Roberta Guthrie

“As hateful as Trump’s rhetoric was, it was part of a grand American tradition. As we saw earlier, anti-immigrant fervor was the engine that drove Millard Fillmore’s 1856 presidential campaign as the Know-Nothing nominee. A century and a half before Trump trained his xenophobia on Mexicans, the Know-Nothings had vilified Germans, Irish, and Catholics. They also undermined the validity of elections, suppressed voting, and started riots. Trump’s ideology wasn’t just toxic—it was derivative.”
― Andy Borowitz, Profiles in Ignorance: How America's Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber

“The beer quiz has been a staple of stupid campaign coverage ever since, underscoring the condescending assumption that voters want a president who, in the pollsters’ parlance, is just like them. I don’t want a president who’s just like me. I’m pretty sure I’d suck at the job. I want a president to be better than I am: smarter, braver, calmer, and more patient. When a country faces war, economic collapse, or contagion, I’m not sure it’s Miller Time. Lincoln may have been our greatest president, but he wouldn’t be in my top hundred potential drinking buddies. He could get kind of dark.”
― Andy Borowitz, Profiles in Ignorance: How America's Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber

“During his 1980 White House run, his campaign wisely blocked their release. Here he is in 1978: “There were two Vietnams, north and south. They had been separate nations for centuries.” (More like since 1954.) Also in 1978: “Swarms of locusts and grasshoppers; a plague of crickets, cutworms, and ants; and swarms of mosquitoes are making life miserable and even impossible in some parts of the world… Some experts are treating this as an unexplainable mystery. Actually, there is no mystery about it… The most effective pesticide, DDT, was outlawed… on the theoretical grounds that it might, under some circumstances, some day, harm some one or some thing.”
― Andy Borowitz, Profiles in Ignorance: How America's Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber

“One of Giuliani’s favorite claims was the charge that anywhere between 8,000 and 30,000 dead people voted in Philadelphia. In fact, investigations would show that it was exactly two. Similarly in Georgia, he variously claimed that 800 or 6,000 or 10,515 dead people voted. There, as well, it would eventually be determined that at most it was just four. But that did not deter Giuliani. He also asserted that 65,000 or 165,000 underage people voted in Georgia, when, in fact, the number was zero. In Arizona, he said at different points that “way more than 10,000” or “32,000” or “probably about 250,000” or “a few hundred thousand” undocumented immigrants had voted illegally in the state, but investigators found no evidence that any had.[22] Not hundreds of thousands, not tens of thousands, not any.”
― Peter Baker, The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021