Politics & Power Quote by Ronald Reagan

Reagan’s line works because it smuggles a brutal accusation into a dinner-party joke: politics, he implies, is a kind of legalized transaction where loyalty is rented, promises are performed, and intimacy is staged for a price. By yoking government to “the first” profession, he gets to say “corruption” without sounding moralistic. The laugh does the dirty work; the audience supplies the missing noun, and in doing so becomes complicit in the critique.

The intent is classic Reagan: disarm with genial humor, then sharpen the blade. It flatters the listener’s cynicism (you already suspect politicians are selling something) while positioning Reagan as the rare truth-teller willing to puncture Washington’s self-importance. Subtextually, it’s also an inoculation. If politics is inherently tawdry, then skepticism toward institutions is not a bug but a feature, and the case for shrinking government starts to sound like simple hygiene.

Context matters. Reagan arrived as an outsider-brand president, a former actor who understood that tone is policy’s most effective delivery system. In an era of post-Watergate distrust and economic malaise, the public appetite for anti-establishment language was enormous. The quip channels that mood into a clean, quotable indictment of the capital’s “professional” class.

There’s a quieter move here, too: the joke launders a moral judgment through a sexist cultural shorthand. It borrows the stigma attached to sex work to stain political work by association, while keeping the target conveniently broad: not a specific scandal, but the whole system. That vagueness is why it endures. It’s a weapon you can point anywhere.