David Rothkopf > Quotes

“In place of philosophy, which involves developing a system of belief based on questioning and reasoning, many of our modern leaders have embraced ideology, which is based on having a system of beliefs essentially stripped of the questions.”
― David Rothkopf, Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power

“Nuclear weapons made global warfare of the twentieth century variety too costly to conduct. But cyber weapons make far more likely an era of nearly permanent or persistent conflict that seeks to degrade rather than destroy enemies, and to do so at a distance, behind cover of anonymity, with few if any human assets at risk. In a hundred years we may have gone from the war to end all wars to the war that never ends.”
― David Rothkopf, National Insecurity: American Leadership in an Age of Fear

“Turning the military-industrial complex is a little bit like turning a battleship, in an age in which smaller, faster ships with smaller crews launching unmanned aircraft is probably a better way to go.”
― David Rothkopf, Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making

“Take politics in a place like the United States. To run for president in 2008 will require that candidates raise in excess of $100 million each in order to be truly competitive. That means that before there was one primary election among voters, there was a “money primary” in 2007 that selected which candidates voters would see.”
― David Rothkopf, Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making

“as Heraclitus prophesied, “character determines fate.”
― David Rothkopf, Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power

“As a Capitol Hill staffer for Texas representative Michael McCaul, Miles Taylor saw Trump from the perspective of a committed Republican. Later, after serving in senior positions in the administration, Taylor became so disaffected with Trump that he wrote the famous “Anonymous” critique of the president that ran on the op-ed page of the New York Times. But long before Trump was even a candidate, he had an inkling there would be trouble: “In the middle of the 2016 race, I was working on Capitol Hill at the time, on the House side, as the policy director on the House Homeland Security Committee. Michael McCaul was chairman, Paul Ryan was Speaker. And we were in the midst of developing something for Paul Ryan called the Better Way agenda. Ryan wanted to put out an optimistic center-right vision for America’s future. Very policy oriented, but also a brand that Republicans could run on for years. He wanted this to be enduring. And I think, frankly, and had it been successful, he would have seen it as the centerpiece of his time as Speaker.”
― David Rothkopf, American Resistance: The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation

“Hence, his touching belief that US stealth aircraft were actually invisible—like, say, Wonder Woman’s airplane—rather than just nearly invisible to radar, as is the case. Trump also possessed a showman’s impulse to regularly use the military as a political prop, as a backdrop for rallies, or as a validator for his policy announcements.”
― David Rothkopf, American Resistance: The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation

“Bush’s team during their first term made some absolutely catastrophic decisions (like going to war in Iraq). But Bush grew in office and was considerably more successful during his second term as a consequence.”
― David Rothkopf, American Resistance: The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation

“And it also conveyed a sense of toughness to him. He would refer to them as his ‘killers,’ at least until he came to realize that most of the generals he settled on were actually thoughtful professionals who, having seen war up close, had no great appetite for it.”
― David Rothkopf, American Resistance: The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation

“I’ll give you an example. Let’s say one week we hop on the phone, you know, H.R. would go through five things. ‘Hey, you know, president’s meeting with Ambassador So-and-so this week, we’ve got this decision coming up at the NSC, etc. But also, got to let you guys know, he keeps bringing up NATO, and then wanting to pull out of NATO.’ It would be a bomb like that. And then you have Tillerson and Mattis say, ‘Well, what does his day look like today? We need to get in with him before he does something stupid.”
― David Rothkopf, American Resistance: The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation

“And, believe it or not, on a number of occasions it was Mike Pence that was stepping in to help him out. The shared Indiana connection made a difference. Now, I want to be absolutely clear about this. Pence was a coward in almost every other respect. But the one place where he kind of stuck his neck out was if the issue or the person involved was very Hoosier. He feels strong about people from Indiana. That’s probably a result of him having run for governor two times.”
― David Rothkopf, American Resistance: The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation

“Needless to say, perhaps the most extreme ideas the president floated or considered for using the military came at the end of his tenure. At that time some of his most extreme 2020 campaign advisors, including disgraced former national security advisor General Michael Flynn, recommended he use the military to seize voting machines in the 2020 election. They actually drafted an executive order to implement the idea.”
― David Rothkopf, American Resistance: The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation

