"lot of people have looked around after 28 years, from when they were promised all these things by Ronald Reagan... realized that for the bottom 90% of Americans incomes are unchanged... even though the country is more than twice as wealthy in real terms, and productivity per capita is up 70%; for every dollar the economy put out back then, per person, in real terms, it puts our $1.70 today. And they've said, "Where's the beef?" ...hat disconnect is ...opening up an opportunity to get people to see what the government has done that's contrary to their interests, because Adam Smith said "Any policy that benefits the majority of the people must be a good thing for the society."

“lot of what I've been writing about in Free Lunch and... Perfectly Legal and the 13 years of stories I've been doing in The New York Times are about... a growing disconnect between our political and cultural mythology, and how the economy actually works. ...ll societies have to operate from myths. You have to have a shorthand for your culture, but ours is getting disconnected from reality.”

“Trump has worked hard to make sure few... know about his lifelong entanglements with a major cocaine trafficker... with American and Russian mobsters and many mob associates, and with various con artists and swindlers.”

“Martin Luther King Jr. said he had a dream that one day his four children would be judged by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin. ...Today we often value people less by their character than by the contents of their wallet. ...The pursuit of ever more financial zeros... has... produced a moral breakdown... twisting our culture and our values in ways that tear at the fabric of our society.”

“The hiring of Manafort and others, specifically, a Russian-born real estate mogul with mob ties whose 2015 emails indicate that he hoped to help secure both a Moscow-based real estate deal and the American presidency for Trump—showed a disturbing pattern of associations with those around Vladimir Putin, head of the in Moscow...”

“To the addicted, money is like cocaine: Too much is never enough.”

“and... as leaders of ... describe Trump's conduct as a "flagrant abuse" of the Constitution for personal profit. ...Painter, the Bush ethics chief... is almost apoplectic at Trump's conduct and the failure of his fellow Republicans to speak up.”