Sublime

Amid all the attacks, Trump proves as incalculable as Wildcard. A bully one moment, kindhearted the next. Brash and unapologetic. He’s savvy yet reckless, reliable only in terms of his unpredictability. There’s no way to accurately poll his popularity or place odds on his voter appeal. He throws the whole “establishment” into disarray. His strength

Richard Nixon confiait à quelques journalistes que de Gaulle était un des rares hommes du monde dont on pouvait dire qu’il était plus grand que le pouvoir qu’il représentait. Nixon avait connu Eisenhower, Churchill, Adenauer et de Gaulle. « Tous les quatre étaient également des géants, disait-il. Mais c’est probablement le général de Gaulle qui eut

“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master,” Lincoln wrote in 1858. “This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.

George Washington warned, after the revolution, of the “settling, or rather overspreading the Western Country … by a parcel of banditti, who will bid defiance to all authority.” To prevent this, he proposed drawing a settlement boundary, just as the British had, and prosecuting as a felon any citizen who crossed it.

Un soir, pris de mélancolie devant la désagrégation de l’Union soviétique, Gorbatchev confia à un de ses proches cette sentence qu’aurait pu prononcer notre Louis XVI : « Je suis un mauvais tsar ; un bon tsar est celui qui tue. »

As Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was to write: The Founding Fathers appear to have envisaged the treaty-making process as a genuine exercise in concurrent authority, in which the President and Senate would collaborate at all stages.… One third plus one of the senators … retained the power of life and death over the treaties.

And ex-President George W. Bush may have retroactively won a few votes when he started devoting himself to painting sensitive portraits of veterans and immigrants.

The Reagan cycle solved the problem of capital shortage bequeathed to it by the Roosevelt cycle by shifting the tax structure. Reducing taxes on the upper, investor class freed up money for investment and also made taking the risk of investing more attractive.