I'm not talking about Trump's brand but rather the intimately connected brand called "make America great again" that he created to make all these promises to working Americans - is intensely vulnerable, if there is sustained scrutiny of the kind we've seen about Comey and Russia. He's appointed five Goldman Sachs former executives to his Cabinet, his commerce secretary is renegotiating NAFTA to make it far better for corporations and worse for workers, and they're talking about this right out in the open... I mean, how much news have you seen about that?

The widespread abuse of prisoners is a virtually foolproof indication that politicians are trying to impose a system--whether political, religious or economic--that is rejected by large numbers of the people they are ruling. Just as ecologists define ecosystems by the presence of certain "indicator species" of plants and birds, torture is an indicator species of a regime that is engaged in a deeply anti-democratic project, even if that regime happens to have come to power through elections.

So if the meaning of the Trump brand is being the ultimate boss who has the power because he's so rich, the way you undermine that brand is by making him look like a puppet, and by showing that while he's playing gold and admiring his properties, it's actually other people making the key decisions and he doesn't really know what's going on.

Politics hates a vacuum. If it isn't filled with hope, someone will fill it with fear.

If you're not arguing, your coalition isn't wide enough.

I see The Gap ads as being a great example of how branding has changed. Those Gap campaigns are pop culture. They've been incredibly powerful. They have had the kind of effect on culture that a hit band has. Just look at The Gap's Khaki swing ads, which were music videos. They had this tremendous impact on the industry - suddenly everything started looking like Gap ads and it became difficult to know who was co-opting whom and who was creating culture.

But we need to be very clear: because of our decades of collective denial, no gradual, incremental options are now available to us.