It's interesting how identity politics and Ann Coulter-style tactics have now blossomed. But they were always there in CPAC.
It's both strategic, to get people's minds off other things, and to pick an internal enemy. It's part of [Donald Trump's] psychodynamics to always care about his press coverage intensely. He's more interested in that than anything else.
Hillary Clinton, at the end of the debate, what you want viewers to say, yes, she's smart, she's knowledgeable, but she's not a bad egg, you know? Not a bad egg is a pretty high compliment in American politics, given the toxic atmosphere in which we currently dwell.
Donald Trump defies gravity. And so I guess he has to be Donald Trump. It's gotten him so far.
I think Hillary Clinton - first of all, it's a great victory, acknowledge it. She has made history.
The single worst campaign slogan I have ever heard, is Hillary's Clinton, "I'm with her," it means nothing. It absolutely means nothing to anybody. I mean, it's about appealing - and it says nothing about anybody's life, about the country.
I do think what the Tea Party also had was Obamacare and the unpopularity of that, at least at the time. And so whether there is something that is equally unpopular and equally galvanizing that is almost self-destructive from the administration, that's another factor that we will wait and see.
The final thing the Tea Party had was, they fed into the philosophy that Donald Trump now embodies. So they had a different view of how the world should be governed. And so they had a lot of things that we didn't appreciate going for them as time went by.
It's tempting to remember that the Tea Party had a peak and then the Republican Party establishment sort of beat it back down. And so these things are won in a day.
[Democrats] have got to start winning elections. That involves not some great idea, but it also involves recruiting candidates. And Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago, who has given obnoxiousness a new definition in his personal behavior, oftentimes in his dealings with the press, had a very good point.
The Democrats have to do what he did when [Rahm Emanuel] was chairman of the Democratic House Campaign Committee, recruit veterans, recruit football players, recruit business people. And I think that's what the job of the new party chair has to be.
[Donald Trump] stood up and he said, you finally have a president, you finally have a president. I am the future.And what did he get? Hosannas and huzzahs and genuflection. It was a total takeover of the conservative movement.
[Donald] Trump, he - you know, buy American, buy American, anti-free trade, and got big cheers. They're waving Russian flags, probably partly as a joke. But, still, the party has become an ethnic nationalist party.
The strength of Donald Trump as a candidate - and I'm not in any way defending moral convictions or anything of the sort - was that he says what he means, you know where he stands.
[Donald trump] is moved from the enemy being Barack Obama, now gone, fading is Hillary Clinton, and there is no question he's chosen the enemy.
President [John F.] Kennedy, after the Bay of Pigs, said to Turner Catledge of The New York Times: I wish you had written more, I wish you had investigated more, because it might have saved the country of the cataclysm of the Bay of Pigs.
That's the job of a free press is to hold the lamp up, to investigate, to hold accountable. And denying access, as Sean Spicer did , is the first step toward a dictatorship.
I think Donald Trump is not going to be impeached [in a ] month. Let's not close out possibilities.I do think that what's happening is great and that people are active and people are just involved in the democratic process.
The Tea Party thing is only apt in some ways. The activism in the town halls, that looks superficially like it. But what the Tea Party did was, they went after the party, the Republican Party, as their vehicle. And parties is how you change history.
It's fine to be an activist, but you're not - if you're not putting up candidates, if you're not getting political, if you're not in your party, then you're probably not going to have long-term change. You will probably dissipate.
The problem is that every study I'm aware of, which is probably not that many, has indicated that a dollar spent in preparation and avoidance of natural disasters is worth $15 that is spent in relief. But there's no political payoff for preparation. So, who benefits? I mean, the governor or senator or the president? Bill Clinton at Oklahoma City, his performance there helped him enormously. And there really hasn't been any regulation that would, in fact, interfere with environmental disaster.
I personally believe that [Donald Trump] is wrong on the condition of America.
The Sheldon Adelsons, the Koch brothers, the George Soroses, what we want to try to do is force them into the parties, not so that Kasich or whoever is going to straight to them and trying to kiss up to special interests, but so the parties have the power and they can direct the money.
Hillary Clinton should get a bounce out of her convention, I mean a bounce in the polls. I think it's probably conceded that Donald Trump got about a three-point bounce out of his conventions. He's closed the gap that much.
The Democrats are standing on one side, and the Republicans are playing games on the other. Both sides are playing games.
