Words matter. These are the best Joy Reid Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
We Americans think quite highly of ourselves, and nothing makes us think more of ourselves than our romantic view of our presidents.
Freedom is neither guaranteed nor automatic; not even in the United States. Left unguarded, it can slip away like a thief in the night.
If I had to reduce ‘Black Panther’ to a single word, it would be ‘glorious.’
Trump’s cabinet picks seem designed to unwind government itself, leaving the average citizen completely exposed and vulnerable to full exploitation by corporate interests.
Whether on guns, race, culture or feminism, there really are two Americas.
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.
President Barack Obama read to a certain portion of white America as an unending attack on white Christian identity, centrality and cultural relevance. In their minds, he was seeking to end their right to bear arms and the right of conservatives to speak freely.
The abuse of congressional power for pure partisan gain has become a specialty of the GOP.
Being on a grand jury felt like attending a series of hangings in a legal Wild West. Hands up for a true bill. Hands up for a dismissal. A show of hands to save a life, or to end it.
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.
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.
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?’
Local government is a gamble that can have disastrous consequences when it fails.
Trump is, in every way, the anti-Obama.
Trump, who in his own history as a developer preferred mob concrete and Chinese steel to the variety produced in the Rust Belt, cannot bring back the steel and manufacturing jobs lost in Lorain, Ohio or western Pennsylvania.
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.
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.
America after Trump may be more like the European Union; a rambling alliance of interstate compacts, rather than the forced marriage of a country that emerged after the Civil War.
I multitask and always have the TV on in the background. If I need to focus, I generally have to turn off the TV.
Republicans don’t vote Republican because of Nancy Pelosi. They vote Republican because they are Republicans.
Trump has humbled our country under the shadow of China’s autocrat Xi Jinping.
The Trumps have spent exactly zero percent of their lives caring about anyone other than themselves.
Whatever its cause, the media’s general Hillary Clinton loathing is a foundational truth that would define her as president.
Trump built Trump Tower using mob concrete, not Bethlehem steel.
Republicans have relentlessly pursued investigations of Hillary Clinton, going back to her time as secretary of state (to say nothing of the 30-year project to take down both Clintons by right-wing outside groups).
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.
Trump is an erratic figure – seemingly fragile, consumed by his own unpopularity and desperate to somehow exceed Barack Obama in public acclaim.
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.
The reversion of American society to a nation of the superrich and the rest… is straining the country in ways that go way beyond economics.
Protest is, at its core, designed to move policy.
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 presidency is, in many ways, America’s comment on itself; our collective national costume. In the occupant of our sole nationwide elected office, we see who we think we are, or who we want to be.
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.
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.
To be white in America is to assume, with total self-confidence and little afterthought, the personal ownership of public spaces.
The Trump phenomenon might feel both interminable and unprecedented to Republican elites, but of course it isn’t.
It is uncomfortable in the extreme for people, and particularly for members of the press, to confront the notion that a president could be so far outside the bounds of tradition that he must be treated differently from his predecessors.
In the 1950s, the black men and women and their white allies who fought for civil rights and basic human dignity could look to the federal government. If the racist sheriff and his troops beat them with batons or sprayed them and their children with water cannons, the attorney general would act.
Trumpists want a return to a white, Christian America.
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.
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.
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.
Wakanda, in short, is the Africa of black dreams.
To be sure, the Trump administration is shot through with corruption.
As a media consultant to Republican presidents, Ailes proved a deft manipulator of racial fear. But it was in building Fox News that he found his calling.
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.
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.
Obama has presided over sweeping cultural advances, particularly in the rights of gay and lesbian Americans.
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.
Hillary Clinton’s time in the Senate indicates she is happier being a policy workhorse than a show horse.
