That's an important Obama accomplishment: he raised taxes back to Bill Clinton levels, and made a major dent in inequality doing so. That's certain to be reversed, that's going to disappear. The Republicans are going to slash the rich's taxes.

Obama took 20 million people from the category of ignorables and put them into the category of unignorables. No one had to do anything for these 20 million people because they were outside the system. Now they're inside the system. Taking away their health care imposes all kind of political pain. We don't know the outcome, but every passing day it show how difficult it is for Trump to deprive them of what they now have.

One of the things we've learned during the Obama era is how important norms are, because we've seen how the Republican Party behaved against Obama. So much of what they did was to smash pre-existing norms, which were nothing more than assumptions of how people would behave, which didn't have any real basis in rules or limits.

President Obama is so much smarter and a better communicator than members of Congress in either party. The contrast, side by side, is almost ridiculous.

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.

Barack Obama is extremely smart.

Trump was the logical outcome of the Republican's irrational, racialized backlash to Obama that had utterly come to dominate the party's thinking.