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.
To be white in America is to assume, with total self-confidence and little afterthought, the personal ownership of public spaces.
Trump channeled ethno-populist rage as naturally and charismatically as George Wallace had during the 1960s, while seating a billionaire cabinet.
I multitask and always have the TV on in the background. If I need to focus, I generally have to turn off the TV.
In fundamental ways, the 2016 Democratic primary has been a litigation of the Obama years, and of whether the president's 2008 campaign vow of 'change we can believe in' succeeded or failed.
When he ran for president in 2008, Mr. Obama was the candidate of the young and the demographically ascendant. He eventually attracted strong majorities among African-Americans, Hispanics, Asian-Americans and voters under 30.
Of all the liberal resentments during the Obama years, one of the sharpest has been the failure to secure a public insurance option as part of the Affordable Care Act.
The evidence of our divided racial self was all over the Obama presidency from the beginning: from the shouts of 'you lie' from the well of Congress as he spoke to a joint session, to the unprecedented spectacle of American conservatives rooting against their own country being awarded the Olympic Games.
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.
To be sure, police do a dangerous job and take tremendous personal risks to safeguard the public. Most officers just want to do their jobs and go home alive.
Trump's real Achilles heel, and the thing most likely to keep him out of the White House, is his brazen contempt for women (plus his lack of impulse control and inability to stay off his Android phone).
The one woman Trump does seem to totally respect is his daughter from his first marriage, Ivanka, on whom he heaps constant, effusive, at-times borderline creepy praise and physical affection.
The abuse of congressional power for pure partisan gain has become a specialty of the GOP.
Trump's trade and immigration policies will deliver an economic shock to states like Texas where trade produces a substantial share of the jobs, and which depend on high oil prices.
Americans have, at various times, leaned on the FBI for a measure of justice that local and state police couldn't be counted on to deliver, and recoiled in fear at their exercise of raw federal power. That uneasy trust; the combination of need and dread, is the lot that FBI agents live with day to day.
Trump is beset by clear and alarming conflicts between his international business concerns and the national interest.
The sharp differences between the way city dwellers and rural, suburban and exurban residents vote, think and live cannot be papered over by federal laws, federal rules or, clearly, by a president.
Whether on guns, race, culture or feminism, there really are two Americas.
We Americans think quite highly of ourselves, and nothing makes us think more of ourselves than our romantic view of our presidents.
I've written before that the president is our national avatar - a stand-in for what we believe we are, or want to be.
