Explains to trump he cannot if hes thinking of running for president cannot do it as a traditional republican. Can you describe this . He had been thinking of running for president but he wasnt quite sure. By 2012 he was getting serious about it. David who is a conservative activist was a friend of donald trump and decided to talk about running for president and he did not know donald trump at that point so he took him up to learn about this possibility. If he planned to run as an outsider, how would he do it. They basically said theres a new populist mood in the country and donald trump looked at him and said youre right thats what i am im a popular rest but he concluded he is right if hes going to run and be a popular rest and then of course he doesnt decide to run but four years later that is exactly what he does and in the meantime between 2012 and 2016 he starts the message and theres a lot of starting points for the revolution but thats one of the more intriguing ones. It is from the beginning. Its been all about the writings Newt Gingrich is fascinating and has a lot of insight into this period, the story of the conservative revolution from Ronald Reagan in 1979 when he starts to run for president to Donald Trumps arrival and Newt Gingrich has a lot of insight into that whole period. One of the things he said to me though is donald trump is not a conservative, hes an antiliberal and he thinks a lot of liberal thinking is nonsense but he didnt have the philosophy to read the review what you are against it is as is important as what you are for. Even the title you should have seen it coming as first person plural how did you come up with the title and what were you expecting to do with it . Thats interesting. It wasnt my plan. To think about something in the first person is exceptionally uncomfortable and not what i intended to do. When i got into this project it was an attempt to explain where did donald trump come from and i got very interested in the starting point. The starting point i decided was 1979 when the carter presidency kind of collapses. That began the four decade period conservatives so it was both the most interesting and perhaps the most powerful Political Movement at the times. So with power under Ronald Reagan and somehow evolved to picking donald trump to be the standardbearer by 2016. When i talked with my editor at random house about it he said that is the arc of your career i had been following the story of her sins and he said once i accepted the idea it did seem like a good way to sort of insert myself occasionally in the story by saying i saw this convention and heres what it felt like or i interviewed bill clinton and this is what it sounded like. I hope it isnt too intrusive. I hope it humanizes the story a little bit but its not a natural or comfortable place for a journalist to land. Host lets talk about 1980. Ronald reagan represented a number of things. He did represent very traditional conservative principles. Freetrade, smaller governments, stronger military. He was in some ways and internationalist but he also comes along with a sort of optimistic upbeat view of the world and something that the country after jimmy carter and the period you write about it a shot of selfconfidence that the country really needed at that moment. People forget and i remember because it is like one of the formative memories by 1979 people were saying the presidency is too big a job for any one person to handle. Maybe we need to split it into and have a domestic policy that is how beleaguered the Carter White House was at that point. And Ronald Reagan walked through the door and said explicitly this is america lets pull ourselves together and move forward. The philosophy was with conservatives 1976 just four years earlier Ronald Reagan tried to take the nomination away from gerald ford in the Republican Party and the party decided out of the country thought he was too conservative, thats too far out there. But by 1980, Ronald Reagan hadnt moved but the country was ready for it and i had as much to do with his failure as reagans success, but there you have it. What really happened that i didnt appreciate until i did the book as Ronald Reagan took a basic kind of core message that he had developed for years and expanded it and flushed it out. How did that happen . First his economic philosophy became clear because he took supplies from jack kemp and said basically im just not for balancing the budget. Im for a big tax cut. So he had a conservative message that suddenly had a little more to it. Then he united with religious conservatives and people forget that hadnt happened. It was a revolutionary idea that people in the evangelical movement would get out of the churches and into the Political Movement. That hadnt happened before certainly on this scale. They came to him and linked on so that was the second leg of the stool in the social religious conservatives. Then he made the common cause with the neoconservatives and the hawkish democrats in the Foreign Policy were very antisoviet and very much cold warriors and he brought them into the coalition and that is when the kind of anticommunism that held this group together for so many years kind of provided the glue that kept it all together. What Ronald Reagan did is put those elements together and created a coalition. Suddenly there wasnt just a conservative message but there was a fully formed conservative platform and that is what reagan brought to the table in 1980. Although it is not entirely clear at the beginning that its going to succeed, he gets through these massive tax cuts in the Economic Program within the next thing that happens is he gets hit