 Trust is central to Trump's strategy. He has weaponized trust. He is intentionally undermining trust in science, in journalism, in the FBI and law enforcement in general. He's basically trying really hard to break all of these systems that are supposed to reign him in. But when you repeat lies, what happens is not that you convince people that your lie is true. That doesn't really happen all the time. A lot of lies are quite unconvincing. What happens is you break everything. You basically put doubts into people's minds about everything that's going on. So you create this fog of war. You create a basically muddiness where a lot of people will just grab whatever feels right or whatever plays out the way they'd like it to play out, wishful thinking, whatever it might be. Or hey, there's this ballsy guy who's willing to say anything or do anything. Let's just go with him. So the undermining of trust, the active and intentional undermining of trust creates a very difficult environment. I'm afraid that this post-truth, post-factual era isn't a four- or eight-year detour. I'm afraid this is like a 200-year era. We have the Enlightenment and then we have Romanticism. We basically have backlash sometimes against things we think are inevitable and going to keep going. So my concern is that we not let facts and discourse and all the things that might actually help us govern together leave for lifetimes and a few lifetimes after us. Newt Gingrich laid the groundwork for a lot of what Trump has eaten and taken advantage of. What do I mean? Well, if you read Steve Kornacki's The Red and Blue, he tells the story of Newt's rise. He also tells the story of the Clinton administration in ways that I hadn't quite remembered or thought about. But he tells the story of Newt's rise from a little district in Georgia to Speaker of the House. And when Newt comes to power, he basically separates the left and the right. Democrats and Republicans used to have crash pads together. They would room in Washington D.C. share apartments. They would eat together in a common dining room, common exercise facilities. He made sure that nobody was touching the other party so that there might be conversations where they could compromise, not happening. He also made sure everybody stayed on message and made the message quite strident. Remember the contract with America. And if you were not on message, they could cut off your primary funds. Now, most Republicans were not afraid of the general election. They were afraid of primaries because through gerrymandering, most districts are pretty safe. Once they come back to the same party that's kind of managed to own that district, so you have to win the primary, which then led to a series of other dysfunctions. And I'm no political scientist, but really created a very strange set of disturbances and separated Republicans and Democrats and their ability to actually speak to each other. Then along comes Donald Trump, who, as I said earlier, has had ambitions on the presidency for a really long time. But he says, hey, Republicans, thank you very much for pursuing a scorched earth strategy for 30 years, for developing a whole series of think tanks, for developing a media echo chamber that when we put something out can make it sound legit, then it has to echo around through mainstream media. All of these things, he said, that is awesome. Thank you so much. And he ate the party. And I'm pretty sure he was nobody's best bet for who they wanted to be in charge. I'm pretty sure they've had to swallow a lot of bile and a lot of pride, but many of them are on board now and they're saying things that are contradictory to what they said during the campaign or in other times. So it goes when the horse you're riding is coming in and actually delivering a lot of goods, sometimes you have to swallow what you said and take a position that follows. So that's been happening a lot. In fact, conservatives are so all in that if this whole situation goes as far south as it could, and I'm unclear that it will, the political pendulum and the public pendulum swing both ways pretty often, so maybe there's a way back before this plays out badly, but we could all be heading, and if we survive this whole process, we could all be heading for the equivalent of Nuremberg trials down the road. And I would just like politicians to think about that for a second because the weaponization of trust, the breaking of agreements, the dangers that are imminent in the brinksmanship and basically this confrontational approach that Trump loves and insists on really is a threat to many ways of being. And they're all complicit. There are accomplices in this doing at this point as they back him. I can deduce three reasons to back Trump. One, Trump is God's flawed messenger. Yes, when God does his own work, sometimes he does not pick a perfect person, he picks a flawed messenger and boy does Trump have flaws, but you can overlook them because what he's doing is pretty cool, which brings me to number two, Trump is paying off. Trump is the most productive person, the most productive conservative in decades. If you're scoring conservative issues and whether they're paying off or not, the Supreme Court is clearly swinging conservative and could swing a lot worse. I pray that RBG continues in good health, but there's other members as well. This could get really, really ugly. The bench, in fact, the federal circuit courts and the rest of the bench has been packed quickly with lots of conservatives thanks to McConnell who has made it his mission to make sure that these things get done. But also, they've hit the global undo on anything that Obama did. They've basically gone around, and I'm pretty sure that Trump's instructions to a lot of his secretaries were, okay, go in there and leave the sign on the door, but make sure that this department can't actually do very much. Defang them, take away their power to correct curb change, do whatever. And so we've had massive deregulation plus tax cuts. So business is happy. We're still in this long boom. One of the things that worries me is that people vote their pocketbooks, and if this boom continues right into election time, that is going to be a major influence in favor of Trump's reelection. The third reason is that liberals aren't yet selling a better deal. This idea that a lot of people feel left behind, that a lot of people see that they or their children will not lead a better life than they did, that prospects are dim. Liberals need to have something that actually sounds like it's going to work. I loved Bernie's critique of the system. Yes, the system is broken and rigged, but I didn't and don't like his solutions, which sound like 1970s big government solutions which aren't going to sell. There are some really bold and interesting initiatives coming out from Elizabeth Warren and others, more power to them. But until we've trained everybody on what these things are to the simple threshold or benchmark of Donald Trump making us memorize the points that he was going to go launch on inauguration day, to the point where we don't have that in our heads, the liberals are actually in danger.