A Quote by Ben H. Winters

The election of Donald Trump is, to me, this very clownish personality with no political experience, who had literally been using fascist slogans in his campaign. It had seemed so impossible. Even after he was elected, and even now, it still feels impossible. It felt like we had fallen into this wormhole of history.
Donald Trump's election was a watershed moment. Even those like me, who had previously pulled levers for candidates of both parties, felt that Mr. Trump had not only violated all sense of common decency, but, alarmingly, that he seemed to have no idea that there even existed such an unspoken code of civility and dignity.
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.
Even if Donald Trump had lost the 2016 election, instead of won it in a surprise, the media's coverage of his campaign and supporters would have been a horrific failure. They presented that race as unwinnable for Trump and as if his support was inexplicable.
It was amazing to see Donald Trump on the night before election, who had been describing Hillary Clinton as crooked and corrupt, in a matter of a moment, was describing her as a fine and dedicated public servant, once he had won the election. So, there was a kind of barbarism all the way around, I think, in this political campaign, in which the issues really were boiled down to very small sound bites.
Even if it meant that she had failed, she was glad. And if what she'd wanted had been impossible from the start, still there was a certain lonely comfort in the fact that she'd known it was impossible and had gone ahead and done it anyway.
I chose as the campaign logo a blue rose, which means 'make possible the impossible.' I think the British with Brexit, then the Americans with the election of Donald Trump, did that: They made possible the impossible.
In the Latino community, the Trump campaign, even when it seemed it was a long shot he would be elected president, his campaign itself just caused lots of consternation and nervousness and anger. Famously, piñata makers started making piñatas of Donald Trump, even before he won the Republican nomination. There was this sense that, here's a person who's rising in the polls because he's insulting us, because he's created this scapegoated image of us as the people responsible for the decline of the United States.
I was still very hopeful that much work lay ahead of me. Perhaps because much of what I had worked on or thought about had not yet been put into writing, I felt I still had things in reserve. Given this optimistic nature, I feel this way even now when I am past sixty.
At the same time, you had Barack Obama as a president. You had Hillary Clinton on track, all the Democrats looking good. And, you know, Donald Trump was just an entertaining buffoon to watch. And, over time, you came to realize that Donald Trump was appealing to a lot of people with his populist message. And, slowly, I think, even as a show, we started shifting in tone as the election started shifting.
Donald Trump had probably the biggest mandate to do things of any recent president because of the specifics of his agenda and his campaign. So many times a day he announced what he was gonna do. So he was elected, he won; therefore, he's got a mandate. And his party is not assisting and not helping, and they're even violating promises they made for seven years on the repeal and replace Obamacare.
The Republicans don't want Donald Trump to define the Republican Party agenda. They are very loyal. They owe a lot to their donors. The donors hate Trump. The Chamber of Commerce hates Trump. All of these people that the Republicans think they can't get elected without don't like Trump. So it has been a stonewall. This behavior by the House and Senate Republican leadership isn't anything new. All you had to do was to listen what they were saying during the campaign.
For me, personally, life in South Africa had come to an end. I had been lucky in some of the whites I had met. Meeting them had made a straight 'all-blacks-are-good, all-whites-are-bad' attitude impossible. But I had reached a point where the gestures of even my friends among the whites were suspect, so I had to go or be forever lost.
There were times when it appeared to Dorian Gray that the whole of history was merely the record of his own life, not as he had lived it in act and circumstand, but as his imagination had created it for him, as it had been in his brain and in his passions. He felt that he had known them all, those strange terrible figures that had passed across the stage of the world and made sin so marvellous, and evil so full of subtlety. It seemed to him that in some mysterious way their lives had been his own.
and even when I was broken the way sometimes one can be broken, and even though I had fallen, I found upon arising that I was stronger than before, that the glories, if I may call them that, which I had loved so much and that had been darkened in my fall, were shinning even brighter and nearly everytime subsequently I have fallen and darkness has come over me, they have obstinately arisen, not as they were, but brighter.
Donald Trump is a different ball of wax. I've been trying to say for I don't know how many months now that the traditional political playbook in destroying and attacking a political opponent is not gonna work on Trump, because Trump's connection with his supporters or his audience is far deeper and far greater than most voters' connection with a candidate that's very popular. Reagan had the connection.
I had to get over [him]. For months now, a stone had been sitting on my heart. I'd shed a lot of tears over [him], lost a lot of sleep, eaten a lot of cake batter. Somehow, I had to move on. [Life] would be hell if I didn't shake loose from the grip he had on my heart. I most definitely didn't want to keep feeling this way, alone in a love affair meant for two. Even if he'd felt like The One. Even if I'd always thought we'd end up together. Even if he still had a choke chain on my heart.
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