Donald Trump didn't have a polling operation until very late in his campaign. How did he know what to do? That the Ted Cruz people leaked their polls to Trump because they were looking forward to eliminating all the other rivals, clearing the way for a Cruz-Trump fight that they were certain Cruz would win. In the end, Cruz was the last man standing, it's true. If he had known at the beginning what he knew at the end, he might have thought twice. The Congressional Republican Party thought they could make Trump their tool to impose their very unpopular agenda. Instead, they became his tool.
If you watch a movie from between the end of the Second World War and the mid-1970s, whenever anyone steps out in a white lab coat, they're there to offer a solution. They're there to tell you how the laser's going to save the day. They're going to give you James Bond's array of tools. After about 1975, whenever the man in the white lab coat steps out, it's to come up with some crazy idea that's going to bring ruin on everybody. "Let's clone dinosaurs!" And the last we see of him is disappearing down the gullet of the Tyrannosaurus rex.
Obviously, Donald Trump won't be impeached or removed so long as the Republicans hold even one House of Congress. And even should they lose both in November of 2018, launching an impeachment - as the Republicans discovered with Bill Clinton - is very dangerous to the impeaching party. Unless you have a highly credible set of extremely damning facts, you turn a constitutional crisis into a political crisis. You rally potential supporters of the impeached president to him. You make his base bigger. So I imagine that he is likely to serve out the full term.
Donald Trump is the least unpopular thing about today's Republican Party. I mean, the idea that a Mitch McConnell or a Paul Ryan could say, "Let's toss Trump overboard and return to our program of plutocratic politics, health care removal, massive income tax cuts for the affluent, deregulation of finance" - if they cut loose from Donald Trump, it's like, you know, storm in channel, continent cut off. If they cut loose from him, they are much likelier to sink.
One of the questions I often get asked is, "Were you surprised that Trump won?" I always answer the same way: "I was surprised, I am surprised and I will never stop being surprised."
In America, you will see in area after area, media under pressure, businesses under pressure not to criticize Donald Trump lest he reduce their stock value with an angry tweet.
We all work for media, we all make mistakes all the time. That's inevitable. What the difference between a responsible journalistic institution is, does it care whether it makes mistakes or not? And does it correct them?
President Trump watches a lot of television. I mean, really a lot. His favourite channel is Fox. Now just imagine somebody wants put a message in front of the president. You can hire a lobbyist or you can buy a minute on Fox or you can even pay somebody at a think tank to articulate your message and then pay a booker at that think tank to get that person on Fox and put the thought directly in the president's ear.
So long as Donald Trump is powerful and popular, Fox News is going to achieve an advertising bonanza unheard of in the era of modern cable, because people will pay them to talk to the president.
One of the things that really has gone wrong in modern politics, one of the things that made Trump possible was that many people have a view of politics as something dramatic and exciting and thrilling and emotional.
Democracy is not about protests. Democracy is about meetings.
The habit of going to your congressman's town hall and asking questions, that's powerful in a way that shouting slogans or getting arrested is not, that is completely counterproductive.
Canada has a real civil service, which the United States doesn't have, an independent civil service. Canada also has a stronger federal system.
I don't think that disasters have to be spectacular. They can be a slow corrosion.
One of the reasons I've been interested in the US health care is that here is something you can do, that could lift one of the largest burdens of worry from the shoulders of tens of millions of people for whom the rest of the economy isn't working. A lot of the things that are in Obamacare that Republicans don't like were deliberately put there to force Republicans to negotiate. Republicans wouldn't negotiate, so we got Obamacare with all of the fur on it. Once it's there, of course, it's very hard to take health care benefits away from people, as the Republicans discovered.
Anybody who imagines that an election can be won under these circumstances by banging on about William Ayers and Jeremiah Wright is ... to put it mildly ... severely under-estimating the electoral importance of pocketbook issues. We conservatives are sending a powerful, inadvertent message with this negative campaign against Barack Obama's associations and former associations: that we lack a positive agenda of our own and that we don't care about the economic issues that are worrying American voters.
The Iraq fight itself is probably going to go very, very fast. The shooting should be over within just a very few days from when it starts.
[democrats] hated Richard Nixon, and no wonder. It was Nixon who sent Alger Hiss to jail, and Nixon who waged the Vietnam War after the Democrats gave up.
The business model of the conservative media is built on two elements: provoking the audience into a fever of indignation (to keep them watching) and fomenting mistrust of all other information sources (so that they never change the channel).
Think tanks do have points of view, and they are absolutely entitled to defend them.
Crown Prince Rupprecht, the heir to the throne of Bavaria who commanded the army group facing the British at the Somme, was the senior direct lineal heir of James Stuart, the Old Pretender of 1715. Had there been any Jacobites left in Britain in 1916, they would have had to regard this south German prince as their rightful king.
Life, as the signs in the liquor stores say, is too short to drink bad wine. And summer is too short to read bad books.
What I say is I am somebody who cares about conservative ideas. I want to see them implemented in governance.
As thrilling as it was, speechwriting is ultimately frustrating for someone who wants to be a writer.
I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words. And the big shock to me has been that although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas. And that is the root of, maybe, everything.
