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Tom Donilon

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2018-06-11

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2018-06-11

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1. “Say, I am going to lead the free world. I think we need better civic education in the United States. We need critical education, critical thinking education in the United States. We need to defend ourselves against these attacks. So there's a lot to be done here in order to kind of really have the United States thrive, and I think it can in this new competitive phase.”

   2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “Where, if you look at the polling data today, David, you have increasing numbers, particularly of younger people, who don't see democracy as essential to the way to run a government, right? That's very dangerous, I think, for us going forward. There's a crisis of governance in the Western democracies. You know, Frank Fukiama wrote a famous book in 1989 called The End of History, where his proposition was that we had found the best way to run governments. And it is kind of the liberal economic, democratic order. And that was going to win out and all the rest were going to get swept to the side. He turned out to be wrong. You know, there were two other great books written around that same time period, one by Sam Huntington called The Clash of Civilization, one written by the famous John Mersheimer at the University of Chicago on the tragedy of great powers, which store a much more complicated competitive world. That feels like the world we're in.”

   2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “In the modern world. Yeah, right. And that's the contest we're in, right? So that ideological contest where the United States has historically been the leader to great effect is one that we can't step back from. And that's what I fear we're stepping back from. And this goes to, I know we have to finish up, is on the issue of democracy.”

   2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “It. They expressly reject a number of the approaches and the principles and pillars of our approach in kind of Western level democracies, and they have much more top-down one-party-led system. And that's the offer that they're making, right? Their approach is making.”

   2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “Yeah, and again, and it's at multiple levels, it's economic, it's geopolitical, the Chinese clearly have tried to push to have a sphere of influence in the region. So it's very important for us to reinforce our alliances. It's also really important for us to continue to be the leader of the free world, as we said in the past, right? A values leader, because there's no alternative model on offer. That's interesting. If you spend time in China today, and it isn't, the theory that many people had for many years was that as China became richer, it would move towards a liberal Western democratic approach and would adopt the principles and approaches of the Western liberal democracies. That is not what's going on in China today. China has made a set of different decisions, and they're quite clear about it.”

   2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “Which was to go to the very concept of reciprocity. That is, our companies need to be treated in your country the way we treat your companies in our country. And that's been pushed to the side as well. And third, of course, we've decided to do this bilaterally as opposed to kind of multilaterally with the Europeans and others, where we could have had a much more constructive conversation and I think more effectiveness in terms of dealing with China. So my fear is that this bilateral focus on deals and focus on numbers in the bilateral trade deficit I hope my fear is though it will distract us from and not allow us to deal, David, with what are really important structural issues going forward here in terms of the US-China relationship.”

   2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “These were going to have to be addressed by whoever was the president. What I fear is this president's focus on the bilateral trade deficit, which is the function of a lot of other things, including your investment level and savings level in your country. I fear that we're going to make smaller deals on that, right, and not deal with really some of the fundamental issues that are facing the United States and China over the long haul. And we actually had an approach, which I think would have been better for the Trump administration to pursue, which was a multilateral approach to deal with these structural issues. The TPP was exactly geared, right? To set the rules of the game on trade in the world. And at some point along the way here of history, China was going to have to move to those rules of the game if they wanted to participate in global trade. We had under negotiation a bilateral investment treaty.”

   2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “There's a strategic set of conversations that need to be had here, I think, and insights to be gained with respect to this new competitive phase that we're in vis-a-vis China. It's not the same as Russia. I think on Russia, we're actually in an actively hostile mode with the Russians, but it is a more competitive phase with China as it becomes a bigger player on the world scene. Third is that as a result whether Hillary Clinton had got elected president or Donald Trump got elected president, we were going to have to deal with address a number of these structural economic issues between the United States and China, including their subsidies and the way they are pursuing their technological agenda things. We were going to feel...”

   2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “Yeah, a couple of things. First of all, China is in a very confident mode right now. President Xi Jinping has been selected now to be the leader of China without limit with the change in their constitution. And he's a very powerful leader of China. People say in a clich ⁇ that he's the most powerful leader of China since Mao. In truth, in terms of the presence on the world stage, more powerful. Because the China that Mao led is not the China thing leads today. It's entirely different, entirely different country, which with much more impact on the world's economy and geopolitics.”

   2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “I don't know where it goes now. You would want to get it back to a negotiated track, but we'll now have to start to try to put together the sanctions again. I think there's been damage done here. There's been some damage done, I think, to the alliance, particularly with South Korea, who was blindsided by this. I think more importantly, it's been damaged unto the maximum pressure campaign because we took the pressure off and we took the pressure off without knowing with enough confidence that we could have a successful negotiation. So there's been damage done here, I think, through the process that we've undertaken here.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “Exactly. We have a channel that has been working thus far with Secretary Pompeo. I think the right decision David would have been to hold in place the gains that we've had to date and to ask for the meeting to be postponed for Secretary Pompeo and interlocutors, including the leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-un, to have further conversations so that we can raise the prospects of success for this meeting. Where does it go now?”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “Intended to be. Yeah, the right way forward here, I don't think, was to send this letter scuttling the negotiation, the June 12th meeting. I think the right way forward would have been to say the following. And we didn't do this at the front end. We don't have the same understandings, evidently, with respect to what our goals are here. We don't have common understandings with respect to what denuclearization means. It means something to us in terms of giving up in a verifiable and irreversible way your nuclear program. To you, it means the phase drawdown and all kinds of other things on the North Korea side. We clearly need more work before we get together if such a meeting takes place.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “Ambassador Bolton had clear views on North Korea for a long time, but I can't look into his mind. I don't like to ascribe motivations to people. But I can just tell you the fact. The fact is that citing the Libyan model was not geared to make this a successful negotiation. It was geared to kind of a mistake to take it off track.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “It's a very tough situation. The policy that the United States was pursuing, the maximum pressure policy to bring the North Koreans to the table to address the nuclear program is the right policy. And I think we should have continued along those lines. Now we evidently had an opportunity for a face-to-face negotiation and negotiations about the nuclear program, and we were right to try to move in that direction. This execution of this has been really, I think, kind of off track from the beginning, David. It was entered into impulsively after a briefing from South Korean officials. We then lost message discipline on it where we had the National Security Advisor, one of my successor, John Bolton, talking about the Libyan model, which is not applicable here and was guaranteed goes to the core of what the North”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “The Iraq War in the Middle East, and I think we'll see pulling out of the TPP as one of the worst mistakes we've made in Asia since Vietnam.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “Our ability to execute on that. And it would seem to me that our experience in the Middle East over the last 15 plus years should have us focus on the real problem, right? The real problem here was a security problem. The real problem was, at least in the first instance, was to cap the nuclear program, which we did and provided an important element of stability. And then we could move to these other issues, which are real issues. By the way, Secretary Pompeo laid out a dozen things that he would like to see Iran do that they're not doing today that cause us issues, right? I agree with, I think, with every one of them, but we've actually now foregone the most effective way to address those, I fear. So I think at a very high cost, including, as I said earlier, to our European allies and our relationships as well. So I think we've taken the wrong course there. And I think we'll look back at it, and I think we'll see that as the worst mistake.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “A couple things. First of all, the sanctions will never be as effective as they were, right? We had the world Engaged in a pressure campaign on Iran, including the Chinese and the Russians. It'll be exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, for us to put together that kind of campaign again. And at some point, if you can't put together that kind of campaign that brought them to the table, you could be brought to the brink of what we faced initially, which was a choice between a choice between Iran going nuclear and us having to take military action because they'll go back to their military action. And you'll be confronted with that choice which makes military action more likely. There are, I think, a number of people in the Trump administration who do see regime change as the. Well, John Bolton, for one who has your job, your old job, as a solution, right? And of course you have to think about what the cost of that would be.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “Multilateral. The pressure I led the pressure campaign, as you know, for almost five years against Iran. The key wasn't U.S. bilateral pressure on Iran. We haven't done any real economic business with Iran since 1979. The key was our ability to talk to the world about the value. The goal, which was not to have a nuclear Iran pull that together and get an agreement on the pressure campaign, you needed to have multilateral pressure in order to have an effective pressure campaign in Iran. And so it would be very difficult to reconstruct that now. I think that the TPP, we talked about a Paris. There isn't their truth.