that s not a position a politician wants to be in. they want to have the momentum in their favor. yet that moment where he had to make a decision in the split second endured ten years later and will endure many years beyond today because he was willing to do without checking with a consultant or contemplating his poll numbers. he just spoke what he felt was right. not telling them they were wrong but the country would be okay in the hands of barack obama. let s be clear, when he conceded, that was heartbreaking for john mccain. he wanted to be president. he want twice and believed he would have been a good president. but he also believed the coun y country s future was more important than his own. that s the thing that was so rare. well said. imagine that, you could choose to do the right thing without
difficult negotiations that are ahead? well, david, first let me say, there was powerful symbolism today in singapore. the president should get some credit here for having arrived at this day, turned away from war where we were seven or eight months ago and turned towards diplomacy. but i must say, i think the big question i ve got, david, is does donald trump have the strategic patience to carry out a multi-year negotiation? he s not a famously patient person. it took ten years from the time that president bush started thinking about negotiating and then sanctioning iran to what wendy sherman and john kerry were able to fulfill ten years later. it took three years for the u.s./india negotiations and that was with a friendly country, two acts of congress to achieve a civil nuclear deal. this will take years. and this statement is very general. it has goals in it, but it doesn t really have a road map. and the key tactical questions are, can mike pompeo be unleashed to be a tough-mind
jeff flake couldn t run for re-election because he had the audacity to stand up to donald trump. mark sanford, also the audacity to stand up to donald trump voted out of office because there was a woman running against him who was seen as more pro-trump. the question in the republican party right now is, where are those leaders? is there a place for them? i believe that is a crisis. it doesn t look like it right now. and it never does, but i do think the crisis actually is with the future of the republican party. the future of the conservative movement, and just for those out there that would say that we have become hyperbolic at time, i m reminded of a donald trump quote from last year where he said that madison s system of checks and balances and the united states constitution was archaic and let me get this quote exactly right. a bad thing for the country.
the madisonian system of checks and balances are not great enough to endure even four years of donald trump. no. not at all. none whatsoever and that s why oftentimes you ll hear not just, is that the constitution is at risk, but american democracy itself is at risk of collapse under donald trump, which is a bit hyperbolic, i would say. are there anti-democratic things he does on a daily basis, yes. are his attacks on a free press extremely corrosive to democracy and fact and this whole idea now people really are entitled to their own facts? yes. all of that is really troubling. what s also really troubling and this is a lesson we take from the founding of the country is that leadership matters. there were people who stepped up and did the right thing at the time, and you see that now, but those people are being thrown under the bus in the republican party.
you put yard signs in your neighbors yards, and these days you make new facebook friends. you talk to your friends in your neighborhood. you ask them if you can drive them to vote. and i think what may happen and sort of by natural selection, something i was telling mika happened in 1994 when i showed up in washington. i said, you know, all of us that got elected at time, it was so long ago, the republican party would fax us messages every day. we were supposed to read. i d tear them up and go out and deliver the message that i thought was relevant. i met a guy named jack metcalf from washington state, who was an older gentleman. shared very little in common with me, except for the fact that when we first met he goes, oh, yeah. i i tore those things up, too, and you had a natural selection from northwest florida to to, you know, the great northwest all across the coun y