John Dickerson > Quotes

“We have gone from holding the door out of courtesy to standing before it out of obliviousness.”
― John Dickerson

“We want our movies instantly. We order our groceries at lunchtime and expect them to arrive in time for dinner. We punch up cars to deliver us to our whims. The largest companies in America, from Amazon to Uber to Facebook, want to fill the air with buzzing drones dropping from the skies whatever you want and more of it. Manna is now always on the delivery menu.”
― John Dickerson, The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency

“Donald Trump repeatedly promised he would hire "the best people." He did not. That is not my opinion; it is President Trump's, which he expresses frequently. Trump has said that his first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, was "dumb as a rock" and "lazy as hell." His attorney general, Jeff Sessions, was "scared stiff and Missing in Action," "didn't have a clue," and "should be ashamed of himself." Trump described one of his assistants, Omarosa Manigault Newman, as "wacky," "deranged," "vicious, but not smart," a "crazed, crying lowlife," and finally a "dog." After lasting only eleven days as communications director, Anthony Scaramucci "was quickly terminated 'from' a position that he was totally incapable of handling" and was called "very much out of control." An anonymous adviser to the president was called "a drunk/drugged-up loser." Chief strategist Steve Bannon was "sloppy," a "leaker," and "dumped like a dog by almost everyone." His longtime lawyer Michael Cohen was "TERRIBLE," "hostile," "a convicted liar & fraudster," and a "failed lawyer." The president was "Never a big fan!" of his White House counsel Don McGahn and "not even a little bit happy" with Jerome Powell, his selection to head the Federal Reserve, whom he called an "enemy." His third national security advisor, John Bolton, was mocked as a "tough guy [who] got us into Iraq." When the president was irritated with his former chief of staff, John Kelly, the president's press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, declared that Kelly "was totally unequipped to handle the genius of our great president.”
― John Dickerson, The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency

“Whataboutism does not work with the police, judges, or our mothers. If you work in customer service, do not try this. If you work for an airline, when a customer comes to you complaining that the airline has lost his family's luggage, it will not lead to job retention if you say, as a representative of the airline, that the other airlines lose luggage too.”
― John Dickerson, The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency

“That a [presidential] candidate would do whatever it took to get power is now proof that a candidate is fit for the job—a perfect reversal of the founders' intent.”
― John Dickerson, The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency

“By January 2020, about 1,095 days into his administration, the number of false or misleading claims made by President Trump reached 16,241 ... He told outright lies, repeated lies even after having been fact-checked repeatedly, and made up stories when the truth would do. He lied about little things and he lied about the most important issues a president must handle. He took credit for things he had nothing to do with and denied involvement in matters he orchestrated. To list the individual examples would fill the next twenty pages. Even the president's supporters admit this.”
― John Dickerson, The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency

“the founders believed a president should cool the passions of the people, not inflame them, because the national temperature would have a direct effect on the health of the republic. A president who was acting presidential would constrain his or her behavior accordingly.”
― John Dickerson, The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency

“It was a ready-made moment for an action-hungry president in which he could fulfill the role of consoler and moral leader. The moral high ground was clear, level, and open. It would be hard to find groups more in conflict with American ideals than white supremacists and neo-Nazis. President Trump, who is constantly alive to personal slights, might also have found it personally offensive that he was being used to support a racist cause. They had invoked his name in their putrid cause. "We are determined to take our country back," said David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, at the kickoff to the rally. "We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That's what we believed in, that's why we voted for Donald Trump. Because he said he's going to take our country back. And that's what we gotta do." ...
"We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides—on many sides," Trump said. ...
This was not moral clarity, but moral flattening. The point the president chose to stress—repeating it for emphasis—was that the hatred and bigotry were displayed "on many sides." But the only bigots marching for an ideology of hate were the white supremacists. Anger stirred in opposition to them was not a reason for presidential condemnation, but elevation. The president, who has an uncommon ability to single out individuals and groups of people for abuse, did not mention the white supremacists at all in his remarks.”
― John Dickerson

“If a president whipped up the crowd, “the passions…not the reason, of the public would sit in judgment,” wrote Madison in Federalist No. 49. “But it is the reason, alone, of the public, that ought to control and regulate the government. The passions ought to be controlled and regulated by the government.”37”
― John Dickerson, The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency

“Americans tell pollsters they want bipartisan cooperation. But those who actually vote don’t value that as much—or they define “bipartisanship” as acquiescence by the other party to what their party believes.”
― John Dickerson, The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency

“His rough tongue is a sign of a president who is dismantling the traditional presidency.”
― John Dickerson, The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency

“Nearly 60 percent of the American economy is tied up in foreign trade, which means millions of U.S. jobs and families are linked to the undulations of the global market.31”
― John Dickerson, The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency

“President Trump has changed the presidency by speaking for himself. A signature aspect of this characteristic is his facility with quick denunciations of melting intensity. In June 2017, the president criticized the mayor of London for being soft on terrorists just hours after his city was attacked. He dinged California forest management officials in the middle of record fires that were scorching acres in November 2018. The president sent twenty-seven tweets about NFL players protesting racial injustice by choosing to kneel during the national anthem, a practice he found repugnant. He tweeted eighty-four times suggesting that President Obama was not born in America. Whether his target is a federal judge, Gold Star parents, or weather-battered officials in Puerto Rico, Donald Trump says what is on his mind immediately and doesn't sweat the nuances.

