You have the Republican Party, who see themselves in their heart of hearts as being a party of colorblind meritocracy. That's their great belief about themselves. And yet somehow you also have a party where a lot of racial resentment and a camp of even neo-Nazis have set up camp in their party. If you point it out to them, they get mad at you, not at the neo-Nazis.

You can't lead anybody you don't love. You can't do it. It's not possible.

There's no higher honor, in my estimation, than being asked to serve in the White House.

Trump is much, much worse than people understand. In his ideal world, you would have an alliance between Trump, Putin, Marine Le Pen, maybe a right winger might knock off Merkel in Germany, and you'd have this sort of, essentially, a nationalist populist alliance that can only be made sense of when seen as a right-wing, white nationalism against the world. Because, who do they want to fight? They want to fight Asia and China, they want to fight Latin America and Mexico.

It is the Muslim community that has the best chance of stopping and checking and pushing back on people who are trying to politicize their own faith. So this attack on Islam is an attack on a great faith. It undermines the people who are trying to rescue this faith from these horrible people. It endangers every human being on earth because it accelerates the radicalization of some and emboldens the worst elements of that faith. So this fight is a fight I think that we have to take on.

It's become fashionable to put down people who we then expect to vote for us.

I want to be remembered as one of the great innovators among social justice advocates of the 21st Century.