When you go to Washington now, you can feel a sense of fear in the air - the fear to do anything, or say anything, that might affect the polls, or give the other side an advantage, or offend a special interest.

I like what I see when I look in the mirror. If I get sentimental, I look and say, "Uh. It's a bad day. They beat up on me," this, that, and the other thing. But ya know? We've spent one billion trying to convince people to not smoke. It's been phenomenally successful. We've probably saved millions of lives. There aren't many people that have done that. So, you know, when I get to heaven, I'm not sure I'm gonna stand for an interview. I'm going right in.

Partisanship may be King in Washington - but the rest of us don't have to pay tribute.

I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh biggest army in the world. I have my own State Department, much to Foggy Bottom's annoyance. We have the United Nations in New York, and so we have an entree into the diplomatic world that Washington does not have.

We've continued progress in the six months since Trump got elected, and the good thing about what we're doing is that success begets success. As we bring down greenhouse gases, for example, we've closed half of the coal-fired power plants in the country in recent years. There's more impetus to try to close the other half because you can see that it is working. So, you know, I had hoped that Trump would not do that, and it doesn't make any sense to me, but regardless, it is not as cataclysmic as it could be.

I know that many Irish-born New Yorkers are caught in the trap of our federal immigration policies. If we are going to continue to attract the best and the brightest - and Ireland has more than its fair share - we need to inject some common sense into our immigration laws, and I'm doing my best to make that case in Washington.

Design does matter. And not necessarily in a way that people realize. A lot of what you do, people take for granted - that a park has always been here, that a bicycle lane has always been there, that the street is safe or clean.