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David Cay Johnston

250 quotes

“The other old democracy... was in Athens. ...Aristotle said democracy means "to rule and to be ruled in turns"... because the system... was designed to ensure that nobody would... cease power. ...Different clans had to be together. You couldn't be segregated. ...[E]very month a different group was in charge. ...[I]t worked for 200 years. [Much of] our Constitution is based... on the experience of Ancient Athens, of .”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All of the Founders of this country... were well steeped in the history of the ancient world. ...[T]hey were very concerned about the rabble... about people being inflamed, and making bad decisions, and ruining this idea they had. ...In many places you weren't allowed to vote if you were just a wage earner. The theory, and this came out of the horrible system of the Dutch in Hudson Valley, where ordinary people would be told by their boss, who to vote for. But if you were a no one could tell you what to do.”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[O]ur Consitution... is designed to be slow and hard to change. It takes six years to get rid of all the scalawags in office today. ...[I]t's designed to be conservative, and it has a very interesting backstop. ...The has a second purpose... to have an ultimate backstop if the people went for a zealot, or a crazy person, to be president of the United States. ...[T]hat [the elector] would vote [his] conscious and say "No, the popular will here is wrong. This person will destroy our democracy.”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And then we get a man who hasn't done a single day of public service in his life, and he has a rabid following. This is a man whose lawyers... in court two weeks ago said that "Yes... if he were to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue no law enforcement agency could investigate. He is immune.”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are always people who want a tyrant. Democracy requires work if it's going to work.”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the things that changed was [that] the institutions that supported working people have been decimated. ...[T]he Democrats, the party of the working people, played a role in this. They allowed the weakening... of unions. They bought the argument that unions are bad for companies.”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Japan has mandatory unions. ...It's in their Constitution, and who wrote their Constitution? ...The staff of... General Douglas MacArthur, because he knew that if Japan had unions it would democratize the country, it would tend to equalize incomes, and it would help resist the bellicose tendencies of the aristocratic class in Japan. And it's worked brilliantly.”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We're all interdependent. Don't think about exploiting and mining other people because we're all interdependent. ...You say that today and people say, "Oh, you're a socialist!”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Bill O'Reilly... called me a socialist, and I said "Interestingly, my books champion competitive markets," but I understand people like Bill think that competitive markets are a socialist scheme, because they just want to mine the public and make all the money they can, with no regard for anybody else.”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Those organizations that were focused on the New Testament and the idea that you have an obligation to your fellow man and to provide people with a means to interface with government... That's just shriveled away like unions have. ...[W]hat's risen in their place? Corporate America.”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Corporations are good things. They encourage people to take risk. They're smart vehicles for building wealth, but they also have to be controlled. ...[T]he reason is, they are soulless entities. A corporation has no morals and its purpose is to make money. ...If we have to induce diabetes in millions of children by getting them to drink sugary soft drinks and eat too many french fries and greasy hamburgers, [corporations will] do that.”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We have to... channel... greed so that it becomes useful to our society.”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Adolf Hitler had a really deep philosophy. ...It came out of a hundred years of German and Polish and Austrian and Russian and Belarus and Ukrainian philosophy about the "Demon Jews" and the Romanis and the "cripples”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]here are people in this country looking at what's going on... and either for themselves or someone they think they can put in that [tyrannical] position. ...Every politician has people around them who are going to promote them. ...There are people... that realize that Americans have become so disconnected... so amenable to messages like "all taxes are bad."... Tax is the most vile three-letter word in America.”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Trying to get people to understand, as I'm going to try and do in my next book, that we can have a wholly different tax system that will actually make us wealthier... 'The Prosperity Tax'... It's going to be a tough sell because so many people have been brainwashed on this. ...Trying to tell them that we created this country so that we could tax ourselves.”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Think about someone who's like Donald Trump in that he has... charisma... You've got to give it to Donald, he's a great con man. He's got these audiences wrapped around his finger. People who believe literally... He looks up to the sky. He implies that he's God. Did you see any pastors or rabbis or imams saying that's sacrilegious?”