Jon Lovett

One thing that is for certain is that there are tens of millions of people who are deeply unsatisfied with the way they get their political news.

When I was a kid, all I knew about Michael Jackson was that he was crazy. He had a monkey named Bubbles and some kind of oxygen chamber, and he used to be black, but he made himself white, and he was nuts. That was Michael Jackson in full. Wacko Jacko.

The conversation on Twitter and the way people are in the world are very different.

You look at what animates Democratic voters; you look at what animates Democratic politicians: it's health care. It's increasingly climate. It is wages and economic issues. It's issues around reproductive freedom and criminal justice reform and inequality.

Barack Obama took office in the middle of a massive financial crisis. He was handed a bunch of messes all around the world and at home.

Washington is filled with people making other people's arguments for money.

I could have continued being a speechwriter for as long as I wanted.

We have a lot of really boring, silly, stupid politics. We need people to point that out.

It's a reasonable thing to tell somebody, 'I've watched 70 hours of 'Game of Thrones.'' That's a totally normal, boring thing to say about yourself. But if you were like, 'I just spent 100 hours playing 'Skyrim,'' people think you're a weirdo.

I personally believe that Donald Trump being elected president is a national emergency and a crisis that stems from a great cascade of failures.

I would like to be able to write in my own voice.

It was awesome how supportive the White House was. It meant a lot to me that when I left, the people that I worked with - Jon Favreau and David Axelrod and others - really understood that this was something that I felt I held had to do.