“Authoritarianism doesn’t fall on a nation like a book falling from a shelf and striking you in the head. It rolls in like a slow tide.”
― Joy Reid
“If you are a certain kind of white conservative, especially a white male conservative, then Roger Ailes was a hero. He constructed a world in which your core beliefs and your gut instincts were, and still are, constantly validated.”
― Joy Reid
“If you are Black or Brown, or a liberal or immigrant or Democrat, or a woman unwilling to quietly submit, then Ailes was the ultimate villain. You were the object of mockery and scorn – sometimes overt, often subtle. You were the thing to be gawked at, pawed at, jeered at, propositioned or feared.”
― Joy Reid
“Ailes built a Kingdom of Yes. That was his genius. He understood the id of many white conservatives – their sense of constant persecution and victimization; and their existential fears of an America whose racial makeup, sexual mores and gender roles were careening in the opposite direction of the country of their childhood.”
― Joy Reid
“As a media consultant to Republican presidents, Ailes proved a deft manipulator of racial fear. But it was in building Fox News that he found his calling.”
― Joy Reid
“When I was 15 years old, my sister and I went on a trip to Europe. We went on scholarship because my mother didn’t have the money to pay the full fare for the two of us, which ran into the thousands of dollars.”
― Joy Reid
“To be white in America is to assume, with total self-confidence and little afterthought, the personal ownership of public spaces.”
― Joy Reid
“To be white in America is to have the confidence to say, without a second thought: this space, this neighborhood, this city, this county, this country is mine.”
― Joy Reid
“The work of anti-racism can only take place inside each individual soul, where we all try to grow into better people. There is no national tonic or instant cure.”
― Joy Reid
“Trump channeled ethno-populist rage as naturally and charismatically as George Wallace had during the 1960s, while seating a billionaire cabinet.”
― Joy Reid
“Trumpists want a return to a white, Christian America.”
― Joy Reid
“The reversion of American society to a nation of the superrich and the rest… is straining the country in ways that go way beyond economics.”
― Joy Reid
“Technology has made it a lot easier to be productive. It’s incredibly helpful to be able to get little bits of information quickly.”
― Joy Reid
“I think social media tools are helpful, so long as you pick your social media wisely.”
― Joy Reid
“I multitask and always have the TV on in the background. If I need to focus, I generally have to turn off the TV.”
― Joy Reid
“I always want to be doing something – going somewhere, doing a project, teaching a class, writing an article. I try to use up my day. You have a limited time on this planet – try to use as much of it as you can for productive purposes.”
― Joy Reid
“In fundamental ways, the 2016 Democratic primary has been a litigation of the Obama years, and of whether the president’s 2008 campaign vow of ‘change we can believe in’ succeeded or failed.”
― Joy Reid
“When he ran for president in 2008, Mr. Obama was the candidate of the young and the demographically ascendant. He eventually attracted strong majorities among African-Americans, Hispanics, Asian-Americans and voters under 30.”
― Joy Reid
“Of all the liberal resentments during the Obama years, one of the sharpest has been the failure to secure a public insurance option as part of the Affordable Care Act.”
― Joy Reid
“President Barack Obama read to a certain portion of white America as an unending attack on white Christian identity, centrality and cultural relevance. In their minds, he was seeking to end their right to bear arms and the right of conservatives to speak freely.”
― Joy Reid
“The evidence of our divided racial self was all over the Obama presidency from the beginning: from the shouts of ‘you lie’ from the well of Congress as he spoke to a joint session, to the unprecedented spectacle of American conservatives rooting against their own country being awarded the Olympic Games.”
― Joy Reid
“What White America and Black America wanted and expected from Obama were fundamentally different and opposite things.”
― Joy Reid
“The America that clings to Confederate statues and flags, and that jealously guards the social privileges white Americans have long enjoyed, form the stalwarts of Trump’s base.”
― Joy Reid
“If I had to reduce ‘Black Panther’ to a single word, it would be ‘glorious.’”
― Joy Reid
“Wakanda, in short, is the Africa of black dreams.”
