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Remember There’s No Such Thing As An Unrealistic Goal – Just Unrealistic Time Frames
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Donald J. Trump
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When you walk in distinction, even the photocopying machine can’t replicate your unique quality.
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Onyi Anyado
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A great leader has to be flexible, holding his ground on the major principles but finding room for compromises that can bring people together. A great leader has to be savvy at negotiations so we don't drown every bill in pork barrel bridges to nowhere. I know how to stand my ground — but I also know that Republicans and Democrats need to find common ground to stand on as well.
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Donald J. Trump (Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again)
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The call of distinction cannot be heard by the average, neither can the vision of distinction be seen by the eyes of the mediocre.
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Onyi Anyado
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Like other aspiring autocrats, Donald Trump cannot succeed alone. He depends upon enablers and collaborators. Every American should understand what his enablers in Congress and in the leadership of the Republican Party were willing to do to help Trump seize power in the months after he lost the 2020 presidential election—and what they continue to do to this day.
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Liz Cheney (Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning)
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When you walk in distinction, you don’t compete with anyone but competition wants to compete with you.
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Onyi Anyado
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Today, more than a quarter century later, we must ask what has happened to that uplifting vision; why does it seem to be fading instead of becoming more clear? Why, per Freedom House, is democracy now “under assault and in retreat”? Why are many people in positions of power seeking to undermine public confidence in elections, the courts, the media, and—on the fundamental question of earth’s future—science? Why have such dangerous splits been allowed to develop between rich and poor, urban and rural, those with a higher education and those without? Why has the United States—at least temporarily—abdicated its leadership in world affairs? And why, this far into the twenty-first century, are we once again talking about Fascism? ONE REASON, FRANKLY, IS DONALD TRUMP. IF WE THINK OF FASCISM as a wound from the past that had almost healed, putting Trump in the White House was like ripping off the bandage and picking at the scab
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Madeleine K. Albright (Fascism: A Warning)
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It may sound strange, but throughout my five months working under Donald Trump, I wanted him to succeed as president. That’s not a political bias. Had Hillary Clinton been elected, I would have wanted her to succeed as president. I think that’s what it means to love your country. We need our presidents to succeed.
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James B. Comey (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership)
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Facts, as Reagan famously said, are stubborn things. Truth and honesty are vital pillars of presidential leadership; they create an ineffable reservoir of goodwill for the moments when the man in the Oval Office can’t tell Americans all the details of a military or law enforcement operation. They are a buttress against attacks on his programs, his intentions, and his statements. Leadership demands trust. Trust that the president will keep his word, do as he promises, and deliver on commitments. Donald Trump, the Münchhausen of presidents, is a notorious serial liar and fabulist. He is a man who has boasted about his own dishonesty in life, marriage, and business.
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Rick Wilson (Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever)
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Self-serving leaders can literally get people killed. But in any society, leaders who aren’t willing to make sacrifices aren’t leaders, they’re opportunists, and opportunists rarely have the common good in mind. They’re easy to spot, though: opportunists live reflexively, blame others for failure, and are unapologetic cowards.
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Sebastian Junger (Freedom)
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This mess calls for leadership in the worst way.
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Donald J. Trump (Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again)
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Anybody who leads with hate, is not fit for leadership.
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Jeanette Coron
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When we have rigid theories about what makes people the way they are and we project our theories onto patients and clients, insisting that our reality is their reality, we do the same thing their parents did. This is the wounding shadow of authority that says, 'I know what your story is and I know its meaning,' and it robs the person of the opportunity to discover this. This is a risk for anyone in a leadership role.
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Jean Shinoda Bolen (A Clear and Present Danger: Narcissism in the Era of Donald Trump)
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Stories focused purely on what side was winning represented 42 percent of the coverage. Coverage of policy issues took up a paltry 10 percent, while stories focused on leadership and experience accounted for only 3 percent.
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Nathan Bomey (After the Fact: The Erosion of Truth and the Inevitable Rise of Donald Trump)
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Recently though, they have been claiming I haven’t put out enough specifics. There’s a good reason for this, and it fits perfectly with my overall philosophy of leadership: Many of our problems, caused by years of stupid decisions or no decisions at all, have grown into a huge mess. If I could wave a magic wand and fix them, I’d do it. But there are a lot of different voices—and interests—that have to be considered when working toward solutions. This involves getting people into a room and negotiating compromises until everyone walks out of that room on the same page.
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Donald J. Trump (Great Again: How to Fix Our Crippled America)
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You haven’t heard much about the real Trump presidency, because the media we rely on for news are part of the dishonest “Resistance.” They’re too busy pushing distorted or flatly untrue narratives against Donald Trump to simply report on the great things happening in their own country under his leadership.