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So imagine somebody who has Donald's charisma, but first rate management skills... actually knows how to be an executive and get things done, how to prioritize, how to follow-up, how to select people and hold them accountable, and who doesn't believe you should be able to question what he does.”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That's what I'm worried about... the tyrant next time.”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]hroughout his adult life Trump sought out—and worked closely with—more than a score of criminals, including Mafia associates, Russian mob associates, violent felons, con artists, swindlers, and most significant of all, the embezzler and mob associate Joseph Weichselbaum, a thrice-convicted felon. ...[W]hen Trump was the big man in Atlantic City, he got his helicopters to bring his high-rollers in and out of town through a company formed by Weichselbaum. ...Spy ...reported that Weichselbaum ...personally piloted the Trumps [in the Ivana, Trump’s personal helicopter]. ...Weichselbaum also had another business: importing drugs from Colombia...”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) first seen 2016 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Drug Trafficker Donald Trump Risked His Casino Empire to Protect" (Oct. 19, 2016) "The Donald and his sister, federal judge Maryanne Trump Barry, both took helicopter flights with a guy who had a lot of ways to get …
“Almost two cents of every dollar reported as losses one year by everyone in the United States, were reported by Donald Trump. ...He's a terrible business man. His business model is not to get an enterprise, to nurture it, to grow it, to make it more profitable over time. His business model is the same as a mob bust-out. ...[S]queeze all the cash out... don't pay your vendors, try to cheat as best you can your employees, don't pay the bankers... Trump once said, "I borrowed money knowing I wouldn't pay it back," and then leave the carcass and go on to the next deal. ...Trump's business model is to rip off one person after another who gets involved with him, thinking he will make them wealthy, while he is destroying their wealth.”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) first seen 2019 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Billion Dollar Loser: NYT Report on Trump’s Taxes & Massive Losses May Prompt Fraud Investigation" (May 8, 2019) DemocracyNow! interview with Amy Goodman.
“[I]n 1997... Congress passed what its sponsors promoted as a tax cut for the middle class... Buried in that law were many tax breaks for the rich... notably a sharp reduction... on long term capital gains, the source of two thirds of the incomes of the top 400. ...For years the IRS found big tax evaders by looking into people whose reported income did not seem sufficient to support their lifestyle... But the 1997 law stopped such inquiries. ...Lee Shepherd ...said the law "should be called the mobsters and drug dealers tax relief act of 1997." ...1997 cuts for the rich were not enough ...Under ...President Bush in 2001 ...their income going to taxes would slip further ...”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Conservatism... means we take the things that we know work and we keep... and maintain them. ...[I]f you want to try something new... you're careful... you're cautious... you're skeptical of it. If it turns out it works we'll try incorporating that, but we have a great skepticism about doing that. Well, that's not what we got. We got radical ideas that no one else in the world is doing. ...[T]hese other countries are having fewer problems, and their middle class is better off, because they didn't do these radical things. They were in fact, conservative. Now the things they did, we might view as liberal, but they were conservative in hanging on to those things.”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We were promised that... markets would provide solutions. A lot of my book is a defense of markets. The Supreme Court says a market is where independent parties, neither under duress or coercion, and with knowledge of the facts, come to an agreement on a price. That's not what a lot of our new markets do. We now have markets designed to thwart competition... Adam Smith's invisible hand of the market, in which there are lots of sellers, and smart consumers who can compare prices, and this drives prices down... to the lowest level at which businesses can continue to operate. We've replaced that, through government policies, with practices that artificially restrict competition... raise prices... inflate profits; all under the guise of conservatism, and "the markets will solve our problems.”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Fundamentally I argue in Free Lunch what's happened is, that a narrow segment of our society, large corporations which are immortal and amoral... They're necessary, they're important, they are great producers of wealth, but there's reasons that you want to regulate and control entities that are both amoral; their purpose is to maximize return to capital, which is a perfectly good thing to do, but they have no other obligation... [T]hey are immortal. Unless they mess up in the marketplace they go on forever, unlike you and I... Unless we have rules that govern their conduct, they can do enormous damage to our society; and we have had a massive effort to collect subsidies from the government, to get rid of government employees and replace them with private sector workers who typically cost twice as much. So the federal work force has gone down... but the number of people who are paid by the federal government to work is going up; and the cost per... labor-hour is going up enormously. ...Unlike creating a bureaucracy ...empire-building bureaucrats, now you have a corporation that makes campaign contributions to encourage more of this ...and more contracts and... money flowing their direction.”