Start off on this recent quite a fascinating book of yours, the trump century, ive got to ask you a question. You worked on cnn for some 30 years, you have a variety of shows, you are not in orthodox republican, you are obviously yt a liberal democrat. Could you go back into that environment today or Something Like it or what was the formula that allowed you to exist for three decades, did you have a particular relationship with ted turner or just enlighten us a little bit on the development. Guest it was helpful i joined at the beginning as one of the founders of cnn, one of the fortunate ones who was present at the creation as they say. It was a spectacular place to work as they say because it was unflawed of before ted turner. The global cable newscast and he put it into action and institutionalized it. It was truly remarkable though it changed over time as these things do and we founded it in 1980 and by 1984, he was on the forbes list, the lobbyist list and had been basically on the verge of bankruptcy just four years later when they found it. So his position changed, so did ours. We were in the white house pool, growing, and over time, his commitment to a more liberal approach to the news became far more serious and emphatic, and by 1999, it was clear that it was going to be a tough balancing act, but at that point i wasnt so much an advocacy journalist. By 2009, when we had our final falling out, not with ted but with time warner, it was just simply a matter of ideology. I would say as many critical things about george w. Bush, perhaps more, than i ever said about barack obama. The truth is they were committed to a different approach. They decided it would be ideological that there was only room for one point of view instead of many voices. And i was the only conservative on the air and obviously that just didnt work out. And if anything its gotten an even more decided fashion to the left rather than to either end of journalism or moderation. As you know. Host one last question before we get to the details of the book, in this three decade evolution of cnn, you sort of brought in some more specific interest in business or the economy to a panorama of news and general politics, economics and started to have a certain worldview that wouldnt be easily categorized on issues. Did you ever think that there would be a candidate, not a thirdparty candidate but one of the major two candidates that would dovetail with this formula, this ideology that you had been over 30 years . Guest honestly i didnt think we would see it in my lifetime. I was hoping that we would, and i had known donald trump for as long as i knew ted turner but we were not friends. It was a professional relationship. I watched as he stepped out and by 2016. I have to tell you i rejoiced because he was independentminded. He was secular if you will. For me, that was exciting because first of all that meant he was aligned with the Republican Party or the democrat ideology but he was aligned with patriots and this country. I always every time i hear the expression White Nationalism in this country, it its nationali, its not white, it is every color, every creed weve got. Being an american nationalist means that you embrace the constitution, which is our great assurance of equality and equal opportunity, of respect for all citizens. He embodies that so i was excited to see him run and it brought me back to the Republican Party. I was independent, and i think a fierce independent in most respects. Host in the book, you outline these signature issues ensuring that immigration is measured, getting tough with china, favoring fair resident freetrade, you didnt buy into the idea that the industrial midwest was tired or played out but it could be denigrated and you are skeptical as i read the book of these optional military engagements specifically in the middle east and the cost benefit analysis didnt play out for us or the region, but there were other thirdparty candidates that had picked up on some of this. Pat buchanan may be. Maybe. What was it about trump, did he incorporate these issues in the broad fabric of traditional conservatism or was it his personality . Why did he succeed when these other thirdparty people had failed failure at this level . Guest i already mentioned pat because he was unreservedly an independent figure, irrespective of his political preference. The difference for donald trump is he was beholden to none of the establishment. This is a clash of so many influences in our society what we are contended with now. But fundamentally it is a clash in the establishment that controls both political parties, or dead, until the arrival of donald trump. Donald trump broke through and said i will take on the orthodoxies, i will be in the disruptor and represent the forgotten man and woman in this country. He pledged to do that and within days, he was doing that. He has he is one of those surprises and delights in politics. He is a man who said what he meant and kept his promises and that drives the left, the establishment o mad, because hes taking on this multi trillion dollar Business Roundtable. Its 135, 140 ceos that control a huge part of our gdp. He took on the chamber of commerce and the ridiculous mantra that freetrade is the boom to the american economy. But it was certainly not. We finance the rest of the world certainly, and wall street did great, but one of the reasons a working man and woman in the country didnt share in that for some 20 years before trump and had to stagnant wages in the last opportunity is because it was a financial benefit for the elite but not the middle class which is the foundation of the country. Host you have a chapter jobs jobs jobs and that is one thing in the trump century its true he had record unemployment for minorities in 2019 i think it was down to 3. 