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Jeanine Pirro (Liars, Leakers, and Liberals: The Case Against the Anti-Trump Conspiracy)
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I AM WRITING IN A time of great anxiety in my country. I understand the anxiety, but also believe America is going to be fine. I choose to see opportunity as well as danger. Donald Trump’s presidency threatens much of what is good in this nation. We all bear responsibility for the deeply flawed choices put before voters during the 2016 election, and our country is paying a high price: this president is unethical, and untethered to truth and institutional values. His leadership is transactional, ego driven, and about personal loyalty. We are fortunate some ethical leaders have chosen to serve and to stay at senior levels of government, but they cannot prevent all of the damage from the forest fire that is the Trump presidency. Their task is to try to contain it. I see many so-called conservative commentators, including some faith leaders, focusing on favorable policy initiatives or court appointments to justify their acceptance of this damage, while deemphasizing the impact of this president on basic norms and ethics. That strikes me as both hypocritical and morally wrong. The hypocrisy is evident if you simply switch the names and imagine that a President Hillary Clinton had conducted herself in a similar fashion in office. I’ve said this earlier but it’s worth repeating: close your eyes and imagine these same voices if President Hillary Clinton had told the FBI director, “I hope you will let it go,” about the investigation of a senior aide, or told casual, easily disprovable lies nearly every day and then demanded we believe them. The hypocrisy is so thick as to almost be darkly funny. I say this as someone who has worked in law enforcement for most of my life, and served presidents of both parties. What is happening now is not normal. It is not fake news. It is not okay.
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James B. Comey (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership)
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Donald Trump’s presidency threatens much of what is good in this nation. We all bear responsibility for the deeply flawed choices put before voters during the 2016 election, and our country is paying a high price: this president is unethical, and untethered to truth and institutional values. His leadership is transactional, ego driven, and about personal loyalty.
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James B. Comey (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership)
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This job of international leadership is not the kind of assignment one ever finishes. Old dangers rarely go away completely, and new ones appear as regularly as dawn. Dealing with them effectively has never been a matter of just money and might. Countries and people must join forces, and that doesn’t happen naturally. Though the United States has made many mistakes in its eventful history, it has retained the ability to mobilize others because of its commitment to lead in the direction most want to go—toward liberty, justice, and peace. The issue before us now is whether America can continue to exhibit that brand of leadership under a president who doesn’t appear to attach much weight to either international cooperation or democratic values.
The answer matters because, although nature abhors a vacuum, Fascism welcomes one.
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Madeleine K. Albright (Fascism: A Warning)
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Despite the brutal violence, destruction, and death at the Capitol, despite the fact that Donald Trump’s lies—the same lies Republicans were telling to justify the objections—had mobilized the mob and caused the attack, McCarthy was going to let the travesty go on. Kevin McCarthy lacked the courage and the honor to abide by his oath to the Constitution. This wasn’t leadership. It was cowardice, and it was craven. I wanted no part of it. I got up and walked out of the House chamber.
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Liz Cheney (Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning)
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White/Western feminism's attempt at erasing the political context of Palestinian women's oppression was evident yet again around the 2017 Women's March on Washington, when liberal feminists objected to the leadership of Palestinian American organizer Linda Sarsour, and the newly minted "Zionesses" complained of "antisemitism" because Palestinian women's circumstances were on the platform, as part of a broader discussion of US President Donald Trump's Muslim ban and the overall Islamophobia he pandered to.
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Sumaya Awad (Palestine: A Socialist Introduction)
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Esper had not directly criticized the commander in chief, but his predecessor, Jim Mattis, finally delivered the rebuke of Trump he had held in for years. “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us,” Mattis told the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, before invoking “the Nazi slogan for destroying us . . . ‘Divide and Conquer.’ “We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort,” Mattis went on. “We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society.
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Maggie Haberman (Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America)
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AM WRITING IN A time of great anxiety in my country. I understand the anxiety, but also believe America is going to be fine. I choose to see opportunity as well as danger. Donald Trump’s presidency threatens much of what is good in this nation. We all bear responsibility for the deeply flawed choices put before voters during the 2016 election, and our country is paying a high price: this president is unethical, and untethered to truth and institutional values. His leadership is transactional, ego driven, and about personal loyalty. We are fortunate some ethical leaders have chosen to serve and to stay at senior levels of government, but they cannot prevent all of the damage from the forest fire that is the Trump presidency. Their task is to try to contain it.
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James B. Comey (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership)
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Donald can insult Cuomo and complain about him, but every day the governor’s real leadership further reveals Donald as a petty, pathetic little man—ignorant, incapable, out of his depth, and lost in his own delusional spin. What Donald can do in order to offset the powerlessness and rage he feels is punish the rest of us. He’ll withhold ventilators or steal supplies from states that have not groveled sufficiently. If New York continues not to have enough equipment, Cuomo will look bad, the rest of us be damned. Thankfully, Donald doesn’t have many supporters in New York City, but even some of those will die because of his craven need for “revenge.” What Donald thinks is justified retaliation is, in this context, mass murder.
