When you get a big crisis, everyone wants somebody with some experience and some credibility.

Putin has been - and with a lot of the groups, the conservative groups, the more extreme conservative groups that underlie Trump, he's a bit of a hero because he speaks for traditional values, he's against the global institutions.

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.

Memo to young journalists: Democratic victories are always ascribed to hope; Republican ones to rage.

Stairway to Wisdom”) David Brooks detailed the needed ingredients to gaining a deep understanding of a social problem, beginning with the data and moving on to first-hand accounts. The highest rung on his stairway, though, went beyond those: “Empathy opens you up to absorb the good and the bad. Love impels you not just to observe but to seek union—to think as another thinks and feel as another feels.

I certainly hear a lot of people say that Donald Trump not only incited some bad things. He also exposed some things. He exposed pain in America that a lot of us didn't have the full extent of, some of the divisions and chasms in the country.

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.