“Those present were in varying degrees of shock. But one close aide to Tillerson recalled that after the meeting the secretary of state said he was “disgusted by what” he saw. To his credit, Tillerson did not just mumble his concern under his breath. He spoke out in defense of the military. Then in the wake of the meeting, after the president had left, Tillerson uttered the line for which his tenure as secretary of state will likely be best remembered. He said of the commander in chief: “He’s a fucking moron.”
― David Rothkopf, American Resistance: The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation

“Yes, ma’am. Yes, ma’am. Now, now, ma’am, please calm down and tell me what is wrong.” And there was silence and periodically he would offer a sound of listening and taking it in: “Mmm-hmmm. Mmm-hmmm. Yes, ma’am.” After about ten minutes of listening, he said: “Well, you know, ma’am, I really think this is a police matter. If you like, I can connect you to the precinct.” He was comforting in his tone. Soon after, he hung up. I asked what the call was about and he said that it was an old woman who sometimes called. She was mostly lonely and wanted someone to talk to. This time the call was about a plate of cream cheese that had gone missing from her refrigerator. I looked at him and he offered a small smile. But it was compassionate. He was not making fun of her. He was just offering her a willing ear when she needed one.”
― David Rothkopf, American Resistance: The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation

“There were lots of people who stood up to Donald Trump along the way,” he said, “and a lot of that was about, in my mind, constitutional patriotism. Colonel Vindman is a good example. I mean, people who felt as if they swore an oath not to one guy, but they swore an oath to a system of constitutional values. And that belief in constitutional democracy itself is the sustaining ethos.”
― David Rothkopf, American Resistance: The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation

“Although he was known as a scholarly and deeply reflective officer, Trump latched on to Mattis’s reputation and, uncomfortably for Mattis, a nickname that he deeply disliked: “Mad Dog.” When Mattis was introduced to a crowd for the first time as Trump’s nominee, Trump delighted in the fact that the crowd started chanting, “Mad Dog! Mad Dog!” Almost from that point forward, the mismatch—the oil-and-water personalities of the superficial, glib, impetuous Trump and that of his intellectual, measured, deeply principled secretary of defense—began to slowly fall apart. For Mattis “it was just a matter of time.” The split finally occurred in 2018, following President Trump’s decision to withdraw US troops from Syria and abandon America’s long-standing and courageous Kurdish allies.”
― David Rothkopf, American Resistance: The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation

“Fiona Hill, as formidable a public servant as I have ever encountered, was prepared. And, as it turned out, because Donald Trump was the man he was and his administration was the threat to the United States it ultimately became, she had to be.”
― David Rothkopf, American Resistance: The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation

“Lieu continued: “I also think Abraham Lincoln had it right when he said, ‘Public sentiment is everything: with it nothing can fail, without it, nothing can succeed.’ Most people don’t pay that much attention to politics. They’re busy, they’re living their lives, so impeachment caused a lot more people to focus on the corruption happening in the Trump administration.”
― David Rothkopf, American Resistance: The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation

“Yovanovitch took the Russian threat very seriously. Speaking late in 2021 before the war on Ukraine, she said: “Russia is a historically expansionist empire. And Putin is a bully. And if we let him get away with it as we did in 2014, as we did in Georgia in 2008, as we did with Moldova, it’s just going to continue.” She also undertook, because it was US policy, to call out corruption and to encourage reforms from the Ukrainian government.”
― David Rothkopf, American Resistance: The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation

“Taylor took the advice and Pompeo agreed to meet. In the meeting Taylor was direct. He said: “Mr. Secretary, your boss doesn’t like Ukraine and doesn’t support Ukraine. So, in that case you don’t want me going out there. And, frankly, I don’t want to go out there. So unless you can assure me that the US policy will continue to be to support Ukraine, I don’t want to go. But even if you can give me that assurance, and if for some reason that US policy of strong support—which has been the case for decades under Republican and Democratic administrations, the House and Senate, executive branch, has supported Ukraine—if that changes, which it might under this president, then you don’t want me out there. And if I were out there when that happened, I would have to come back. I would have to quit. And to my surprise, Secretary Pompeo in his office with just a couple of people around said, ‘No, you’re right. The president doesn’t like Ukraine.”
― David Rothkopf, American Resistance: The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation

“What the public also could discern, if it listened to the testimony presented to the House, was what we have heard from the participants. There were multiple efforts to hold Trump to the law and to encourage him to act in the national interest, even when his impulse was to do otherwise. Trump’s impulsiveness, recklessness, inexperience, narcissism, and biases also forced senior officials to find ways to balance his demands with the requirements of the law, regulations, and their oaths of office.”
― David Rothkopf, American Resistance: The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation

