Joy-Ann Reid > Quotes

“Trump’s base bonded around the ritualized pain inflicted on the brown, the foreign, and the poor. They enjoyed seeing them suffer, because it sent a message to the rest of the unwanted: “Stay away.” And it reminded Trump’s followers that at last, a president of the United States was working for them; he was putting them, the “real Americans,” first.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“Trump consistently flaunted his admiration for Putin, shocking even some Republican allies with his performance at a July 2018 joint press conference in Helsinki, Finland, during which he echoed Putin’s denial of interfering in the 2016 election that made Trump president. He stood by this, even though his administration’s intelligence services had concluded that Russia had done so, including hacking into the emails of the Democratic National Committee and distributing the content through WikiLeaks.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“And unlike even John Dean during Watergate, Cohen came to Congress bearing documentary evidence: checks”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“Americans on the right and left were targeted by an extensive Russian disinformation campaign that”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“The trouble is, he didn’t seem to actually want to be president. What he did want was to put on the greatest presidential campaign show of all time.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“DeSantis refused to return campaign donations from a longtime supporter, Steven Alembik, who tweeted that former president Barack Obama was a “fucking Muslim nigger,” and justified it to Politico”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“The myths Trump had for decades created about himself, and the celebrity he so eagerly cultivated, helped make him president. Americans believed what they saw on TV. Unless you lived in New York City when he was damning the Central Park Five in the ’80s or were a black tenant denied an apartment in one of his buildings in the ’70s, or a contractor or creditor left unpaid, you likely had no idea who he really was. Even some who did know looked past it, faced with the chance to put an “outsider” in the White House. Alongside the negative motivations he cynically pitched—hurting immigrants, humiliating Mexicans, and pummeling China—for many Americans there were affirmative motivations for voting for him, too. For millions of Americans, a President Donald Trump meant jobs and opportunity and a gaudy, joyous spectacle of gold-plated success. But if the entire architecture of the Trump myth was a house of lies, nothing was more false than the”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“In autocratic regimes, an impotent legislature often rubber-stamps the erratic demands of a petulant leader. Without them, and a loyal military, he cannot rule. The Republican Party under Donald Trump, existing at the narrow end of the inverted pyramid, had become a kind of Politburo, acting only with his permission—and it was this relationship that made Trump’s impetuous rule possible. Only the courts and a Democratic House stood in his way. No one seemed more emblematic of the shift toward learned helplessness than South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, the once-fierce Trump critic who during the 2016 primary called Trump “a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot,” but who now declared on his Twitter feed, “Declare emergency, build the wall now.” The man who once stood with Senator John McCain to lambaste dictators and autocrats around the world now said of the opposition party in his own country, “I think Democrats hate Trump so much they want him to lose even though”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell continued to shield the president. He refused to take up multiple House bills to reopen the government and vowed to only bring the president’s preferred legislation to the floor, including American tax dollars to begin building his vanity wall. Ultimately, the shutdown ended with Trump giving in—and signing a bill no different from the one presented to him in December, with no money for a wall.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“The damage to the United States’s reputation was most acute in Latin America and Canada, and among our closest allies, in Europe, where approval of U.S. leadership declined in 21 out of 28 members of the European Union. American leadership saw its highest approval in Israel and the Philippines, and its lowest approval in Pakistan and the Palestinian territories. Even Russians had a net negative view, with just 8 percent approving and 58 percent having a negative view.26 China was a major beneficiary of America’s decline—along with Germany, newly christened as the world’s most admired country.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“2020, remaining majority leader, and seating conservative judges who would remain on the bench for decades and cement his legacy as a legislative hero of the Christian far right. For that, he needed a Republican president.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“lamenting that it took too long to remove a group of hecklers, saying “part of the reason it takes so long is nobody wants to hurt each other anymore.” Thirty people were arrested outside the venue amid violence and mayhem that included anti-Muslim slurs hurled at protesters.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“Even when Trump was accused more than twenty times of sexual harassment or misconduct32 and pilloried for bragging about being free, as a celebrity, to “grab [women]” by their genitalia, he refused to back down or bow to modern feminist norms. He defied anyone whose sensitivities sought to strip football and baseball teams of their Native American monikers and mascots, even mocking Senator Elizabeth Warren with the “Pocahontas” slur in the presence of Navajo Code Talkers being honored at the White House as he made them stand beneath a portrait of Andrew Jackson.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“I think that what people don’t understand is that this isn’t just about stimulating the economy. It’s obvious that the tax cuts of the Bush and Trump eras had no economic effect whatsoever. Their agenda is to destroy government, to downsize it to such a point that we have virtual anarchy.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“More important is the shift this has created in the global balance of soft power and what that means for U.S. influence abroad. With its stable approval rating of 41 percent, Germany has replaced the U.S. as the top-rated global power in the world. The U.S. is now on nearly even footing with China (31 percent) and barely more popular than Russia (27 percent)—two countries that Trump sees as rivals seeking to ‘challenge American influence, values and wealth.’”25”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“In his testimony, Cohen called Trump an enigma. “He has both good and bad, as do we all,” he said in his opening statement. “But the bad far outweighs the good, and since taking office, he has become the worst version of himself. He is capable of behaving kindly, but he is not kind. He is capable of committing acts of generosity, but he is not generous. He is capable of being loyal, but he is fundamentally disloyal.” Cohen went on to describe a man who was virulently racist in his presence. He said Trump told him as they rode through a black neighborhood while Obama was still president, that no decent country had ever been run by a black person, calling all black-run nations “shitholes” and saying black Americans were “too stupid” to vote for him.