Trump has a lot of authoritarian tendencies that need to be a serious concern.

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.

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.

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

Barack Obama is a very impressive human being.

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.

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