5. He almost got 3 or did almost annual gdp. And the point im making is what you say is a twopronged assault on the left and the right and a populace empathetic message, what do you think if he gave say pick one example, innercity youth for the first time in our lives they were being bid on, their labor was being bid on and why do you think that empathetic message or attitude never resonated, he didnt emphasize it, why do we not think of we being the public as the most empathetic concerned president about the lower middle class . Guest because he doesnt speak in the same language as the elite of both parties. They have a lexicon all to themselves and its programmatic. Its about what they will do to make a number of assumptions. They are talking about the dependency of those who are low income and thats the basis. Its a condescension of government. Its wrapped up in the idea that without dependency, what is the role for government and we have a huge permanent bureaucracy that requires dependency on the part of a goodsized number of people. Theyve gotten use t used to itr 65, well since 1965 with the war on poverty, we spent over 22 trillion, and we have everything that a measuring bureau, and metrics bureau for success. No one wants to follow up on black youth in the innercity and what happens to them when they go to these Public Schools run by unions rather than by their communities. Its a strange world weve created and one that both parties have been perfectly content until now to permit to continue the status quo in perpetuity. Host another thing other than the Trump Program and jobs and success and creating employment we hadnt seen in 50 years is china and you talk in a variety of ways about china. Prior to trump, i think everybody felt, everybody meaning among the elite to bipartisan, that the more concessions we gave to it, the more they would repay the gratitude they would become wealthy and democratize. They would take over the world in a general way and we would manage the decline as obama put it. You come along and say trump stopped that but what im interested in and the general idea, you never suggested china was that strong and predetermined to rule the world in intrinsic weaknesses we either didnt see or didnt want to see but i never got from your book that you felt there was a steamroller that was inevitable, that there were contradictions you were trying to warn people about. Guest i started talking about the red storm rising. We had known for a quartercentury china had the Country Companies operating with only one purpose, and that was to steal our technology and military secrets, take them back to china and exploit our technological advances. They saved themselves a lot of money investing in education, Actual Research and development of their own, and thats what theyve done. We built china in some respects as the president put it. We literally built it. They are taking 600 billion a year from us in our intellectual property stealing it. They have been running deficits with this country since the beginning of the relationship. We have been in deficit to them and trade and we have shared our technology both openly and willingly as well as permitting their theft. Its been extraordinary and an unprecedented relationship between the wealthy power and the merging one. At no time was it required of us that we be the global chomp that we played. And we did it under clinton, bush, obama. You couldnt have asked for a trifecta of worst president s to put together in the national security. Its devastating from what we have squandered. And we did so with the knowledge of Joseph Stiglitz who was a nobel prizewinning economist for the adventurism in iraq it ended up being 6 trillion and counting in addition to the lives we lost. We have gone through a period of madness that is remarkable. And donald trump to step forward. Hes the only one who wasnt deranged in the entire city of washington. Its quite something to behold. Host one of the things you point out is how insidious this is and we saw it with the development of the 5 billiondollar market with the offset losses but it changes the ideology that the nba itself were more critical about misdemeanors in the United States and they ignored the felonies of human rights and education camp, hong kong and china, the same we found out recently with hollywood, that part of the anger at the racial makeup of movies was in part a reaction to directors who were under orders or at least perceived orders from china that they wanted lighter skin actors. So, how do you in your book you have a lot of ideas, but how feasible is it given the insidious presence that we dont even feel, we cant even detect because they seem so much more than during the cold war. I infer from your question that you are suggesting that we cant change what we brought because we are so inextricably intertwined which insidiously as you suggest has enmeshed itself in our economy, in our society and even in our culture. Hollywood right now is editing their films and shooting their movies in many cases with beijing because they want the International Market to be excited about their product. Its no longer for a u. S. Audience. Its no longer a u. S. Product. We went through a long period where it was always an american product before an international audience. That product coming out of hollywood now is a international and chinese product and the United States market sort of tags along behind it. Its a major change in our society and our culture and business of entertainment and media because this gives inordinate influence of their values being represented in movies and many cases much more than u. S. Traditional american