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The ... is... fundamental to the American Revolution and it is taught the wrong way in American schools. ...There's a wonderful book called The Boston Tea Party by Professor [Labaree]... where he... got the British records... and the American records. ...It was a protest against a ...a government tax favor to the politically connected friends of King George who owned this royal monopoly, The East India Company. They mismanaged it because... in a competitive environment managers who can't run the business are gotten rid of, or they go out of business. But in a monopoly you can mismanage for a long time, and the same thing with a and an , where there's a... scintilla of competition among a few firms. ...[T]hey were going to go bankrupt because they had all this tea that they couldn't sell, and they were going to replace a market in Boston... 7 out of 10 cups of tea drunk in November and December of 1773 were Dutch tea, but under this law that was being protested, there would be a monopoly, and only British tea could be drunk. ...[P]eople understood that ...would ...mean higher prices ...less competition ...If we have such a fundamental misunderstanding of how the country got started, then we're going to have fundamentally flawed policies that flow out of these myths.”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[A] lot of people have looked around after 28 years, from when they were promised all these things by Ronald Reagan... [and] realized that for the bottom 90% of Americans incomes are unchanged... even though the country is more than twice as wealthy in real terms, and productivity per capita is up 70%; for every dollar the economy put out back then, per person, in real terms, it puts our $1.70 today. And they've said, "Where's the beef?" ...[T]hat disconnect is ...opening up an opportunity to get people to see what the government has done that's contrary to their interests, because Adam Smith said "Any policy that benefits the majority of the people must be a good thing for the society.”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the stories that I tell in Free Lunch when I talk about the hedge fund business in the United States and the hedge fund managers who pay taxes at the same rate as janitors... a 15% tax rate on their incomes... The average hedge fund manager in 2006, remember the hedge fund managers keep telling us that if you raise our taxes the whole economy be negatively affected, said that it was not fair to have them pay more than a 15% rate. Of course, school teachers and reporters pay 25% or 31%. Well-to-do Americans pay 35% and... the top hedge fund manager's average income was only $11 million... a week! But they can't afford the taxes.”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you go... to the big stadiums where we are subsidizing commercial sports, $2 billion a year taxpayer subsidies to baseball, basketball, football and hockey. All the new facilities have these luxury boxes. Most of them are owned by companies, almost all of them are, which are a tax deductible expense. You want to buy a ticket to a baseball game, you pay with your after-tax dollar. People in the luxury box, this is a business expense because they're entertaining clients, and so you're subsidizing this because they're getting a deduction, and... the subsidy payments that you're making for these new stadiums are being used also to create private walkways, so that the wealthy that go to these boxes don't have to mingle with the likes of you and me, and we're the ones who are putting up the money so that they don't have to be with us!”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The most widely read literature in Western Civilization is Jane Austen and her stories are about these young women... They're looking at these young men... "Oh, Mr. Darcey has 10,000... Mr. So & so has 5,000," and what they're talking about is... the British finance system in the 1700s and 1800s where wealthy people loaned... large amounts to the crown and were paid interest. ...All the crown had to do then was raise enough taxes from the poor and the middle class, to the extent there was one, to pay the interest. ...[W]hat have we been doing since 1980. Ronald Reagan came in saying he wanted a balanced budget. We last had a balanced budget under Richard Nixon. We have seen budget deficits grow enormously over the years to the point where the federal debt, not adjusted to inflation, was just under $1 trillion when Ronald Reagan came into office, and by the time George Bush leaves, it will be $10 trillion. ...Over $400 billion a year is just going to pay interest on the national debt. That means it's money we don't have for higher education, for infrastructure improvements so we don't have have bridges collapse and kill people in Minnesota when they're commuting home from work. So we don't have pinch points that are costing us billions and billions of dollars because we can't efficiently move goods around the country. We don't have it for all sorts of things that would grease the wheels of commerce and make us wealthier.”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This practice of borrowing is a practice that in the long run will make us less wealthy. The practice of spending money we don't have inherently, in the long run, has to make you less wealthy, unless you're spending it for things that add value to your society. So if you're borrowing to build... the Erie Canal, the Interstate Highway system, to educate young people so that their productive minds will make more value in the future, you're making an investment in the future. That's not what we're doing with our borrowing. We're... simply spending money we don't have today... transferring enormous amounts of money to big corporations and wealthy individuals.”