YouSaid · the spoken record

David Axelrod

lines on the record: 75
first: 2022-09-01
most recent: 2022-09-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Justin Churmel handles the research. Margot? She's our assistant producer. Stephanie Stender still, we're wondering, hologram or post producer or hologramic post-producer, one of the other. She's certainly doing all the work. And the guy who sits over her presiding in kind of self-satisfied glory given some turns of events in recent Chilean politics. Anyway, he's a man of mythology. His name is Christian Fidale, Castro Russell, our executive producer.”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And leave a rat Make it a nice rating in the Apple Podcast app. I'm your host and the executive editor of the Recount John Heilman. Grace Weinstein is a co-creator of Kalen High Water, Aliyah Jackson and David Wilson engineer the podcast.”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If it actually believes children are our future, let them lead the way, whenever that thing is. It's awesome to see you. And I'm not being at all dismissive. I know how much the IOP means to you. And I actually find this true. I get asked the same question. It's like, every time I go out and speak at a college someplace, I'm always like, yeah, I'm really scared about the future. In a way, I've never been in my life before democracy, the whole fucking thing. It's like I said, it's apocalyptic. And then you go and hang out with some college students and you're like, He's got a pretty amazing. If we can just hold it together long enough to let them inherit and get us in the grave and let them take over, it'll be all right.”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Democratic death spiral autocracy. Chuck Prolock also, my last question. Well, all these things are like gloom and doom and dark and all this shit. You're basically fundamentally an optimist, so I want you to end the session. What's the rosy scenario?”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is there anything to be done about the menace that is the right wing disinformation conveyor belt? And not Tucker in particular, although he's horrible, but is there anything to be done about that? From the white, I don't mean like passing laws and regulations. Is there anything we can do about that? Is there anything Biden can do about it? How do you address that problem? Because it's a huge political fact. Dealing with that machine that's not just Fox News, but is OAN and NewsMax and all of it.”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“popular man on cable television tuck carlson biggest audience okay we can spend all day on tucker carlson i have two questions that arrive out of this right so that's just pure disinformation right and obviously what the political agenda etc etc how does joe biden deal with that problem that the right wing echo chamber is really big and really powerful we see it in the big lie and we see it here how do you deal with that if you're Joe Biden and then the subsidiary question There are a lot of people that you meet and I meet every day who aren't necessarily adheres to Tucker Carlson and who don't think Joe Biden's senior, but that rings a chord for them a little bit, which is like Joe Biden really all there. Is he really on top of his game? You hear it 20 times a day from people who are Democrats who say it like in a concerned way, not like a harsh way. How do you deal with that? There are two different problems there. The disinformation Republican right-wing problem and the age competence question that is going to dog him going forward.”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“History is allowed to be history. All the libraries have been burned down by the Trumpists. I want to play one more piece of sound because you can't talk about American politics in any year anymore without talking about the right-wing media echo chamber and this specific thing. Here's Tucker Carlson talking about Joe Biden's mental fitness”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we agree about this. And Joe Biden Neva's Beach in 2021, a speech in Philadelphia about voting rights. There's a couple pieces of legislation in Washington about voting rights. He said we're headed to the new Jim Crow. He said it was an existential threat. I don't really know he's done anything else about it. All of the rest of 2021. I've seen a president, Barack Obama, when he thought that the most important thing in the world was to get affordable care act. He's talked about it every day. If it's an existential threat and it's the new Jim Crow, has Joe Biden done enough about this issue in the course of his first year at office?”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That to me, I hadn't really heard anybody put it quite that way take the who's right and who's wrong out of it that that's the one thing we always counted on, right, was that everybody thought that our elections were there. And now we're on this path towards the anti-democratic death spiral. That to me is the nightmare scenario. Well, and it's also 2024.”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Chris Krebs on this show, and Chris Krebs, who is not false equivalents, okay, then I want to frame this as this, because he says Republicans are horrible about all this stuff. He's like, I'm a single issue voter now, I'm a single cause person, which is American democracy area. And team democracy or not. And he's not saying that they're the same. But when he looked at what was talked about, what he thought was coming was that given everything that's going on, that Democrats inevitably are going to say, and maybe rightly are going to say in 2022, that democracy was undermined, whether it was in suppression efforts or subversion slash nullification efforts, and that his concern as just an observer of this process, what we saw in 2020 with the big lie, what we're going to see in 2022, is that we're going to enter what he called an anti-democratic death spiral. That, again, Jenny Perrots will have more legitimate claims, but that the faith in the system is unraveling. And it's almost inevitable to unravel.”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And super disturbing. So I asked that question Is that like, what do you see as you look ahead? I mean, it's disturbing. Where do you think that's going? And are you as freaked out about what it means from the future of democracy as I am? Yes. Which is a lot.”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not doing that. On the other side, who just want to tear it all down. And I was getting right to it. That's why I said there were two sides of this coin. So I saved the worst for last in this context, right? Republican parties, you know, we talked about the big lie already and how fucked up it all is. There's a larger thing, and I know you're concerned about this, right? People said 2020 was the most important election of our lifetime. Now people look at it 2022 and seeing these voter suppression laws, the voter subversion laws, the way we're changing the way the ballots are counted. Nullification subversion, whatever you want to call it, the stuff that happens on the backside, what ballots get counted, how they get counted, who does the counting, make that stuff partisan. The Trump agenda.”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, but I mean, their images being the dominant image for people of the Democratic Party that that's what people see in some parts of America as being what today's Democratic Party is.”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, I did not really think there was going to be a fuck Joe Biden caucus in the Democratic Party, but apparently there is, and there are the ones, there's those six people. How big a problem is that politically for Democrats, that left wing and the wokeness issue broad”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It That's the challenge. How do you get Democrats turn out in this non Trump? There's all these other variables that are complicated. There are two flip side questions here, one of which is a lot of ink spilled, a lot of words spoken off your elections about whether wokeness on the Democratic side is a fatal problem or at least a very significantly bad problem for Democrats. And, you know, you had people like James Carville made a big deal out of it, but you pointed to, you looked out what happened in Portland, what happened beyond the Defendant Police stuff, all this stuff, right? Pointed a lot of things on the cultural side. How big a problem do you think wokeness, and I'm using that word broadly, but you know,”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Texas Republicans basically think there's no way better could win because he lost to Ted Cruz a year when Trump's in office. This is the problem. In 18 you had Trump, enormous Democratic turnout because people just wanted to do something to try to rein in Trump. Do you think there's a world where Democrats with Joe Biden in the White House under these circumstances turn out in those kind of numbers? What would it take?”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so then you have, interestingly, right, better work, gonna run for governor in Texas. He just announced that, Stacey Abrams just announced she's going to run for governor of Georgia. Ron DeSantis, we're not going to see Andrew Gillam, I don't think, again, in Florida, given some of the circumstances. But you got those three big gubernatorial races, again, and some others, right? When you look at those who are like national races in 18, and even in a year that was great for Democrats, great for Democrats in 2018, Betto lost to Ted Cruz, Stacey Abram lost to Brian Kemp, and Ron DeSantis won in Florida. There's going to be a lot of focus on those races again. Do you think that we should be focused on those races? And do you think Bett Oak has a chance to come the next governor of Texas? Stacey Abrams has a chance to become the next governor of Georgia. What do you think?”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a lot of job growth, though, so there's things that are encouraging. We don't know where COVID's going to take us, right? But as we sit here today, given the slenderness of majorities and other things that we've seen, you'd say it's pretty likely the House is going to be Republican You think the Senate, the 50 50 Senate, is if you look at the seats that are in play, you kind of expect more likely than not that we'll have a Republican Senate also.”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, as you sit here today, again, it's all we can do is sit here today and look forward. You look at where there tomorrow is. We look at people. There peers have different views about inflation, how persistent a problem that is, how bad it could be. Obviously, if it's persistent, it can rise, you're fucked, the supply chain issues are out there.”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Beginning of the turnaround in a lot of ways for you guys. Did it cut a deal Republicans? It got a bunch of stuff going. Started to elevate and get him back out of the weeds and up and up. Yeah, now we had another.”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, I'm not recommending for every future president that they take a shellacking like I did last night I'm sure there are easier ways to learn these lessons. But I do think that this is a growth process. Two guys both got their asses handed to them. The party did. First of all, I think it's a company I love that Clinton is like the president's relevant is one of my favorite things ever. Like that talk about AI in a defensive crouch. Obama's not as defensive, but I bet you would have not rather have had him use the word shellacking, which is kind of like the only headline out of that.”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We go back to 1994, where we saw you earlier talking about Bill Clinton didn't have a good midterm either. Here's Bill Clinton after the 1994 midterms and Barack Obama, like back to back. Here's how they took it.”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Take a break. David Axelrod, Helen High Water will be back. Talk about the future. The future 2022, which looms before us. Fetching So the midterms are looming. You guys had a midterm in 2010. Didn't go a while.”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was a time when you guys thought that you needed to be better on television, so you brought in Bill Daley to be chief of staff. That was one of the things you guys tried to do. Now, that did not work out well, but this notion of who's going to go on the shows, who's going to be on cable. When you left the White House, part of the thing that Obama wanted was like, I need some guys, I need my Carville. I need people to be out on the cables making my case. Apart from Biden, do you think the White House has done a good job of running a media operation in this environment of being out there in this very complicated, very fractious environment that we live in and like driving a message? Have they done that well? Do they have someone who you think has been the media field general for them that face the administration other than Joe Biden? How do you rate them on that scale?”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Announcements. I know that you want to trumpet the economy, but Joe Biden Ralph's numbers, this is not like the winning thing for him. He's not a good narrator. He's never been. Even in his best days, he's never been a crisp, clean narrator of things or a storyteller.”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He did this, he had this moment where it was like it might have been in South Carolina around AME. And it was like, he'd done it before. And every time. Guy lost. Every time he would have his campaign would be on the ropes, he would have some moment in a town hall where that thing that we all know he has, that empathy gene, would come out and he would have a moment, right? So that is not the only thing that saved him, but it's part of what saved him. And he had it. It's an incredibly powerful thing.”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is kind of my point though, right? You and I were up in New Hampshire in February of 2020, right? Biden had gotten crushed in Iowa, gotten crushed in February, and we were both like, he's probably done, right? And there was one Town Hall, maybe in South Carolina, I can't remember where, but I remember talking to you on the phone. It was like, did you see?”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's, I think, what kind of what I'm trying to get at. I want to let's play this. It's, I think, one of the most people still cry when they watch this. 2015 after Dylan Roof shut up Emmanuel AME in Charleston, South Carolina horrible, racially motivated shooting. This was a moment where when you watched it, the moments of rare, of total serendipitous, spontaneous Cathartic uplift in politics are very rare. And this moment when everybody watches the time, we're like, Oh my God, who else could have done this other than the story?”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're kind of asking for trouble. And the reason I'm raising it is because it gets us to Biden, right? We talked about what 2021 was like for him. What do you think as you watched Obama and you learned that lesson, which is asking presidents to do things they're not good at is asking for trouble? How does that apply to Biden? And are there things that he's being asked to do that he's just not very good at? And there's a way that in terms of the messaging questions and how he talks about stuff, how he relates to stuff, do you say, given what I learned with Obama in this context, this is what they should avoid or what they're making mistakes that they seem to be walking into these traps sometimes.”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People appreciate it in a And this was one of them, right? So it's like the flip side no drama Obama is Bulkan Obama Detached professorial. I mean, there's all cliches, but that's how a lot of people thought of them. They got baked into the narrative. When we talked about this the other day, one of the things you said was like if you ask a president to do stuff they're not good at,”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the point I'm making here, I think you agree with, right, is that in that period, May, June 2010, when the BPO hospital was a huge crisis, every day it was dominated the news for weeks and weeks. And every time he responded to it in any way was like that. He's talking about mitigation strategies and conflicts between a bureaucrat. There's no passion. There's no empathy. There's no anger at BP. There was a, you got your asses kicked for his lack of performance skills, which everyone assumed he had in spades. I'm just curious how that felt when you went through it. What did you think about it?”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Moment of national crisis. He did press conferences at the briefing room in the White House. He did novel office address. And you guys got your asses kicked during this period.”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you find out that even though he has enormous strengths, like every candidate or president, he has weaknesses too. So here's Barack Obama in the middle of the BPO oil spill, down in Louisiana at a moment when people are like, we need empathy. We need anger. We need something. Here's Brockam.”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And all of a sudden, you're confronted with a thing that's nothing like a candidate has ever really contemplated and certainly has no idea, no game plan going on.”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Started at a high level, though, and he got better. Yeah, that's why he's a generational talent. So you saw all of those things. And by the time he gets the White House and you go into the White House, expectations are extraordinarily high. People know that he can do a lot of things, right? Very quickly. We talked about this the other day and it made me go back your president now and you get something like the BP oil spill.”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. But also, I mean, look, I want to get to his presidency for a particular reason because I think it does reflect on Biden and there's a way to kind of think about what we saw in Obama and what we see in Biden, their thought of as being obviously the vice president and president together. But here's the thing about this, that even though when we say, all of those of us who watch this carefully and nobody watch it more carefully than you, that he wasn't very good in 2007, here's the thing. He wasn't very good in 2007, but he was still better than everybody else in the field except Hillary Clinton in 2007. Even in his bad days, he was pretty good. He had preternatural performance skills that were better than Chris Dodd, better than Joe Biden, better than Bill Richardson, better than all the rest of those people who were in a very crowded field. He still was in second place all throughout it. He did. So all I'm saying is that let's just give him credit for, he grew a lot, but he still”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do black men who make him the black candidate? Yes, exactly. Incredible. So you get this reputation for having a good feel for those kinds of races, those kinds of issues, those kinds of dynamics in both directions, like how to work it and how to win. And then you've stumbled on the canon of a lifetime. Really? Is there any candidate you've ever seen better than Obama? No. No. So he's fantastic in a million ways. We all know. We don't even need to talk about it. Incredible order, incredibly smart, incredibly, you know, all of things. And tough. And a bunch of things that people didn't see immediately.”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not just your base. Well, and part of the thing was that with all these cancer, and you'll tell them, you'll correct me if I'm wrong about this, but I think one of the things that was true, and this becomes very relevant to Barack Obama. You want to be a candidate who's black and qualified. Well”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An incredible thing, charismatic figure. Yes. And you went on and then you became kind of a specialist, right? It was like Dennis Archer in Detroit and Michael White in Cleveland and all these basically African American mayors in big American northern cities. That became your specialty, right? Tell me about that. I mean, other than the fact that you had the experience of working for Harold, you put out a shingle in a lot of ways of being a white strategist who helped black candidates win big city mayorships and navigate some of the trickinesses of the race issue in American cities.”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You talked in that clip in 94. Again, at this point, you had a lot of experience with the question of race. You said that one of the main trend lines of the exploitation by the Republican Party manipulation of race, you knew race, was always at the center of our politics, but you were talking at that point from a lot of experience because the first thing you did basically when you left, or one of the first things you did when you left journalism was go work for Harold Washington. I moved to Chicago to go to college in 1983 and watching Harold Washington in that period, 83 to 87, become Black Mayor of Chicago was an incredible thing, the transformative thing for the city.”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, well, yes. Those that lasted about five minutes. In 2004, we won't talk about your ill-fated tangling. What's his name, Edwards, John Edwards? But you were closer to being a journalist at that point still than you were to where we are sitting now here today. And we could talk all day about this. But I always find it fascinating that you were a rising star in political journalism. You were the City Hall Bureau chief at the Tribune. covered one of the most interesting political cities in the country and you'd wanted to be a writer your whole life The question I have is what was it that made you decide to leave and you love to write now you're now back in this role in a lot of ways as a journalist what made you decide to leave our glorious noble profession to go to become a hatchet man and a spin meister and all the shit you did later? I mean what was the moment of like I got to go do that?”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we'll get to that in a second. In 1994, David Axelrod was still a decade away from working on a presidential campaign.”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These two guys have basically touched on the two. A number of things to say about that. One, I miss the mustache. Two, I will say not to be sucky about this. A lot of stuff you said there just turned out to be quite prescient and true, right? The racial stuff and the makers and the takers and the middle class versus the undeserving, that was already clear in 1994. Man, it's gotten way worse in the last 30 years.”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We should ask for those, the guys should bring them in. And we couldn't find anything from the Tribune newsroom when you were City Hall Bureau with nothing. But we could find you as a relatively young political consultant. 1994 here on C-SPAN. Let's play that.”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All right, we're going to take a quick break, and then we're going to come back and talk about the life and times of David Axelrod before we turn a little bit to the future in 2022 here on Hellen High Water. We're back with David Axeron, Helen High Water trending old video is one of the things I love to do. And, you know, we weren't able to get anything from your childhood. I don't think there were any videos taken of you as a child.”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know. Well, we could be here all day. Let me ask this question because as we sit here, two white dudes. It's not that long ago that the U.S. Supreme Court heard this case on abortion that I think your wife, my wife, many women we know, are already looking back, even though we don't know what the outcome of it is. But on the basis of the tenor of the conversation, they would cite what they think now is the dawning realization that Roe is dead, Roe vu Wade is dead. Historically significant and would probably lobby to put it on the list of most important political developments of 2021, do you think that potentially, if that's where we end up with Roe mostly or fully repealed, that it could be a thing that will be on the list of the most important things that happen in 2021?”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want to put one more issue on the table before we move to a little David Axel biographical walkdown memory lane. It's my favorite. It's such a long lane.”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, before we go to break, I want to ask, I asked you before the show, you refused to give us the one thing I asked for, asked for just one thing, the three most important political developments of the year. We may have covered some of them already. What are your January?”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All of those things, right? So he capitalized on it, he opportunistically exploited it, he accelerated it. All of that. But if you believe that that's all true, that Trump's not the root cause of the problem, you would have thought that because you're pointing to the real problem here is that the trumpification of the party, that he has this power over people still. And if you kind of buy the first thesis, you would have thought that what power does he still have over these people, what's that grounded in? How can it be that this is the thing that befuddles me? It's not just he doesn't have any offices, like they still act like they're afraid of him, even though, again, he's not president. He holds no office. He has no platform. And yet they're all still terrified. Why, given our previous theory about Trump, capitalizer, exploiter, coagulant, accelerant, why is the party still following Donald Trump to the degree that they are tonally, as we see here?”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know you are. You're doing very well. Thank you for doing that. But I do want to just stick on this last Trump question about this, which is, I think you and I agree about this. And we said for four years you would say Trump is not the cause of what's going on. He's an accelerant. He's a coagulant.”
2022-09-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · The Axe Files presents Hell & High Water with John Heilemann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source