values. The world knows it. They see it and by the way, they are accepting it. Host one of the things you talk about is the china lie and the wuhan virus, that it didnt really emerge until january but we knew it was far in the fall 2019 it emerged accidentally at a wet market and we know that narrative has been discredited, but i think there is a consensus that it came out of a lab. But whether it was accidental or whatever the narrative goes, why do you what was the attitude about it and why did they allow direct flights say for 12 days after you couldnt go to wuhan for anywhere forget about the origins or whether it was accidental or intentional, what was the mindset about it that unleashed this and it destroyed the western economy in a way that we never thought would be possible . As you say, this virus was unique. Was it engineered plex we still cant say scientifically with great empirical evidence or judgment what it was. Was it natural, was it manmade . But we do know for a fact whether accidental or engineered, communist Chinese Government knew for months that it was transmissible, and they knew very early on that it was deadly. They hid those truths from their own people of course and very importantly they hid the truth from the rest of the world, the who, the cdc. What folks may not realize is the u. S. , the Public Health institutions and some of the best doctors in all the world, our great friends and colleagues of doctors in china and thats fine, but we also took apart in funding the research. Think of this, we also helped them design their version of the cdc. There was a certain cockiness on the part of american doctors that they would be forthcoming. They had a professional medical relationship with individuals that they thought would obviate the institution in beijing or wuhan. They truly believe in my discussions with them from january on with those doctors, they were very, very certain that they would know best about what would be going on in wuhan, even as that virus was unleashed by the Chinese Communist party on the world, an unsuspecting world, and didnt acknowledge it. I declared on my show, victor, that it was a viral pandemic two weeks before the who would move to that point. The cdc wouldnt call it a pandemic because the who hadnt called it a pandemic. The madness of this moment is, again, like so much of this is stunning. We had so much to catch up with. Host you suggest in the book the fact that we were in Election Year 2020, and we were engaged in each trade war with china at the time served as a force multiplier of the acrimony or the world hysteria or the divisiveness back home and inadvertently or by design they helped lower this acrimony and hysteria that played out in a certain way because we were not able to focus in a unified manner and what the at what theg and what they were saying and what the who was. But it was kind of coincidental we were right in this trade war that you spend so much time eloquently defining and then you say there was this virus in the middle of it. Historically its very odd. Guest its very odd because they encounter they are counter events that are not necessarily a conflict as far as the chinese are concerned. You can almost see the death and of chinese intelligence in all of this. Its not a reach at all to consider the possibility of this being engineered and purposeful in the chinese interest because they have managed vertically or otherwise to have taken down the economies of europe, the United States, all of the chief competitors in the global marketplace. They have killed hundreds of thousands of people across the world and infected others. But we do know that they have been the beneficiary of it all and they are the ones responsible for this infection, this pandemic that has claimed so many lives and second so many civilians and cost trillions of dollars and lost gdp for the world, not just the United States. So, im very suspicious about the coincidence, the convenience of who benefited from it because we also know that the chinese shutdown travel outside of wuhan and encouraged International Travel to europe, to the United States. We were having it come back into this country from europe as well as from china and asia. I dont get lost and whether or not they are being engineered. The reality is theyve made an unconscionable decision to not warn the world of what they do and knew he was a deadly virus that they had unleashed upon it that is a moral responsibility. It is a conscious moral decision that they took. Host another thing that characterizes the achievement on the economy theres this theme you keep going back to globalism versus nationalism. A couple more questions on the Foreign Policy when you look at the world and see the United States withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord and the iran deal in a way that really got people angry to up there 2 and then we move unilaterally to jerusalem. Now we see this new nexus between some of the gulf states and israel and iran seems to be out in the cold. What is your assessment not just on the ideology but the efficacy. What does he do when he decided to pursue no worse enemy attitude abroad part of this we are all the brotherhood of man . I hear people sort of dismiss that as a business mans hard edge reasoning. I call it just intelligence and knowledge of what is actually transpiring internationally. The first act by the way by this congress was the tariff act and he exploded the idea that it would destroy the economy. Its interesting to think of the things we no longer hear spoken about. You dont hear people saying that nonsense anymore. You dont even hear the expression free trade because now the whole country knows the chamber of commerce, the Business Roundtable