Top 99 Quotes & Sayings by Rick Wilson - Page 2

I said Donald Trump could never be elected, confidently fueled by the empirical data of professional polling, a certainty in the vital necessity of field operations, and the knowledge his own campaign team (even on the night of the election) was ratting out the shambolic train wreck his campaign had been. I was wrong.

We should tell the true stories of that day to honor the memory and sacrifice of those who perished on 9/11 and in the long wars since.

There's an unspoken rule post-Cold War American Presidents have used when describing the awesome power of our nuclear arsenal; the more devastating the ability to destroy the enemy, the more restrained the language should be.

Richard Nixon is typically considered the modern exemplar of a dark and vindictive president. President Trump would be Nixon minus the keen intellect and work ethic.

We should tell the honest, painful stories of 9/11 because it dishonors the memory of heroes to invent a phony cast of villains when the actual terrorists were terrible enough to tear open this nation's heart.

I believed that the numbers and processes of modern campaigning that revolve around the meticulous use of data would matter in 2016. I believed Trump was merely a spectacle, a political sideshow who would be dispatched by the well-funded and the well-staffed major campaigns.

Trump devotees don't care about shrinking the size and scope of government. They don't care about the Constitution. They're not Republicans, except as a flag of convenience.

Trump would have us revise and edit our historical memory of 9/11, turning it from a unifying narrative of heroism, tragedy, and war and recast it to serve the political ends of a man unworthy of the presidency.

The prisoner never loves his warden, even if he obeys the rules from time to time.

Trump is always Trump, and never, ever improves.

For Trump, there's always a dark conspiracy arrayed against him. Someone is always doing him an injustice by not treating him with the required deference.

Trump's inability to relate actions to consequences, his profound intellectual ambivalence about history, strategy and facts, in addition to his notoriously delicate ego, combine to create a risk we've never seen in a President during a nuclear crisis.

Because Donald Trump has to destroy everything in his path, why not the true history of 9/11?

American populism is no stranger to our political life. From the earliest anti-Federalists to William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, and George Wallace, and many in between, we've sampled the populist temptation, often in times of national distress and dislocation.

I've knocked out any number of Democrats using ads associating them with the brand toxicity of Reid, Pelosi, and Obama, and before that Ted Kennedy, Barney Frank, and others.

There's a reason most Republicans and a vast majority of voters loathe Donald Trump: his vulgarity, his blistering ignorance, his constant dishonesty, his venality, and his utter lack of the knowledge, judgment, or temperament to be president of the United States.

In politics, Victory Disease comes when a majority believes their position is so secure and immune from challenge that they forget the lessons of the past and can't imagine an outcome that isn't in their favor. Neither party is inoculated against it.

FISA targets those who are 'agents of a foreign power.'

Our leaders ranged from bad to extraordinary. But through it all, the GOP was the one party even vaguely amenable to limited-government conservatism, to at least some adherence to the Constitution over the social preferences of the moment, and to the constraints on government power that our Founding Fathers so cherished.

I really like Bobby Jindal.

Obama was referred to in terms so glowing, so fulsome, so toadying that it was easy to pin down the journalist class of 2008 as a group of fangirls squeeing and fainting at his every utterance.

Kasich does two fundamentals in presidential politics wrong; he talks, and he keeps talking.

Crony capitalism on the left and crony capitalism on the right are still crony capitalism.

As a Republican governor, a senator, or member of Congress, or as a Republican candidate, let me remind you: You're known by the company you keep. By associating yourself with or endorsing Trump, you own Trump's toxic radioactivity with voters outside his base.

When the 2010 election swept Republicans into office in a massive tidal wave, they were part of a philosophical and ideological change. They were bound by a set of limited-government principles. To be sure, sometimes loosely and imperfectly so, but the Tea Party wave was driven by ideas, not a singular, authoritarian personality.

Even as a Southerner, there's only so much corn-pone shucking and jiving about mama-and-gravy talk I can take.

Every man who has sat in the Oval Office has felt the short, sharp shock when an ordinary day in the highest office in the land shifts from pomp and ceremony to urgent briefings, immediate choices, crucial decisions where lives are on the line. It's not something that may happen to a president. It's something that will happen.

The first two weeks of Donald Trump's Presidency made it clear: Trump's Gonna Trump. No newfound dignity for him.

A large plurality of the Trump electorate believed the definition of 'conservative' was simply 'Not Hillary.'

Trump fans convinced of his strategic genius are welcome to their view, but they're wrong.

Lord knows I'm all for lowering rates and simplifying the tax code.

Only a fool would believe Trump would draw a sharp, bright line between his personal and family financial interests and the interests of the nation.

Free-market capitalism doesn't pick economic winners and losers based on the president's economic nostalgia, and limited-government conservatism isn't marked a top-down ideological conformity strictly enforced by state media organs.

Before the GOP became the party of Trump's gangster capitalism, they weren't perfect capitalists, but they at least paid lip service to the power of markets and capitalism.

All my life, the Republican Party has been my political home. Helping it succeed has been my work for decades. It was never perfect, but families never are.

Clintons lie with facility, intent, and design.

Disasters happen. Nature refuses to cooperate with the best-laid plans of kings and lesser men alike.

In 1974, Democrats gained 49 House seats and four Senate seats. It wasn't just the Watergate scandal that drove Democratic wins, but the sense that Republicans had defended corruption and criminality in the White House.

As Trump's mistakes pile up, Congress will be left on cleanup detail.