Daniel Fried Quotes

I have directed all of my cabinet to work to prepare a transition plan for the incoming administration.

We now know that Mike Pence - Vice President-elect Mike Pence is going to be in charge of the transition replacing Chris Christie.

In this case, the government will essentially be run by the people who are running it now. The top level [Barack] Obama appointees will leave by inauguration day.

There certainly is a pattern of administrations that have good transitions, George W. Bush to Barack Obama, and administrations that have really bad transitions, I would say Dwight Eisenhower to John F. Kennedy. I would say this is beginning to look like a bad transition, from Barack Obama to Donald Trump as they begin to argue even at the presidential level, which is more or less unprecedented.

I was honored when [Donald Trump] asked me to chair the transition effort.

I think there was a pretty smooth hand-off from the administration of President Clinton to the administration of President Bush, particularly in the counterterrorism area. The reason I say that is because there was, for transitions, I think a stunning continuity.

It is certainly not unrealistic to think we could have elections by mid-year 2004 and when a sovereign government is installed - my job here will be done.

Naming a transition team varies with the intentions of the candidate; some candidates have been careful to name a transition team as much as a year in advance.

As for meetings, I think the President-elect [Donald Trump] should be given an opportunity to first form his administration and assume office. Meetings will come next.

Whenever a new president comes in, people that are used to the previous president wonder if he has the same capacity.

President Bush says now he is sticking to his plan for handing over power to the Iraqis on June 30. It's also part of his plan to hand over power to John Kerry on January 20.

Have a deputy and develop a successor. Don't be consumed by the job or you'll risk losing your balance. Keep your mooring lines to the outside world - family, friends, neighbors, people out of government, and people who may not agree with you.

I think people should start to practice the words 'President Romney.'

[Donald Trump] has to have and he said he is going to have a transition element for those states, like in Florida, he's, you know, Republican governors who have put in some form of it. They has to be a transition through it.

I'm just learning that according to a source familiar with the transition process, President-elect Donald Trump intends to select Lieutenant General Michael Flynn as his national security adviser.

As far as I understand, the president-elect of the United States [Donald Trump] is ready for such joint work. We do not know yet what it will be like in actual practice. We have to wait for him to take office and form his administration.

Join me in welcoming the next president of the United States, Paul Ryan.

I am told that very early on in this transition process, to expect that [Donald] Trump will announce his nominee for the Supreme Court.

The [Donald] Trump transition team is already functioning as the worst transition team we have ever seen. And the good news is the slower they do their work, the better off we are.

This thing about getting rid of a man in the Cabinet is all right, but there is one bad feature to it that few people realize. That is, that unfortunately every one of them is replaced by someone else. If it wasn't for that, this resignation business would be great.

You have a lot of unfinished business, but obviously every president who leaves, particularly after two terms, can point to many different areas where there has been progress and there has been change.

When this president was sworn into office, he was handed a deficit of over a trillion dollars. Republicans were in control of Congress for much of the time that President George W. Bush was in office, and they didn't do a great job of controlling spending.

..Such practices and beliefs, which interfere with happiness, are neither inevitable nor necessary; they evolved by chance, as a result of random responses to accidental conditions. But once they become part of the norms and habits of a culture, people assume that this is how things must be; they come to believe they have no other options.

I've never believed unemployment numbers because the way that they calculate unemployment makes no sense whatsoever. It's not how many people are unemployed. It's how many people are actively looking for a job.

Ultimately, it's not your job, as an actress, to satisfy people's expectations or image of who you should be. Even in your life, you are just who you are.