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“From 1945 to 1980 we had a bipartisan consensus in this country about nurturing and developing the middle class. ...There were plenty of fights back and forth, but both sides of the aisle agreed that government should be building up the majority of the people to create a better, wealthier society. We had the , probably the smartest single thing government's done in modern times. ...We had the built, although it was built at the urging of the Pentagon so that we could move material around if we had to have productivity for a war. We invested in all sorts of things, basic science education, we had 30 year mortgages developed...”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Child poverty [has] increased in this country since 1980, even though we have had divorce rates fall. We have hundreds of thousands of young people who don't go to college because they can't afford it. ...[F]rom tax data, the average income of the bottom half of Americans is $15,000 per tax payer. ...It's right out of the IRS tables. Some people say it's unfair to use that because there's income that isn't counted, like Social Security payments, and it's taxpayers not households, but even if you go to households, the cost of going to state college now is about $10,000... If you go to household income, even at the typical median level, $50,000; how somebody making $50,000, with even two children, can afford $10,000 a year for college for kids is amazing. When you and I were kids college was paid for. It was free to us. Society paid for it because they were investing in the future. Now, we're putting road blocks in the way of the most valuable asset we have. We're subsidizing the owners of baseball teams and football teams, which is lots of fun, but it's trivia, and we're doing it, in part, by cutting money for this.”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]wo income households... Lots and lots of women are out there working at jobs that pay minimum wage or $8 an hour. ...[T]he result of the falling wage structure in this country is that the average family with children does 1,000 hours more paid labor today than it did back in the early '70s. ...That's working essentially half of the year. ...[M]arried women with children have often worked throughout history. A Christmas job, a Saturday job. They had what we used to call pin money, but they were not fundamental bread winners, and there are costs associated with this. We have costs for daycare [etc.]”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everything has rules... The rules that we set really determines who benefits and who bears the burden. ...[W]e have all of these policies ...that largely determine what's happening. ...[I]n America... we live in a society... where coming out of the Great Recession, a third [33%] of all increased income through 2012 went to the top 16,000 households, that's the 1% of the 1% [1 out of 10,000], 95% of that income went to the top 1%, and the bottom 90 per cent's income actually fell... to the level of 1966... [T]hat happened because the government rules, in many ways, from who gets access to quality education, to who gets proper health care, to incarceration policies, are shaping what's happening to our society.”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The most important period determining your lifetime health and emotional well being, and therefore you ability to get along, is from conception to about the first 6 months of your life. We pay very little attention to that. We give women in this country 6 weeks of disability, and they may use several other at the end of their pregnancy, so little babies... are not getting enough nurturing. In some of the European countries you are required to take a year off, and it's a violation of the law... to hold a job when you have a small child, because these societies recognize that we have a long-term interest. So just as we're using up our infrastructure by not fixing up roads and bridges and dams and pipelines, we are also stealing from the future by not nurturing and providing proper care for small children. ...[T]here will be a price, and it will be very high.”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Adam Smith, in his lessor known book, , says that the greatest corruption of our moral sentiments is a tendency to almost worship the rich, and to hold in bad regard people who are poor. ...[O]ur politicians reflect this, even though many of them will tell you... how religious they are. ...[T]hey obviously have not studied their religious texts because, if they did, they would know that (in the case of the Christians, for example) you are supposed to give all that thou hast to the poor. That's a standard I'm not willing to meet, but that's the standard that you are supposed to meet... It's certainly not to be mean and literally deny hungry children food.”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[I]f Reaganism worked, if Bush's tax cuts worked, America today would be swimming in jobs. That's what we were promised. It would lead to all this investment and all these jobs. Instead, it's led to this enormous concentration of wealth among people who could never consume that much wealth, and who now increasingly are putting it into financial products, rather than investing it in ways that will grow the economy. ...[W]e're socking it away ...American corporations, under a rule almost nobody knows about ...are limited in how much cash they can hold, unless they move it overseas. ...