YouSaid · the spoken record

Peter Wehner

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2018-03-19

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2018-03-19

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1. “Some of it is economics. It's a complicated mix. And I think the net effect of that is an effort to try and, as Bill Buckley said years ago in the National Review, stand athwart history and say stop, but you can't stop history. And there are certain movements that you can't stop. But again, I think what you have to do, and I think what conservatives traditionally have done when conservatism is its best, is to recognize these changes and to channel them in constructive and humane ways. and to become the party and the agents of reform. And so it's not simply saying stop to history, but trying to recognize what's going on, to prudentially see what the dangers are, to try and set up guardrails, and to act in ways that makes us better than we were that unifies the country. Country in right now, we're not there.”

   2018-03-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 226 - Peter Wehner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “I think that's a fair point. I think for a lot of people, and if you talk to Trump supporters, one of the things I do believe that we have to do is to learn to listen well to people who have differences. And in my case, that means listening to Trump supporters and to try and hear where they're coming from and to try and honor people's own experiences and not to dehumanize them in the process. It's very easy. To do. So I do believe that for reasons that are complicated, some that are malicious, some that certainly are not. For a lot of Trump supporters, there is a sense that things are going awfully fast. And the country that they knew is changing. And for a lot of them, culturally, some of it is ethnicity and democracy.”

   2018-03-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 226 - Peter Wehner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “Is there a figure or figures who can rise up and channel the discontent and the grievances in a way that's constructive and humane and productive? Right now that's not happening. And you've got these feelings, these deep grievances that a lot of people on the American right feel. And with that in place, you've got a president who is, let's say that's the kindling, and then he takes the blowtorch.”

   2018-03-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 226 - Peter Wehner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “I agree with that, and I do things that in the short term things are going to get worse rather than better. I think we're going to have to buckle our seatbelts because Donald Trump is there. In the end, I feel like Donald Trump has to be repudiated and Trumpism has to be repudiated for the country and the Republican Party to recover. But I also believe that whatever happens when Donald Trump leaves the scene at whatever point that he does, that a lot of these currents and movements and dispositions and sentiments that exist on the American right aren't going to disappear. The question is, in part”

   2018-03-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 226 - Peter Wehner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “I don't know how the story ends, and I don't think any of us do because history is unfolding. I think it's important at this time where there's a lot to be concerned about to remember that history and politics isn't linear and things can go in cycles. And sometimes viruses create their own antibodies. And it wouldn't surprise me that the Trump political virus creates its own antibodies over time and that people, having seen what Trump is doing to our political and civic culture and just the sheer exhaustion of his presidency, will over time look for something different. I mean, you know enough about history and politics. You're well versed in it to know that often certain political figures give rise to other figures and movements.”

   2018-03-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 226 - Peter Wehner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “Apparently, it is. It's not an accident that Donald Trump won the Republican nomination. Now, he won the presidency too, and that's its own series of issues that went into that. But he is popular among the people on the right. And this is not a party anymore, the Republican Party that cares primarily about economics. It's now a party that cares primarily about ethnicity and cultural identity. And that's where things, I think, are really getting ugly.”

   2018-03-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 226 - Peter Wehner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “But the problem here is that not simply that Trump is doing it, but that a large number of Republicans and his base is reacting to it. That is, Donald Trump knows his base. And he knows what they'll react to. And that's, for me, been a difficult revelation. What I've seen during the Trump era, what it's revealed about the Republican Party and the American right. Is a side that I guess I knew existed, but I didn't have any idea was as widespread as it apparently.”

   2018-03-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 226 - Peter Wehner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “Yeah. And it's a mixed bag. I mean, they know that they're the head of the party and during elections they have to mobilize their supporters and nobody is perfect. And so that's all true. But there's never been a president that I can think of, certainly in my lifetime, but I don't think really in American history like Donald Trump who has gone out of his way to intentionally divide us and divide us on grounds of race and ethnicity. And he does it, I think, both as a political strategy and as I think something that seems to be true to him and his personality. He seems to draw a kind of psychic energy and satisfaction at creating chaos and turmoil and division. That kind of sprung from the...”

