Trump doesn't live in the same universe as Harry Truman. He belongs to the same universe as Snooki. And his supporters know it. They take vengeful pleasure in his profound lack of seriousness. They protest complexity. Why can't we take Mosul in three days? Why can't we have manufacturing jobs and cheap goods at Walmart at the same time. Why can't we just have immigrants from Europe?

In the midst of our bountiful October harvest of Trump grotesqueries, the Russians and Julian Assange organized a WikiLeaks dump of private emails from the Clinton campaign. These revealed a shocking and scandalous fact about the former Secretary of State: she is a politician. Indeed, the documents represent one of the reassuring moments of this calamitous campaign. The overwhelming impression is of the candidate's and her staff's competence and sanity - and something more: a refreshing sense of reality about the vagaries of politics.

[Hillary Clinton was] an extremely peripheral figure in the failure to secure the Benghazi station: matters of consular security never reached her level of seniority - and more to the point, the significant operation in Benghazi was run by the CIA, which should have been responsible for security. David Petraeus was director of Central Intelligence at that point, and no one blames him for the ambush, nor should they

I look at Bernie Sanders and see an Old Testament prophet kvetching about greed and corruption. There is a place for that in American politics, but not in the White House.

[on the head of CNN hiring Trump-supporter Corey Lewandowski as a 'political analyst] Jeff Zucker is just another huckster, someone trying to make some money in disheveled times. But here is a question for him: Do you think giving a podium to Lewandowski will improve our discourse, make the views of Trumpists more comprehensible - or just provide another loaf of bread, another circus to a populace stuffed on starch and drivel?

[on the 2016 Presidential primaries] Bad taste and flagrant bigotry had been rewarded. And lessons had been learned by a generation of future candidates: if you want to get ahead, be outrageous, slag the weak and the different. You'll get a lot of airtime.

[observation, 2015] That was the dream - that somehow Jews and Arabs could make it work, could eventually, together, create vibrant societies that would transcend bigotry and exist side by side. The dream was that the unifying force of common humanity and ethnicity would, for once, trump religious exceptionalism. It was always a long shot. It seems impossible now. For the sake of his own future, Benjamin Netanyahu has made dreadful Jewish history: he is the man who made anti-Arab bigotry an overt factor in Israeli political life. This is beyond tragic. It is shameful and embarrassing.