Chris Kofinis Quotes

If you think about what folks have been doing for 20 or 30 years, they have been bottling frustration and resentment that the political elites don't understand them, that the political elites don't care about them, that the political elites judge them in various ways. All Donald Trump does is provide the opposite of those things.

They have acted like carnivores who used the world to enrich only themselves, and whether it's the election of Donald Trump, or Brexit, the elites have realized that the people have stopped listening to them, that the people want to determine their futures and, in a perfectly democratic framework, regain control of their destiny.

Populists feed on democratic dysfunction. As long as democratic elites and institutions in advanced industrial democracies remain unable or unwilling to tackle the myriad challenges facing their societies, we should expect populism to remain an attractive political option.

After thirty years of a collapsing middle class,” he writes, “after thirty years of an economy designed to stack the deck in favor of the big guys; after thirty years of a political and constitutional system increasingly rigged to work for economic elites — after all this, the people revolted.

I think that liberalism and the centrist governing elite of this country need to learn lessons from the Trump phenomenon. It is part of the way that the country is governed and the country is shaped that induces spasms of populism, including spasms of bigoted populism.

Trump was able to convey - oddly enough a message from a billionaire who lives in Manhattan - a genuine concern for people who felt kind of left off, who felt offended by all the political correctness they see around them.

I happen to think Donald Trump is crazy, but that's not an economic message.

The critics of Donald Trump are looking for people to blame for his rise. There are many people who are either surprised by his strength or don't like him and want to blame someone to explain why he has been this popular.

The fact that populism is flourishing internationally, far from the Electoral College and Fox News, suggests that Trump's specific faults might actually be propping up American liberalism.

Trump has seized the Republican nomination by finding scapegoats for the economic hardships and disintegrating lives of working-class whites while giving these voters a reassuring but false promise of their restoration to the center of American life.

The Trump phenomenon might feel both interminable and unprecedented to Republican elites, but of course it isn't.

The two candidates have very different visions of America. Donald Trump's is very dark: Things are not going well. There are dark days ahead unless you make a change, and he's the one to fix it.

I do not think it is a coincidence that young people gravitated toward populist voices in the French election and that the two issue positions where Donald Trump and young voters seem to agree most - global engagement and trade - are rooted in populism.

With Donald J. Trump's arrival to power, many feel astonished by the growth of populism. Others analyze with extreme care the decline of companies that measure public opinion. I am saddened to watch the lack of temperament and political stability of those who 'represent' a trend or ideology.

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

Little things had to go wrong for Donald Trump to become president: Comey, emails, all that stuff. Big things did make Trump possible. Big, cultural, political, economic forces opened the door to someone like Trump.

If there's one epithet the Right never tires of, it's 'elitism.'

In the 2016 U.S. presidential election, celebrity endorsements possibly damaged Hillary Clinton, since they allowed Donald Trump to emphasise that she was part of an out-of-touch elite. That is ironic, given that Mr Trump owed his election victory to his own celebrity status on a TV reality show.

I don't believe that all folks who supported Donald Trump are racist. I think that there was a lot of economic anxiety, there was a lot of economic panic. A lot of deep-rooted economic insecurity. I think what Trump did, you know, very astutely, was he tapped into this vein, and he promised them a job.

People are tired of the politics of Donald Trump. l really do believe that.

Maybe this is my left-wing conspiracy theory, but the right has re-branded itself as kind of the everyman party: Who's the person you'd rather have a beer with? The Republican Party, even though it's a party of incredible wealth and corporate interests, has hidden behind this everyman quality.

Brexit is a harbinger for Trump, really.

Many of the nation’s 59 prior presidential elections have been choices between mediocrities, with some scoundrels thrown in (and into office). This year’s choice is, however, the worst ever.

Stevenson had noble ideas--as did the young Franklin for that matter. But Stevenson felt that the way to implement them was to present himself as a thoughtful idealist and wait for the world to flock to him. He considered it below him, or wrong, to scramble out among the people and ask them what they wanted. Roosevelt grappled voters to him. Stevenson shied off from them. Some thought him too pure to desire power, though he showed ambition when it mattered.

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