We should tell the honest, painful stories of 9/11 because it dishonors the memory of heroes to invent a phony cast of villains when the actual terrorists were terrible enough to tear open this nation's heart.

Trump fans convinced of his strategic genius are welcome to their view, but they're wrong.

No bully ever turns down a free shot when his posse pins back your arms.

If you think Barr's Justice Department will take a single step to confront Trump or his cronies with any kind of challenge, think again. His hyper-maximalist vision of executive power borders on the fetishistic.

Trump's inability to relate actions to consequences, his profound intellectual ambivalence about history, strategy and facts, in addition to his notoriously delicate ego, combine to create a risk we've never seen in a President during a nuclear crisis.

With every product, the delta between the brand and the reality determines its power over the minds of consumers, and with Trump, that delta is always broad. If Trump said it was the best, it was average. If he said something was the finest, it typically included a spray-painted gold veneer.

I think Trump is so dangerous because the people that he appeals to the most have this sense of despair and oppression that has become a central defining characteristic of their lives. And they feel like only he is their avatar; only he will fight for them; only he will keep the wolf from the proverbial door.

Free-market capitalism doesn't pick economic winners and losers based on the president's economic nostalgia, and limited-government conservatism isn't marked a top-down ideological conformity strictly enforced by state media organs.

McConnell is the most talented majority leader in a generation. He has complete control of his caucus and understands and exploits their weaknesses, ambitions, and desires. In an impeachment trial where his members knew Trump's guilt was absolute and unequivocal, he bribed and browbeat them into submission.

Trump devotees don't care about shrinking the size and scope of government. They don't care about the Constitution. They're not Republicans, except as a flag of convenience.

If there's one thing no one will ever mistake Ted Cruz for, it's a charismatic cult leader. Cruz scans more as the accountant for the charismatic cult leader than the guy ladling out the Kool Aid.

I believed that the donor class would cringe at the vast threat Donald Trump poses to the entire Republican Party, its brand, its prospects for expansion, and the nation.

I will not vote for Hillary, and I will not vote for Trump. At the end of the day, I believe that President Clinton would be less damaging to the Republican Party than President Trump. Because five minutes after she's elected president, every bit of this anxiety in our party disappears instantly. We will go at the main enemy as we do.

I'm not a squishy liberal Republican.

Stay away from national polls. They are always an illusion. They will always trick you into stupid political behavior.

The delta between who I am on Twitter and in real life is zero.

We were a family of incredible talkers, readers, arguers.

I'm going to keep correcting people, sometimes harshly, on the disparity between conservativism and Trumpism.

I'm of the philosophy that you wage a campaign of full engagement and you use every tool in the toolbox.

I'm not afraid of what people say about me. I don't care if people say, 'You're an awful person.'

I always advise my candidates, 'You better fight to the last bullet.'

I think that Republicans are going to deeply, fundamentally, and profoundly regret the way that they have - the way Trump has - framed the party with Hispanics.

Even as an empiricist, I have to say that I believe in luck. I've seen it too many times in politics to let it pass by unnoticed.

Trump would rather submerge himself in the lake of fire for a thousand years than talk about Russia again. It's the subject he can never avoid, never fully wash out.

It's not that I mind fighting with Trump's cheer squad... it's that it's so rarely a fair fight.

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.

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

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.

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.

I really like Bobby Jindal.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Trump is always Trump, and never, ever improves.

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

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

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.

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.