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Mary L. Trump (Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man)
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With a Senate nominee voicing an opinion on “legitimate rape,” the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Reince Priebus, called on Akin to withdraw from the race and blocked any official party support for him. But four years later, Donald Trump called for a ban on Muslims’ entering the United States, a clearly unconstitutional edict violating the Constitution’s Article VI clause against a religious test, and the Republican Party leadership did nothing.
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Stuart Stevens (It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump)
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I was never burdened by the notion that I was working for a political party that was fundamentally hypocritical on the deficit and economy and one that would proceed to impeach Bill Clinton for lying about sex under the leadership of Speaker Newt Gingrich, who was having an affair with a former House intern himself.
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Stuart Stevens (It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump)
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I suspect strongly that he hoped for a narrow defeat after an exciting campaign. That would have been the ideal platform for his leadership ambitions and spared him the immense complex and detailed tasks of taking responsibility for the United Kingdom’s exit from the EU.
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Peter Oborne (The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism)
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-Whatever the world would say; however, as a fact, Russia, in the leadership of Vladimir Putin, has given historical lessons and the silent defeat to the United States of America in both ways; the diplomatic and war strategy. After retreating from Afghanistan by the American-made Taliban, including Bin Laden since that and the Iraq war till present, the USA has lost its incredibility in world eyes and failed to build peace, harmony, and equality within small and large states of the world. Now, Donald Trump, even though his political speeches meet hard critical responses, but it seems that he will restore, and achieve the American image of justice and peace for everyone. Otherwise, the failure is the destiny that may collapse the unity within states of it, as in the Soviet Union.
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Ehsan Sehgal
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If he talks like Robert Mugabe, tweets like Donald Trump, and parades the pitiless disposition of Kim Jong-un, it is far from leadership
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Anthony Obi Ogbo
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Breaking Tweet
Whatever world would say; however, as a fact, Russia, in the leadership of Vladimir Putin has given, a historical lesson and silent defeat, to the United States of America, in both ways, the diplomatic and war strategic, after retreating from Afghanistan by the American made Taliban including Usama Bin Laden. Since that and the Iraq war till present, USA has lost its incredibility in world eyes and failed to build peace, harmony, and equality within small and large states of the world. Now, Donald Trump, even though his political speeches meet hard critical responses, but it seems that he will restore, and achieve the American image of justice and peace for everyone. Otherwise, the failure is its destiny that may collapse the unity within its states, as in the Soviet Union.
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Ehsan Sehgal
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Whatever the world would say, however, as a fact, Russia, under the leadership of Vladimir Putin, has given a historical lesson and a silent defeat to the United States of America, in both ways, the diplomatic and war strategic, after retreating from Afghanistan by the American-made Taliban, including Usama Bin Laden. Since then and the Iraq War until the present, the USA has lost its incredibility in the eyes of the world and failed to build peace, harmony, and equality within small and large states of the world. Now, Donald Trump, even though his political speeches meet hard critical responses, seems to restore and achieve the American image of justice and peace for everyone. Otherwise, failure is its destiny and may collapse the unity within its states, as in the Soviet Union.
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Ehsan Sehgal
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Donald John Trump was born on June 14th, 1946.
Donald is derived from the word Domhnall meaning 'world leader' or 'leader of the world' (Gaelic dunno, 'world'; val, 'rule'). John is a Hebrew name that means 'God is gracious'. Trump is a German surname meaning 'trumpet' or 'drum' and it is also and Engish verb meaning 'to excel, surpass, or outdo', as well as an early English variant of the word 'triumph '. As Mary Colbert, who co-authored 'The Trump Prophecies describes, "Donald John Trump's name means 'World Leader Under the Grace of God Who's Leadership Will Ecel, Surpass and Outdo in Triumph.
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Bethanon (Love Joy Trump: A Chorus of Prophetic Voices)
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I’m done,” Trump said, cutting her off. “I’m starting my own party.” McDaniel balked. “You cannot do that,” McDaniel implored Trump on the phone. “If you do, we will lose forever.” “This isn’t their Republican Party anymore. This is Donald Trump’s Republican Party,” Trump’s eldest son, Don Jr., had declared onstage at the “Save America” rally on January 6. “Exactly. You lose forever without me,” Trump snapped at McDaniel. “This is what Republicans deserve for not sticking with me.” He wanted to take down the Republican Party. The Republican National Committee leadership would later make clear to Trump’s advisers that the former president’s lust for revenge would hurt not only his legacy but his finances. The Republican Party threatened to cease paying Trump’s legal bills and destroy the value of his campaign’s email list that contained 40 million Trump voters. Trump had been selling the list to other Republican candidates. If he tried to use it they would give it away for free. Trump backed down.
