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00:00Your you've written quite a bit over the last few months about Donald Trump. Is there anything you've seen since he got elected that makes you more hopeful about his presidency than you were when he was a candidate . Well look I think he's handled the last 48 72 hours pretty well . But look this is the easy stuff and this is the kind of thing that you expect. Think he's been gracious enough. I think President Obama has been been gracious but we're just have to wait and see. We have to see the appointments that he makes both within the White House and his cabinet and really the test is going to become and begin on January 20th. And it's going to accelerate after that. So I just I think we have enough to go on what we've seen so far which is very early very preliminary. He's he's been fined so to speak. When there were people who were never Trump during the campaign. Who then changed their mind. Once he became the Republican nominee. Your view of those people was what you had said the cancer for instance on conservatism and then ended up endorsing him shortly after he won the nomination . Your view of them was what. Well it really depended on the individuals and how passionate they were and what their reasons were. I think they made a mistake like I thought and think that Donald Trump is a malignant and malicious force in the political landscape. And I was quite worried what would happen if he becomes president how we're going to test that proposition and I may be wrong and I and I hope I am. I do think that the people who were never Trump and really spoke in vivid language like Bobby Jindal and Rick Perry and others did and then they flipped around and came behind him. I was not impressed with that. I think that that they put the party above their convictions and I think that they were they were potentially opportunistic right . So that said look a lot of my friends were Trump supporters not enthusiastically but they were. And I understood the calculation that they made. I just disagreed with it. I just I was using that kind of as a setup question to the next question which is what what is one to do if one is has been and it was a consistent never trump her throughout the entirety all the way up until Election Day. And now you're confronted with this call. This is you basically you're now confronted with someone who you've said incredibly negative things about his character his temperament is personality is intellect. Suddenly he's now the president United States so what does a man like you to do in these circumstances yeah I'd say a couple of things. I mean there is such a thing as democratic legitimacy and you have to recognize that. I mean that people voted for him. We only get one president. He is it and that matters. And there is something about coming kind of Democratic race. I think that a person like myself has to give him the benefit of the doubt and allow him to prove me wrong and see how he does and I have to be intellectually honest here if he does things that I agree with or that advance the interests of the country that that advance justice I need to say that on the other hand the people who were defenders of Trump also have an obligation to be intellectually honest here too. And if he does things that require that he be challenged and criticized they should they should do that. And you know my posture here is to wait and see. I may be wrong I've been wrong before. I felt like I saw an after in the campaign to convince me that he was not a man who was qualified temperamentally or intellectually to be president. But now he's going to be and and we'll test the propositions and see who is right and who is wrong. You have respect for Paul Ryan and your friends right . Yeah. You know and you have respect for Mike Pence and I believe you're friends with him as well. I'm not friends with him. Okay. But you know him. Yes. So those two guys are going to be pretty big players in the Trump administration right . Does that give you any comfort . Yeah it does give me some comfort and I hope as as he houses his administration fills it up that there are gonna be people of high quality and I hope frankly that he defers to Paul Ryan on the agenda. If he does that I'd be very very comforted but I will say this the entire argument throughout the campaign was that these people who would surround Trump including Paul and Mike Pence is that they could contain him that they could control him and the line that was used again and again and again as it related to Trump was he would become more presidential . And he never did. There were moments weeks that he was OK. But then he would revert to type and there was nobody in the campaign that could ever really control him and control his worst impulses and they kept coming and as the campaign went on he got worse not better. And if that continues in the presidency then we're in for a real. We're in for real trouble now. We don't know. Maybe he will grow in the job. But my reading of history is that people with that are narcissistic and have disordered personalities when they get virtually unlimited power they don't get better they get worse. But he may be the exception. I hope he is for the sake of the republic. Do you have a sense Pete that that being one of the things that's been true about Trump beyond some of the things they did that offended a lot of people there were people like you were conservative. The question of whether he was an actual conservative or not. I mean obviously in some of the things he put forward his policy prescriptions were decidedly un conservative. So do you imagine that what we're going to see now is a an attempt to to run a conservative administration or do you imagine that a lot of the past Donald Trump positions from even before he ran which were quite liberal in a lot of respects are going to suddenly now bubble to the surface and we're going to be actually confronting a really ideologically indoctrinated kind of president here Yeah that's a great question and the truth is I don't imagine anything at this point. So I really don't know. I think more than any president we've ever had in our lifetime and maybe in American history we just not know what to expect for a couple of reasons. One is he was so policy ignorant he was all over the map on so many issues as as you said and he has no philosophical roots so there's no real way to understand how he's going to govern or what are the principles that are going to govern him . He seems to govern by impulse and by God and this you know he could feel one way one week and another way another week so he could govern as a conservative. He could turn left. It could be an odd mix. It could be depending on who is chief of staff is and who he talks to you know before he goes to sleep at night. So I really don't know if that's one of the fascinating things that will whether it will unfold. But I don't think that there's any way even people who know Trump and I would suspect even Donald Trump doesn't frankly know how he's going to govern at this stage .

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Peter Wehner: Trump Is Malignant, Malicious Force

On “With All Due Respect,” Peter Wehner, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, discusses Donald Trump’s election victory and his disappointment with “Never-Trump” people who flipped to vote for the GOP nominee.

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