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“Donald Trump is a man who ran for office to make his brand great, not to make our country great,” Cohen said.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“Fred Trump evinced a talent for acquiring wealth, but also a studious avoidance of taxation and a driving antiblack racism, culminating in his arrest at a Klan riot in Queens, New York, in 1927.18 And a 1973 federal lawsuit accused the company run by Fred and Donald Trump of refusing to rent to black and Puerto Rican tenants.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“In a New York Times op-ed, former U.S. solicitor general Neal Katyal, who wrote”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“The report established definitively that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election to help elect Trump, “identified numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign,” and confirmed that the campaign sought to benefit from Russia’s meddling. It reiterated reports that Paul Manafort shared polling data and strategy information with a Russian oligarch, detailing the campaign’s plans to target Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Minnesota—three out of four of which Trump narrowly won on his way to an Electoral College victory. It established that the Trump campaign eagerly accepted Russia’s help, that the Trump children openly courted Russia ties, and that Julian Assange of Wikileaks solicited hacked material from the Russian intelligence services who stole them, even smearing a dead DNC staffer, Seth Rich, to obscure Russia’s role in disseminating the material Wikileaks helped to spread, including to traditional news media. And where Barr parsed Mueller’s findings to find only the most exculpatory ones, the actual conclusions in the report were damning. The report found ten distinct instances of potential obstruction of justice, including Trump pressuring James Comey to end the investigation of General Michael Flynn,”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“These online movements harnessed the anger and frustrations of young, mostly white men who soon became eager recruits for a larger project: electing Donald Trump. Some of the same actors who participated in or egged on the Gamergate attacks, including then–Breitbart contributor Milo Yiannopoulos, eventually emerged as online fans and enforcers of Trump’s 2016 campaign. They trafficked in racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and even Nazism to harass female supporters of Hillary Clinton on Twitter. And their tactics were soon picked up by foreign attackers aligned with the Kremlin, such as Russia’s Internet Research Agency, a St. Petersburg–based “troll farm” whose operatives hacked into dormant Twitter and Facebook accounts, mimicked the identities and vernacular of the users they targeted—including”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“Therefore, I would consider it an honor if you would revoke my security clearance as well, so I can add my name to the list of men and women who have spoken up against your presidency.”31”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“Meanwhile, Miller’s boss, Donald Trump, with his own history of housing discrimination and racist provocations, was now being blamed for emboldening violence, anti-Semitism, and racism. With each violent incident, at a mosque or a synagogue, or on the streets of cities around the country, people shifted their gaze to the White House, and the man who stubbornly refused to take a vocal stand against white supremacy. Trump’s refusals begged the question why, as did his party’s reticence to condemn him for not doing so.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“Two years into Trump’s presidency, one Republican strategist who is white, worked for Trump’s election, supports his tax and healthcare policies, and has vigorously defended the president’s supporters for three years against the idea that they were motivated by racism has had a change of heart. “Donald Trump’s election was about race. Just race,” this strategist said in March 2019, calling the 2016 election a blend of resentment of Obama coupled with “a mix of racial attitude and a little hope and change.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“White America and the institutions that wield political and economic power have to engage. The challenge today is doing so against the determined opposition of the person with the ultimate bully pulpit: the president of the United States.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“Wise believes that racism must be confronted head-on. He says that if Hillary Clinton had not called Trump’s supporters “deplorables” and instead had said, “Donald Trump thinks his voters are so racist that they will fall for this phony scapegoating of black people and Mexican immigrants, but I know the people in this country are too smart to fall for that,” she might have found a way into a conversation with white voters who were not yet deeply entrenched against her.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“Russian troll farms studied what American online harassers had done and adapted the techniques to help elect Donald Trump.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“The report established definitively that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election to help elect Trump, “identified numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign,” and”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“white vulnerability,” driven by racial resentment, was the principal factor in their support for Trump’s candidacy.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story

“used the power of the presidency to sell rank-and-file Republicans on a familiar GOP menu of tax cuts for the rich and deregulation of business, while thrilling the Christian right by handing them the power to drag the country back from modernity through the courts. To the horror of many, including those who could no longer call themselves Republicans, Trump seemed to normalize corruption, cronyism, kleptocracy, and the public display of thuggery and open racism by white Americans who felt empowered to assert themselves as the arbiters of cultural legitimacy in his name. They would decide who was really an American, who belonged in public spaces, and who had any rights they were bound to respect. Donald Trump was indeed waging a new American civil war. And unlike the mere “politicians,” he was fighting for real. America was learning what might have been had Governor Wallace won the White House in 1968 after all.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story