Every man who has sat in the Oval Office has felt the short, sharp shock when an ordinary day in the highest office in the land shifts from pomp and ceremony to urgent briefings, immediate choices, crucial decisions where lives are on the line. It's not something that may happen to a president. It's something that will happen.

There's an unspoken rule post-Cold War American Presidents have used when describing the awesome power of our nuclear arsenal; the more devastating the ability to destroy the enemy, the more restrained the language should be.

All the fantasies of Trump-Bannon nationalism require a vastly expanded state, with greater powers over the economy and society.

The prisoner never loves his warden, even if he obeys the rules from time to time.

Trump is always Trump, and never, ever improves.

In politics, Victory Disease comes when a majority believes their position is so secure and immune from challenge that they forget the lessons of the past and can't imagine an outcome that isn't in their favor. Neither party is inoculated against it.

As Trump's mistakes pile up, Congress will be left on cleanup detail.

Obama was referred to in terms so glowing, so fulsome, so toadying that it was easy to pin down the journalist class of 2008 as a group of fangirls squeeing and fainting at his every utterance.

FISA targets those who are 'agents of a foreign power.'

Lord knows I'm all for lowering rates and simplifying the tax code.

Before the GOP became the party of Trump's gangster capitalism, they weren't perfect capitalists, but they at least paid lip service to the power of markets and capitalism.

A large plurality of the Trump electorate believed the definition of 'conservative' was simply 'Not Hillary.'

I believed that the numbers and processes of modern campaigning that revolve around the meticulous use of data would matter in 2016. I believed Trump was merely a spectacle, a political sideshow who would be dispatched by the well-funded and the well-staffed major campaigns.

As a Republican governor, a senator, or member of Congress, or as a Republican candidate, let me remind you: You're known by the company you keep. By associating yourself with or endorsing Trump, you own Trump's toxic radioactivity with voters outside his base.

We should tell the true stories of that day to honor the memory and sacrifice of those who perished on 9/11 and in the long wars since.

Because Donald Trump has to destroy everything in his path, why not the true history of 9/11?

Trump would have us revise and edit our historical memory of 9/11, turning it from a unifying narrative of heroism, tragedy, and war and recast it to serve the political ends of a man unworthy of the presidency.

Kasich does two fundamentals in presidential politics wrong; he talks, and he keeps talking.

Even as a Southerner, there's only so much corn-pone shucking and jiving about mama-and-gravy talk I can take.

I really like Bobby Jindal.

All my life, the Republican Party has been my political home. Helping it succeed has been my work for decades. It was never perfect, but families never are.

Con artists specialize in finding what people need, and Trump knows the media craves variety, scandal, secrets, and he-said-she-said stories, even of the most dubious provenance.

Trump sees himself as the center of the media universe, the sun to which all eyes turn.

Even the most liberal reporters I know have a sense of drive and curiosity about what the Clintons are hiding, because they know it's always something.