The Machine (Metaphor)
Richardson quotes the student activist Mario Savio's famous metaphor, who exhorted people to "put [their] bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus [of the machine] and... make it stop" (42). The metaphor uses a machine in place of the institutions—universities, the government—and tells young people that they have to shut the machine down. It is effective in that it paints the institutions as soulless, callous.
Shot (Metaphor)
Richardson says that when Reagan attached a signing statement to a bill that came across his desk, "While few people paid attention to it, this statement was a shot across the bow of American democracy" (62). The metaphor is that the signing statement is a shot from a weapon across the bow of a ship, which is the U.S., and it is a warning that something more is going to come. It's a provocation, a promise of more shots.
Trump's Vision (Simile)
Trump's speeches are skillful at using imagery and other rhetorical devices to paint a picture of an America that serves his agenda. In one speech he says there are "mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation..." (91). The simile here of factories looking like tombstones is effective because the picture it paints is one of death, of obsolescence. It's not entirely untrue and it's not wholly true either, but what it definitely is is effective.
Paine (Metaphor)
In her overview of American democracy, Richardson writes of the Revolutionary War and Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense: "Paine's spark set to flame more than a decade of accumulating tinder" (177). This is a simple and effective metaphor that sets up the issues the colonists had been dealing with as kindling that the fiery pamphlet then ignited.
System (Metaphor)
In the accounting of the structure of the Constitution, Richardson writes, "It was quite an elegant system of paths and trip wires, really" (181). This metaphor of a system of wires and codes, such as a computer, is effective to convey how the Constitution provided for checks and balances among the three branches. It makes the Constitution sound intuitive, canny, able to handle various situations.
