I've always been of the view that people want to see their president periodically not taking himself too seriously.
— Daniel Pfeiffer
We're so obsessed with, 'Is Michael Cohen going to jail or not? Is Rod Rosenstein going to be fired? What did Trump tweet today? Did he call the press an enemy of the state?' We're so focused on that, we're missing just the tremendous damage Trump is doing to the decency and moral character of this country.
It's - I can't imagine a world - the idea that every day Sarah Huckabee Sanders briefs, Donald Trump stops what he's doing and turns on the TV and watches it while eating a Taco Bell or whatever he eats. And then she has to go into his office afterwards and get critiqued on it.
It's always great to have an enemy in politics; there's no question about that.
There's a lot of work you have to do before you ever fire the starting gun on a health reform bill - doing the scut work with members of Congress, talking to your allies - to figure out the best plan.
I worry that, given the way the 2016 election went, how cynical and how terrible politics seems, that young people will be less likely to get involved.
There's never been a time when we've taken progressive action and regretted it.
We always say in the Obama world, in the toughest times, you can laugh or you can cry, so you might as well laugh.
I was incredibly - I've never been more confident of anything in my life that Hillary Clinton was going to win and Donald Trump would lose by a very large margin.
The White House New Media team circulates multiple highlights each day of what people are looking for online - Twitter trending topics, popular Google searches, etc. - and it gives us a sense of what's breaking through, what isn't, and a sanity check for what the larger online population cares about at any given time.
As President Franklin Delano Roosevelt learned when he tried to pack the Supreme Court, the three branches of government are coequal for a reason. Neither the executive branch or the legislative branch should use the third branch to a pursue a partisan agenda.
Any politician is always looking for a format where they can show who they really are, show their true selves.
I sometimes think, as bad as things seem for progressives in this world in the Trump era, it's worse than we think it is.
Every legislative meeting on how to pass health care, the communications director or someone from the communications team would be a part of because we did a lot of press interviews when we were trying to pass the Affordable Care Act specifically designed to help pass the bill.
Health reform is, in some ways, a microcosm to everything that's right about Washington and everything that's wrong about it.
I do think the strategy of Trump, and now the Republican Party, is to eviscerate the idea of objective truth.
I think politics is an incredibly noble and fulfilling enterprise, and it's the best way to do the most good for the most people.
I've always believed that the fundamental, driving strategic ethos of the Republican House leadership has been, 'What do we do to get through the next caucus or conference without getting yelled at?' We should never assume they have a long game.
What I am unable to understand with the people who associate themselves with Trump is their willingness to overlook the dishonesty, the indecency, the lack of empathy, to be asked to go out every single day and why.
I think on a whole host of issues Washington tends to be a lagging indicator on public opinion.
We absolutely look at larger trends and reactions on Twitter here at the White House.
From the day he took office, President Obama has been open to any good idea when it comes to the budget, as long as supporting middle-class families remains our North Star. Republicans won't extract concessions over the full faith and credit of the United States.
I do worry about not just the policy consequences of Trump's terrible policies - and they are devastating - but also just in the idea that the president is to some extent also the head of state.
I knew Trump was gonna be a very bad president.
The Republican establishment who did not want Trump to win - either the primary, in some cases the general - they were unable to do anything that impacted the actual vote.
Tom Daschle is one of the smartest guys in Washington.
What I learned from Barack Obama the person is that you can be a great leader and a good person at the same time and that the way to be the best kind of leader is to be decent to the people around you.
The greatest danger zone a president can be in is when he is being attacked on the left and the right.
What drives 90 percent of stuff is not the small tactical decisions or the personal relationships but the big, macro political incentives.
It wasn't until Trump won that I thought back to all the things that I dealt with in the White House and that President Obama dealt with - the political forces, the changes in media and technology, the radicalization of the Right.
The most famous Obama precept is, 'No drama.'
There's discussion in athletics about how sport - where they say 'SportsCenter' has ruined the fundamentals of basketball because it's - it only applauds dunks and three point shots and blocks, and I think, you know, the cable news has done the same thing for politics.