were lying through their teeth when they said hardly a zerosum game. This makes us rich and wealthy and powerful while weve built up a huge external trade debt and cost trillions of dollars in Economic Growth as a result of the deficits particularly with china. He applied that same reasoning and Clear Thinking to the wall of mexico. At the same time, negotiating with the president of mexico to join forces and put tens of thousands of mexican troops on the borders of mexico to stop illegal immigration. Does he get credit for that, no, but its what he did and as a result, illegal immigration into the country, despite the recent surge is the lowest in decades, so he has been endsley successful but the media wont credit him. Whether its nato or the middle east as you say, this is a man that gets nominated for two Nobel Peace Prize is for two separate advancements of the interest of peace and he cant even get the media to acknowledge. Hes fighting against more evil forces against him, whether its the media, the body politic or his own party, for crying out loud, and he has to fight them through every day and win. Host what you are saying kind of resignation or reflects the title have you changed the course of history forever. As much as he was opposed, he is on a reality of truth that convinced even his enemies and so after trump, whether its a republican or democrat youre not going to hear this dont pressure nato, let them pay what they want or lets get back into the climate accord or the iran deal, weve got to get right back. Lets watch out for those gulf states and the nexus with israel or maybe we should stop the sanctions on iran. You are suggesting he did things whose very success convinced his enemies as if he said the emperor has no clothes, and now look at the dialect that has been changed. Guest without question. I would phrase it somewhat differently. What hes demonstrated is the assumptions of the liberal Foreign Policy establishment had been dashed by the president s successes because he did in some cases the opposite of what they would recommend or what they would expect or insist upon. If its in nato, how dare you suggest the United States wont pay the bill but we have great benefits that result from the deficit spending to support the wealthy european friends or in the case of the middle east all you have to say is all of the palestinian dreams, desires and wishes before you even begin to deal with organizing and aligning the interest of the states in the region. He did the latter and th laddert is bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and we know other nations are waiting to join working together to ensur assure in the region and yes, confounding iran and never being held to account. If joe biden were to be president and he said trump was wrong weve got to put the palestinians into the middle of the discussions and reopen the deal and be very skeptical, that would have no residents now because hes changed the entire conversation by his success. Guest like so many variables in this Political Year one of them is the national leftwing media they are not performing as watchdogs they are looking as political arms and the corporations that own them. Comcast owns nbc they have an agenda and when they tell about the big news, hes not talking about in my opinion adequately a structure the American People need to understand we have such a powerful consolidation of media power whether it be these vast Media Companies and Technology Companies they had the economic power to absolutely block so much of any other president s agenda it just wouldnt happen. And the reason it hasnt happened until this man had the courage and the vision to stand up and say this is not right. Its by his call against the Technology Companies in Silicon Valley and insisting that there be a change in the relationship between these monster Media Companies that control fake news. The American People are awakening to it and i think the polls have shown that they have somehow dollars that will buy into the idea of the ticket i think thats fantasyland. Host you have a chapter on big tech and i think your argument is as you said they have an insidious way whether it is the order of a Google Search or deep platform and the bias seems to be predictably oneway. With 4 trillion in market capitalization of facebook and google and apple, you talk about regulating that were stopping that monopoly and its almost as if that hasnt happened because big tech says two liberals this money is at your disposal, and they say to the conservatives your libertarian free market laissezfaire, so its against your philosophy to even regulate us and then they find the soft spot between the two parties. In your book you Say Something has to be done before it strangles all of us. Its a daily utility we depend on. What do you think we can do about it . Guest first we have to identify how vast and powerful it is because the interest not only of hollywood and the Media Companies which extends to the reporters and a close alignment in many cases financially with china and beijing then they do with the United States and the interest of this nation. Its amazing to imagine. The United States government is a minor influence on Corporate America to the degree that it is. The ftc that would protect the regulatory agencies, fcc, you name it. They are basically swarming. This president is trying to reintroduce that. Its regulation and the ability to define markets and the actors which hasnt been done for a very long time. You have to go back to microsoft which was a failed action but nonetheless it was even attempted. After this election, you will see a highly energetic Trump Administration taking on these critically important issues because the nation depends on it absolutely. You focus a lot on Interest Rates and i think you could clarify some of the confusion that when im on this far farmhe my greatgrandmother built i thought we were getting pretty good reduction credit rates at 14 and this was 1980. Every time i buy a bag of salt say for two dollars and i go in and i see the six or seven prices have been crossed out, 2. 