By contrast, the president's six tweets in the aftermath of the Charlottesville violence never referred to racism or bigotry or white nationalism.

When Trump is passionate about something, it's unmistakable. So why did the president lapse into vagueness when it came to Charlottesville?”
― John Dickerson, The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency

“In 1938, the idea of senators swaying in such synchronicity moved former president Herbert Hoover to a Nazi analogy. "Mr. Hitler also has a parliament," said Hoover. "You may not know it. It was also once upon a time an independent arm of the German government. But Mr. Hitler has rearranged its function. I quote him: 'Individual members may advise but never decide; that is the exclusive prerogative of the responsible president for the time being,'"

Lockstep unity between a president and members of Congress in the same party would lead to "the malignant growth of personal power," warned Hoover. "Liberty never dies from direct attack. No man ever arises and says 'Down with Liberty.' Liberty has died in 14 countries in a single score of years from weakening its safeguards, from demoralization of the moral stamina of the people. ... If we examine the fate of wrecked republics throughout the world we find their first symptoms in the weakening of the legislative arm. Subservience in legislative halls is the spot where liberty and political morals commit suicide.”
― John Dickerson, The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency

“Nothing comes to my desk that is perfectly solvable," President Obama explained to the author Michael Lewis. "Otherwise, someone else would have solved it. So you wind up dealing with probabilities. ... You can't be paralyzed by the fact that it might not work out." Thomas Jefferson explained this to his secretary of the treasury: "What is good in this case cannot be effected. We have, therefore, only to find out what will be least bad.”
― John Dickerson, The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency

“She later said, “Sex to Jack [Kennedy] meant no more than a cup of coffee.” How did she know? Did she ever have coffee with him? I have no reason to think so, but in that picture, the president looks like he’s about to start the percolator.”
― John Dickerson, On Her Trail: My Mother, Nancy Dickerson, TV News' First Woman Star

“Whether a candidate promises to sweep the stables, as [Andrew] Jackson did, or drain the swamp, the passion for disruption in the name of connecting the people to their government is rich and long-standing.

The problem with downgrading the sausage-making skills is that government is still a sausage-making enterprise in which ugly compromises are made for partial progress in the name of the greater good. This is not a theory. It is the instruction left by the framers in the Constitution: Make sausage.”
― John Dickerson, The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency

“Debate moderators press candidates about how they are going to pay for their domestic programs, but they rarely raise the issue when it involves spending on military adventures. This allows the belief to flower that national security is somehow too important to be limited by prosaic matters of accounting. But President Eisenhower, whose military record perhaps gave him the standing to make that case, drew the connection directly: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
― John Dickerson, The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency

“It was as though in a community susceptible to alcoholism, the Russians placed liquor bottles on every doorstep, and the press, the public, and Donald Trump encouraged everyone to open the door.”
― John Dickerson, The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency

“A PRESIDENT WEARS MASKS”
― John Dickerson, The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency

“Moderate Republicans like Rockefeller supported the national consensus toward advancing civil rights by promoting national legislation to protect the vote, employment, housing and other elements of the American promise denied to blacks. They sought to contain Communism, not eradicate it, and they had faith that the government could be a force for good if it were circumscribed and run efficiently. They believed in experts and belittled the Goldwater approach, which held that complex problems could be solved merely by the application of common sense. It was not a plus to the Rockefeller camp that Goldwater had publicly admitted, “You know, I haven’t got a really first-class brain.”174 Politically, moderates believed that these positions would also preserve the Republican Party in a changing America. Conservatives wanted to restrict government from meddling in private enterprise and the free exercise of liberty. They thought bipartisanship and compromise were leading to collectivism and fiscal irresponsibility. On national security, Goldwater and his allies felt Eisenhower had been barely fighting the communists, and that the Soviets were gobbling up territory across the globe. At one point, Goldwater appeared to muse about dropping a low-yield nuclear bomb on the Chinese supply lines in Vietnam, though it may have been more a press misunderstanding than his actual view.175 Conservatives believed that by promoting these ideas, they were not just saving a party, they were rescuing the American experiment. Politically, they saw in Goldwater a chance to break the stranglehold of the Eastern moneyed interests. If a candidate could raise money and build an organization without being beholden to the Eastern power brokers, then such a candidate could finally represent the interests of authentic Americans, the silent majority that made the country an exceptional one. Goldwater looked like the leader of a party that was moving west. His head seemed fashioned from sandstone. An Air Force pilot, his skin was taut, as though he’d always left the window open on his plane. He would not be mistaken for an East Coast banker. The likely nominee disagreed most violently with moderates over the issue of federal protections for the rights of black Americans. In June, a month before the convention, the Senate had voted on the Civil Rights Act. Twenty-seven of thirty-three Republicans voted for the legislation. Goldwater was one of the six who did not, arguing that the law was unconstitutional. “The structure of the federal system, with its fifty separate state units, has long permitted this nation to nourish local differences, even local cultures,” said Goldwater. Though Goldwater had voted for previous civil rights legislation and had founded the Arizona Air National Guard as a racially integrated unit, moderates rejected his reasoning. They said it was a disguise to cover his political appeal to anxious white voters whom he needed to win the primaries. He was courting not just Southern whites but whites in the North and the Midwest who were worried about the speed of change in America and competition from newly empowered blacks.”
― John Dickerson, Whistlestop: My Favorite Stories from Presidential Campaign History