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The irony is that Washington was, in reality, very much like Benedict Arnold. The big difference was that Washington was ultimately able to control his emotions, something Arnold never learned to do.

We think of Washington as the defensive-minded pragmatist who won the Revolution by avoiding unnecessary risks on the battlefield. But that was not how he started out.

Washington worked very hard to create his legacy. Even before the War of Independence was over, he was assembling his papers and making sure they were going to be in a state of preservation that would represent as best he could the official side of what occurred during the Revolution.

There's a void of leadership in a lot of Washington. I think one of the reasons why there's so much angst across the country.

Washington has always had a pretty healthy amount of self-loathing.

One of the remarkable things about Donald Trump is that he didn't just beat the Progressive establishment - he also beat the Conservative establishment. Two political tribes that dominated Washington for half a century were defeated in the space of one election campaign.

We saw what happened in Jimmy Carter's administration. President Carter was a good man with the best of intentions. But he came to Washington without a good working relationship with Democratic members of Congress, which played a big part in his administration's problems.

The presidency made John Adams an old man long before there was television. As early as the nation's first contested presidential election, with Adams and Jefferson running to succeed Washington, you had a brutal, ugly, vicious campaign that was divisive and as partisan as anything we're experiencing today.

I was wholeheartedly attracted to the conservative atmosphere that permeated the city of Washington.