10, 20 cents, 30 cents, thats how that inflationary high Interest Rate, but now purchasing homes at three or three and a quarter, middleclass citizens not familiar if you count moderate inflation in the calculus, they are getting zero on their accounts and its up to 27 trillion is financed basically as manageable because we have zero with inflation but you still seem to be worried that the fed wants to raise Interest Rates to high at particular times when its not warranted at the expense of the economy and threat of deflation. Guest the answer is i have a simple view on Interest Rates as it pertains to the Federal Reserve and monetary policy. No economist ever envisioned the Federal Reserve would raise rates for any other reason than motivation for price stability and the onset of inflation. This under Jerome Powell raised Interest Rate four times after he was put in place by donald trump. Then the leftwing media started clocking because President Trump was saying wait a minute, youre trying to kill this economy because it will benefit me and my reelection bid. That is really what he was saying and it will shut down 3 gdp growth and it will alter the Job Opportunities in this country horribly. They raised rates four times, trying to do what, i have no idea. Milton friedman didnt teach me that one. My professors didnt teach me why you would raise rates in anticipation of the market you couldnt accurately predict and thats what they kept trying to do. Jerome powell was an investment banker, not an economist. We have lots of economists and the federainthe Federal Reservet economists are not worldrenowned because they are particularly prissy and inaccurate in their forecasting. They are the inverse. And you have to follow markets if you are in banking or if you are in the central bank. Jerome powell was doing none of that. So i applaud the president again mightily because he was right to stop this nonsense. And Jerome Powell, while he would never acknowledge of the president was right, he calmed down and it ended. Then he announced a new policy at the Federal Reserve. To point out also, it resembled precisely what donald trump had been saying since the absolute incipient point of their little disagreement over Interest Rates. Without the presence of inflation, what in hell are you doing, and that by the way put trump in a majority of one as the president of the United States against wall street and on the extra volatility that would be introduced by the Interest Rate increases. And the stunning economic historians who said president s cannot by criticizing it. Thats over, thats done, wont happen. Its sort of controversial whether they did it. We know barack obama then doubled down on that when he started it with about 4 trillion and then we went to a petroleum and then up to 17 trillion and now hes running a four to 5 billiondollar or trillion dollar deficit this year for the stimulus. At what point do the Interest Rates have to be de facto near zero or are you worried about surfacing that magnitude of the debt while trump got more revenue from the stimulus and the deregulation of the tax cuts, he wasnt successful in proving the cost of the federal government, so where do we end up if we dont do something . Guest its a great question and i wish i could give you the exact answer but we are in a place weve never been before, but not because of fiscal policy choices we have been to make an pursuit o in pua brilliant strategy. This was all reactionary to a virus that tore this economy up. We watched as the president would say the most beautiful economy we have ever seen in this countrys history form under by a virus from wuhan, china. We dont go looking for war but sometimes they find us. We didnt go looking for it, but it found us. I cant even imagine what other choice we had other than to stimulate and add trillions of dollars to the Federal ReserveBalance Sheet to ensure liquidity adequately to get through it. I believe we are coming up to that and i dont think we should be putting another 3 trillion into a stimulus bill as nancy pelosi wants. Its horrible to think we are talking about the difference between 3,000,000,000,001,000,000,000,00 0. Once you Start Talking trillions, you know we have a big problem. Host one of the things ive noticed when i was reading your book this week is that almost every other page you point out the role of the courts, whether it was a travel ban or donald trump about the wall, he was challenging the courts and the expectation was after 2017 or during 2017, trumps opponents had lost control of both houses of congress and one of the ways to check his executive power would be to turn to the courts and they did so as you point out successfully. Now with the sad passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg we have a frenzy that we are looking at right before the election. Each side theres the biden rule or the macconnell rule, there is no rule than the constitution. The Senate Advises and consents which means either confirms or doesnt. The democrats lost the senate and 14, 16 and 18. I dont know why harry reid did, but as you remember, the Senate Filibuster on the judicial appointments and Ruth Bader Ginsburg was very confident either Hillary Clinton would when or donald trump after four years would not win a reelection because when she was much more vigorous, but either 81 or 82 and lets