I don't discount that Trump or those in his inner circle are guilty of something here. I just don't know of what. The range of possibilities is enormous. Is it active collusion? Passive collusion? Accidental collusion? Ideological collusion (many maintain this is the same as the active kind)? What, exactly, was the law broken? With what illegal act did the collusion start? I see all these unknowns and it puzzles me that there's such certainty.

Since the Alabama Special Election, when Doug Johnson won a Senate seat for Democrats in the deep South, pundits can't seem to stop talking about an upcoming "Blue Wave" in the 2018 midterms. Democrats are expected to take back the House, and perhaps even the Senate. Do you agree with this assessment? And if it happens, what's next?

If there's one lesson we should all take with us from 2016, it's to stop listening to pollsters. The more sure they are, the more wrong they seem to be. My guess, as someone who gambles on things like football, would be the Democrats take the House but not the Senate. If the Mueller probe lasts that long, they'll find something for use in impeaching Trump, and Trump will be impeached in the House but not the Senate. This will be the strategy for winning the White House back in 2020. I have no idea if that will work, but that's my guess.

Since the presidential primaries a lot is being made of the real and perceived divide between traditional Democrats and "Berniecrats". How much of a problem is this for the national Democratic party in the long run?

It's a massive problem for the Democratic party, as it should be. Whenever I visit Europe I am amazed by all of the sensible social programs enjoyed by ordinary people in virtually every major country: mandated or free child care, affordable higher education, truly rehabilitative criminal justice systems, health care as a human right, more job security, pay equity, shorter work weeks and guaranteed vacations, maternity and paternity leave, less militarization, and so on. We have none of that here in America, and there is a real fight between those who want such things and those who want to focus just on beating the Republicans using Trump's negatives as the main issue.

I think that divide is real and growing more bitter all the time. I think a lot of the acrimony and infighting in American politics comes from the resistance to a real movement for change even within the Democratic Party.

While America is busy navel-gazing, the rest of world is concerned about the long-term impact the Trump presidency and the isolationist ways of the modern Republican party are going to have on global stability. Is the idea of American leadership in the 21st century dead? Or is the Trump era, as some conservative commentators are arguing, "just a phase" we have to go through – and survive – before everything goes back to "normal", whatever that means in this day and age?

America will never be a truly isolationist country in the way Trump seems to desire occasionally, because the mere fact of our overwhelming military and economic might will always put us in the middle of things. But America as the unquestioned world leader is not necessarily a great thing, either.
We are an extraordinarily stupid and violent country, as we've recently proven at the polls. Your average American can't write his or her own name in the ground with a stick. We are institutionalizing things like the drone assassination program that, guaranteed, will soon result in people being incinerated from space for saying things like, "This cheeseburger is da bomb, yo!" I would feel a lot better if the Canadians or the Danes were hegemonic world powers.