I am a very conservative person. And there are a lot of things that Donald Trump's government or administration is doing that I might agree with. The point is we have to defend the rules of the game. And one of the things that has empowered Donald Trump is that not enough people are serious enough about defending the rules of the game, maybe because they don't understand how endangered those rules are.

In America, you will see in area after area, media under pressure, businesses under pressure not to criticize Donald Trump lest he reduce their stock value with an angry tweet.

So if I have two pieces of cake, do I have twice as good an experience as the first piece of cake? One of the things I've found in life is that the first piece of cake is the best.

I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words. And the big shock to me has been that although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas. And that is the root of, maybe, everything.

Donald Trump doesn't believe in much, doesn't want to do much.

President Trump watches a lot of television. I mean, really a lot. His favourite channel is Fox. Now just imagine somebody wants put a message in front of the president. You can hire a lobbyist or you can buy a minute on Fox or you can even pay somebody at a think tank to articulate your message and then pay a booker at that think tank to get that person on Fox and put the thought directly in the president's ear.

People who want to wage cultural wars ought to keep in mind that cultural views often don't move at all for a very long time, but when they move they can move very fast.