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Bob Woodward (War)
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The Harvard discussions were chaotic, at least in part because the Trump team’s fractured leadership was overrepresented in many of the panels. Corey Lewandowski, for example, was included in both the primary-election panel and, inexplicably, the general-election panel. He seemed to play a bigger role at the conference than he had on the campaign trail. Incredibly, Lewandowski would tell the Harvard conference that he had written Trump’s announcement speech, which was ludicrous given that Trump spoke without notes and there was no prepared text to memorize. The
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Roger Stone (The Making of the President 2016: How Donald Trump Orchestrated a Revolution)
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Achieving great things through training, tenacity & time doesn't make someone vain. It lessens vanity! Therefore, I have one question:
is @realDonaldTrump vain?
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Steve Cioccolanti
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According to an CFR article published in 2017, members were not happy with the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency. “The Trump administration seems determined to muddle through its foreign policy without initial guiding principles, benchmarks for progress, or the means of adjudicating between competing objectives, and with a wildly improvisational leadership style that has no precedent in recent history.
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Jim Marrs (The Illuminati: The Secret Society That Hijacked the World)
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As we were arriving at this decision, one of the lawyers on the team asked a searing question. She was a brilliant and quiet person, whom I sometimes had to invite into the conversation. “Should you consider that what you are about to do may help elect Donald Trump president?” she asked. I paused for several seconds. It was of course the question that was on everyone’s mind, whether they expressed it out loud or not. I began my reply by thanking her for asking that question. “It is a great question,” I said, “but not for a moment can I consider it. Because down that path lies the death of the FBI as an independent force in American life. If we start making decisions based on whose political fortunes will be affected, we are lost.
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James B. Comey (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership)
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out of curiosity, I googled it and looked through YouTube videos. In all of my searching, I found one video of something that could be called Donald Trump exhibiting a laugh, and a mean one at that—in January 2016, when he asked a New Hampshire audience about the origin of a noise in the background that sounded like a dog barking and someone shouted: “It’s Hillary.” There is a risk that I’m overinterpreting this, and I suppose it’s possible that in private he may keep his wife or children or some favorite staff member in stitches or that I have missed a collection of his public laughs, but I don’t know of another elected leader who doesn’t laugh with some regularity in public.
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James B. Comey (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership)
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Like many others, I was surprised when Donald Trump was elected president. I had assumed from media polling that Hillary Clinton was going to win. I have asked myself many times since if I was influenced by that assumption. I don’t know. Certainly not consciously, but I would be a fool to say it couldn’t have had an impact on me. It is entirely possible that, because I was making decisions in an environment where Hillary Clinton was sure to be the next president, my concern about making her an illegitimate president by concealing the restarted investigation bore greater weight than it would have if the election appeared closer or if Donald Trump were ahead in all polls.
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James B. Comey (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership)
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awkward televised hug from the new president of the United States. My curtain call worked. Until it didn’t. Still speaking in his usual stream-of-consciousness and free-association cadence, the president moved his eyes again, sweeping from left to right, toward me and my protective curtain. This time, I was not so lucky. The small eyes with the white shadows stopped on me. “Jim!” Trump exclaimed. The president called me forward. “He’s more famous than me.” Awesome. My wife Patrice has known me since I was nineteen. In the endless TV coverage of what felt to me like a thousand-yard walk across the Blue Room, back at our home she was watching TV and pointing at the screen: “That’s Jim’s ‘oh shit’ face.” Yes, it was. My inner voice was screaming: “How could he think this is a good idea? Isn’t he supposed to be the master of television? This is a complete disaster. And there is no fricking way I’m going to hug him.” The FBI and its director are not on anyone’s political team. The entire nightmare of the Clinton email investigation had been about protecting the integrity and independence of the FBI and the Department of Justice, about safeguarding the reservoir of trust and credibility. That Trump would appear to publicly thank me on his second day in office was a threat to the reservoir. Near the end of my thousand-yard walk, I extended my right hand to President Trump. This was going to be a handshake, nothing more. The president gripped my hand. Then he pulled it forward and down. There it was. He was going for the hug on national TV. I tightened the right side of my body, calling on years of side planks and dumbbell rows. He was not going to get a hug without being a whole lot stronger than he looked. He wasn’t. I thwarted the hug, but I got something worse in exchange. The president leaned in and put his mouth near my right ear. “I’m really looking forward to working with you,” he said. Unfortunately, because of the vantage point of the TV cameras, what many in the world, including my children, thought they saw was a kiss. The whole world “saw” Donald Trump kiss the man who some believed got him elected. Surely this couldn’t get any worse. President Trump made a motion as if to invite me to stand with him and the vice president and Joe Clancy. Backing away, I waved it off with a smile. “I’m not worthy,” my expression tried to say. “I’m not suicidal,” my inner voice said. Defeated and depressed, I retreated back to the far side of the room. The press was excused, and the police chiefs and directors started lining up for pictures with the president. They were very quiet. I made like I was getting in the back of the line and slipped out the side door, through the Green Room, into the hall, and down the stairs. On the way, I heard someone say the score from the Packers-Falcons game. Perfect. It is possible that I was reading too much into the usual Trump theatrics, but the episode left me worried. It was no surprise that President Trump behaved in a manner that was completely different from his predecessors—I couldn’t imagine Barack Obama or George W. Bush asking someone to come onstage like a contestant on The Price Is Right. What was distressing was what Trump symbolically seemed to be asking leaders of the law enforcement and national security agencies to do—to come forward and kiss the great man’s ring. To show their deference and loyalty. It was tremendously important that these leaders not do that—or be seen to even look like they were doing that. Trump either didn’t know that or didn’t care, though I’d spend the next several weeks quite memorably, and disastrously, trying to make this point to him and his staff.
