When [Republicans] say they can reduce taxes and trim deficits at the same time, they are either deluded or deceptive, and they are playing voters for fools.

[ Donald Trump is] candidate who said he has more confidence in Vladimir Putin's strength than in Barack Obama's strength. His closeness to Putin is a very scary thing for the country and the fact that the news was dominated for 33 days I think it was by WikiLeaks stories, that had an impact on states that were decided by a knife-edge.

You have this all the way through this cabinet so that I think there are a lot of other things to worry about [Donald] Trump. But in conventional political terms, this is a cabinet that I think is going to have a very hard time delivering to the base that Trump courted in this election.

I think Donald Trump simply needs to make himself look less bigoted, less dangerous, more comfortable to people.

I think there are a lot of Americans who are very scared, scared that [Vladimir] Putin manipulated us, worried about Rex Tillerson, the winner of Russia's order of friendship as the secretary of state.

The new culture war is about national identity rather than religion and 'transcendent authority.' It focuses on which groups the United States will formally admit to residence and citizenship. It asks the same question as the old culture war: 'Who are we?' But the earlier query was primarily about how we define ourselves morally. The new question is about how we define ourselves ethnically, racially and linguistically. It is, in truth, one of the oldest questions in our history, going back to our earliest immigration battles of the 1840s and 1850s.

The worst kind of job to have is a job with lots of responsibility and very little power.