Quotes of the Week

Plus links to some of the best articles and essays.

Maryland Democratic Congressman Jaime Raskin compared the Trump administration to the mafia during an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, Saturday, May 31, 2025. | MSNBC

Note for new subscribers: On Fridays I send out a post with a list of notable quotes from the past week, along with links to some of the best longform essays and articles that I’ve come across. You can opt out of these posts by clicking “manage subscription” on the top right.

---

• “The blood of the Boulder Terror Attack is on Trump’s hands. It’s his fault because the Trump’s ‘illegal alien’ stunts aren’t about preventing crime - it’s about satiating MAGA sadism.” — Keith Olbermann

• “Trump orders investigation of Joe Biden’s alleged ‘cognitive decline’ and use of autopen” — USA Today headline

• “If your dog barks on a daily basis it should be taken away from you permanently.” — Taylor Lorenz

• “There are mass murderers in the world—Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, Stalin. We don’t have anyone on the list from America. And I don’t think it’s the same as committing the kind of genocide they did. But by taking away [USAID] and being at least semi-responsible for the deaths of, probably by the end of this, hundreds of thousands if not millions of people, that’s Elon Musk’s legacy.” — NYT’s David Brooks

• “[Musk] failed not because his ambitions were too grand, but because they were so pathetically small.” — The Washington Post’s Mat Bai

• “If Joe Biden was like mentally deficient in some way and he was still able to keep this sucker on the tracks, then give me a mentally deficient Joe Biden any given day over Donald Trump.” — Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett

• “So, why not muddy the waters if we can hopefully keep a strong black woman down?” — Also Jasmine Crockett, regarding scrutiny of the Biden administration’s $2B green energy grant to a fledgling Stacey Abrams nonprofit

• “I understand that many people on the left think that associating Trump with conservative views is a shortcut to delegitimizing everything about conservatism, but Trump is no conservative; the MAGA movement is Big Government, Nanny Statism for white people.” — The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols

• “This is a gangster state. And I just hope people begin to understand this is not basically a legitimate government that is sometimes doing corrupt things, this is an essentially corrupt enterprise. It’s like watching the Sopranos. Every day they get up and they try to figure out how to plunder and pillage the people.” — Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin

• “You can see that I’m mentally incompetent, I can’t walk, and I can beat the hell out of both of ‘em.” — Joe Biden, in reference to CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson, authors of Original Sin

• “I know the [NYPD’s] feelings on the gang database and how they feel it can be improved. Again, I’m just always gonna stand on the side of things cannot be fixed when it already comes with a broken system. A broken clock can be right twice a day, and things like that just have to go because it stems from racism.” — New York City Councilwoman Althea Steven

• “The rise of anti-Semitism in the last decade can be correlated with the rise of Donald Trump.” — CNN’s Maria Cardona

• “The Trump administration’s framing of Black history as ‘D.E.I.’ and ‘D.E.I.’ as harming white Americans - recasts its attack on Black history as protecting white Americans. As administering justice. Which is the justification of nearly every Klan and racist mob attack in history.” — Ibram X. Kendi

• “A very odd part of the Biden legacy: Elevating black women as the first to be VP and WH press secretary, then making it known to everybody that they were disasters.” — Semafor’s David Weigel

• “You know what I think? I think it’s a waste of money. Maybe these guys should spend their money on teaching men to not be such sexists.” — The View’s Joy Behar, regarding the Democrats spending $20 million to study American men

• “Asking straight white people to acknowledge that they’ve had every advantage this world has to offer is not something we are allowed to do in this country. Instead, we live in a world where every time a white person doesn’t get something they think they’re entitled to, we’re supposed to assume they’ve been treated unfairly.” — MSNBC’s Elie Mystal

• “Radical Supreme Court rules 9-0 that anti-discrimination laws make discrimination illegal even if progressives dislike the people being discriminated against.” — Charles Cooke

• “Who is actually making the decisions? Who is actually running the country? Everybody wants to say Joe Biden wasn’t running the country. I know for a fact he not only read his presidential daily briefing, he was engaged in the meeting. He asked questions and he gave directives.” — MSNBC’s Symone Sanders

• “The Colorado Civil Rights Commission will be having a heated debate about whether throwing Molotov cocktails at Jews rises to the level of declining to bake a cake.” — National Review’s Dominic Pino

• “American Jews Are Paying for the War in Gaza” — NYT headline¹

If you need to get past a paywall, try Archive Today or 12ft.io.

• GQ: “The Longest Night”

• The New Yorker: “Atchafalaya”

• ProPublica: “The Tech Recruitment Ruse That Has Avoided Trump’s Crackdown on Immigration”

• The Atlantic: “That Day at Hiroshima”

• Vanity Fair: “A Case So Cold It Was Blue”

• The American Scholar: “The Last Island of the Savages”

1. The headline was later changed to “Jews Are Afraid Right Now”