A presidential speech is always the work of many hands.

The big winners under the American fiscal system are the rich, who pay some of the lowest taxes anywhere in the world; the old, who are the main beneficiaries of the American social service state; farmers, rural people. These are Republican constituencies.

Maybe it's true that people with less extreme views who are also interested in public affairs have been driven out by a marketplace that doesn't offer them anything of the tone they want to listen to.

I think the single most important question is how do you maximize the number of children who grow up in stable two-parent households. We know in all kinds of ways it makes a huge difference to how kids come out and we are hardening into a caste society where some kids do better in all kinds of ways because they have two parents and others don't.

The thing that sustains a strong Fox network is the thing that undermines a strong Republican party.

So little of what makes a democracy work is written down. So much of it is just the things you don't do. There are a lot of things that a prime minister or a president can do and they don't do them because it never occurs to them to do them.

One of the questions I often get asked is, "Were you surprised that Trump won?" I always answer the same way: "I was surprised, I am surprised and I will never stop being surprised."