When you cover politics, you realize that knowing how to talk about character matters more and more. The way we hold ideas is more important than the ideas.

I think Romney's foreign policy is sensible.

Certainly, the country can't have two presidents at once, so the tradition has been to hang back if you're the president-elect and wait for your time in office. [Donald] Trump is not a hang-back kind of guy.

The thing that should most concern us is a shift in American foreign policy. We have had a bipartisan belief in American foreign policy based on the post-World War II institutions that believed in democratic global world, which Russia and the Soviet Union was often seen as hostile to. And most Republicans and Democrats have always basically believed in this world order. Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and maybe Marine Le Pen do not agree with this basic structure of the world.

The more people doubt their own beliefs the more, paradoxically, they are inclined to proselytize in favor of them.

It’s not that Egypt doesn’t have a recipe for a democratic transition. It seems to lack even the basic mental ingredients.

People who give money in large amount in politics are basically not altruistic.