If you're cutting deals with one company or another, eventually, there's going to be a quid pro quo. There's going to be a bribe. There's going to be something.

I've come to think that flourishing consists of putting yourself in situations in which you lose self-consciousness and become fused with other people, experiences, or tasks.

If I were Donald Trump, I would definitely not pick Mitt Romney because it's very easy for Mitt Romney to have have a separate foreign policy operatus in the State Department that would run a dissenting foreign policy from the White House foreign policy. There, I think the populist America-first foreign policy of Donald Trump does run against a potential rival.

Donald Trump understands sense of belonging. And a lot of people think globalization, any time you make any particularity, you're sort of offending some other group. And a lot of people in this country think they belong to America anymore, and he at least appeals to some sense of belonging. I like the idea that we belong to Western traditions, so I'm glad he appeals to that sort of thing.

I generally think the president [Donald Trump] should get his Cabinet picks, unless they're egregiously out of the range, either ethically or intellectually out of the range of what's acceptable.

The politics is broken up and down. And Trump may emerge from a reality TV world that is much more powerful than we think. And there is the prospect that this is where we are, which is an horrific thought.

Politics is based on social identity, and so, again, there is going to be differences between rural and urban and between left and right.