I'm a latecomer to the environmental issue, which for years seemed to me like an excuse for more government regulation. But I can see that in rich societies, voters are paying less attention to economic issues and more to issues of the spirit, including the environment.

The great power the president has is that he is the most prominent person in the biggest media event on the planet. He has the attention of the nation and the world. When he speaks, everybody listens.

But the thought leaders on talk radio and Fox do more than shape opinion. Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics.

Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us, and now we are discovering we work for Fox

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.

World War II proved a hypothesis that Alexis de Tocqueville advanced a century before: the war-fighting potential of a democracy is at its greatest when war is most intense; at its weakest when war is most limited. This is a lesson with enduring relevance to our own times - and our own wars.

Donald Trump is not supposed to save jobs one by one. He's supposed to build a sound macro economy in which private enterprises create jobs.