Trump “comes out of a reality TV world,” Sasse told me in the latest episode of POLITICO’s Off Message podcast. “And I have lots of anxiety about whether or not that kind of world is really what we want for our kids.”…

“There’s a risk in our media-driven, and particularly digital media-driven culture; TV-based, broadcast-based, and image-based culture of this digital moment,” Sasse says. “There is a danger that we create shorter and shorter attention spans, more and more unbridled passions, less and less self-control and self-restraint. I don’t think that our Founders would believe that America could long prosper if the people were not readers.”

I asked him how, in a word, he’d describe Trump. All he came up with: “current president.”

But Trump isn’t his only problem. Asked for one word to describe the Republican Party, he again came up with two: “question mark.”