   2018-03-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 226 - Peter Wehner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “No other president I can think of has done this. Other presidents have certainly been imperfect in terms of trying to unify the country. And it's not an easy task to do. Both the president I work for and you tried to unify the country and it became more polarized”

   2018-03-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 226 - Peter Wehner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “And what Trump does is he finds these cultural flashpoints. And he knows his base large parts of his base well enough to know that if he gets into these cultural fights, not these policy fights per se, but cultural fights, fights about symbolic issues, but which have deep meaning to the country. That his supporters will forgive him transgressions of conservative Orthodoxy or Republican orthodoxy as long as he's getting into these fights. And I think that there are fights that are dividing the nation and really zeroing in on some of the fault lines in American history and American society. And he seems to take great delight in rending the country and pulling it apart.”

    2018-03-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 226 - Peter Wehner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “And what did he do? He brought up the issue of NFL players not standing up, kneeling for the national anthem. The previous weekend, I think six or seven players in the NFL had not stood for the national anthem. It was not an issue at that time. He went out of his way. Exactly. And you use that word a couple of times, and I think it's exactly the right one. I found myself using it a lot now, too, which is inflame, the inflammation of the body politic.”

    2018-03-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 226 - Peter Wehner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “What had happened a few days before that was that he had made noises that were sympathetic on DACA for children who had come to the United States. Their parents were undocumented workers and this was a debate that's going on now on whether those people should be deported or not. Most people overwhelmingly say they shouldn't. Trump himself had been somewhat sympathetic to it, and he was getting some criticism from Talk Radio World and others who are very, very, I think, harsh and rigid on the issue of immigration and illegal immigration. So what did he do? He went down to Alabama on a Friday. It was a speech for Luther Strange during the primary in the Alabama Senate. Against Roy Moore, against Roy Moore.”

    2018-03-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 226 - Peter Wehner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “My point is simply on the tolerances. I do think it's a virtue and we probably all need it more. But again, how you apply it on different matters, some people will view particular public policy issues through the prism of tolerance. Others will say this isn't really a matter of tolerance. It has to do with, in this case, the strength of institutions. In any event, as it relates to Donald Trump, I think you're exactly right. And I want to illustrate what I think is the pernicious nature of his presidency. When he mentioned the NFL players and not kneeling for the national anthem,”

    2018-03-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 226 - Peter Wehner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “Right. No, they would make that, and their argument has certainly won the day. By the way, it is interesting if you go back over the history of the same-sex marriage debate to show you in a way the power of ideas and how moments can change, there were really two people who made those arguments early on. That was Andrew Sullivan mentioned earlier, and then Jonathan Rausch. And they made what was interesting to me is that they made their case in very careful and non-inflammatory ways. They went out of their way not to accuse their critics and those who had views different than of being bigots. And they tried to answer their arguments one at a time, and they both did a very, very good job. And at that, and public opinion shifted not just because of them, but I think in part because of them.”

    2018-03-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 226 - Peter Wehner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “Yeah, I think that's right. Let me take those in order in terms of tolerance being a virtue. Absolutely. And it was in the Enlightenment for so much of it's central to the political philosophy that informs democracy and a republic, which is tolerance for different views. That is how it works, right? Which is you have differences and you're able to tolerate those differences. Now, how that applies on the issue of, say,”

    2018-03-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 226 - Peter Wehner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “Republican Party, partly because I've been a conservative and a Republican my whole life, and I do think that here and now, the moment that we're at, it's really the Republican Party and the right, I won't even call it conservatives that are probably doing the most damage to our political and civic culture. I don't think it's an action, by the way, that Newt Gingrich now is one of the leading proponents and defenders of Donald Trump.”

    2018-03-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 226 - Peter Wehner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “That's right. If you go back, I think it was in the 1990s, maybe even earlier than that, where he would put forth a sort of certain vocabulary that Republicans were supposed to use. So if I'm recalling it right, it would invoke the word corruption a lot. So it was this whole view that it was an attitude that the people that you disagree with aren't simply wrong. They're wicked or they're out to destroy America. And it's not confined to the right. The left is head. It's version of it too. I think it's attacks on Robert Bork. Some of them really cross the line. And I think hyper-politicized, the court nominations in a way that prior to that, there were exceptions that wasn't there. The left has its own problems. I think part of the reason that I'm troubled so much about what's happening with conservatism.”