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James B. Comey (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership)
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I have spent a great deal of time looking back at 2016. And even though hindsight doesn’t always offer a perfect view, it offers a unique and valuable perspective. Like many others, I was surprised when Donald Trump was elected president. I had assumed from media polling that Hillary Clinton was going to win. I have asked myself many times since if I was influenced by that assumption. I don’t know. Certainly not consciously, but I would be a fool to say it couldn’t have had an impact on me. It is entirely possible that, because I was making decisions in an environment where Hillary Clinton was sure to be the next president, my concern about making her an illegitimate president by concealing the restarted investigation bore greater weight than it would have if the election appeared closer or if Donald Trump were ahead in all polls. But I don’t know.
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James B. Comey (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership)
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Putin wanted to help Donald Trump win. Trump had been saying favorable things about the Russian government and Putin had shown a long-standing appreciation for business leaders who cut deals rather than stand on principle.
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James B. Comey (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership)
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Then came that Friday, when WikiLeaks dumped twenty thousand Democratic Party emails in a move deliberately timed to disrupt our convention. The WikiLeaks emails—written by a wide range of DNC staff from the top leadership all the way down to the lowest employees—were carefully chosen to reveal senior members of the DNC staff speaking disrespectfully of Bernie and his supporters;
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Donna Brazile (Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House)
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What we need is leadership that can deal with our mess and begin to apply practical solutions to our problems. My goal is not to design hundreds of pages of government regulation and red tape like others propose. We need to outline commonsense policies and then knock some heads together if necessary to make them work. The fact is we are over-regulated. People can’t move. They’re stymied. Companies can’t be built. We’re over-regulated.
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Donald J. Trump (Great Again: How to Fix Our Crippled America)
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His departure would return the Trump organization to pure family control—the family and its functionaries, without an internal rival for brand meaning and leadership. From the family’s point of view, it would also—at least in theory—help facilitate one of the most implausible brand shifts in history: Donald Trump to respectability.
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Michael Wolff (Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House)
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Donald Trump’s presidency threatens much of what is good in this nation. We all bear responsibility for the deeply flawed choices put before voters during the 2016 election, and our country is paying a high price: this president is unethical, and untethered to truth and institutional values. His leadership is transactional, ego driven, and about personal loyalty. We are fortunate some ethical leaders have chosen to serve and to stay at senior levels of government, but they cannot prevent all of the damage from the forest fire that is the Trump presidency. Their task is to try to contain it.
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James B. Comey (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership)
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Labor unions have more and more been expressing their dismay about ObamaCare as they have realized in practice the thing isn't working. Recently the labor unions came to the Obama administration and said, We want an exemption too. Big businesses got an exemption, Members of Congress got an exemption. Shouldn't labor unions, shouldn't union bosses get an exemption? And with much fanfare the administration reportedly told them, No. I am going to make a prediction right here and now. If the Congress does not act, if we don't show leadership in defunding ObamaCare, if we don't stand together in imposing cloture on Friday, if we don't act to avert this train wreck for the American people, before the end of this President's term we are going to see him grant an exemption for labor unions. That has been the pattern. Friends, political buddies--they get a slap on the back. They get special treatment. It
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Ted Cruz (TED CRUZ: FOR GOD AND COUNTRY: Ted Cruz on ISIS, ISIL, Terrorism, Immigration, Obamacare, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Republicans,)
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The religious right and the alt-right are bonded together by shared grievances over a supposedly lost America in which Christians don’t have to bake cakes for gay couples and white people don’t have to bow to “multiculturalism” or “political correctness.” But this fused political bloc does not actually long for a mythical past of the formerly “great” America that Trump idealized for them. Instead, it envisions a future in which America, and the hard-won values it codified over the past seven decades—desegregation and church-state separation by the Supreme Court; laws passed by Congress to protect the rights of minorities such as the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the 1965 Immigration Act; the advance of rights for women and LGBTQ people—loses its standing as a moral and political leader in the world and is transformed into a nativist power that accords different rights to different groups of people, based on race, religion, and ethnicity. For the ideologues of this bloc, America has so lost its bearings that they must look now to leadership outside of the United States to lead it out of an abyss. Their shared target: modern, pluralistic liberal democracy that is led by what they would disparage as “globalists” who are destroying “Western civilization.
