Political Norms Quotes

So little of what makes a democracy work is written down. So much of it is just the things you don't do. There are a lot of things that a prime minister or a president can do and they don't do them because it never occurs to them to do them.

Donald Trump has taken a battering ram to longstanding political norms - the unwritten conventions that make governance possible. But even before he decided to run for president, those norms were under assault.

It's unusual for elected officials to step outside of the box.

To me, the biggest lesson I've learned up till now with two weeks to go before the election, and the thing I have to keep, sort of, taking myself back to kind of parse, is just how powerful a personality can be when it is as not worried about norms or shame as a normal person.

I am a very conservative person. And there are a lot of things that Donald Trump's government or administration is doing that I might agree with. The point is we have to defend the rules of the game. And one of the things that has empowered Donald Trump is that not enough people are serious enough about defending the rules of the game, maybe because they don't understand how endangered those rules are.

People who champion Trump say they don't want politics-as-usual. But 'politic' is also an adjective. It means 'tactful and diplomatic.' It's necessary for an elected official to be politic.

No one ever built the filibuster rule. It just kind of was created.

I want to caucus in Iowa. I'll caucus all over the state. I don't caucus in California. You don't caucus where you live. It doesn't look good.

In their day, no man worthy of the presidency would ever stoop to campaigning for it. George Washington was asked to serve. Decades later, his successors were also expected to sit by the phone.

As for the President-elect [Donald Trump], he has his own views on things, and this is also fairly natural.

Mr. Roosevelt, when you are in Washington as long as I have been, you will learn that the President of the United States calls on nobody.

No one can change the definition of what behavior is presidential because that definition fundamentally depends on what our form of government requires, not on what one individual prefers.

If Obama was fundamentally different from prior presidents, Trump seems to violate every tenet of what Americans have long sought as our national image.

In Washington, common sense policy is considered bold.

Obviously in the Senate we have all types of different people, all kinds of different folks that have come from all types of different backgrounds - and I think that’s part of that sense of entitlement that he gives off is that, almost like, I served my country, let me into the Senate. But that’s not how it works in Arkansas.

Senator Bernie Sanders saying in effect that he wants Washington to operate under the old rules, where someone like Steve Bannon would never be allowed to visit the White house, never mind work there.

Up until Trump announced his candidacy, the conventional wisdom was that you had to be a professional politician in order to run. You had to have a background that was politically scrubbed. In other words, smart people who didn't live perfect lives could never run.

We are in a new era, a new era where campaign rules certainly don't apply, and who knows what other rules don't apply.

The American political system is based on the president taking the initiative and Congress responding. With President Trump, it's been the opposite.

I still maintain that you cannot treat [Donald] Trump, analyze Trump, destroy Trump the way politics says you destroy people that are running for office. I don't think the standard, ordinary operating procedures work.

I just think it's weird that Donald Trump wants to be an executive producer of a TV show while he's President of the United States. I agree with Newt Gingrich. He doesn't have to do that.

The Democrats are incapable of even being accused of violating political correctness, so they don't even worry about it. The Democrats have really grown accustomed, however, to Republicans not attacking, not criticizing them.

For me, the thing that is different about Trump is that you don't realize it, and I didn't realize it, but there is a rhythm that the political press - including myself - expects people to show in terms of embarrassing statements or shameful acts. And that is spinning it away and finally being forced to apologize, and then apologize again.

The British electors will not vote for a man who doesn’t wear a hat.

The one thing I've said to [Donald Trump] directly, and I would advise my Republican friends in Congress and supporters around the country, is just make sure that, as we go forward certain norms, certain institutional traditions don't get eroded, because there's a reason they're in place.