Why should we not expect self-designated environmental leaders to practice what they preach?

One of the great drivers of the alienation that has made Donald Trump possible is that the growth in the American economy has been weak. In the decade from 2005 to 2015, there was not one year when the US hit three per cent growth. And to the extent there's been growth, virtually all of it has been collected by the top 10 per cent of the population. Obviously, if we knew how to make growth faster, we would. We don't. And it's very difficult to make growth more broadly shared. Because it's not just the US that has this problem.

One of the reasons I've been interested in the US health care is that here is something you can do, that could lift one of the largest burdens of worry from the shoulders of tens of millions of people for whom the rest of the economy isn't working. A lot of the things that are in Obamacare that Republicans don't like were deliberately put there to force Republicans to negotiate. Republicans wouldn't negotiate, so we got Obamacare with all of the fur on it. Once it's there, of course, it's very hard to take health care benefits away from people, as the Republicans discovered.

Civil unrest, civil turmoil is not a challenge to President Trump. It's a resource for him. He needs to create an image of a polarized country in which the people who are against him are somehow alien or anti-system.

Reagan survived the Iran-Contra scandal because the elements of it that were illegal (aiding anti-communist Nicaraguans) were popular and the things that were unpopular (arming the Iranians) were quite legal.

Republicans have to move to a point of greater unity.

Obviously, Donald Trump won't be impeached or removed so long as the Republicans hold even one House of Congress. And even should they lose both in November of 2018, launching an impeachment - as the Republicans discovered with Bill Clinton - is very dangerous to the impeaching party. Unless you have a highly credible set of extremely damning facts, you turn a constitutional crisis into a political crisis. You rally potential supporters of the impeached president to him. You make his base bigger. So I imagine that he is likely to serve out the full term.