On Obamacare, every day that goes by I have more evidence that I wish I could put in my book, on how difficult it is for the Republicans to eliminate this law. They have no real alternative. They're afraid to take away health care from the 20 million people who now have it.

Liberals tend to romanticize the past, past leaders' failures.

Obamaism is the future of America.

There's an element of clowning and entertainment to Trump, that makes it surreal and hard to understand to what extent he is pretending to be a fascist or an authoritarian.

Republicans fighting back against changes Obama made means those changes are important, as with most of the major progress in American history.

Because many people remembered a time when the Republican Party was not so extreme, and hadn't full grasped how much it had changed, people blamed Obama for his failure to get Republicans to agree with him. That blame coloured so much of how the public saw Obama during his presidency. The public thought he was dealing with a brand of Republican leader that just didn't exist any more.

The story of the Republican Party is of a far-right that has moved from the fringes of the party to a complete domination of the party. The moderate, mainstream and pragmatic leaders of the party have been pushed out or died off.