Political Outsider Quotes

Texans and independent voters like to vote for somebody who is going to buck the status quo, and isn't going to do as he is told.

I think Donald Trump was successful in capturing "drain the swamp, change Washington, a big screw-you to the status quo" - which has already been ironic since election night. But it was one of his big messages, and there's a broader sense of how to address the feelings of so many people left behind by the economy.

As many have noted, Donald Trump's presidency is an insurgency. Mr. Trump himself is the quintessential insurgent, doing battle with a disingenuous and entrenched establishment.

People are fed up with the career politicians who created this mess or failed to prevent it and neither was acceptable, and the only way we could change that was by sending a different type of person to Washington.

The traditional media never gave Bernie Sanders the time of day. But he went viral the same way hip-hop and new dances go viral. And I'm part of that culture.

Bernie Sanders started off at about three percent himself and skyrocketed as word got out about him.

I don't buy the argument that there can't be a successful independent candidacy for the presidency of the United States. People who say, 'It can't happen,' are many of the same people who said we'd never elect an African American.

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

The very things that I would love about Barack and that you would love about Barack is that he is one of us. He's a normal guy. He's not a political animal.

The AAP was not the first group of well-meaning outsiders in politics.

Donald Trump heard a voice out in America that no one else heard.

The Sanders campaign showed that a candidate with mildly progressive programs could win the nomination, maybe the election, even without the backing of the major funders or any media support. There's good reason to suppose that Sanders would have won the nomination had it not been for shenanigans of the Obama-Clinton party managers. He is now the most popular political figure in the country by a large margin.

What we are doing in this campaign [2016], it just blows my mind every day because I see it clearly, we're taking on not only Wall Street and economic establishment, we're taking on the political establishment.

There's one way of looking at the Trump phenomenon that he's essentially a Doofus or he is an opportunist.

[Donald Trump] ran an extraordinarily unconventional campaign and it resulted in the biggest political upset in perhaps modern political history. American history.

I may be controversial, but my allegiance is to people outside the Beltway.

In 2012 there was a megafoolish, if well-funded, effort by a group called Americans Elect to raise an independent Cincinnatus to run for president via an Internet draft. It flopped, spectacularly.

Donald Trump is a genuine outsider.

The fact of the matter, it's that Trump is getting money from blue-collar workers who send him checks for $250. Why? Who is Donald Trump? It's not who he is, it's who he isn't. Not what he is for, what he is against - that is, everything Washington is doing.

Trump represents a vibrant and fed-up mass of people who see the Republican Party as standing for nothing, so they have turned to someone who can beat the party by standing for anything.

It's gotta be hard when you are a newcomer to this kind of thing, this big political scene and you have somebody like Michael Bloomberg come in with hundreds of millions of dollars, dumping it in.

I think that [Donald Trump] clearly was able to tap into a lot of grievances. And he has a talent for making a connection with his supporters that overrode some of the traditional benchmarks of how you'd run a campaign or conduct yourself as a presidential candidate. What will be interesting to see is how that plays out during the course of his presidency.

Donald Trump is an extremist leader who came out of nowhere. He's self-financed, recruits through social media, attracts his followers with a radical ideology to take over the world, and is actively trying to promote a war between Islam and the West.

Another similarity of Brexit and Trump's campaigns was an attack on so-called elites. This is not so much a failure of capitalism as of its high priests in the economic profession, for which we must all take some responsibility.

The thing about Donald Trump, he is a different candidate.