Top 43 Quotes & Sayings by Jonathan Chait

Barack Obama is an intellectual.

Republicans fighting back against changes Obama made means those changes are important, as with most of the major progress in American history.

The Republicans' response to Obama confused a lot of people. I really think there's been a measure of clarity at the end, with Trump's election, that was not present during the Obama presidency.

President Obama is so much smarter and a better communicator than members of Congress in either party. The contrast, side by side, is almost ridiculous.

Barack Obama knows a lot about a lot of things.

Trump is what Obama critics think Obama is: Someone who's focused on symbolism rather than substance.

In the long run, however much damage we come through, Obama's vision is the one that's going to be left standing. It's a question of how much pain and suffering America has to endure in the meantime.

Barack Obama is pretty similar to the person you see in public, at press conferences. He's a little saltier, a little more sarcastic and cutting.

I don't think the Democrats need a silver bullet.

One of the things we've learned during the Obama era is how important norms are, because we've seen how the Republican Party behaved against Obama. So much of what they did was to smash pre-existing norms, which were nothing more than assumptions of how people would behave, which didn't have any real basis in rules or limits.

Illiberal left ideology has its greatest strength on campuses because campuses are one of the few places in American life where a certain kind of far-left politics can actually impose hegemony on other ideas and really control the discourse in a way it can't in most places in American life where even moderate liberals are more of a minority.

Barack Obama is a very impressive human being.

Barack Obama is extremely smart.

Activists measure progress against the standard of perfection, or at least the most perfect possible choice. Historians gauge progress against what came before it.

Netanyahu and his coalition have no strategy of their own except endless counterinsurgency against the backdrop of a steadily deteriorating diplomatic position within the world and an inexorable demographic decline. The operation in Gaza is not Netanyahu’s strategy in excess; it is Netanyahu’s strategy in its entirety. The liberal Zionist, two-state vision with which I identify, which once commanded a mainstream position within Israeli political life has been relegated to a left-wing rump within it.

I'm convinced in 100 years Obama will have an important place in the civic pantheon of American life.

The story of the Republican Party is of a far-right that has moved from the fringes of the party to a complete domination of the party. The moderate, mainstream and pragmatic leaders of the party have been pushed out or died off.

We're not going to be living in a world where white identity politics is the basis for a major political party.

Trump has a lot of authoritarian tendencies that need to be a serious concern.

Trump's not the future; his ideas and his coalition are a dead end.

Everything on Twitter is true.

Liberals will only support you after you're gone.

It's possible that the clowning and the buffoonery and the entertainment are a bigger part of what's happening than we've allowed. And that Trump is primarily an entertainer who wants ratings, and an undisciplined speaker, and it will all be less than we think. It's something that we have to consider as a possibility; we don't know.

In public, Barack Obama's giving the simple version of his beliefs for the mass public. In private, he can discuss it at a really high level.

There's an element of clowning and entertainment to Trump, that makes it surreal and hard to understand to what extent he is pretending to be a fascist or an authoritarian.

Because many people remembered a time when the Republican Party was not so extreme, and hadn't full grasped how much it had changed, people blamed Obama for his failure to get Republicans to agree with him. That blame coloured so much of how the public saw Obama during his presidency. The public thought he was dealing with a brand of Republican leader that just didn't exist any more.

That's an important Obama accomplishment: he raised taxes back to Bill Clinton levels, and made a major dent in inequality doing so. That's certain to be reversed, that's going to disappear. The Republicans are going to slash the rich's taxes.

It's possible that Trump will have success by staging jobs theatre, rather than creating jobs. It's the inverse of what Obama did: saving an enormous amount of jobs without having the televised theatre to go along with it.

I never thought Hillary Clinton was a very good politician.

I worry about the entire structure of American democracy under Trump.

It's pretty clear that Hillary Clinton was a deeply, deeply flawed alternative. She had the wrong combination of the internal political chops to muscle out all the mainstream nominations from the field, leaving only Bernie Sanders, who was unacceptable to the Democrats' party establishment. But she also had a real lack of political skill that would enable her to win the general election.

American democracy faces a massive challenge. I don't think it is a certainty that we're headed toward Putin's Russia, as some commentariat does. But people need to mobilize and build up small-d democratic institutions to prepare against that eventuality.

Obama took 20 million people from the category of ignorables and put them into the category of unignorables. No one had to do anything for these 20 million people because they were outside the system. Now they're inside the system. Taking away their health care imposes all kind of political pain. We don't know the outcome, but every passing day it show how difficult it is for Trump to deprive them of what they now have.

Obamaism is the future of America.

It's absolutely true that people who believed Hillary Clinton would be a decent or even strong nominee need to think why that got that wrong. Laying the entire blame at the feet of Russia and the FBI is not sufficient. The biggest reason things went wrong were her own choices and her own weaknesses.

Liberals tend to romanticize the past, past leaders' failures.

On Obamacare, every day that goes by I have more evidence that I wish I could put in my book, on how difficult it is for the Republicans to eliminate this law. They have no real alternative. They're afraid to take away health care from the 20 million people who now have it.

In some ways, Trump is just going to continue the trend: by continuing the norm-smashing behaviour that Republicans used in opposition.

We're not going to be living in a world of abundant coal power in a hundred years.

Conservatives are much more comfortable supporting the leader who's in power than liberals.

At best, Trumpism will be a more right-wing version of the same old Republican Party.

Trump was the logical outcome of the Republican's irrational, racialized backlash to Obama that had utterly come to dominate the party's thinking.

Donald Trump will be a tragedy, a sad joke in American history.