I cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past. We need all hands on deck, fighting for the future.

[Donald Trump] has a tremendous opportunity, you know, this week, to come out and say I don't want that.

It's time to start bringing the congregations down to City Hall and to ask the mayors, the city councils and the school boards, "What's the plan? What's the local government going to do for us?"

"Big" government? Who wants that? I just want effective government. That means America's government needs to be big in some places, small in others and non-existent in others.

We have to accept that some very toxic stuff was marbled into the Trump phenomenon.

Little kids sing a song called "America the Beautiful." They sing a song called "This Land Is Your Land, This Land Is My Land." To me, those songs are not just nice little ditties. They are marching orders. They are commandments that we must protect America's beauty from the clear-cutters, the strip-miners, the oil spillers. They are pledges we have made. They are promises to keep.

Donald Trump was underrated, but he understood social media and he understood reality television.