    2018-03-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 226 - Peter Wehner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “Damaging in that assault on government because I think his attacks on government were less modulated and less careful than Reagan's. I think Gingrich introduced a kind of nihilism, or at least a quasi-nihilism and a personalization of politics that was very popular in the”

    2018-03-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 226 - Peter Wehner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “Yes, it's a fair point, but I'd caveat it. Reagan was, I don't think, really reckless. Even if you go back to his inaugural, what he said was at this moment, government is the problem, not the solution. And I think he had a fair point at that time in history that government had become too large. And Reagan, in the way he treated government and actually the way he executed government, had a certain respect for it. Trust in government went up during the Reagan years, not down because it was viewed as things were going well. Of course, he won re-election with 49 states. So there is a critique of conservatism, and I would grant you that conservatives too often have been too reckless and loose in their criticisms of government. But I think in terms of their performance as government, I think that they did well. I would actually turn to another figure. I think Newt Gingrich was much more.”

    2018-03-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 226 - Peter Wehner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “Conservative movement in the Republican Party. Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1981 wrote a piece in The New York Times where he said the DOP of a sudden had become the party of ideas. And when I was really a sort of a child of the Reagan era in the 1980s, what were the important books of that era? Charles Murray Losing Ground, Richard John Newhouse, The Naked Public Square, James Q Wilson and Richard Hernstein, Crime and Human Nature, Alan Bloom in the Closing of the American Mind, ideas were taken seriously. Antony and Scalia, judicial restraint, whatever you think of Scalia's philosophy, he was brilliant and he was articulate in expressing it. That has now gone, and I think the politics of theatrics has taken over the politics of governance. I think that Republicans and conservatives for a lot of them, there's a denigration of government and indifference to it. They don't much like it and they're not much interested in it.”

    2018-03-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 226 - Peter Wehner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “Or it's the courts, or it's our intelligence agencies, these things matter. They used to matter a whole lot, by the way, to conservatives themselves. You know, back in the 80s and 90s and even 2000s, it was conservatism that was actually making this argument against deconstructionism and postmodernism on the academy said that objective truth matters. And now you've got it flipped around. And Donald Trump is leading this assault in the political sphere and now really, which is, I think, seeping out into the civic sphere. And conservatives and Republicans are not only not stopping it. They're helping it. for what happened to the Republican Party and how it nominated Trump and how it's turned out to be what it now is. That's a great question. It's a complicated one. I think several things went on. One is we've seen a tremendous evaluation of ideas, I think, within the”

    2018-03-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 226 - Peter Wehner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “Let's take the issue of truth and lies. Let's grant that a lot of politicians shade the truth, some lie, and sometimes that there are close calls about where on the spectrum people how forthcoming they are. So let's just grant that. There has never been a president who has been as pathological a liar as Donald Trump, who is engaged not just on an assault on truth, but the almost daily annihilation of truth. That has deep consequences for politics and for a country. We are, I think, in some respects in a kind of post-truth moment in politics, which is a real threat to democracy and the kind of assaults that Donald Trump is engaging in in terms of our most important institutions, whether it's the FBI.”

    2018-03-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 226 - Peter Wehner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “Yeah, and it's the rest that I think is so deeply troubling. Because politics is more than where you just check the policy boxes. And I say that as somebody who's, as you said, spent a lot of my life in public policy. I don't mean for a moment to diminish that importance. But that's not all what politics is about. It's not all of what the life of a country is about as it relates to politics. There are such things as norms and standards and standards of decency and respect for institutions. When you have, just to take one issue, and then I'll go to your issue about how the Republic got into this bind,”

    2018-03-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 226 - Peter Wehner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “Slim volume for slim volume for a reason. Look, Donald Trump tapped into the base of the Republican Party. As you said, he is now supported by 90% or so of Republicans, and there are just not enough Republicans in Congress and the House and the Senate who are willing to go crosswise of him because it would create an uprising. It might endanger their election chances. Some people, I think, make more prudential judgments, but I think in the end wrong judgments. I think their argument to be fair to them would be, look, Trump was 18 out of 17 candidates. I wish he wasn't present, but we've got to work with him. And if I fired off the rounds at Trump that you do rhetorically, I would have no influence with the Trump administration. And we've got to have somebody to try and keep this shit from...”

    2018-03-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 226 - Peter Wehner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “Yeah, let me take those in reverse order. Where are those voices? Well, they're not in Congress. That's for the most part. Why? I think they're not because I think there's a lack of courage. Go back to John Kennedy and profiles and courage.”

    2018-03-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 226 - Peter Wehner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “And something is deeply amiss. So, I mean, it doesn't really matter that I don't call myself an evangelical Christian anymore, but you do what you feel like you have to at any given moment in time. And the Trump era was bad enough. And then to see what happened with Rory Moore, I was like, at some point, you just say enough.”

    2018-03-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 226 - Peter Wehner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “Senator Lee and others who I like and admire, but Donald Trump is the face of the Republican Party. And in terms of evangelical Christianity, I certainly haven't given up on my Christian faith. But that term has become so politicized. And I think so denigrated because of that politicization that it bothers me. And again, I want to underscore it, evangelical Christianity, it's a huge movement. a quarter of the country and there are people who in their daily lives are doing great good and great charitable work and they're evangelicals who are uncomfortable with Trump. Some of them didn't vote for him. Some of them voted with him with reluctance. Having said that, time after time after time by most of the metrics that we can measure these things, they just rallied to Hasside and his cause. And they did with Roy Moore.”

    2018-03-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 226 - Peter Wehner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “Yeah. Yeah. It's, you know, I'm not less of a Christian or less of a conservative during the Trump era, but I'm very uncomfortable calling myself now a Republican, even though my roots are with a Republican Party. I have a lot of friends who are Republicans. And I think below the level of Donald Trump, there are certainly people like Ben Sass and...”

    2018-03-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 226 - Peter Wehner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “Exactly. And Roy Moore's after the post story came out, where are these four credible allegations of child molestation, evangelical support for Roy Moore went up in Alabama, according to the polls, which shows you just how sick this whole thing is. They wrote a column.”

    2018-03-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 226 - Peter Wehner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “And so that kind of corruption, that intellectual and I think a kind of moral intellectual corruption is very problematic. Second thing is that I would say is that this is just complete hypocrisy. I'm old enough to remember the 1990s in Bill Clinton. And a lot of these guys were the same ones who were talking about the importance of moral character in leaders. That was Primus Interparis. That was the most important thing of all. That mattered to them then. It doesn't matter to them now, which leads one to think that this is about political tribalism. If it's a Democrat who's acted in morally questionable or problematic ways, then you go after them, both barrels blazing. But if it's a Republican, you go sotovoce, or you defend him. And the third thing I'll say is that...”

    2018-03-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 226 - Peter Wehner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “And his attacks are something that are really troubling and problematic and hush money, one hundred thirty thousand dollars for a porn star, while your third wife was at home with your child. That really troubles us. They don't seem able to do that. They are like 100% in defense of him to the point that Tony Perkins, it's up the Family Research Council when this issue came up about the Payments, hush money for this porn star said, Well, we're going to give him a mulligan.”

    2018-03-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 226 - Peter Wehner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “Hillary Clinton presidency. And so with reluctance, recognizing his moral failures and his drawbacks, we're going to vote for him. That's a reasonable position if you're a conservative evangelical Christian. Again, I disagree with it. Here's the problem with it, and I think there are several. Number one, we're no longer in a binary choice. The election is over. Hillary Clinton is not present. Donald Trump is. What's happened is that a lot of these prominent evangelical Christians have gone from making a prudential judgment to being the sword and shield for Donald Trump. They are his most reliable defenders. So they aren't capable, at least if they are, they haven't shown themselves capable of saying, look, we think the Gorsuch nomination was a good thing. But on the other hand, his treatment of women and his pathological lies and his denigration of the poor.”

    2018-03-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 226 - Peter Wehner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “Yeah, that's an articulate way to put it. Let me deal with this because it's a fascinating issue and it deserves to be disaggregated. You're quite right. And there is a responsible, I think, Christian evangelical case to make for having voted for Donald Trump. I didn't share it and I didn't vote for Donald Trump. But let me express it and then tell you where I think things have gone off the rails. In that case would go something like this. Donald Trump, and it was an imperfect person for sure, morally imperfect, obviously. But on the issues that we care about, judges, courts, pro-life cause, a whole series of other issues, that these conservative evangelical Christians believe is better for the country, for the good of the country. Their argument was you have to weigh these two things, and so a Trump presidency would do more good for more people than it does.”

