The velocity of the walking combined with the talking makes it feel even faster.

The walking is a result of the talking. Tommy Schlamme, both with Sports Night and The West Wing, recognized that basically I write people in rooms talking, and that there needed to be some visual interest on television. So he would say to me, “Hey, this scene that’s all in Brad’s office, would it be okay if they left the office, walked down here, got a cup of coffee, dropped this report off on a desk, walk by Leo’s office, and then came back?” That’s how that started, and then I started writing the scenes that way.

You did a cameo on 30 Rock in which you did a walk-and-talk with Liz Lemon. After having to do it yourself, did you feel bad for inflicting it on your actors?

Yes! And oftentimes there were long lists of names, places, and dates that I’d give them. Sometimes they had to speak in another language…. [laughs and dissolves into a coughing fit].

A lot of the actors in that cast are great comedy performers. Did you know from the start that you wanted the show to be funny?

I have always felt that if you can tell a serious story “funny,” you’re doing yourself a favor. And that with the kind of hubris that these characters have, there was going to have to be some comedy. There are a lot of funny people in the cast. Listen, Brad Whitford is never so happy as if he can be in a pair of yellow waders trying to sit down at his desk chair and missing.

Vanity Fair ran a piece about how The West Wing influenced a lot of the people who would take over D.C. during the Obama years. The show presumably gave them an unrealistic idea of what government would be like.

Maybe they can change government into something closer to that unrealistic idea. That’s the whole point about writing heroes who don’t wear a cape. You can say, Okay, I get that only a TV show can solve the world’s problems in an hour...but in terms of decency and character, why can’t we do that? Why shouldn’t that be first of all the definition of patriotism, and not hugging a flag or some kind of bumper sticker patriotism?

On recent shows like Veep and House of Cards, the White House inhabitants were monstrous—cynical, manipulative, devious, interested only in power.

I want to be very clear: I am a big fan of Veep and House of Cards, okay? But again, that goes back to how in popular culture, our leaders are portrayed either as Machiavellian or dolts. It was Machiavellian in House of Cards, and both Machiavellian and dolts inhabited Veep. And The West Wing just wasn’t that kind of show.

The idea of a West Wing revival pops up from time to time. Will it happen, and what would it look like?

That’s the problem: I don’t know what it would look like. Sure, I would love to do it. I love these people, and I’d love to revisit the area, especially nowadays, but I simply don’t have an idea that wouldn’t feel like A Very Brady Reunion. I think, in a way, you also have the same problem as [we had with 9/11], which is: Do you create a world in which there is such a thing as Trumpism, or not? And if the answer is not, then what do we care? No matter where you are on the political spectrum, we all have a problem, which is that half of us are looking at our world completely differently than the other half of us. We’re living in a world of just crude politics, corruption in plain sight, out-and-out lying, and a staggeringly, breathtakingly dumb person in the Oval Office.