― Joy Reid
“There is a twinge of abandonment that comes with being a member of the African Diaspora. But ‘Black Panther’ fearlessly introduces and then complicates this and other deeply held albeit rarely expressed emotions; that indeed is what makes this film so profoundly innovative.”
― Joy Reid
“If you’ve never feared the police – if you don’t get a dull ache in the pit of your stomach when you see red and blue flashing lights, even when you know you’re not doing anything wrong – consider yourself lucky.”
― Joy Reid
“For millions of Americans who happen to be black or brown, that core bond of trust with the government that governs closest to you, is too often broken.”
― Joy Reid
“Local government is a gamble that can have disastrous consequences when it fails.”
― Joy Reid
“To be sure, police do a dangerous job and take tremendous personal risks to safeguard the public. Most officers just want to do their jobs and go home alive.”
― Joy Reid
“If a novel were written about Florida’s administration of its healthcare for the working poor, an appropriate title might be: ‘Don’t get sick, and God help you if you do.’”
― Joy Reid
“Who in the GOP would complain if Trump federalizes ‘stop and frisk’ or encourages its proliferation in states using the power of the Justice Department purse?”
― Joy Reid
“What stalwart Republican would stop Trump from profiteering for his businesses from the White House the way he’s gamed his companies and the tax code for decades, or prevent him from letting his adult children milk their father’s position to benefit his supposed ‘blind trust?’”
― Joy Reid
“Trump’s more outre economic ideas, like repealing trade bills and implementing a massive surcharge on imports, would seem like non-starters in a Republican-led House and Senate, except when you consider a second point as a kind of syllogism: Republicans fear their angry, white electorate. Their angry, white electorate chose Donald Trump.”
― Joy Reid
“Trump’s real Achilles heel, and the thing most likely to keep him out of the White House, is his brazen contempt for women (plus his lack of impulse control and inability to stay off his Android phone).”
― Joy Reid
“Even without the euphoria of ‘yes we can,’ Hillary Clinton is to white women what Barack Obama was to African-Americans. She represents the opportunity to see a like image in the Oval Office for the first time.”
― Joy Reid
“The one woman Trump does seem to totally respect is his daughter from his first marriage, Ivanka, on whom he heaps constant, effusive, at-times borderline creepy praise and physical affection.”
― Joy Reid
“Republicans have relentlessly pursued investigations of Hillary Clinton, going back to her time as secretary of state (to say nothing of the 30-year project to take down both Clintons by right-wing outside groups).”
― Joy Reid
“The goal of the eight Benghazi committees, one of which produced and nurtured ’emailgate,’ has been clear from the start: to prevent Hillary Clinton from becoming president of the United States.”
― Joy Reid
“The abuse of congressional power for pure partisan gain has become a specialty of the GOP.”
― Joy Reid
“Trump, who in his own history as a developer preferred mob concrete and Chinese steel to the variety produced in the Rust Belt, cannot bring back the steel and manufacturing jobs lost in Lorain, Ohio or western Pennsylvania.”
― Joy Reid
“No president can force shuttered mills to reopen, or companies who’ve left in search of cheaper labor to relocate to the United States (or those who have come back to choose expensive humans over cheaper robots).”
― Joy Reid
“Trump’s trade and immigration policies will deliver an economic shock to states like Texas where trade produces a substantial share of the jobs, and which depend on high oil prices.”
― Joy Reid
“In the 1950s, the black men and women and their white allies who fought for civil rights and basic human dignity could look to the federal government. If the racist sheriff and his troops beat them with batons or sprayed them and their children with water cannons, the attorney general would act.”
― Joy Reid
“Americans have, at various times, leaned on the FBI for a measure of justice that local and state police couldn’t be counted on to deliver, and recoiled in fear at their exercise of raw federal power. That uneasy trust; the combination of need and dread, is the lot that FBI agents live with day to day.”
― Joy Reid
“Trump is beset by clear and alarming conflicts between his international business concerns and the national interest.”
― Joy Reid
“Trump is reviled around the world.”