“His next comment revealed just what that was. It was a turning point in the Trump presidency. It would directly lead to Trump’s first impeachment. Worse, within less than three years the call would help establish Trump’s position as one directly antithetical to US interests—reckless and dangerous to US interests—and helpful to the interests of a declared enemy of the United States: Russia, a country with which Trump sought much warmer, closer relations.”
― David Rothkopf, American Resistance: The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation

“The examples of Trump’s irrational and often deeply strained relationship with the Pentagon are abundant. In Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos, Peter Bergen cites many. For example: “When told the capital of South Korea, Seoul, was so close to the North Korean border that millions of people would likely die in the first hours of any all-out war, Trump had a bold response, ‘They have to move.”
― David Rothkopf, American Resistance: The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation

“Obama argued to the press in mid-June that the decision to withdraw even a residual force was made not by him but by the Iraqis when they refused to sign a new Status of Forces Agreement, or SOFA, early in his presidency. As had been the case with his attempt to argue that it was the world and not he who set the Syria red line, within twenty-four hours the Washington Post published an article noting that during the [2012] campaign in a debate with opponent Mitt Romney, Obama had in fact taken credit for making the decision to get all US troops out of Iraq.”
― David Rothkopf, National Insecurity: American Leadership in an Age of Fear

“However stupid a fool’s words may be, they are sometimes enough to confound an intelligent man. —nikolai gogol, Dead Souls”
― David Rothkopf, American Resistance: The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation

“Gradually, the generals and several others, notably Secretary of State Tillerson, would communicate and share strategies for how to manage the sometimes challenging, sometimes downright irrational requests that would come out of the White House. Kori Schake described it this way: “I think what the people, particularly in the Pentagon, did was try and explain to the president and his top aides why things weren’t possible. There’s this beautiful saying in Portuguese. It’s what the Portuguese administrators in the colonies, like Brazil, used to answer when the government in Lisbon would ask them to do something that was undoable, inappropriate: ‘I obey, but I do not comply.’ And that, I think, is a lot of what happened. People weren’t saying, ‘No, I’m not going to pull troops out of Afghanistan.’ What they would say was ‘If we pull troops out of Afghanistan, here are the things that are going to happen. Are you comfortable with those outcomes?’ That’s a lot of how Jim Mattis, for example, handled his relationship with the president.”
― David Rothkopf, American Resistance: The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation

“Shannon grasped that the administration’s blanket new approach threatened to stifle all the ongoing refugee and immigration programs at a stroke: “The administration announces that people coming from certain countries need to be vetted in a special way or need special visa processing, like Iran. Then you end up with a scientist from Cambridge University in the UK, who’s lived in Great Britain all his life but still has an Iranian passport, suddenly is stopped at Boston airport and told he can’t go to the conference at Harvard. And that person calls Cambridge and Cambridge calls Boris Johnson and Boris Johnson calls somebody, and so there was a whole effort that had to be made to kind of fix what was coming out of the White House. And at that time, in the very early days, General Kelly was at DHS. And I knew Kelly well, from his days first as Leon Panetta’s military aide, but then as US Southern Command combatant commander. And so Kelly and I would get on the phone and say, ‘Okay, how are we going to figure this out?’ So we would create these small working groups, and his staff and my staff would then try to fix what was being presented. So that was a kind of immediate and everyday example of how we tried to fix things.”
― David Rothkopf, American Resistance: The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation

“He was the one who had to go to the transition offices and fire everyone. According to Lewis, Bannon would later say: “I was fucking nervous as shit. I go, ‘Holy fuck, this guy [Trump] doesn’t know anything. And he doesn’t give a shit.”
― David Rothkopf, American Resistance: The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation

“Unfortunately for Trump, Maguire also took the job seriously and insisted the team around him do so as well. On February 13, 2020, one of Maguire’s staffers, Shelby Pierson, testified to the House Intelligence Committee that Russia was already interfering in the 2020 election, and was doing so with a “preference” for Trump. According to a person who saw his reaction, the president “got red in the face and exploded.”
― David Rothkopf, American Resistance: The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation

“This official was struggling to convey what one the former DHS secretary, Janet Napolitano, had pithily said: “Show me a fifty-foot wall and I’ll show you a fifty-one-foot ladder.” But Trump didn’t get it.”
― David Rothkopf, American Resistance: The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation