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Republican U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump poses for a photo in New York
Sullivan told Slate's Jacob Weisberg that he thinks Trump, the presumed Republican nominee for president, has a better chance of winning the general election than his likely Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.
Sullivan cited Trump's ability to hold and control attention in the press as a key advantage.
"I think to be honest with you, I think he's more likely to win at this point than Clinton," Sullivan said. "... I can't prove that. That's my instinct at this point, because he owns the narrative."
Sullivan also noted that Trump is less interested in policy than in power, and this might hold some of his appeal for the American people.
"He's really, really interested in the wielding of his own power," Sullivan said. "And that's not the American way. It's not a democratic way of being. It's an anti-democratic notion of being. And I think there's also an element in the culture in which Washington is viewed as entirely broken. And therefore they want to blow it up and use this guy to blow it up."
He continued: "I think that at the root of this is a very un-American desire to abolish self-government. To say, 'OK, we live in such a divided, fractured, polarized society, we can't really solve our own problems through our traditional constitutional processes. We'll elect this tyrant and he will just do it somehow.'"