Well, I don’t know by when, but I certainly did not expect the dramatic rise in subscriptions that The New York Times has seen. I don’t think the industry’s seen anything like it — and that was before Trump. I remember going to a celebration not that long ago when we crossed a million. And that seemed like such an elusive, big thing. And if we have more years like the year we just had, I don’t think that’s [10 million] unreasonable. I don’t know when that will be, but it’s not unreasonable. And, by the way, we’re just starting our international expansion, because most of our audience is still domestic. I think that there’s a big audience for New York Times coverage; I think a lot of people don’t know what we do. It’s always surprising when we talk to readers — they don’t know how much video we do. We did an experiment in which we showed them some foreign coverage — and readers assumed it was Vice. We do more adventurous foreign reporting than anybody in the world. Oddly enough for an institution that people think of as overconfident sometimes, we’re not that good at tooting our own horn.

I did a call-out to readers earlier this week asking what questions they had for you. Many, not surprisingly, asked about politics. They seem to be in two camps. One complains that opinion is bleeding into news stories. Another worries that The Times will “normalize” Trump and fall prey to his manipulations. Does one of these sides better represent your concern?

I think this is an extraordinary presidency. And the reason that we’re putting more energy into covering it is not because we have this goal of taking Donald Trump down. It is because he literally has placed people in positions of power who by the standards of Washington, whether you like them or not — and I’m using this as a neutral word — are revolutionary figures. The secretary of state is unlike any we have ever had. He ran the biggest corporation in the world. The head of the E.P.A. doesn’t necessarily think we should have an E.P.A. So this is an extraordinary moment in the life of Washington. And we will cover that very, very aggressively.

I do not believe that opinion has seeped into the pages of The New York Times. I think some who think that do so because of my decision to use the word “lie” [in stories that refer to Trump’s bolder falsehoods]. Some of it is, to be frank, because some of our competitors have accused us of that and I think that resonates with people. I really don’t buy it and we work really, really hard to not do it.

Our writing is more relaxed than it used to be — that’s intentional. I actually think some newspaper writing of a generation ago was too stilted, was too hard to follow, too hard to understand. And I think that I’ve tried really hard to push us to loosen up language. I think there was something elitist about coverage of Congress 25 years ago that assumed people knew how a bill became a law. And I think the one thing we’ve been smacked in the head with in recent years is that people don’t understand that stuff. And the most non-elitist thing we can do is to assume people don’t understand it. To relax a bit in forms of storytelling, to tell people when we witness things and observe things. To be transparent. Of course, does that mean that sometimes we may have slipped in a way I wish we hadn’t? Yes, of course. But I think the alternative, which was to keep telling stories in this sort of made-up newspaper language that I grew up on, I don’t think that’s a good alternative.

But do you think reporters and editors at times inject opinion?

You and I could probably go through The Times every day and come up with a couple examples where they do. But I think mostly they don’t.

Another political question from a reader, on the topic of Trump’s crack-of-dawn tweets: “For the love of God, can The Times stop treating Trump’s tweets as front-page news?” In essence, plenty of readers ask, why does The Times give so much attention to his tweets, even some that are misleading or inaccurate?