by the recession and has to then pull back on some of those economic policies be implemented in his first year so what does that due to the movement . That is a good point and its forgotten now in the mythology of reagan. He cut taxes and everything came back to life. That wasnt true at all. There was a giant tax cut in 1981, his first year in office. Its almost exactly what he asked for and it didnt work right away. The deficit exploded, republicans were like crazy nervous with what had happened. The recession continued, the economy was going down. This looked like it might be for a while the colossal failure and in fact so much so that 1982 republicans pushed through congress a tax bill that took back some of the tax cuts. Then eventually the combination of the deficit spending frankly because the government and the tax cuts finally kicked in it had gone bust and it wasnt in its success by any stretch of the imagination. You write how there was an infrastructure being built so reaganism about last reagan so those who were traveling with him on this road and the establishment of the think tanks and outside organizations. Guest again as you know when you do a book you get the chance to look through the Rearview Mirror and things are suddenly clear more than they are looking at the front windshield sometimes and this is one of the things i didnt appreciate at the time. I looked through it but it happened so i didnt really grasp it. When you go back and look you realize one of the things that happened in the first reagan term in particular but really all through the years was that the construction of a conservative infrastructure that could support the reagan revolution. And it didnt really exist. Liberals had kind of an infrastructure, think tanks and networks of supporters and money organizations, activists all through the new deal era and beyond that supported what they were doing. Conservatives didnt have that and they sort of created it and it took various forms. It took Grover Norquist americans for tax reform, a new organization created at the behest of the Reagan White House which wanted a group out there in society somewhere to support taxcutting regimens and to lend some firepower for outside to support what we are doing so that gets created. We have go back which was a Little Organization that tried to recruit republicans to run for state legislature, state legislatures. Newt gingrich puts it on steroids and all of a sudden you have a giant Foundation Wide republican conservative being developed at the state level offices, governorships and house races being fueled by Newt Gingrichs ideas. Describe the technology by which they are doing this, because, i mean, i had long thought the happiest coincidences in his entire political career was the fact that he and the cspan cameras arrived at the chamber that proactively the same moment. So he is spreading his message to cspan but lets talk a little bit about the tapes. He used two technologies that were cutting edge the same ridiculous now. One of them as you say cspan cameras. He figured out if you show up Late Afternoon on the floor of the house, the cameras were on and cspan was showing what was happening to the country, but there was nothing happening. So you step in and fill the vacuum by giving regular order speeches and start to basically spread the gospel because you have a really big platform available to you so he does that. But he also uses cassette tapes which seems ridiculous now. But he figured out that there were all these republican wannabes out there who wanted to be conservative reagan foot soldiers but they needed talking points and practical advice, so he figures out the way i can do this is i will make cassette tape recordings of things republicans should say and do and know if they are going to run for office as conservative and he sends them out by the thousands across the country to grassroots, young republican politicians by and large, who are meant to take the cassette tapes, put them in their cars when they are going from event to event and listen to them and they are basically getting howto instructions and indoctrination from Newt Gingrich as they go out for their days on the trail. And this is a whole generation of young republican conservatives into Newt Gingrich conservative republicans who are all basically playing by the same playbook. So, gingrich does all those things and at the same time the nra starts to become a more Political Organization fueled by a democrat, john dingell, was ao was an outdoorsman, very much gun rights and of democrat who basically convinces the nra they should defend gun rights and not just talk about outdoor conservation and hunting and fishing. So that happens. And then i think crucially the other organization that gets created in this period is the Federalist Society which again was a completely novel idea. An organization of conservative legalists, lawyers and professors which created this kind of extended and spread of the conservative legal gospel. But what it then turns out that is an organization that is made to recruit federal conservative judges and so the Federalist Society is created during this period and it starts to recommend people and then promote conservatives that are nominated to be judges, federal and state. Now where we live today the Federalist Society is the most important force pushing conservative judges onto the federal benches and Supreme Court and all of washington and it is basically running that part of the operation for the Trump White House and to some extent Mitch Mcconnell the republican leader in the senate and all that started during the reagan year. Then there is another