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Sarah Posner (Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump)
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They knew it on November 9 at 7:00 p.m. when they were planning on how to rebuild the party from the disaster of nominating a know-nothing racist for president, and they knew it at midnight, when they were all frantically calling the oddballs and kooks Trump had assembled into a campaign to lavishly praise their brilliance. The Republican Party stood by a candidate who ran on a religious test to enter the United States. They knew it was unconstitutional and indecent, but they were silent. All through 2016, I had conversations with what passed for leadership in the Republican Party on the need to stand up to Trump. Most of their responses went like this: “Trump is a disaster and a disgrace. But we have to let him lose on his own. If we, the establishment, put our thumbs on the scale, when he loses it will be our fault and not the fault of his racism, the alt-right, and those idiots at Breitbart. We will have elected Hillary Clinton. We have to let him lose and rebuild.
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Stuart Stevens (It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump)
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Why, per Freedom House, is democracy now "under assault and in retreat"? Why are many people in positions of power seeking to undermine public confidence in elections, the courts, the media, and--on the fundamental question of earth's future--science? Why have such dangerous splits been allowed to develop between rich and poor, urban and rural, those with a higher education and those without? Why has the United States--at least temporarily --abdicated its leadership in world affairs? And why, this far into the twenty-first century, are we once again talking about Fascism?
One reason, frankly, is Donald Trump. If we think of Fascism as a wound from the past that had almost healed, putting Trump in the White House was like ripping off the bandage and picking at the scab.
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Madeleine K. Albright (Fascism: A Warning)
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Russia is America’s Ghost of Christmas Future, a harbinger of things to come if we can’t adjust course and heal our political polarization. In the late 1980s and 1990s, Russia entered a promising period of democratization that was ultimately weakened by political upheavals and attempted coups, overwhelmed by economic crisis, and undermined by declining opportunity. Vladimir Putin was the first populist president of a major country in the twenty-first century. He came into the presidency at the end of 1999 promising to make Russia a great power again, blazing a restorationist political trail at home and abroad. Putin set a personalized, bravura style of leadership that others, including Donald Trump, sought to emulate. And over the next two decades Putin rolled back Russia’s democratic gains to firmly entrench himself in the Kremlin. First he served as president, then as prime minister, and then as president again. Each time he made adjustments to Russia’s political system, until finally, in 2020, he amended the constitution. In theory, Vladimir Putin can now stay in power until 2036. Under the guise of Putin strengthening the state and restoring its global position, Russia slowly succumbed to authoritarianism.
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Fiona Hill (There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century)
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He attacked the FBI’s leadership with demeaning names: “nut job,” “phony,” “ignorant fool,” “major sleazebag.” 14 His most aggressive assaults often came in response to specific investigations, acts of retaliation and intimidation aimed at undermining FBI inquiries into his administration’s ties to Russia. To Trump, anyone who was not with him was against him, including a vast array of government employees who were supposed to be loyal to the facts and the truth and the law—and not to the Trump White House.
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Julian E. Zelizer (The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: A First Historical Assessment)
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That's the imposter complex - the fear that by showing ourselves we will be exposed as the flawed person we are.
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James B. Comey (A Higher Loyalty Truth Lies and Leadership By James Comey & A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America By Carol D. Leonnig and Philip Rucker 2 Books Collection Set)
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I long ago learned that people tend to assume that you act and think the way they would in a similar situation. They project their worldview onto you, even if you see the world very differently.
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James B. Comey (A Higher Loyalty Truth Lies and Leadership By James Comey & A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America By Carol D. Leonnig and Philip Rucker 2 Books Collection Set)
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There was nothing illegal, for example, about naturalized American citizens like the Odessa-born billionaire oligarch Len Blavatnik and his businesses contributing millions to Mitch McConnell’s GOP Senate Leadership Fund and to the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, as he did in 2016.
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Craig Unger (American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery)
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Leadership takes two things Donald Trump notoriously and evidently lacks: character and an ability to engage in political acts that go beyond oneself.