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “To our interest and our security going forward, coming out of what we led the order. So I think that his analysis is something I wish he would revisit because it's not correct. Now, a couple of the specific things. I think the pulling out of the Iran agreement is the worst mistake the United States has made in the Middle East since the Iraq War. And it's been at a high cost, including with allies in Europe. And there's nothing that was laid out, for example, in Secretary Pompeo's speech the other day about our goals, the additional things we want to do with Iran. There's nothing that we couldn't have pursued more effectively, multilaterally, while keeping the arrangement in place that really has capped, rolled back, and for extended period of time pushed back the Iranian nuclear program. We had that as a base and we could have worked on follow-on agreements with allies around the world. The key to the Iran agreement, of course, was that it was.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “Taking advantage of That's extraordinarily short-sighted and inaccurate historically, of course, because no country in the world has had the level of peace and prosperity the United States has had at the core of this international order that the United States put together. It's just not correct. And indeed, we benefit tremendously from the levels of stability and prosperity around the world. And what's happened is we pull back. The world doesn't stay static. So we pull back from the trade, from the TPP, the Transport Partnership, right? And the other 11 countries go forward. We pull back from our allies in Europe, and they start to talk about it and look at moving forward without us. Indeed, you have the Chancellor of Germany saying things like, we can no longer count on the United States to provide for our defense or lead us as an alliance. These are extraordinary things that are going on in the world.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “Institutions, these approaches, what's going to replace it? And that's the real challenge. And it comes at a really inoportune time. It comes when we have a resurgence of geopolitical competition among the great powers. It comes when we have really an ideological resurgence of an ideological debate in the world about what system is best and can deliver for people. And for the United States to be pulling back at this point and the ways that President Trump has is deeply worrying and it's caused a tremendous amount of instability and volatility around the world. So the question presented is, if you've had 75 years of a U.S.-led order and you pull back all the pillars of that order, you have to, the question is, what's going to replace it? And we don't really have an answer to that. He would say...”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “Trade, liberal economics, democracy, international institutions, and international agreements are all elements of this international order that President Trump has challenged. And in almost each of those cases pulled back from, a much different relationship with allies, a much more transactional relationship with allies. It's called deep concern among our allies around the world and uncertainty about U.S. leadership on trade has pulled back pretty dramatically and inserted a tremendous amount of uncertainty in our economic approach. International agreements like the Paris Accord, right? Basically the president has said that he's not really that interested in multilateral agreements, wants to have bilateral agreements and international institutions generally. And I think the question in the world, David, is if the United States isn't leading on these values, these”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “My concern is this for the last 70 years we have had an international order created and led by the United States which has led to and it has an imperfect but in the main it has led to extraordinary prosperity and security for the United States and at the core of that are a set of principles and institutions that we led on values that we led on in terms of democracy and free markets and institutions like international agreements international institutions like the United Nations and things like the structures around something like the Paris Accord but most importantly the United States in the lead the alliance structure that the United States put together around the world to support our efforts around the world and each one of these pillars alliance”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “so-called Arab Spring. In Libya, I think what the president has said is not that it was a mistake to act against Gaddafi and his threats against the Libyan people, but rather that the international community, and I think principally the Europeans, were not adequately prepared to deal with the aftermath In the kind of scale and force of intervention that was necessary to keep the country on track. I think that's what he, I think that's a lot of”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “Well, let me step back for a minute on what was going on in the world at that point. The Arab Spring, which came to the kind of the forefront in the winter of 2011, turned out to be negative in almost every respect from the perspective of security in the Middle East and our own security interests in the Middle East. It has its roots and my judgment, decades of failure of governance in the Middle East, vacuums created as a result of that. At the time,”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “To that decision, that were very significant in terms of working through the mechanisms by which the special forces would get in and out. But this was the thing that tipped the decision, right? I think was his absolute confidence in the confidence and judgment of the special forces of the United States.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “Well, that was part of the basis for the decision that President Ulton made. He had confidence that our special forces, if bin Laden were that they would deal with it. If he wasn't there, they would get out safely. But this is exactly, I think, what tipped the balance. As you know, what tipped the balance here in a circumstantial case was the president's experience with and his confidence in the U.S. special forces. The U.S. special forces are a unique American asset. There isn't anything like it in the world. There never has been anything like it in the world, as far as I know. And he had every confidence that these teams could go in. And if bin Laden was there, they would deal with it. And either capture or eliminate him. And if he wasn't there, that they would have the ability to go in and get out. He actually made contributions.