[In politics,] when there is no reason to speak, there is a reason not to speak.

My view on candidates on money is unless it's proven that the donor stole the money, the campaign keeps the money.

The habit of going to your congressman's town hall and asking questions, that's powerful in a way that shouting slogans or getting arrested is not, that is completely counterproductive.

Normally what happens in a new presidency is the president has a big agenda, and Congress is full of people with human weaknesses. And so the president indulges the human weaknesses of members of Congress in order to pass his agenda. This time it's the other way around. Donald Trump does not have much of an agenda. Congress burns with this intense Republican agenda and so does Congress that has to put up with the human weaknesses of the president in order to get a signature on the things it desperately wants to pass.

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.

The Iraq fight itself is probably going to go very, very fast. The shooting should be over within just a very few days from when it starts.

As thrilling as it was, speechwriting is ultimately frustrating for someone who wants to be a writer.