    2018-03-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 226 - Peter Wehner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “Today, they see a lot for a lot of Christians, not all by any means. I want to be fair to people who are Christians who live their lives honorably. But for an awful lot, particularly prominent evangelical leaders, and I'm talking about people like Jerry Falwell, Jr. and Franklin Graham and Eric Metaxis and Robert Jeffers and others, they speak with such a harsh spirit. And I think we've seen that there is in their defense of Donald Trump a kind of hypocrisy that is so obvious to everybody else, but apparently themselves. And so I think that that has really had a discrediting effect on faith, and it bothers me a great deal. That's one of the reasons why I've spoken out as often as vocally as I have, because I feel like something that I treasure.”

    2018-03-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 226 - Peter Wehner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “It's been interpreted and seen, and I think even delivered a censorious and judgmental. Often there is very little grace and redemption that is associated with faith and politics. Philipp Yancei is a tremendous Christian author. He sold, I think, 14 million books or so. Person I like and admire very much. And he did a book back in the 1990s called What's So Amazing About Grace And in the course of that book he would ask people, strangers, what they associated with the Christian faith. And he said, what he kept hearing was political attachments to it. And he never once heard the word grace. And so if you're a person like I of that faith where grace is so central to that faith and that's being occluded and not only occluded, people don't see that manifest, they see something very different.”

    2018-03-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 226 - Peter Wehner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “Marginal good in some areas, maybe more than marginal good in other areas. But I think net net, it was harmful, and I think it unleashed some dark forces within politics. And over that period of time, that sort of arc of modern American history from the 80s, 90s, 2000s to today, to see the way that faith has been employed has been for me a kind of painful experience as someone who was up till now I'd identified as an evangelical Christian. And I think part of it is that what I've seen is the subordination of faith to political tribalism and partisanship. And that's when it becomes weaponized. That's when it becomes a cudgel. It becomes a bat that you can beat people upside the head with.”

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37. “In this country, and really in sort of modern American politics, things really began to shift, I would say, in the 80s with Jerry Falwell Sr. and the moral majority and Pat Robertson in the 80s, as you said. He challenged George H.W. Bush in 88. That was a movement that I think had some.”

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38. “That's exactly right. I agree with you. I mean, faith is informed. Some of the great social movements in American history, the abolition movement, the civil rights movement, and my, from my perspective, the pro-life movement and others. But it's a two-edged sword. In this country and within obviously the history of the world, you had the religious wars on the European continent that gave rise to John Locke and this concern about he and other Enlightenment philosophers who, having lived through that and seen what I think is a fair appraisal, which is sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively the weaponization of faith, what that can do. So, you know, history is complicated enough and human beings are complicated enough that you can pick and choose your historical examples to show when faith has been a source of healing and a source for decency and when it's been a source of maliciousness and division.”

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39. “My entire life. I've seen up close because most of my life has been involved in politics what can happen to people of faith when they get too closely aligned with it. And I think the Trump era has underscored that more vividly and I think more problematically than at any other time in my lifetime.”

    2018-03-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 226 - Peter Wehner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “The way around. And I feel like in my case, the Christian faith should inform certain principles, but to take those general principles and to begin to precisely apply them to public policy is a very tricky business because public policy, as you know so well, governing is hard, and it's so often depends on prudential judgments and moments in time and different moments require different things. So you can take, for example, a sentiment that I think is quite strong within the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament about care for the stranger and the dispossessed and the poor. But how that applies to particular immigration policy or particular welfare reform, that's not so obvious. And there you have to invoke good judgment, wisdom, empirical evidence, and so forth. But it's a tightrope. It's one I felt.”