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “Yeah, very much so, but it was a divided room, David. So the president, he has in his national security team some of the most prominent Americans in national security that we have, right? Bob Gates, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Mike Mullen, Leon Panetta. It was an extraordinary array of talent and experience in the room. And on the Thursday night before the decision, this has been reported, the president asked people where they stood and the room was divided. And at the end of the day, of course, we ask our president to make those decisions.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “No, we didn't, not that we knew, right? So there was not direct evidence. We couldn't go in and say to the president, we were absolutely sure here's a picture, here's another piece of evidence where we can tell you with 100% certainty that Osama bin Laden is at the city.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “Yeah, yeah. If you want to keep a secret in Washington, don't tell anybody, all right? And it was really, in all seriousness, something that was held very close. It did not leak. That's a tribute to the people involved. It's a tribute to how serious they took their obligations to the country and the seriousness of the operation that we were about to undertake because it really was a strategic blow against Al-Qaeda. So the president oversaw this process for eight months, again, from August or so 2010 to May of 2011. Now, the decision itself to undertake the raid from Afghanistan into Pakistan to strike the compound of the Bhattabad Pakistan was based on circumstantial evidence. This was not a direct evidence case. This was an analytical case put together by the intelligence community.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “Very few people, just a few people in the White House, and it was on a strict need-to-know basis. It was a lesson in how to keep a secret in Washington, which is a simple rule. If you want to keep a secret in Washington, don't tell them.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “Yeah, so this begins in the summer of 2010 when the Central Intelligence Agency indicated to the president that they had the best lead that they thought they had had since he disappeared in the mountains of Torobora in the early 2000s as to where Osama bin Laden might be. And we worked on the intelligence community, which have been working on this through two presidencies, worked to develop the intelligence, to pinpoint this as a starker way or as careful a way as they could during the rest of the year, 2000-2010. By the beginning of 2010, it indicated to the president that this was the best evidence we had been able to develop since he had disappeared. And the president asked us to develop options for addressing the issue, which we did during the first part of 2011 and then in May of 2011. So all of that time.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “It's very different. You know, this was a period where the great power of relations in the world were generally cooperative and constructive. We were under no illusions what Putin's coming back would mean for this. But during the period that Medvedev was leading Russia, the Prime Minister of Russia, Presidency of Russia in the spring of 2012.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “Well, that's not clear. That's not clear. In our military at that point, would very much objected to not having the kinds of immunities given to them by the Iraqi parliament that they sought. And I also don't think at the end of the day that you can assign the rise of ISIS to that set of decisions. There were a lot of other dynamics going on in Iraq, principally the Maliki government had become sectarian. An authoritarian and really kind of quite violent against their opposition. And you had an uprising that took place. And you have to ask yourself, David, if the United States had had $5 or 10,000 troops in Baghdad, what kind of difference would it have made? And I'm not sure that at the end of the day, given the overall dynamics that were underway, including the war in Syria, that were underway.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “But it took place over a period of three years. It took place essentially on the timetable that had been put together and agreed to by President Bush 43's administration and the Iraqi and the Iraqi government. By the time that December of 2011 came around, there was not a lot of appetite among Iraqi politicians for the continuation of large presence of U.S. troops in Iraq.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “Say a couple of things about that. Number one, that was not a precipitous drawdown of troops in Iraq by the Obama administration.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “The floor for a vote. He would have been on the natural, I think he probably would have been a 90 to 10 confirmation for the Supreme Court. And it was a mistake. And it was a mistake from a lot of perspectives. It was a mistake, I think, for the country because we don't have his service on the Supreme Court. But the precedent is really damaging for the reasons that you lay out, right? Which is that you can imagine that if Democrats are now in a similar position, they would also hold off on going forward with a nomination.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “It's just kind of outside my area of XO. It may be outside your area of comfort, but it's not outside your area of expertise. I think that the precedent that was set by the Republican Senate on not bringing up Merrick Garland's nomination of the Supreme Corps for over a year was a really bad precedent. No one could have been more qualified. I think that was accepted on both sides of the aisle.