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Rick Wilson (Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever)
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said in testimony, the very idea that my decision had any impact on the outcome leaves me feeling mildly nauseous (or, as one of my grammatically minded daughters later corrected me, “nauseated”). That’s not because Donald Trump is such a deeply flawed person and leader (so flawed that he likely misunderstood what I meant when I testified that the notion of impact on the election left me “mildly nauseous”). It leaves me feeling sick because I have devoted my life to serving institutions I love precisely
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James B. Comey (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership)
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Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York and currently the de facto leader of the country’s COVID-19 response, has committed not only the sin of insufficiently kissing Donald’s ass but the ultimate sin of showing Donald up by being better and more competent, a real leader who is respected and effective and admired. Donald can’t fight back by shutting Cuomo up or reversing his decisions; having abdicated his authority to lead a nationwide response, he no longer has the ability to counter decisions made at the state level. Donald can insult Cuomo and complain about him, but every day the governor’s real leadership further reveals Donald as a petty, pathetic little man—ignorant, incapable, out of his depth, and lost in his own delusional spin. What Donald can do in order to offset the powerlessness and rage he feels is punish the rest of us. He’ll withhold ventilators or steal supplies from states that have not groveled sufficiently. If New York continues not to have enough equipment, Cuomo will look bad, the rest of us be damned. Thankfully, Donald doesn’t have many supporters in New York City, but even some of those will die because of his craven need for “revenge.” What Donald thinks is justified retaliation is, in this context, mass murder.
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Mary L. Trump (Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man)
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When I joined the military, some 50 years ago,” Mattis wrote, “I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander in chief, with military leadership standing alongside.… “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try,” he continued. “Instead, he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership.
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Bob Woodward (Rage)
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Abraham Lincoln (1861-1865): Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States, is widely considered one of the greatest presidents in American history. He served during a time of great crisis, leading the country through the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. Lincoln was a strong leader and a skilled politician, and his leadership had a lasting impact on the country and the party.
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Jack Donahue (The Republican Party: From Abraham Lincoln to Donald Trump)
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The President, however, did instruct the Secretary of Health and Human Services, RFK Jr., to determine whether NPR and PBS are complying with the statutory mandate that no person shall be subjected to discrimination in employment on the grounds of race, color, religion, national origin or sex. All this based on the idea that our nation, now firmly under the leadership of white Christian men, must safeguard, at all costs, the marginalized, disfavored voices of white Christian men.
All others, excluding Trump allies, have risen to power through an unjust system.
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Brooke Gladstone
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Foreign nationals are prohibited from contributing to Senate races, but, according to the Dallas Morning News, during the 2015–16 election season, Ukrainian-born oligarch Leonard “Len” Blavatnik, who has British-American dual citizenship, put a small fraction of his $ 20 billion fortune into GOP Senate races. McConnell, who took $ 2.5 million for his GOP Senate Leadership Fund from two of Blavatnik’s companies, was the leading recipient. Others included political action committees for Senator Marco Rubio, Senator Lindsey Graham, Ohio governor John Kasich, and Arizona senator John McCain.
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Craig Unger (House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia)
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DONALD J. TRUMP WAS inaugurated the forty-fifth president of the United States on January 20, 2017, before a crowd whose number immediately and famously came into dispute. The new president was determined to demonstrate that the number of spectators who turned out for him, which was sizable, surpassed the number of people present for Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration. They did not. No evidence, photographic or otherwise, would move him off his view, which, as far as everyone but his press team seemed to agree, was simply false. This small moment was deeply disconcerting to those of us in the business of trying to find the truth, whether in a criminal investigation or in assessing the plans and intentions of America’s adversaries. Much of life is ambiguous and subject to interpretation, but there are things that are objectively, verifiably either true or false. It was simply not true that the biggest crowd in history attended the inauguration, as he asserted, or even that Trump’s crowd was bigger than Obama’s. To say otherwise was not to offer an opinion, a view, a perspective. It was a lie.
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James B. Comey (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership)
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The anti-Trump movement is a conspiracy by the powerful and connected to overturn the will of the American people. Among the co-conspirators are FBI officials illegally exonerating their favorite candidate of violating well-defined federal criminal statutes, first to help her get elected and then to frame Donald J. Trump for “Russia collusion” that never happened. It all began when members of the Obama administration, seeking a Hillary Clinton presidency and continuation of Obama’s platform, used the intelligence community to spy on the campaign of the Republican candidate for president. But once the unelected Deep State got on board, the anti-Trump conspiracy grew from mere dirty politics to an assault on our republic itself. Continuing beyond Election Day and throughout President Trump’s term to date, the LYING, LEAKING, LIBERAL Establishment has sought to nullify the decision of the American people and continue the globalist, open-border oligarchy that the people voted to dismantle in 2016. The perpetrators of this anti-American plot include, but are not limited to, the leadership at the FBI, the CIA, NSA, and other intelligence agencies, the Democrat Party, and perhaps even the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) courts. And let’s not forget the media and entertainment industries that are waging a nonstop propaganda campaign that would render envious their counterparts in the worst totalitarian states of history. Yes, this is a conspiracy, and you and anyone who loves the America described in our founding documents, are among its victims. The rule of law has become irrelevant and politically motivated fiction has become truth.