― Joy Reid
“We are not, in some fundamental ways, a single country. The map of that vast red swatch of states and rural counties that voted for Trump, and the blue coastal edges and scattered urban centers where Clinton won, are a pictograph of mutual contempt.”
― Joy Reid
“The sharp differences between the way city dwellers and rural, suburban and exurban residents vote, think and live cannot be papered over by federal laws, federal rules or, clearly, by a president.”
― Joy Reid
“Whether on guns, race, culture or feminism, there really are two Americas.”
― Joy Reid
“Democrats may want working-class white Rust Belters to have good jobs at high wages with pensions and health benefits, but they can’t make them vote that way.”
― Joy Reid
“Too great a love for the presidency has caused Democrats to neglect state and local politics and to overly prize compromise and a futile quest for bipartisanship. It has made liberals too allergic to federalism and too shy about grassroots politics.”
― Joy Reid
“We Americans think quite highly of ourselves, and nothing makes us think more of ourselves than our romantic view of our presidents.”
― Joy Reid
“I’ve written before that the president is our national avatar – a stand-in for what we believe we are, or want to be.”
― Joy Reid
“Trump’s cabinet picks seem designed to unwind government itself, leaving the average citizen completely exposed and vulnerable to full exploitation by corporate interests.”
― Joy Reid
“Trump built Trump Tower using mob concrete, not Bethlehem steel.”
― Joy Reid
“Trump is a big businessman. He’s your boss or CEO, not one of your brothers on the line.”
― Joy Reid
“The Trumps have spent exactly zero percent of their lives caring about anyone other than themselves.”
― Joy Reid
“America is, in many ways, as much an idea as it is a country. And Americans have long marketed that idea around the world through our popular culture.”
― Joy Reid
“From jazz, the blues, country and rock to Hollywood movies, culture has in many ways been our greatest export (or our most obnoxious one, depending on your point of view).”
― Joy Reid
“The Hollywood of Frank Capra’s era, when Reagan became a minor star, sold the world an image of American pith and patriotism in many ways as defining as the moon landing or the A-bomb.”
― Joy Reid
“Our love of Hollywood-style glamour helped elect two presidents: JFK and Reagan, who fulfilled the prophecy that a country so enamored of actors would eventually make one their president.”
― Joy Reid
“Americans are locked into our traditions.”
― Joy Reid
“It is uncomfortable in the extreme for people, and particularly for members of the press, to confront the notion that a president could be so far outside the bounds of tradition that he must be treated differently from his predecessors.”
― Joy Reid
“Freedom is neither guaranteed nor automatic; not even in the United States. Left unguarded, it can slip away like a thief in the night.”
― Joy Reid
“There are few instances when American history offers us two clear sides of a moral line.”
― Joy Reid
“Trump is an erratic figure – seemingly fragile, consumed by his own unpopularity and desperate to somehow exceed Barack Obama in public acclaim.”
― Joy Reid
“If politics were a high school movie, Republicans would be the jocks and mean girls locking hapless freshmen inside their lockers and threatening to call in their rich parents if the teachers complain – plus the broke kids who are always willing to strong-arm homework for them from the nerds.”
― Joy Reid
“Republicans don’t vote Republican because of Nancy Pelosi. They vote Republican because they are Republicans.”
― Joy Reid
“The criminal justice system in the United States is designed to do two things really well: to railroad black and brown bodies into prison, and to keep police officers out of it.”
― Joy Reid
“Being on a grand jury felt like attending a series of hangings in a legal Wild West. Hands up for a true bill. Hands up for a dismissal. A show of hands to save a life, or to end it.”
― Joy Reid
“It sounds terribly cynical, but the real surprise in the Philando Castile case is not that the officer was acquitted but that he was charged at all. The prosecutors in the case deserve great credit for even trying. But no one should be shocked about how it turned out.”
― Joy Reid
“The Trump phenomenon might feel both interminable and unprecedented to Republican elites, but of course it isn’t.”
― Joy Reid
“American populist politics has a long tradition, from Andrew Jackson to Huey Long to Joseph McCarthy. But the politician Trump is most like could be George Wallace.”
