All politicians, no matter how gifted, ultimately depend on circumstances for their success.

Along with Trump, there are few people, on either the right or the left, who would defend the system. The system is, everyone believes, broken: it's an insider's game; it's totally fixed; it serves itself. Trump codified this into a simple and vivid idea: the swamp.

Donald Trump doesn't necessarily stay mad for very long. He's a transactional guy. If you can offer him something, he will take it. Or from a salesman's point of view, if he's not making the sale, you're of no use to him. But if you suddenly come back into the showroom and are willing to buy, he's willing to sell.

Indeed, Rusbridger has finessed for the Guardian a certain willing suspension of disbelief and is able to credibly maintain conceits and moral standards to which his own behaviour hardly conforms.

I work like every journalist works so I have recordings, I have notes.

Politics is a literal game. Every word must represent a strict view - or be so abstract as to be meaningless.

If selling had been part of his job description, Rusbridger, who never met a pound he had to earn that didn't disgust him in some visceral way, would have been disqualified long ago. Indeed, his early enthusiasm for the Internet - and a continuing principle of faith for him - was that it was free.

A particular modern problem is that megalomania, especially when it involves real estate development, is the disturbance of many faceless men. And a faceless man is a difficult enemy.

Before even getting to David Cameron's father here's a starting-point question about the Panama Papers: how is the desire to break the anonymity of Panama banking secrecy different from the FBI's interest in breaking Apple's encryption of the iPhone?

The Clintons are one of the most closed political organisations operating in America today. It is a kind of secret society.

Voters seem to enjoy voting for what experts believe they won't vote for.

One of the anomalies of digital journalism is a lack of clarity between high and low. That's the historic distinction in publishing, mass from class, the vulgar from the refined, tabloid from broadsheet, the penny press from papers costing a nickel.

The more power you have, the more surely it will be taken from you before you are ready to give it up.

President Donald J Trump and the U.S. media appear now to be split by deep doctrinal differences - of the constitutional crisis kind. But, virtually up until the split, Trump and the media were as one - a perfect symbiosis.

Here's a certainty: When you play out your personal dramas, hurt and self-interest in the media, it's a confection. You say what you have to say in the way you have to say it to give it media currency - and that's always far from the truth. Often, in fact, someone else says it for you. It's all planned. It's all rehearsed.

Corbyn and Trump don't seem to have anything in common except the assumption on the part of anyone subscribing at any level to the standard thinking that they could never achieve electoral success. They were supposed to doom, if not destroy, their party's future.

Culture has no logic.

With obvious irony, many of the left-leaning privacy advocates who might cheer Apple's stand against the government's intrusion into its system, are now, as transparency advocates, on the side of the leakers of the Panama Papers.

If politics is a game of shrewd and knowing men, Trump has ruined it.

If you are identified with certain opinions and an ability to express them, and if you can build yourself an audience, a partisan fan base - measured through social media - then you are an official opinionator, monetizable through books, television contracts and the speaking circuit.

If you run for president and lose, you promote yourself into all sorts of more lucrative, possibly more influential and surely more fun media opportunities.

The most important virtue in politics was once thought to be likeability. But in Corbyn, dislikeable was king. Actually, dislikeability reached its apotheosis in Donald Trump, who exhibited sourness, truculence and negativity in every step and tweet.

I've said many times: I'm not a Washington reporter.

One of the annoyances of working for The Guardian is that, obsessed as the organisation is with its digital and social media presence and its own sense of singular importance, editors would militantly try to edit your tweets.

Many of the accounts of what has happened in the Trump White House are in conflict with one another; many, in Trumpian fashion, are baldly untrue.

Politics, which really is about the art of expression, ought to be a logical profession for writers (it's very hard to explain to politics- and policy-addicted people that language is the basis of all ideas - if you can't say it, you can't think it), instead of a refuge for lawyers and apparatchiks.

As the entertainment industry became more corporate and MBA-driven, Harvey Weinstein remained an unreconstructed specimen of the worst and most compelling character traits of a truer Hollywood. Harvey, and in a sense only Harvey, continued to embody the Hollywood self.

The hold on power always ends. While death will surely break it, someone else usually grabs it before then.

Rusbridger's curious success, especially for a temperamentally remote figure, has been to give a reasonable face to the Guardian's quite quixotic mission.

Bieber is the first mega YouTube star, born inexplicably out of a novel and disruptive medium. It has, of course, always been so for pop culture: feverish bubbles, silly novelty acts and disconcerting new forces impose themselves on a reluctant and condescending media.

More than any other president, save perhaps John F Kennedy, whose father ran a film studio, and Ronald Reagan, a leading man and governor of California, Trump is on a buddy basis with media moguls, a speed dialer with the heads of studios and media conglomerates.

At a particularly dicey moment in my own love life when I was interviewing Rupert Murdoch a number of years ago, I tried to get some advice from him about, well, about anything a man with three wives, the latest the age of his children, might offer.

Rusbridger's intelligence, personal sense of higher calling and almost other-worldly self-absorption have played no small part in the stories that have most defined the Guardian and that, under another sort of steward, might have had a much more sceptical reception.

I think Bob Woodward's books are important books.

What's wrong with politics in the celebrity billionaire analysis is politicians. Populism is not so much a cry for economic equality, or even a disdain for elites, but a mass revulsion against the inauthenticity of politicians. Celebrities are real celebrities, politicians are fake ones.

Alan Rusbridger is, to many, among the most admired newspaper editors of our time.

Politics is ultimately not that complicated a profession; it's where the mediocre distinguish themselves.

The Apple imperative is to build a system that is 100 per cent resistant to any government warrant. The data on your iPhone, no matter how swarmy, corrupt, or dangerous you are, is supposedly safe. That's also the proposition of Panamanian banking laws.

The Snowden story, which won the Guardiana Pulitzer Prize, became the realisation of Rusbridger's dream of a brand-building, left-wing-uniting, global and viral story.

Guns in America have an atavistic force. Possessing them, or the act of not possessing them, is an identity that seems to pass from father to son.

In the litany of issues that separate the two Americas - one more conservative and one more liberal, increasingly as opposed and intractable and opaque to each other as the Palestinians and Israelis - none is so fierce, precise, inviolable and confounding to the other side as guns.

This American right to bear arms with, practically, a Muslim fierceness, sometimes seems as if it must be age-old, an ancient tradition from a tenacious frontier holdover.

I have never heard the word brand used so often as I did around The Guardian. Brand was the magical word, particularly as it was uttered by Alan Rusbridger, that would transform the paper and the goal that everyone was working toward.

One of the frustrations of the Republicans is that they have been mostly unsuccessful in equating the word Clinton with Mafia, which, to them, seems so head-smackingly obvious.

Next to financial impropriety, being charged with a reckless pursuit of women is certainly the most damaging thing you can accuse a public person of.

Trump loves the media. Trump understands the power it has and, accordingly, loves the people who have media power.

Long-running scandal fuels targeted political media. It's the stuff of obsession, which is the basis of a passionate core audience. More obsession means more passion and a crazy, over-the-top audience. Equally, of course, this obsession leads to less soberness, moderation and disinterest in the media world.

Brexit and Trump had upended the fundamental establishment viewpoint that politics was aspirational, that good politics promised progress, generational betterment and ever-expanding world reach.

Trump is a man who, for better or worse, stands in opposition to the institutions that dominate American political life.

In business terms, if you take over a company and oust its CEO or fire a divisional chief, you run the place. But in institutional terms, as it happens, it doesn't at all work that way.