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

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.

I am not a person of the left. But one of the things, the central idea of democracy is that you have a bigger investment in the system as a whole than you do in any particular outcome.

While there is an attempt by the Trump people to say that California isn't really America. California certainly seems like America to me.

[democrats] hated Richard Nixon, and no wonder. It was Nixon who sent Alger Hiss to jail, and Nixon who waged the Vietnam War after the Democrats gave up.

Modern authoritarianism, as it's growing inside Europe and now coming to the United States, rests much more on the use of power to protect the guilty than to persecute the innocent. And its motive is not crazy totalitarian utopianism, it's motive is repressive kleptocracy. To steal and to use the powers of the state to protect theft.

There are a lot of wonderful people in America who shouldn't be on the Supreme Court - and a lot who should be on the court who aren't such wonderful people.