― Joy Reid
“Protest is, at its core, designed to move policy.”
― Joy Reid
“A major loss by a Democratic prosecutor at the hands of the BLM movement could alter the political landscape in a way that might actually change the way prosecutors, and ultimately police departments, operate.”
― Joy Reid
“Even at its most outrageous early moments, the Tea Party movement was treated to sober and at times breathless media coverage, to the point of being invited to co-host a presidential debate.”
― Joy Reid
“Obama has presided over sweeping cultural advances, particularly in the rights of gay and lesbian Americans.”
― Joy Reid
“Votes for president have long been a kind of social signifier. People will proudly boast that they voted for JFK; while it’s harder to find those eager to claim having supported Richard Nixon.”
― Joy Reid
“The presidency is, in many ways, America’s comment on itself; our collective national costume. In the occupant of our sole nationwide elected office, we see who we think we are, or who we want to be.”
― Joy Reid
“Dwight Eisenhower presented a face of America that was heroic and resolute; Ronald Reagan represented a return to confidence and glamour after the weary Carter years.”
― Joy Reid
“Trump is, in every way, the anti-Obama.”
― Joy Reid
“If Obama was fundamentally different from prior presidents, Trump seems to violate every tenet of what Americans have long sought as our national image.”
― Joy Reid
“The fact that many journalists approach the Clintons – especially Hillary Clinton – with a presumption that she has done something that if it’s not outright corrupt is at least worthy of looking into, inevitably colors the way the public views the former secretary of state, and the way they respond to her in the polls.”
― Joy Reid
“Whatever its cause, the media’s general Hillary Clinton loathing is a foundational truth that would define her as president.”
― Joy Reid
“Hillary Clinton’s time in the Senate indicates she is happier being a policy workhorse than a show horse.”
― Joy Reid
“Bill Clinton had a hell of a first 24 months, even though he, like Trump, enjoyed a congressional majority. Scandal after scandal befell the White House, including the failure of Hillary Clinton-led healthcare reform. But Clinton’s scandals, from ‘filegate’ to ‘travelgate’ to a brouhaha over a haircut, were petty, personal and domestic.”
― Joy Reid
“America after Trump may be more like the European Union; a rambling alliance of interstate compacts, rather than the forced marriage of a country that emerged after the Civil War.”
― Joy Reid
“After Trump, how can we credibly say that our process for choosing a national leader yields the best possible result, or even someone capable of uniting the country, let alone running it?”
― Joy Reid
“Trump is reviled around the world, as is the U.S. under his leadership.”
― Joy Reid
“Trump has humbled our country under the shadow of China’s autocrat Xi Jinping.”
― Joy Reid
“The American presidency combines elements of the efficient and the dignified. The president presides over governance – not making legislation but proposing it, cajoling the co-equal federal legislature and then signing and executing the laws.”
― Joy Reid
“Popularity has always been the key currency in choosing a president.”
― Joy Reid
“Donald Trump is many things – a tantrum-throwing man-child and a wannabe strongman pining for his very own banana republic among them – but perhaps most of all he is a giant, melon-colored distraction from what is happening to our country under his watch.”
― Joy Reid
“To be sure, the Trump administration is shot through with corruption.”
― Joy Reid
“In many ways, Trump is both a boon and a bane to Republicans. His insanity and moral decrepitude keep the country focused on things other than the horrible public policies the GOP is attempting to ram through. But because he has no loyalty to anything other than himself, he’s much more useful to them as a shiny object than as an ally.”
― Joy Reid
“Trump is as hollow a vessel as there has ever been in the White House. His rule lacks even a shred of moral authority.”
― Joy Reid
“Trump’s affinity for Russia dates back at least to the late 1980s, during the time of the Soviet Union, and it intensified after his financial empire collapsed.”
― Joy Reid
“For decades, the GOP has faithfully served the rich, corporations, polluters and purveyors of pure, unadulterated greed, and brought blue-collar white voters along for the ride with promises of cultural revival.”
― Joy Reid
“For many Americans – many humans – Trump’s presidency can often feel unbearable.”
― Joy Reid
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