Ronald Reagan came to office and had already been an experienced politician as governor of California, whose ideology and ideas, no matter how simplistic or no matter how much you may disagree with them, were fairly well-developed and fairly consistent. Donald Trump is a real-estate branding operator and a reality-show television star whose entrance into big-time politics, as a victor, as someone who will now wield tremendous power, was as shocking to him as it was to everybody else.

I understand the difference between journalism and scholarship that comes 20 years later.

As journalists, we need to find every avenue to distribute our work, and try to be so good that we become increasingly more influential than before.

I live in a country where, at least by my sense of arithmetic and justice, Al Gore should have been president, not George W. Bush. To this day, John Kerry probably thinks he won Ohio in 2004 because he had suspicions about the vote in Ohio. And, by the way, Richard Nixon had suspicions in 1960 about the vote in Chicago when he lost to JFK.

On Facebook, a lie can seem as convincing to some as an article from SPIEGEL or the Washington Post. That's a problem. I can then like it and like it again and start creating my own media universe, both for me and for my friends, and so we become more and more fenced off from one another.

The minority vote is growing, which is part of the alarm of so many Republicans and why Trump constantly whipped up their alarm with his racist statements.

There is no single field of activity, not a single institution, free of the most brutal sort of corruption. Russia has bred a world-class mafia.