“A tall candidate has won, I think, every one but three of the presidential elections in history.”

— New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio, quoted by The Hill, citing his 6 foot 5 inch height as a reason he’ll be able to beat President Trump in 2020.

Tim Naftali: “The day after the United Nations voted to recognize the People’s Republic of China, then–California Governor Ronald Reagan phoned President Richard Nixon at the White House and vented his frustration at the delegates who had sided against the United States.”

Said Reagan to Nixon: “Last night, I tell you, to watch that thing on television as I did. To see those, those monkeys from those African countries—damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!”

“The exchange was taped by Nixon, and then later became the responsibility of the Nixon Presidential Library, which I directed from 2007 to 2011. When the National Archives originally released the tape of this conversation, in 2000, the racist portion was apparently withheld to protect Reagan’s privacy.”

Gideon Rachman: “It struck me as significant that we had both been reading about the 1930s to try and make sense of 2019. Neither of us believe that Mr Johnson or Donald Trump are reincarnations of Hitler or Mussolini. But we had both found Haffner’s memoir interesting for another, more subtle, reason. It provides an extraordinary insight into what it feels like to live through a period of political turmoil.”

“Haffner’s memoir was written in 1939 — just before the outbreak of the second world war and the Holocaust. He was seven at the start of the first world war in 1914 and left Germany to go into exile in 1938. His book (which was only discovered by his son in 1999, as he cleared up his father’s papers after his death), provides a contemporary sense of what it felt like to watch the Nazis rise to power — and the fears, doubts and moral dilemmas that are thrown up as a new and disturbing kind of politics emerges.”

Defying Hitler: A Memoir

• Sebastian Haffner
• Plunkett Lake Press
• Kindle Edition
• English

Buy on Amazon

Presidential historian Jon Meacham told MSNBC that President Trump’s attacks against four minority lawmakers placed him with Andrew Johnson as the “most racist president in American history.”

Said Meacham: “What the president’s done here is yet again, because I think he did it after Charlottesville, and I think he did it frankly when he was pushing the birther lie about president Obama, is he has joined Andrew Johnson as the most racist president in American history.”

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

— Dr. Martin Luther King, in a 1968 speech.

Major Garrett: “I covered Perot’s first bid for the presidency in 1992. It was the first presidential campaign I covered. And what I saw was this: Perot unleashed one of the most impressive grassroots movement in modern American politics. He didn’t win the presidency, but that’s really beside the point. And whether he took a higher percentage of votes from Clinton or Bush is, in the grand scheme of things, similarly irrelevant.”

“What does matter is that Perot, against odds almost unfathomable now, qualified on ballots in all 50 states as an independent candidate.”

“It wasn’t Perot who did this. Volunteers did. They did so without a party and without a declared candidate.”

John Avlon reviews the “top 5 greatest hits and misses” from presidential primary debates in the last 40 years.

And some history from Kyle Kondik: “While we count 196 debates in modern presidential primary history, almost all of these have come within the last four decades. Prior to 1980, Republicans held just one debate, in 1948, while Democrats held 11 in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. That means that 94% of all presidential primary debates have been held just since 1980.”