Quotes of the Week

Plus links to some of the best articles and essays.

CBS News host Margaret Brennan interviews Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Face the Nation, February 16, 2025.

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 reading material I’ve come across. You can opt out of these posts by simply clicking on the top right and going to “manage subscription.”

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• “I’m in Munich and people keep asking me to decode Vance’s speech. OK: In Vance English ‘free speech’ means ‘Let Musk run your elections’ and ‘democracy’ means ‘let Russia run your elections.’” — Timothy Snyder, the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University

• “Trump’s idea of ‘competence’ — only white men need apply.” — The Hill’s Juan Williams (Trump’s Secretary of State is Cuban, his Attorney General is a woman, his Secretary of Agriculture is a woman, his nominee for Labor Secretary is a Hispanic woman, his HUD Secretary is a black man, his Secretary of Education is a woman, his Secretary of Homeland Security is a woman, his Chief of Staff is a woman, his DNI is a minority woman, his UN Ambassador is a woman, and his SBA Administrator is a woman)

• “Suddenly, and not accidentally, people who work for the American federal government are having the same experience as people who find themselves living under foreign occupation.” — The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum

• “No president has had more planes crash in their first month in office than Donald Trump.” — Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell; according to the National Transportation Safety Board’s Case Analysis and Reporting Online (CAROL), there were 10 fatal plane crashes in the United States between Jan. 20, 2021, and Feb. 18, 2021, and four fatal plane crashes recorded during the same period under the second Trump administration

• “Egg prices are supposed to come down, not airplanes!” — The View’s Joy Behar

• “If American Democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.” — JD Vance, speaking at the Munich Security Conference

• “Well, [Vance] was standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide.” — CBS News’ Margaret Brennan, recasting the Holocaust as a consequence of excessive free speech

• “Maybe ‘Sleepy Joe’ is what we wanted because we could at least sleep at night.” — Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett

• “You understand, as a matter of biology, it’s just incorrect that there are only two sexes, right?” — U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes, posing the question to Justice Department lawyers during a hearing on Trump’s executive order calling for a ban on transgender troops joining the military

• “Trump says there are ‘two sexes.’ Experts and science say it’s not binary.” — Washington Post headline

• “If you voted for [Trump], you really need to question whether you’re American anymore.” — MSNBC’s Frank Figliuzzi

• “They call it, like, Trump Derangement Syndrome. You don’t realize how real this is until you can’t reason with people. I was at a friend’s birthday party in L.A. — a nice, quiet dinner — and I happened to mention the President’s name. And it was like they got shot with a dart in the jugular that contained, like, methamphetamine and rabies.” — Elon Musk

• “People ask me all the time, why is the media so mamsy-pamsey? And there are two explanations. The one is, they are convinced that if they would just move a little bit to the right, all those MAGA readers out there — now, you’ll notice the contradiction in terms, ‘MAGA readers’ — would pick up The Washington Post, and they would have more readers. What is the logical fallacy here? Yes, ‘reader.’” — Former Washington Post columnist Jen Rubin

• “I keep going back to, this does remind me of the federal government version of the Afghanistan drawdown.” — MSNBC’s Elise Jordan, regarding DOGE’s efforts to trim the federal bureaucracy

• “In the 11 days after Jan. 20, migrants apprehended at ports of entry declined by 93%.” — ABC News’ Luke Barr

• “Definitely think it would have been a net positive for 21st century liberalism if the phrase ‘weaponize free speech’ had never been invented.” — NYT’s Ross Douthat

• “All it took for Pete Buttigieg to finally take an interest in transportation was for him to no longer be the Secretary of Transportation.” — National Review’s Charles Cooke

• “Trump/Russia was never a ‘hoax’; it is and always was real.” — Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse

• “There are concerns that the Ukrainian president could be voted out of office if the country holds an election.” — Newsweek headline

• “Elon Musk is just making this stuff up as he goes along, right? And it’s sort of — it’s a little like — someone was saying, comparing it to the search for WMDs in Iraq.” — Jonah Goldberg, during a CNN panel

• “Republicans’ ghoulishly persuasive passion for identity politics, left unchallenged by Democrats, surely greased the slide of young and minority voters to the right over immigration and crime and transphobic fictions. This is part of why the anti-woke diagnosis of what’s ailing Democrats is not only factually flawed and morally vacuous but also strategically enfeebling.” — New York’s Rebecca Traister

• “I’m part of the 92 percent of black women that voted to save the rest of the country. But the country wanted something else, and the country is getting something else. So, I’m resting.” — The View’s Sunny Hostin

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

• Texas Monthly: “The Lost Boys”

• Outside: “Raising the Dead”

• The New York Times Magazine: “‘You’ve Blown a Hole in the Family’: Inside the Murdochs’ Succession Drama”

• Variety: “How Greg Gutfeld Became the Bill Maher of Fox News — And Toppled Fallon and Colbert in the Ratings”

• The Atlantic: “The Monster of Florence”

• Atavist: “A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite”

• Nautilus: “Why We Keep Playing the Lottery”

• The New York Times: “3 Parrots, 1 Shared Wall, 2 Ruptured Lives”