funny story of the creation of the Heritage Foundation and essentially this is things that were going on right under your nose that you didnt know. So, there was a sense early on and this is just before the reagan years in the early 70s some people had the sense that there needed to be a conservative machine in washington to counter what was seen and one of the people who was interested in doing this was the coors beer magnet from colorado, very conservative, very interested in figuring out how to assert himself. So he sends a letter to the colorado senator saying im going to come to town and id like to talk about how to spread money to spread the conservative gospel. He had in mind probably giving a big check to the American Enterprise institute which was the one notable conservative think tank at the time. This letter though was intercepted and ed is aware of this trip so he basically hijacks the trip and arranges to meet with joseph coors and says ive got a better idea. We should have a very aggressive, small kind of green beret conservative think tank in washington that doesnt just put out white papers that people read and put on their shelf but thats out there creating action so he arranges to have a meeting to talk about this idea. But ed fuller is a smart guy and realizes it will have more impact if it doesnt happen in some restaurant in a hotel in downtown washington, but if it happens in the white house where Richard Nixon was still in office at the time. And lynn noffsinger who was a likeminded conservative working in the white house, so they arranged for this meeting to be held in lynn noffsingers office in the Old Executive Office building to impress joseph coors. They walk into the meeting and joseph says these guys think i should give them some money to start a new conservative think tank but i think theres already one in town called the American Enterprise institute. Why dont i give them my money. They arranged ahead of time. Noffsinger walks over to his bookshelf in the Old Executive Office book, pulls off the shelf and aei study on something or another, he blows dust off of it to show that its been sitting on the shelf gathering dust for these many weeks and months, blows it off and says this is what we do with aei studies. They go on the bookshelf and that gather dust. You should give money to these guys. So he cuts a check, gets a town house on capitol hill and the Heritage Foundation is born. And it gets its name because one of the partners is walking through his neighborhood in Fairfax County virginia, suburban washington and they are trying to figure out what to call it. He sees a group of housing called Heritage Homes and says that would be a nice name so they call it the Heritage Foundation and the rest is history. Its a giant multimillion dollar a year conservative think tank. It drove the reagan agenda and its still active today and again it had its seeds in this period where conservatives felt they had to bulk up if you will. Another thing you see happening over the 1980s and going into the 90s is the language of politics begins to shift. It becomes a much rougher, darker kind of lingo people were using. In part, Newt Gingrich as a leader of coaching his acolytes on the way they should be framing these things. That is a big change and it is driven by Newt Gingrich more than anybody else. Ronald reagan had a kind of shocks quality about him. He would get angry sometimes and talk about welfare moms and things like that, but it didnt really last, and people didnt think of Ronald Reagan as a fighter in the personal sense. They thought of him as the kind of guy who famously would go out and have a beer with the democratic speaker of the house, tip oneill after the day was over. Thats a little bit exaggerated, but he was a kind of republican who wanted to get along with everybody and was basically like it even by people who thought he was shallow and a warm longer. Newt gingrich arrived and said conservatives and republicans have been to content for too long to be the minority party. We have accepted that. We just sort of shuffle along and go along with the majority in congress and its time for that to end. These people have taken advantage of us and we are going to fight them. So he starts to basically develop a futuristic style and this happens in particular when he decides to go after jim wright, who was then the democratic speaker of the house and he sets out to take him down and does so by accusing him of ethical shortcomings particularly ethical crimes associated with a book that he had written for which he was getting the proceeds from the both sales that were being arranged by his office basically, political profiteering if you will. So, he goes out and uses the cspan time we talked about earlier, every day, to go after jim wright and the democrats in very harsh terms and basically turns the tenor of the conversation to washington in a different direction. And that has a lot of impact. It has impact with him, the Republican Party, because basically this all plays out in part while George Hw Bush, Ronald Reagans Vice President has become president and hes also a very kind of mainstream and almost genteel personality, yet the party is slowly being taken over by the Newt Gingrich forces who are pushing a much harsher and much more combated view of the world. Its not inconsistent with the reagan message philosophically but its quite different. And i talked with rahm emanuel who was the mayor of chicago and white house chief of staff for barack obama and a leading member of the house for several years so he worked with and against Newt Gingrich in many ways going back to the clinton years. He