I think that Putin views Obama as weak. I think that there is a sense that he could put the troops in Ukraine because he knows Obama will do very little than what he's done at this point.

I think where conservatives were wary of Trump is he had not advocated for conservative positions for decades. He had been more meandering in his politics, including being a Democrat, including writing checks to Democrats. I have said that it's impossible to say what a candidate is until they get to office, especially someone who has never been in office before.

P.J. O'Rourke says that conservatives really hate government and every couple of years we put them in charge and then we're reminded how much we really hate government. We're not always necessarily great at the task of running government. We're the anti-government party. It actually makes some sense we're not so good at that. But you got to have basic competence in how you run the government, even in how you reduce its effectiveness in people's lives.

Donald Trump has clearly put conservative around him, he's clearly taking conservative policy positions, and I think for conservatives, the first, most important pick was selecting Mike Pence, then picking Neil Gorsuch to fill this tiebreaking vote on the Supreme Court. Looking at the Cabinet. Most conservatives are pretty happy.

Some conservatives are traditionalists, and the idea of breaking things up and changing things is concerning to them at times.

You know, when you don't have your real income, your take-home pay increase for a decade or a decade-and-a-half, it makes you awfully discouraged. And then when you see other things in society changing so rapidly, and you think that government is ineffective and unable to - incapable of taking steps, appropriate steps to make sure that America can lead, lead on the international stage and lead the international economy, I think that was so much of this.

I was maybe the earliest person who was constructive toward Trump who served at a high level in the Bush administration. I took a lot of guff from my former Bush colleagues who didn't see what was happening in the country. I'm not smarter than they are or a better person than they are. I just traveled a lot around the country.