“I feel like we’ve lived 700 days in 100 days.” “It has taken Vladimir Putin years, decades, to get to this level of brazen lawlessness that the Trump administration has built in just 100 days.” “I think the thing that I’ve learned about America is that it has changed less than I thought it had changed. The spectacle of citizens taking joy in the pain of their fellow citizens or their political opponents, legitimately taking joy in the suffering of others. That spectacle, I think, is much greater than I thought it was.” “There is both a surprising tolerance for what I would describe as tyrannical exercises of power, whisking away people to foreign prisons without any due process.” “How easy it has been for Donald Trump to overwhelm the checks and balances system that we have. And I think I’ve been surprised by the American public’s willingness to exchange so many of their freedoms for the sense of performative power that Donald Trump gives them.” “How, frankly, spoiled we are as Americans, how much we take for granted, how much we think that the institutions and norms that are going to save us will always be there, as if they were kind of natural laws.” “I did not expect Musk to be so intensely focused on the quest to reduce head count in federal agencies. Personnel costs are not the central part of the federal government’s costs. And so I’ve been both surprised and, frankly, disappointed.” “I think I’ve learned how malleable, how flexible, the definition of ‘we the people’ actually is. Apparently, there are certain kinds of people who don’t belong, who are the wrong kind of people for the United States. For instance, civil servants, the native-born children of undocumented immigrants, former government officials who have been critical of the president, foreign graduate students who are here legally who speak their mind. Americans should always be on edge, wondering who really belongs, which part of the people actually count as ‘we the people.’”