say in 2013 or 2014 when obama had the Democratic Senate and could have easily replaced a distinguished juristic 81, that didnt happen. So now we have a unique situation where the president has the senate and a liberal jurist passed away with a desire to be replaced by a liberal jurist from a conservative president how did you put all this together and what do you think will happen or should happen in this very delicate situation, and also the politics of it if you could just comment. The courts seem to be i think you have a good point that theyve become almost a legislative branch thats more important or has more power than the executive branch sometimes. Guest i think thats right. And i think that we have to somehow restore the constitutional balances. The constitution insists on checks and balances. Our founders envisioned those checks being in place among the three equal branches. With the executive leading the government. This has been one of the great revelations over the course of the past two years in particular as the degree to which the federal judiciary has been politically corrupted. John roberts, the chief justice famously said there are no bush or trump or obama judges. Suggesting theres no partisanship. Well, we know right now the American People are not fools. We look at who appointed a judge and we look at their decisions on the Appellate Court in particular and we know how it is going to go. Whether its right now general michael flynn. The Justice Department has dropped charges against him. And the courts in dc and the Dc District Court judge refused to dismiss the charges, and this is a man that has been persecuted for four years. Forget anything about the rest of the case. There is no prosecutor except the courts itself now. This is not envisioned in our constitution. Its not envisioned in the law. They are just doing what they want because it is politically in their interest and that is stunning. Where we end up with the courts is going to depend greatly on whether or not we reelect donald trump. Its essential that we do. And restore the regionalism to the interpretation by our judges of the constitution and law. Host one of the things you talk about is the opponents of donald trump not just oppose the president without military or political experience or nationalist populist agenda, but they seek structural changes. They want to change the dialect or the environment or landscape itself. Do you see that if trump were to lose in 2020 and he were to lose the senate that we would see things such as a Court Packing scheme or the effort to end of ththeelectoral college or perhas statehood to dc and puerto rico because i asked that because the theme of your wonderful book how the president changed the course of history forever it assumes the present system the achievements are going to be eventually recognized by both sides because they hit on reality and truth, but if the system is changed or the structures are modified so we dont have electoral knowledge or we have 52 states, or we have a 15 person supreme court, all of this beginning in 2021, do you see the structural changes will change the very foundation on which we are talking today . Guest theres another presumption in all of that as you note, that if he wins this election, because it would assure this countrys destiny. Without donald trump and that white house, all bets are off. There is no way that anyone should dismiss what is happening on the party of hate, the Democratic Party. Simple rhetoric, its simply a political squabble. This is a battle for the soul of the nation. Its a battle for the direction of the nation and in deed for whthe needfor who we will be ase people. And i dont mean that to be melodramatic in any way. Its just the fact. You talk about southern puerto rico and dc states that changes who we are. That changes what we are. Because that means then the Democratic Party has sufficient party to pack the court. To insist upon might as well just simply go straight to totalitarian, because that is what the left wants here. They dont want to be bothered by Little Things like the law or constitution or history and heritage and consistent and constant virtuous values. The idea that a Political Party can threaten death and destruction on the streets of america and still be regarded as a Political Party, that to me is nauseating to see what the Democratic Party has become. My colleagues in media for the most part dont care to talk that directly about it, but i do because i believe that is exactly what we are staring at, and its very ugly indeed in the american politics right now. The choices are tough that we are going to have to make over the next several years. We are going to need a tough leader. This president has proven hes tough, strong, smart as hell. By the way, they never want to acknowledge how smart he is. Great judgment, great leader, he is smart and cares about this country. And i will tell you, i pray he wins because that is my way of praying for the country. Host we are out of time, its been a fascinating discussion. The book is the trump century how the president changed the course of history forever. The topics we discussed a lot more in the book. Its an argument that not just he has achievements that have been underappreciated, but that he has achievements that in time history will see as a bipartisan consensus in the previous conventional wisdom and even a way his enemies would have to concede. And with that, thank you so much for coming on to cspan booktv. Its been an honor to interview you. Guest the honor is mine. Thank you very much, victor. This program is available as a podcast. All afterwards next grams can be viewed on our website at booktv. Org. Host harvard professor jill lapore is our t