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41. “That's dangerous, and that's not right. That these things are distinct and they have to be treated as distinct. I believe that faith in form politics, and I've believed people of faith should be involved in politics because I think politics is finally and fundamentally about justice. It's an imperfect profession for sure, and it's not the only means for justice, but I believe, as I think you do and as I understood from your marvelous book, that politics is about advancing the human good and that matters. And my faith has informed that because it's one means to advance justice and human flourishing. At the same time, I've just always had this wariness about conflating them, both as a danger to politics and a danger to faith. If they get too closely aligned, I just think that it's destructive all the time.”

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42. “It really is. And I'm anxious to talk about it. I have some strong feelings about that, but just to take a half a step back, those two things have really kind of marched in concert, I guess, in my life. My interest in faith and my interest in politics, and both have been important to me, my professional and my personal life. The first piece that I ever wrote, and I think that I ever had published, was a piece in the Tri-City Herald. It was a letter to the editor, and it was a warning. It was in response to a person. So this is 1980, shortly after Reagan had been elected. And it was a guy whose last name was Mays. I forgot his first name. And he had basically written, I think, a letter himself that conjoined the conservative agenda and Republican agenda and the Christian faith. And I wrote and I said, nuh.”

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43. “Somebody who's very sympathetic to people who have struggles with faith and doubts just because that was really so much my own journey.”

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44. “I said, Patty, this is like sand in the gears for me. I think partly because what I read about the Bible and what I had heard about what faith was supposed to bring to people, it wasn't bringing to me. To me, it was just, as I said, sanding the gears, I wasn't quite sure it was true. I didn't feel like if I came to believe that it would give me very much in terms of my own life and my heart and my affections and the reordering of my love, over time it changed and I became, and I've been a person of the Christian faith since then. And it became a heart attachment, really more of the spirit than just the mind over time. And I've been so influenced by people that I've met in the journey. So over time it became quite important to me.”

    2018-03-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 226 - Peter Wehner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “Well, my memory is that I wanted to try and ascertain the truth of it. There wasn't a kind of crisis particularly that I was going through and I think it was too young or in any event I didn't feel an existential crisis about the meaning of life. But it was a struggle I remember when I talked to my sister and I...”

    2018-03-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 226 - Peter Wehner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “She had converted to the Christian faith while she had been at school and at college, and she came back. She actually was interning at a church. And so I just began to pepper her with questions. She then put me in touch with a person who I still am friends with. He's now a pastor in Richland. His name is Carl Koppic. But Carl at that point was, I don't know if he was interning at the church, but he started a Bible study with my best friend in me. So that began my journey of Christian faith. It was not an easy journey. Faith never came easily to me, and it was largely a cognitive process. Some people, it's a Damascus.”

    2018-03-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 226 - Peter Wehner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “She was a person both that I admired. She had an individual and also her intellect. She was just a very smart. And had she been studying?”

    2018-03-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 226 - Peter Wehner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “And I try and interpret my politics through the faith. My own journey, I didn't actually grow up in a Christian home. My parents believed in God, but I don't have any memory really of going to church. I just remember in high school beginning to have these questions about faith. My best friend and I really at the same time began these questions. oldest sister is five years older than I am. She'd got off to college, University of Washington, and she came back in the summer, so this is in the later 70s. And I remember just peppering her with questions about theology. I remember my dad's notepad from work and I would just ask, why, why?”

    2018-03-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 226 - Peter Wehner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “And they were ugly then, and then assimilation occurred. And now it's happening again with immigrants from a different set of countries. But often the impulse is the same. I think it derives in part by a fear of the other, which I think in American politics today, there's just a lot of fear that is out there and anxiety and uncertainty. And I think that fear and anxiety over time transmutes into anger and into rage and into attacks on the other. And it's unfortunate, but I think that's where we are right now. I don't think that that will ultimately win, and it's not as if there aren't countervailing voices and forces. But in terms of over my lifetime, I haven't seen anything quite like this. You know, I'm a person of the Christian faith, and my faith is more important than my policy.”

    2018-03-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 226 - Peter Wehner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “Exactly right. I think it was Arthur Susinger Jr. who talked about the cycles of history. And these things go in ebbs and flows. And there are bright moments and dark moments in the history of a country, including in this country. And you're quite right, the views on immigration. The pendulum has swung very, very widely. And there was deep anti-Catholicism in the United States and prejudice towards Jews, toward all sorts of immigrants.”

    2018-03-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 226 - Peter Wehner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source