[O]nce you move if overseas they can have ...unlimited amounts of cash, and what have we seen happen? ...Corporations have almost 3 times as much cash overseas as they have at home, and they then take that cash and buy US treasuries. So we pay big corporations to not pay their taxes. ...The interest they will earn from the treasury will exceed the value of the tax, and we will collect 40 cents on the dollar or less of the actual tax. ...Literally it has become a profit center ...”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is a movement to repeal the Fourteenth Amendment. When the US Supreme Court clerk, who was the former president of a railroad, announced that the corporations are people for purposes of defending their property... That makes sense, because a corporation is property. But Chief Justice Rehnquist, in a dissent in a case called Bellotti vs. ...Bank of Boston, was clearly opposed to the idea of giving political rights to corporations. We are now on the verge, in the Hobby Lobby case, of giving religious rights to corporations. Who's a corporation prey to, Mammon? So we've very much veered off from what was intended.”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When this country was founded, there had only been 7 corporations... in the... old British colonial United States, at the time of the Declaration of Independence. Six of them were what today we would either call a charity or a utility. ...One corporation, created in the colony of New Haven, was set up solely to make profit. It was such a scandal they had to shut it down within a year and it took 10 years to clean up the mess. The Founders disliked and distrusted corporations. But they believed in collective bargaining, and I can prove that because in 1792 Congress passed the first significant labor law and subsidy law. It was to benefit the cod fishing industry. We got a quarter of our foreign earnings from cod and we were deeply in debt from... the Revolutionary War. So it was important we had foreign earnings. ...[T]o address ...harassment by the British Navy the cod fishing industry wanted a subsidy, and Thomas Jefferson ...ordered a study and concluded that those ships that only paid wages to their fishermen should be excluded. But if... the workers were paid partly in the share of the profits... then you got the subsidy, and 5/8 of the subsidy went to the workers and 3/8 to the company. ...[T]hat sounds a lot like collective bargaining.”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Attorney General, Eric Holder testified, in March of 2013, to Congress that he was afraid to prosecute the banks because it would cause economic disruption. ...I've been going after him in Newsweek for that and he has backtracked, but for months, an Inspector General's report shows, he claimed that they had gone after more than a billion dollars and over 500 people involved in mortgage fraud... still... a drop in the bucket. ...In fact, there were less than a hundred cases involving $95 million ...a drop in a drop ...and he kept telling this lie. So we... now have a government that does not go after people who are engaged in criminal frauds because they are considered so powerful, that if they were prosecuted it would damage the economy. My God!”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We decided in 1980 to go down a different path when we elected Ronald Reagan. We have gotten the results that Mr. Reagan said, if you listen to him carefully in 1980, we would get, which is that those people that are wealth holders would realize the income from that wealth, and they have. Their actual tax rates, for people at the very top, are 60% lower than what they paid in the 1960s. But at the same time, by getting rid of unions... by having these "free trade deals," which are really deals to drive down the cost of labor; we have driven down the wages and the salaries of the vast majority of Americans... We have also weakened these environmental laws... that were pretty good. So we've put in place a whole mechanism in which we favor profit over labor. ...When you look at the data you can see it ...Returns to labor in the Federal Reserve data go [down with time] and returns to capital have been rising, and since 2009 it's like looking at one of those jet fighters going straight up.”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A few years after the war ended, [] took on a partner... Willie Tomasello. When cash was short, Tomasello was able to provide Trump with operating capital on short notice. Tomasello also saw to it that there was no trouble from the unions... The New York State Organized Task Force identified Tomasello as an associate of the Genovese and Gambino Mafia families... turned to an organized crime associate as his long time partner... Decades later, Donald Trump would also do business with the heads of the same families, though at a remove, developing numerous business connections with an assortment of criminals, from con artists and a major drug trafficker to the heads of the two largest Mafia families in New York City...”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We have a president of the United States who is not a loyal citizen. ...[L]ook at the email that ... sent to Donald Trump Jr. ...[Y]ou want to read it carefully because the journalists... did not parse the sentences... the fourth sentence in this email makes it clear that there was an ongoing conspiracy. Collusion is not a crime. I don't care about collusion... There was an ongoing conspiracy between the Kremlin and the Trump administration. It says in the fourth line... "as part of Russia's efforts to help." That's not a "Hi, would you like to get together..?" That's "We're already sleeping together. You want to try something new?”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) first seen 2016 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Read the Emails on Donald Trump Jr.’s Russia Meeting, New York Times, see Jun 3, 2016.