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “Yeah. Well, you know, I do think that that nomination was considered. I really do believe on the merit of the nomination, but I also believe that the nominations process has become much too politicized, frankly. I think that my general view is that a president should be able to nominate the people that he wants to nominate and absent some disqualifying element that you should allow the president to have this nomination. Now, the Supreme Court is different, though. And it's become Supreme Court itself has become so divided and in some ways politicized that it's become a very hard problem, David, for us to address.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “And it was fought, I think, on the merits, but it did bring in an error where outside lobbying groups and all kinds of other forces kind of come into the nominations, come into the nominations process.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “I don't think you were there then. I was never formally on the staff. I advised Senator Biden and Chairman Biden on a number of Supreme Court nominations.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “Well, it was probably the most consequential decision of the United States had made in the national security area since World War II. In many ways, more consequential because it was more, the impact has been more long-lasting than Vietnam. Vietnam, obviously, we had many more casualties, 56 or 57,000 Americans lost their lives in Vietnam and 4,000 to 5,000 lost their lives in the course of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Quite focused on Iraq and the wars in the Middle East. Other things were going on in the world that we should have been more focused on, including the rise of China and the dynamics in Asia.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “I think if anyone kind of moves to the point that, well, we basically in the United States conduct our policies between the 40-yard lines, and maybe these elections don't make that much difference, and maybe an electing a president doesn't make that much difference who's president. That's wrong. And I think history has taught it wrong. It's incredibly consequential in America today. And that was an example of that. There were substantial events during the course of George W. Bush's presidency, including the Iraq War, the financial crisis. 9 11 and other significant events, which took the country in a very different direction than I think it would have gone under Vice President Gore.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “Fundamentally, a political confrontation. I think that's right. He was a kind of a mid century American type, modest, tough, but very focused kind of on principle, and he had been, he's a diplomat. He was a diplomat searching for kind of common ground in negotiations representing clients and the United States around the world. So that was a political battle. He was fundamentally not really not a political operative.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “Began though in the mid 1980s, where when I got out of law school, I had lunch with Warren Christopher, who was the chairman of the Law Formal Melody in Myers, where I ended up practicing the law for many years. And he asked me what I was going to do when I graduated from law school. I said I was going to set up a political consulting firm. He said, why do you want to do that? I said, because that's what I'm good at. I have a lot of experience. I think I could do very well at it. He said, well, I have another idea. Why don't you actually learn something, learn a skill, become a lawyer? You can come to my law firm. And there's a way, I think, for you to participate in politics with the law firm as your base. Do interesting things professionally, but come in and out of government, come in and out of public service. That's what he had done.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “Next time around, Jim Baker was doing the negotiations for Reagan, and we came in to do the negotiations. And the first thing he said is this. We will not debate any later than three weeks before an election because there was no recovery time. And of course, that's been kind of a standard negotiating.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “Was the only one debate October 28th Cleveland, Ohio, the only debate, huge stakes, President Carr didn't believe that he could actually kind of, you know, didn't really believe that he could lose a debate against then Governor Reagan. And a lot of the dynamics in the country were moving against President Carter. We talked about the hostage crisis, the economic situation. We're kind of leaning against him. But there was a real resistance to Governor Reagan for lots of different reasons, his background, whether he was qualified, questions about... Questions about his outlook in the middle of the Cold War. Right. And he was able to push through this threshold of acceptability. After that debate, people could imagine him as president. The race broke dramatically and the floodgates opened up. That example.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “And in'92, and of course in June of 2008, this guy named David Axel came by my law office and asked me if I would. I remember that conversation. I wanted to pay preparation for a senator named Barack Obama. It was one of the best decisions.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “I had worked on the campaign and I knew him and knew the people around him well and I had a lot of political experience by that point even though I was fairly young and was asked to take on a piece that I didn't run debate preparation. I worked on the debate preparation. I ended up running in 88.”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “I did. I started a debate prep for the first time. Then, two things one, you know, I had a couple of specialties. One was convention management, so I managed a convention at Muscone Center in San Francisco in 1984. But also I began to develop a sub specialty and debate preparation, working with With Vice President Mondale, and then working with”

    2018-06-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 250 — Tom Donilon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source