"Trump is afraid of alienating his base.. as well as responding to what they want to hear from him. When Trump calls people vermin, who are his enemies or immigrants coming to the country, when he says that he is willing to consider termination of the constitution if he doesn't get his way and that his campaign is about retribution and revenge... he's doing so fairly confident that his electorate will go with him. For me, that's always been the scariest thing. Jan 6th was the "shooting someone on fifth aveneue" moment. It was the moment when Trump showed that he could take a vast bulk of the Republican electorate in the country over the cliff with him and having done so, he blew up all the previous rules and bound them to him more fully. The signal moment was the next day when the results were certified and two-thirds of the Republican conferenece went along with Trump's false and pernicious lies about the election... within hours of their capital being taken over." - Susan Glassser

"The Republican party has been the party of Trump for quite some time... it was in the 2020 election that the Republican party chose note to have any platform at all. It was whatever Donald Trump said... for the first time in its history, there was no policy platform, there was just Donald Trump." - Susan Glasser

"...the alternate realities for the Republican electorate in which January 6th was a peaceful day of protest and martyrs were did in by the evil deep state in furtherance of a rigged election and the complicated conspiracy theory involving Venezuela, etc.. etc.. etc... It's not just Trump but many Republican politicians speaking in a kind of unintelligible code to those of us who do not spend our days marinating in the same media misinformation environment." - Susan Glasser

"One of the things that historians will look back on the one Trump term that we've already had and say that it is remarkable the extent to which Trump defined himself as the president for only part of America, which is a real sharp break and departure from our previous presidencies and traditions. In other words, previous presidents were partisan, actually represented the interests of one faction of the country, but they at least aspired to rhetorically govern the whole country and Trump did not do that." - Susan Glasser

"We have to let go of the fantasy of the fever breaking. The story of the last year in Republican politics is not the story of challengers emerging to defeat Donald Trump. It is the story of how he has re-centered his power over this party to be a republican today is to be in a state of subservient and enabling of Donald Trump, who is truly a kind of generational figure for many." - Susan Glasser