My colleague Ross Douthat wrote that any time you give Donald Trump the benefit of the doubt, he always lets you down.

When your institution is under assault, you're feeling like the weight is on it and the history might be flowing away, don't turn inward, go outward.

[Betsy DeVos] does care about charter schools, which are public schools. She does care about choice, which is a perfectly legitimate thing to care about. It's because it's the one issue where the Democratic donor base was really energized, which was the teacher unions.

For the Republican Convention, I think of Trump's speech and sort of the darkness, the fear of crime, the need for a strong arm really, and so that one core theme.

I've argued that Trump's biggest success in his first 100 days was to keep the Russia story at bay, toss out whatever it takes to push the story back, including those false charges that Obama had his wires tapped.

If we got rid of everybody in Washington who sold access for donations, then the town would be empty. But it's unseemly.

The ugliness can sometimes be super ugly, but also a warning sign of something down below.