Tim Miller > Quotes

“No matter which role they were in, staffers began to see themselves as tacticians in this made-for-TV blood sport rather than as functionaries in a system that is aimed to produce the best policy outcomes for their fellow citizens.”
― Tim Miller, Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell

“One big misconception about Washington is that money is the straw that stirs the drink. Activist types always demand we look to the money! Sometimes they are right, but the driving motivator for most during the Trump era was not a desire for riches. This town is not filled with Gordon Gekkos. More often, it’s the other, more egocentric motivators that drive nefarious actions in D.C. Raising money remains important, but fundraising is really about status and power.”
― Tim Miller, Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell

“You’ll also see how the Republican ruling class dismissed the plight of those we were manipulating, growing increasingly comfortable using tactics that inflamed them, turning them against their fellow man.”
― Tim Miller, Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell

“Senators like Ted Cruz and congressmen like Matt Gaetz aspire to be multiplatform entertainers more than they care about governing.”
― Tim Miller, Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell

“He contained not a single honorable attribute they would want their child to emulate. He had an empty set of virtues. Throughout his entire life, at every opportunity, he had screwed the people who worked with him. He had bilked the innocent victims who had signed up for his myriad scams, only to be left bankrupt. And he did it in order to fill the bottomless black hole within him that required boundless validation and indulgence for sustenance. He was constitutionally incapable of shame or self-reflection. Even his biggest apologists admitted that the best way to get him to do the right thing was to prey on his insecurities.”
― Tim Miller, Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell

“Bannon had taken a shine to the Fox News anchor he considered a rising star. In a leaked private email, he said Gutfeld was a “brilliant cultural commentator who really got pop culture, the hipster scene, and advant [sic] garde.”
― Tim Miller, Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell

“This is Alex Jones, after all. The human ass-pimple best known for defaming and harassing the mourning parents whose innocent little children had just been executed by a monster at Sandy Hook Elementary School.”
― Tim Miller, Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell

“But my soul required coming to terms with something that was more intimate than that. A question that I had grappled with throughout the entire Trump era. Why in the fuck did the vast, vast, vast majority of seemingly normal, decent people whom I worked with go along with the most abnormal, indecent of men? And why hadn’t I seen it coming?”
― Tim Miller, Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell

“Why in the fuck did the vast, vast, vast majority of seemingly normal, decent people whom I worked with go along with the most abnormal, indecent of men? And why hadn’t I seen it coming? If we are to summon even a hint of value from our manifest failures throughout this whole sordid mess, to find any guideposts for bringing people into the light—those were the questions that needed answering. Answering them required plumbing the complicated motivations of real, living humans.”
― Tim Miller, Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell

“We repped ’murica in a jejune back-to-back world war champs kinda way and could cite chapter and verse of Reagan’s Liberty State Park homily declaring that our nation’s golden door was the last best hope of man on earth.”
― Tim Miller, Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell

“Should it have come as a surprise that a charlatan who had spent decades duping the masses into joining his pyramid schemes and buying his shitty products would excel in such an environment? Someone who had a media platform of his own and a reptilian instinct for manipulation? Someone who didn’t hesitate to say the quiet part aloud?”
― Tim Miller, Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell

“Why We Did It is a book about the people who submitted to every whim of a comically unfit and detestable man who crapped all over them and took over the party they had given their life to. It’s about the army of consultants, politicians, and media figures who stood back and stood by as everything they ever fought for was degraded and devalued. The people who privately admitted they recognized all the risks but still climbed aboard for a ride on the SS Trump Hellship that they knew would assuredly sink.”
― Tim Miller