As a media consultant to Republican presidents, Ailes proved a deft manipulator of racial fear. But it was in building Fox News that he found his calling.
Trump's cabinet picks seem designed to unwind government itself, leaving the average citizen completely exposed and vulnerable to full exploitation by corporate interests.
Dwight Eisenhower presented a face of America that was heroic and resolute; Ronald Reagan represented a return to confidence and glamour after the weary Carter years.
When I was 15 years old, my sister and I went on a trip to Europe. We went on scholarship because my mother didn't have the money to pay the full fare for the two of us, which ran into the thousands of dollars.
If you've never feared the police - if you don't get a dull ache in the pit of your stomach when you see red and blue flashing lights, even when you know you're not doing anything wrong - consider yourself lucky.
If politics were a high school movie, Republicans would be the jocks and mean girls locking hapless freshmen inside their lockers and threatening to call in their rich parents if the teachers complain - plus the broke kids who are always willing to strong-arm homework for them from the nerds.
If a novel were written about Florida's administration of its healthcare for the working poor, an appropriate title might be: 'Don't get sick, and God help you if you do.'
Being on a grand jury felt like attending a series of hangings in a legal Wild West. Hands up for a true bill. Hands up for a dismissal. A show of hands to save a life, or to end it.
Democrats may want working-class white Rust Belters to have good jobs at high wages with pensions and health benefits, but they can't make them vote that way.
From jazz, the blues, country and rock to Hollywood movies, culture has in many ways been our greatest export (or our most obnoxious one, depending on your point of view).
Trump's more outre economic ideas, like repealing trade bills and implementing a massive surcharge on imports, would seem like non-starters in a Republican-led House and Senate, except when you consider a second point as a kind of syllogism: Republicans fear their angry, white electorate. Their angry, white electorate chose Donald Trump.
Trump's affinity for Russia dates back at least to the late 1980s, during the time of the Soviet Union, and it intensified after his financial empire collapsed.
America after Trump may be more like the European Union; a rambling alliance of interstate compacts, rather than the forced marriage of a country that emerged after the Civil War.
Who in the GOP would complain if Trump federalizes 'stop and frisk' or encourages its proliferation in states using the power of the Justice Department purse?
I always want to be doing something - going somewhere, doing a project, teaching a class, writing an article. I try to use up my day. You have a limited time on this planet - try to use as much of it as you can for productive purposes.
Whatever its cause, the media's general Hillary Clinton loathing is a foundational truth that would define her as president.
Local government is a gamble that can have disastrous consequences when it fails.
American populist politics has a long tradition, from Andrew Jackson to Huey Long to Joseph McCarthy. But the politician Trump is most like could be George Wallace.
Trump, who in his own history as a developer preferred mob concrete and Chinese steel to the variety produced in the Rust Belt, cannot bring back the steel and manufacturing jobs lost in Lorain, Ohio or western Pennsylvania.
No president can force shuttered mills to reopen, or companies who've left in search of cheaper labor to relocate to the United States (or those who have come back to choose expensive humans over cheaper robots).
