You’re a former Republican communications strategist who worked for George W. Bush, John McCain and Sarah Palin, and now you have a show on MSNBC. What’s it like on that side of the table? I was always the ‘‘squishy’’ one on the Bush White House staff. No one I worked for was ever deceived by my degrees of conservative principles, and that was my value to them: I understood the other side. I helped most of the people I worked for soften their polarizing edges. But to say that I would be totally unemployable in today’s political climate is probably an understatement. That’s just not what any of them do.

What do you think it’s like working at the White House right now? There’s a pretty high level of alarm based on how easy it is to get people to talk about what’s actually happening inside the White House, and you never know the whole story. As chaotic and dysfunctional as it looks from the outside, from my experience with Sarah Palin, I know what’s known and discussed publicly is usually just the tip of the iceberg.

Do you think we still know only the tip of the iceberg with Palin? Well, what I think was unknown was the degree of her rejection of us asking her to do anything that wasn’t her own idea. We were dealing with someone who was maybe ahead of her time. Her irreverence and disdain for the establishment of her own party and her embrace of the ‘‘isms’’ — nativism, isolationism, you know — she blew the walls out on the political norms before Donald Trump did. She was obviously onto something. She had crowds five times the size of McCain’s. We think it was all about her political skills, but it was also about her message. She railed against the mainstream media, she attacked all of us, her own advisers. That her audiences were so enthusiastic about that was the early signal that the party had changed.