Barack Obama is pretty similar to the person you see in public, at press conferences. He's a little saltier, a little more sarcastic and cutting.

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

Activists measure progress against the standard of perfection, or at least the most perfect possible choice. Historians gauge progress against what came before it.

Trump is what Obama critics think Obama is: Someone who's focused on symbolism rather than substance.

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

We're not going to be living in a world where white identity politics is the basis for a major political party.

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.