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Jeanine Pirro (Liars, Leakers, and Liberals: The Case Against the Anti-Trump Conspiracy)
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In some cases, the companies started out fine, and made the decisions to take ethical shortcuts, usually because of a lethal combination of market forces and unethical staff (including leadership). In Twitter’s case, we can almost pinpoint the exact second this happened: It’s when they measured a Donald Trump tweet that broke their guidelines against the engagement it was getting, decided to leave it, and started defending that decision.
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Mike Monteiro (Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It)
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Donald Trump’s presidency threatens much of what is good in this nation.
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James B. Comey (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership)
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It is entirely possible that, because I was making decisions in an environment where Hillary Clinton was sure to be the next president, my concern about making her an illegitimate president by concealing the restarted investigation bore greater weight than it would have if the election appeared closer or if Donald Trump were ahead in all polls. But I don’t know.
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James B. Comey (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership)
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I would need that culture of truth, and habit of true listening, when the FBI ended up, improbably and unexpectedly, in the middle of the 2016 election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
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James B. Comey (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership)
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Whatever world would say; however, as a fact, Russia, in the leadership of Vladimir Putin has given a historical, lesson and the silent defeat to the United States of America in both ways, the diplomatic and war strategy. After, retreating from Afghanistan by the American made Taliban including Bin Laden. Since that and the Iraq war till present, USA has lost its incredibility in world eyes and failed to build peace, harmony, and equality within small and large states of the world. Now, Donald Trump, even though his political speeches meet hard critical responses, but it seems that he will restore, and achieve the American image of justice and peace for everyone. Otherwise, the failure is its destiny that, may collapse the unity within states of it, as in the Soviet Union.
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Ehsan Sehgal
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Hardly anyone has weakened democracy from within as much as the 45th president of the United States, Donald Trump. But it would be uninteresting, predictable, and unjust to write about his failings without even briefly illuminating the other side of the coin. The polarization of American society is certainly not only or even primarily his work. Left-wing politics has contributed its share too, by being increasingly disconnected from the priorities and needs of large parts of the population and full of self-righteousness. Also, if one disregards Trump’s narcissistic self-dramatization and an erratic political style that shows little respect for democratic institutions, one sees an administration that made three important course corrections: the economic decoupling from dictatorships, especially China; the growing pressure on Europe to fund and strengthen NATO; and a critical stance against the abusive market-dominating practices of Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and, most importantly, Chinese surveillance tools and platforms. These policies have all been continued in Joe Biden’s presidency. In style and language, their differences are vast; in substance, strikingly few. Underplaying Trump’s leadership on these fronts does no favors to a substantive critique of his democracy-damaging legacy. From the beginning of his presidential bid, Donald Trump used aggressive and incendiary language, presented simplistic worldviews, and pointedly depicted his opponents as the enemy (US, the good guys, versus THEM, the bad guys). This is the emotional fuel of polarization. His rapid rise was based in part on relativizing racism, and throughout his term, Trump downplayed any cases of police violence against blacks, including the murder of George Floyd in 2020, as isolated incidents. He called protests against racism “un-American.” Deeply associated with Donald Trump’s administration are the terms “fake news” and “alternative facts.” And it is here that lie the most dangerous, democracy-damaging legacies of his time in office. Fake news has been around as long as news has been around. For thousands of years, it spread as rumors in the marketplaces and gossip behind closed doors. Today, it spreads globally within seconds on social media. So fake news is not new. It’s just become more dangerous. And it becomes a problem for democracy when social groups, political parties, or NGOs accuse the other side of falsifying facts and label facts that do not serve their own agenda as fake. Trump not only reinforced this tendency, he elevated it in his political communications and campaigns.
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Mathias Döpfner (Dealings with Dictators: A CEO's Guide to Defending Democracy)
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In February 2017, a month after Donald J. Trump’s inauguration, Christopher Caldwell, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, delivered a speech about Putin at the Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Phoenix, Arizona.
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Jacob Heilbrunn (America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators)
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Through the storm of modern dilemmas, Donald Trump stands as the beacon of tradition, safeguarding our future and the sanctity of family, ensuring that the breath of freedom will be inherited by our grandchildren. His voluntary crusade against the tides of disruptive ideologies is not just leadership - it's a legacy in the making.
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Guru Z.S. Gill