Nobody ever won an election by spitting at his political opponents.
The thing that sustains a strong Fox network is the thing that undermines a strong Republican party.
Trump is not just unlike a Republican, he's unlike a presidential candidate. The whole elaborate presidential process is designed to screen out people like Donald Trump. And that process broke down in ways quite unlike anything in the recent experience of the United States.
You can have these fake engagements, these virtual engagements that substitute for actual engagements. You don't have to participate, you can hit a button, send you 200 dollars to the Barack Obama for President campaign and think it's like you knocked on a door. But you didn't knock on a door.
My mother cared more about how you reasoned than about the conclusions you reached.
Donald Trump, as a businessman, he's not much of a builder and he's not much of dealmaker and he certainly isn't very good at making expenses line up with income. But he is a marketing genius. He must have seen an empty market niche that no one but him filled.
Americans are about to discover that their system is more vulnerable than they thought. There's a lot of complacency in American politics, there's a lot of complacency in advanced democracies generally.
One of the great drivers of the alienation that has made Donald Trump possible is that the growth in the American economy has been weak. In the decade from 2005 to 2015, there was not one year when the US hit three per cent growth. And to the extent there's been growth, virtually all of it has been collected by the top 10 per cent of the population. Obviously, if we knew how to make growth faster, we would. We don't. And it's very difficult to make growth more broadly shared. Because it's not just the US that has this problem.
If we say something often enough, we come to believe it. We don't usually delude others until after we have first deluded ourselves.
Donald Trump is not supposed to save jobs one by one. He's supposed to build a sound macro economy in which private enterprises create jobs.
People who want to wage cultural wars ought to keep in mind that cultural views often don't move at all for a very long time, but when they move they can move very fast.
I have a range of scenarios. One of them is a chaos, that what could happen is Congress does step up a little bit and the administration is paralyzed. And we go through all kinds of constitutional crises, impeachment or the 25th Amendment removal process. Another frightening scenario is Donald Trump is steering his way to a series of international confrontations at the same time as he's appeasing Russia.
I think the single most important question is how do you maximize the number of children who grow up in stable two-parent households. We know in all kinds of ways it makes a huge difference to how kids come out and we are hardening into a caste society where some kids do better in all kinds of ways because they have two parents and others don't.
Donald Trump has declared that he's going to divest himself from his companies and that his sons will be separated from the government. But his sons who run the company are regularly attending his meetings with senators, making it clear to everybody, you want access to Trump you pay.
Donald Trump's big goal is to become the richest man in the world, abusing the powers of the presidency.
Yet when the hour of decision arrives, it turns out that many conservatives care as little as ever about administrative skill and executive accomplishment. Our party and our movement overwhelmingly respond to symbolic cues. Sarah Palin is exciting and appealing. But what kind of executive is she? None of us have even the remotest idea.
Venezuela has gone from being a democratic country 15 years ago to being totally not a democracy today. Usually that de-democratization doesn't take the form of a heavy handed police state.
So little of what makes a democracy work is written down. So much of it is just the things you don't do. There are a lot of things that a prime minister or a president can do and they don't do them because it never occurs to them to do them.
It's very important to understand that 21st century authoritarian rule does not look like 20th century authoritarian rule. You're not going to have people in parade ground formations. You're not going to have a police state. You're not going to people with decorative armbands bullying people on the sidewalks. And the leaders won't stand at microphones for hours ranting at people. All of that is so 80 years ago.
Donald Trump doesn't believe in much, doesn't want to do much.
One of the things you can learn from a figure like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez is that if you take all the resources of the state for yourself, you don't build much of a constituency and you have to rely on repression, and repression is difficult in the modern world.
The system has evolved to protect parties from people like Donald Trump. It really is true that people without well-established public records, without proven capability in public service, without tested beliefs and at least apparently under the influence of a foreign power, such people are screened out by major parties.
I do think Hillary Clinton, I mean the Clintons, I`ve got a lot of critiques of the Clinton foundation. I do think they bend the law. But Hillary Clinton accepts the concept of legality, she accepts that courts are supreme, laws must be complied with and the power of the state is not to be used for persona revenge or personal enrichment. And that`s something - not something I trust Donald Trump to do.
I was in the White House, probably the only administration I'll ever work for. The administration was not a success, neither at home nor abroad. The Iraq War was not a success. The condition of the average person was not enough better at the end of seven years of George Bush than it was at the beginning, and certainly it all ended in the collapse that was the Great Recession. So I feel a sense of karmic obligation to the universe because of that.
I keep telling my American friends, "If you think of Donald Trump as only something that is happening inside the United States, you're missing it." Because there are Trump-like events happening across the Western world, in Warsaw Pact countries, in France, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands. As we speak, the second-largest party in the Dutch legislature - who's more level-headed than the Dutch? - is Geert Wilders's party, which is a very Trump-like party, and they've got 33 out of 150 seats.
