence of our divided racial self was all over the Obama presidency from the beginning: from the shouts of ‘you lie‘ from the well of Congress as he spoke to a joint session, to the unprecedented spectacle of American conservatives rooting against their own country being awarded the Olympic Games.

The Trump phenomenon might feel both interminable and unprecedented to Republican elites, but of course it isn’t.

Protest is, at its core, designed to move policy.

For decades, the GOP has faithfully served the rich, corporations, polluters and purveyors of pure, unadulterated greed, and brought blue-collar white voters along for the ride with promises of cultural revival.

What White America and Black America wanted and expected from Obama were fundamentally different and opposite things.

Dwight Eisenhower presented a face of America that was heroic and resolute; Ronald Reagan represented a return to confidence and glamour after the weary Carter years.

The goal of the eight Benghazi committees, one of which produced and nurtured ’emailgate,’ has been clear from the start: to prevent Hillary Clinton from becoming president of the United States.

To be sure, police do a dangerous job and take tremendous personal risks to safeguard the public. Most officers just want to do their jobs and go home alive.

If Obama was fundamentally different from prior presidents, Trump seems to violate every tenet of what Americans have long sought as our national image.

Trump is a big businessman. He’s your boss or CEO, not one of your brothers on the line.

We Americans think quite highly of ourselves, and nothing makes us think more of ourselves than our romantic view of our presidents.

Trump’s affinity for Russia dates back at least to the late 1980s, during the time of the Soviet Union, and it intensified after his financial empire collapsed.

The America that clings to Confederate statues and flags, and that jealously guards the social privileges white Americans have long enjoyed, form the stalwarts of Trump’s base.

The fact that many journalists approach the Clintons – especially Hillary Clinton – with a presumption that she has done something that if it’s not outright corrupt is at least worthy of looking into, inevitably colors the way the public views the former secretary of state, and the way they respond to her in the polls.

Americans have, at various times, leaned on the FBI for a measure of justice that local and state police couldn’t be counted on to deliver, and recoiled in fear at their exercise of raw federal power. That uneasy trust; the combination of need and dread, is the lot that FBI agents live with day to day.

Our love of Hollywood-style glamour helped elect two presidents: JFK and Reagan, who fulfilled the prophecy that a country so enamored of actors would eventually make one their president.

If you’ve never feared the police – if you don’t get a dull ache in the pit of your stomach when you see red and blue flashing lights, even when you know you’re not doing anything wrong – consider yourself lucky.

The American presidency combines elements of the efficient and the dignified. The president presides over governance – not making legislation but proposing it, cajoling the co-equal federal legislature and then signing and executing the laws.

Trump is reviled around the world, as is the U.S. under his leadership.

Trump is reviled around the world.

No president can force shuttered mills to reopen, or companies who’ve left in search of cheaper labor to relocate to the United States (or those who have come back to choose expensive humans over cheaper robots).

The one woman Trump does seem to totally respect is his daughter from his first marriage, Ivanka, on whom he heaps constant, effusive, at-times borderline creepy praise and physical affection.

There is a twinge of abandonment that comes with being a member of the African Diaspora. But ‘Black Panther‘ fearlessly introduces and then complicates this and other deeply held albeit rarely expressed emotions; that indeed is what makes this film so profoundly innovative.

To be white in America is to have the confidence to say, without a second thought: this space, this neighborhood, this city, this county, this country is mine.

Donald Trump is many things – a tantrum-throwing man-child and a wannabe strongman pining for his very own banana republic among them – but perhaps most of all he is a giant, melon-colored distraction from what is happening to our country under his watch.

Popularity has always been the key currency in choosing a president.

In fundamental ways, the 2016 Democratic primary has been a litigation of the Obama years, and of whether the president’s 2008 campaign vow of ‘change we can believe in’ succeeded or failed.

Votes for president have long been a kind of social signifier. People will proudly boast that they voted for JFK; while it’s harder to find those eager to claim having supported Richard Nixon.

The Trumps have spent exactly zero percent of their lives caring about anyone other than themselves.

The Hollywood of Frank Capra’s era, when Reagan became a minor star, sold the world an image of American pith and patriotism in many ways as defining as the moon landing or the A-bomb.

If a novel were written about Florida‘s administration of its healthcare for the working poor, an appropriate title might be: ‘Don’t get sick, and God help you if you do.’

Freedom is neither guaranteed nor automatic; not even in the United States. Left unguarded, it can slip away like a thief in the night.

I think social media tools are helpful, so long as you pick your social media wisely.

Trump built Trump Tower using mob concrete, not Bethlehem steel.

Even at its most outrageous early moments, the Tea Party movement was treated to sober and at times breathless media coverage, to the point of being invited to co-host a presidential debate.

To be sure, the Trump administration is shot through with corruption.

Ailes built a Kingdom of Yes. That was his genius. He understood the id of many white conservatives – their sense of constant persecution and victimization; and their existential fears of an America whose racial makeup, sexual mores and gender roles were careening in the opposite direction of the country of their childhood.

If I had to reduce ‘Black Panther’ to a single word, it would be ‘glorious.’

After Trump, how can we credibly say that our process for choosing a national leader yields the best possible result, or even someone capable of uniting the country, let alone running it?

Trump’s cabinet picks seem designed to unwind government itself, leaving the average citizen completely exposed and vulnerable to full exploitation by corporate interests.