You ever want to know what consensus and groupthink and conventional wisdom in Washington is, just find what David "Rodham" Gergen is saying and you'll find out what 99% of 'em are thinking.

The American experiment, the United States in the past eight years [2008-2016] was not considered worthy of leading, because we had committed too many transgressions. We didn't have the moral authority to lead anybody because we had too many injustices in our past and too many discriminations and too many thises and thats and so forth. We were not worthy of leading, and we had been leading for too long in all the wrong directions. It was really, I think, despicable.

The time is going to come when [people] are going to really regret this, and they're gonna want to be within [Donald] Trump's orb at some point, 'cause this country's gonna take off.

He discusses his service in Iraq, the wounds he suffered there and he says to me in this ad, until you have the guts to call me a phony soldier to my face, stop telling lies about my service. You know, this is such a blatant use of a valiant combat veteran, lying to him about what I said, and then strapping those lies to his belt, sending him out via the media and a TV ad, to walk into as many people as he can walk into.

Your kids have been taught that there is a more equivalence between Martin Luther King and today's Muslims - a moral equivalent between today's aggrieved gays and lessons and Muslims. They're all victims of an evil and ill-formed United States of America.

It's easy to be negative.

The government's the one thing that's not supposed to grow. The U.S. economy is supposed to grow. The two things can't really happen together.