President Trump is doing what he can to act decisively. And if there's one thing most people have in mind in distinguishing the business world from the political world is that the CEO of a business can act decisively.

If - heaven forbid - a shooter did come into my class, I wouldn't want to have to worry about getting caught in a crossfire.

Americans knock themselves out, especially since 9/11, praising the military.

It's hard to say that Trump actually has a health care policy.

Toward the end of the 1964 presidential campaign, Reagan gives a speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater. It was like a screen test for a new career.

In the early days of the republic, the secretary of state was the heir apparent to the president. Presidents could easily hand-pick their party's next candidate. The party caucuses formally selected the candidates, but presidents guided the process.

The president of the United States from the 1940s until 2017 was considered the leader of the free world - probably the most powerful person in the world - not simply in terms of America's military might but in terms of the moral authority of the president. Donald Trump has largely abdicated that.

If you wanted to, you could write history in Haiku.

Everything that happens today is like something in the past, but it's also unlike things in the past. We never know until an event happens if it's the similarities or differences that matter more.

For Andrew Jackson, politics was very personal. He hated not just the federal debt. He hated debt at all.

I'm the farthest thing from a bibliophile. I purge my collection regularly: If I haven't read a book in a couple of years, I try to give it to someone who will.

The American political system is based on the president taking the initiative and Congress responding. With President Trump, it's been the opposite.

Some years ago, I read Thomas Carlyle's history of the French Revolution, and I was very taken by the way he told the story, and it seemed as though I was right in the middle of things. And it took me a while to figure out how he achieved that effect, and one of the ways was to write it in the present tense.

You might say presidents are drafting the first chapter of their memoirs in these seventh-year State of the Union addresses. They're trying to get the public and the media to think about their presidencies in the way that they would like to have them thought of.

You can always find people, ordinary people, who will support your particular view, so it becomes a politics of personality, especially at the presidential level. People often go for somebody that they like or somebody that they can identify with.

Previous candidates who get elected are almost always sobered by the office and the responsibility they take on. Donald Trump shows no evidence of that. He's the same Trump that he was when he was host of his reality TV show. He's the same Trump that he was when he was a candidate.

In the academic world, biographies of these great figures of the past fell out of favor in the 1960s, when there was a turn toward social history, which meant the history of the voiceless and faceless. But the public at large never embraced the idea that these dead white guys should be abandoned.

Reagan is the subject of ongoing political debate, and a lot of liberals don't want to take Reagan any more seriously than they did when he was president. I understand why they don't, but they should.

The race question in America has often been about race, but it has equally often been about power.

By the early 1960s, there was a moral consensus on what needed to be done on civil rights.

There has always been interest in certain phases and aspects of history - military history is a perennial bestseller, the Civil War, that sort of thing. But I think that there is a lot of interest in historical biography and what's generally called narrative history: history as story-telling.

With my students, I always have to sell my subject because I know when you're 19, 20 years old, you've got other things on your mind besides American history. What I have to do is make this as compelling as possible.

It wasn't the smiling Trump that people elected. It was the frowning, glowering, angry Donald Trump that people elected.

Reagan refused to demonize his foes. Instead he charmed them, with a few exceptions, including Tip O'Neill, the Democratic Speaker of the House and the embodiment of the liberalism Reagan sought to reverse.