David Gergen

It has been American foreign policy for some time now to support and strengthen Ukraine, to come to the aid of those leaders.

There is no way around it, Anderson, and I pray we won't really understand what's happened here for years because some of these documents will be locked up away from public view.

He clearly acknowledged it. He clearly was under instructions from others, including the president to walk it back.

I think the White House feels he has been out a lot on television, as Maggie said, but crucially, he is not effective.

the way he's acting is making it worse not better, in my judgment for his command and leadership of the country.

It may be a joke to Republican senators, it is not being treated as a joke in China.

It's as if the President is trying to normalize a President of the United States asking a foreign power to do a political favor for him to help him in his elections.

It's an independent body or person within the government agency to be there as a watchdog and keep Congress informed if there are misbehaviors under way there.

It looks to me they are doing it in a way that Secretary of State Pompeo who stopped others from going up and teaching has an end run performed on him.

It makes a big difference who blinks on this one.

If he's going to probably avoid a recession... he would be warned that unless he changed course here, he could have a very bad Christmas season.

If you can get the young people out to vote, along with the two other groups in the Democratic coalition, the Obama coalition, you get women out to vote, and you have people of color out to vote, of course, there's overlap in those groups…

I think it's a mistake. I think it's a serious mistake.

But it's striking about how much of a change there has been since Woodrow Wilson.

It can be very discouraging, because if you come in there as an idealist and your ideals are shattered, it's really makes you feel pretty low.

He's got to get in the ring with Trump. He's got to go mano-y-mano in the ring.

I think that's where the votes are, a lot of the kind of things he's talking about.

It tells what they do in life and it sends a message to the other heads of state that this White House is playing it by different rules that nobody seems to understand.

This country very much needs more women in high-level diplomacy jobs and we've had four so far, the two, Condoleezza Rice and Susan Rice, and Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright.

Ivanka Trump simply hasn't paid her dues. If she's there, it's a result of nepotism that bar under the President.

And one of the things that happens to other countries, if you're in a country that sends, you know, a friend of the United States and you send your top level ambassador, that ambassador's job is to be able to speak to the government, the…

I would say that the cyber story brings out the fact that on the cyber -- the cyber command has actually been working to try to contain the Russian disinformation and that to me was encouraging.

Whenever American presidents send troop to the Middle East, the first thing you want to do is take a deep breath, everybody stand back and see if we can resolve this peacefully. We don't want to get into a war with Iran. It would have all…

If he was Don Jr. or what Don Jr. did was totally appropriate not to call the FBI, even though he was approached by someone saying they were representing the Russian government.

I disagree strongly on the idea that he didn't mean maybe. President Trump has a long history of creating loopholes for himself.