Frank Bruni Quotes

Donald Trump is basically giving voice to a lot of people who have felt that they were voiceless.

Trump - the American people have spoken. He definitely touched a chord in this country. I don't think we as a country can ignore that. There are people in this country that felt their voices were not heard, and now I think everybody is listening.

At the same time, you had Barack Obama as a president. You had Hillary Clinton on track, all the Democrats looking good. And, you know, Donald Trump was just an entertaining buffoon to watch. And, over time, you came to realize that Donald Trump was appealing to a lot of people with his populist message. And, slowly, I think, even as a show, we started shifting in tone as the election started shifting.

If Donald Trump's candidacy has proven anything, it's that the media has no idea what Americans care about.

I think a lot of the people that stand by Donald Trump are deplorable. And the things that they say are deplorable.

I think people have made their minds up about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. They love them and hate them - love them or hate them.

It's phenomenal the kind of support Donald Trump has, despite the best efforts to suppress it, and those efforts are being made, I think it's profound, the number of people.

It’s very simple: If you try to win elections by talking to the elites of this country, you’re going to get your ass kicked — there are not enough Beyonces, Oprahs or Hollywood elites to elect anyone. Trump is not the disease. He is the symptom. The disease is political, cultural, and economic elites who keep telling the public what they should think, feel and believe.

I think cable television is wobbling and I think people aren't going to forget what happened - because you had a situation where one of the candidates was hated, not just disagreed with, hated. You can't have that. If you hate somebody, I've got to step aside or I need tell the audience look, I hate this person. You know I'm not going to give you an objective view of them. But they didn't do that about Donald Trump.

The surge in right-wing populism and the phenomenon of Trump are related. You can think of them together as the same problem.

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 lesson is that voters in both parties are in a very anti-establishment, populist mood. Hillary Clinton is the establishment candidate.

I don't think that Donald Trump's gonna look at his approval numbers and say, "Wow, the American people don't want what I want to do. I better change." I don't think he's gonna change his agenda. To have put up with all of this to date already says a mouthful. It already explains a lot to have put up with this, to have not lost his cool. And, by the way, on all of these tweets and all these allegations, all these predications, he ends up being right.

I think Donald Trump is truly a populist.

I think we've had two presidents in a row that tried to unite the American people and both of them failed, quite frankly. And I think Donald Trump has decided he's going to get things done. That's going to be his measuring rod.

The Democrats are still not being honest with themselves about what happened to them. You know, a lot of people voted for Donald Trump knowing full well what the baggage was. They didn't care. The Trump election was, in fact, about issues. It was dead-set on issues, and this is what the media refuses to understand. They know it; they just don't want to believe it, and they don't want to acknowledge it. They think that it was an election about Hillary Clinton being a rotten candidate.

The most active people in the country know different things, and because each one tends to hear mostly and deal mostly with people with whom they agree, they are reinforced not simply in the conviction that they are right, which is totally appropriate, but that they are the majority. So you have both sides, the Left and the Right, thinking that the majority of the country is really with them.

Donald Trump is an unstable charlatan who is appealing to the worst instincts in people, and I believe ultimately the American people are going to reject that.

Despite the bigoted nature of Donald Trump's plan to keep Muslims - all Muslims out of this country and almost universal condemnation of that plan by prominent Republican leaders, new polling out suggests that what Trump wants to do may be perfectly acceptable to rank and file GOP voters.

How does conservatism find its way into the body politic? I think most people actually live their lives that way, but they have been poisoned into not voting that way because the brand - conservatism brand, Republican brand - has been summarily destroyed over the years.

I understand what's going on in people's minds, and I think the political leaders better be asking themselves 'why is it, that Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Bernie Sanders and maybe even others are having the impact that they are having?'

There are millions of people fed up with this daily diet of drivel from the Drive-By Media. But the media thinks everybody in America is waiting with bated breath for Trump to be convicted. They're totally, totally out of touch. The disconnect between everything going on in Washington and the real country has never been wider.

Don't listen to me. I'm not a politician. I know nothing about politics. But people are cheering when something very bad happens to him [Donald Trump]. So that's got to make you think before voting for him.

Instead of engaging on the merits and saying, "Well, we want an open border, you know, we really do," and that's all good for America because they know the people will reject that, they [the elites] attack Donald Trump as an extremist, which I think is unfair.

I mean, voters had that kind of faith in Barack Obama and they had that kind of faith in Bill Clinton, but people having it in Donald Trump, since they think Trump is a bumpkin to begin with, that anybody who has blind faith in Trump's got to be an even bigger bumpkin.