“[T]hey have stopped posting notices of worker deaths. About 4800 people a year die on the job, and some... are just accidents nobody could have predicted. ...But many of them are the result of the fact that... While... most employers try, or do a good job, there are some [that] just don't care. ...[T]ime after time, they have workers who are unnecessarily maimed or killed. The records of those aren't there any more. They're not putting them up. They're fighting giving away the statistical information that we need to understand what they're doing, and the Labor Department's actions in this area are far from unique.”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When Donald Trump took the oath of office "to faithfully execute the laws" and to be "loyal to the United States of America", he then got in a motorcade to go to the White House. There's a TV camera... in the truck... that looks square down the middle ...The presidential limousine... stopped... the family got out... they spent two minutes walking around... in front of the Trump International Hotel, whose lease says "no federal employee can be involved in that lease" and... we have jointly an employee named Donald J. Trump. He's our employee. ...[T]he reason he did that was ...[I]f you are an emissary... seeking a favor from Donald Trump, if you're an oil baron, or a coal company, or anybody else who wants a favor from the Trump administration, you got the message.”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he Democrats, who have not paid attention to their knitting for 40 years, while the Republicans have been building bench strength, passing laws to suppress votes, coming up with laws to throw out votes after they're cast, as we saw in Michigan. The Democrats have to run candidates who are viable. I was sent a news clip by a friend... a couple of interviews of people who want to run for office as Democrats... they were young and they were earnest and... then they got asked questions... [T]hey immediately fell apart because they didn't know anything. They were just like Donald Trump. ...You've got to find and develop real candidates.”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Trump administration deposited political termites throughout the structure of our government. Their task, in the words of Steve Bannon, is the "deconstruction of the administrative state." ...[H]e means to undo the tax, trade, regulatory, and other means... [T]he end game is... a government that looks first after the best-off... not those most in need of a helping hand in the form of a sound education, clean water, and other basics of a healthy society... These termites operate out of sight... to bully or scare scientists into leaving, remove from public access... public records... necessary to enforce environmental, worker safety, and other laws.”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our system for identifying and promoting military officers for leadership actually works. In my biography of Donald Trump I cite the Army Field Manual 6, which is the selection of officers for promotion because they have leadership skills. ...[S]omeone ...had reduced this to 6 basic lessons. Do you take responsibility for what you do? Do you credit other people? Are you open to recognizing a mistake and correcting it, etc. ...Donald Trump flunks every one of those measures. ...But, because he doesn't have real leadership skills, he's who he is. He's a con man and a con artist. He's not a business man, he's a cash extractor who gets a hold of a business, takes cash out of it and puts it aside. He's not capable of being a tyrant and taking over the country. ...But we need to worry about what happens when someone comes along who has a really deep philosophy.”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What about competent managers? ...Vladimir Putin seems to be a reasonably competent manager... the leader of the biggest international gang in the world. These are the criminals who stole the wealth of the old Soviet... and the way that criminal gang leaders work... "This is your territory, that's your territory. Don't bother me. If there's a problem I'll intervene. If necessary I'll have one of you wacked. Because I want to do what I want to do." By the way, that's the way the s operated in Egypt. "I don't want to deal with people's petty problems." So they set up the equivalent of a modern wage and hour court in 1350 BC. You delegate... you set certain boundaries. That's how tyrants operate.”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Trump] just now has someone on his staff in the White House who basically says the Democrats are demonic. ...[I]t's really quite shocking to see what this person who's... what I call a faux Christian. She's a "God wants me to be rich, so send me money and God will love you" sort of person. These kinds of folks, they're looking to advance their interests because they aren't thinking about the society around them. They're [not] thinking about anything in the New Testament, about your obligation to your fellow citizen. They think "I'm in this for me and how do I get this to work for me" and that's how tyrants work.”
David Cay Johnston (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source