With his mendacity and increasingly virulent attacks on immigrants, Muslims, women, the press, the judiciary, the intelligence services, the F.B.I. - any group or institution that he finds threatening or useful as a scapegoat - Mr. Trump is attempting the Orwellian trick of redefining American reality on his own terms.

I've always been a news junkie, and an avid reader of newspapers and magazines, and this interest only ramped up during the campaign of 2016 and in the aftermath of the election.

I was the kid in class who was afraid to get called on.

Trump tapped into a lot of middle-class and working-class disillusion with the political establishment and into economic worries and resentments that ballooned in the wake of the 2008 financial crash.

We're not a democracy.

Of course there are regrets. I shall regret always that I found my own authentic voice in politics. I was too conservative, too conventional. Too safe, too often. Too defensive. Too reactive. Later, too often on the back foot.

No American conservative has ever argued that the government should never be involved in peoples' lives. That is anarchy, and we don't argue for that.

The next president of the United States will be the president that will celebrate 100 years of women having the right to vote. I mean, I think having a woman president lead that celebration would be, you know, one of these instances of history really working out right in a poetic and beautiful way.