said i think that the arrival of Newt Gingrich as the main figure in the republican and conservative movement is really when the era ended, when Newt Gingrich became the spokesman for the movement because he represented and i think theres something to this. He represented such a departure from Ronald Reagan in tone and style but that was the end of the period. But then as we get into the early 90s we begin to see a few figures who do in fact depart from what really William F Buckley and Ronald Reagan would recognize as conservative philosophy. You see for the first time i think those few strains of populism showing up in the party. Can you talk about that and where that came from . I think the important figure in the period and the canary in the coal mine was pat buchanan. He was a Nixon White House aide and a Ronald Reagan loyalist who worked for Ronald Reagan and loved Ronald Reagan. His email address was a variation, so he was the ultimate reagan soldier. But by the early 1990s, he decides that the conservative message has missed the beach. Its not looking out enough for the working class americans and those are the people that have began moving to the Republican Party for cultural reasons, for abortion rights, they dont like liberals and so they are moving into the Republican Party and pat buchanan thinks they are being hurt by our economic message. We have a freetrade message but we are closing down factories so they can move to mexico and we have to stop that. Immigrants are moving in and are driving down the wages and we have to stop that, tomac. So he begins and pat is quite eloquent about this. He says i began to develop a different view of what conservatism is and should be and it was very much early donald trump. Its antifree trade and antinafta. Its very much antiimmigration and imports from abroad. Its pro american, lets promote american industry and have an industrial policy. These are all basically heresies to traditional conservatives and he begins pushing that. So that hes kind of dismissed as a cultural warrior because hes very much pushing the agenda of the religious right. The economic message that he was pushing. The incumbent of the party was running for the reelection and it hurts him in that campaign but you can draw a line and the republican pollster who does the pulling of the wall street journal with our partners said donald trump is just pat buchanan with his own airplane. At the same time we see the emergence of the celebrity billionaires in washington outsiders as well. Talk a little bit about ross perot and where does he come in with all of this . He really was donald trump before donald trump. Hes very match an independent person that has no political connections. He is a little paranoid and conspiracy minded so you can check that box off that he has a very unlikely way to connect in the vernacular so you have a billionaire who talks to the working class people and isnt resented for his wealth but admired for it. He brings the same message. Basically he starts by saying that federal spending is out of control. Its very much a traditional balance the books message and he becomes the person who picks up the pat buchanan seen and its moving all of our jobs out of the u. S. To the south and he picks up a real following their. You and i both probably wrote about the perot army and in some extent in 1996. He was pushing back against what was a bipartisan establishment and the belief of free trade and he ran as an independent and finally thirdparty figure, got a fairly amazing 19 of the vote, probably stopped George Hw Bush from getting a second term. It sends a shiver down the spines of the business constituents of the Republican Party and traditional conservatives but then ultimately collapses because of his own personal flaws in many ways. Hes paranoid, cant keep advisors around, hes a little scary to people, but he has a message that again like buchanan is kind of a sign of things to come and interestingly the parallels to trump are all up and down the line. One of them, he figured out a way to find a soapbox was to go on cable tv constantly and talk about it. Thats donald trump two two or three decades later its the same playbook just the country wasnt ready yet for ross perot but by 2016 it turns out it was kind of ready for donald trump. Host ross perot was sort of mesmerizing on tv and a sort of the same way. It was part of politic politicst performance art. The other thing that was similar, i did a fair amount of reporting during that period and ultimately perrault created the Patriot Party so people that i got to know became kind of regular foot soldiers in the Patriot Party army up in pennsylvania and these were people who felt their part of pennsylvania had been heard by factories closing down and moving overseas particularly textile factories and others who believed ross perot had a point and was right about the country hurting itself by letting freetrade get in the way of what was good for regular americans but what was interesting to me and when i went back and looked at the stories they had the same kind of feeling eventually that a lot of Trump Supporters have which is to say they saw his flaws and recognized he was kind of an egomaniac at a little paranoid and that they wished he would talk nicer and wasnt so crude sometimes. All the things you hear Trump Supporters say about donald trump but they say hes the guy that can carry the best so we will put up with his flaws because we believe that he is the messenger we need right now and that was another interesting parallel. People who followed him were hardheaded and realistic and saw him as a flawed messenger and best one available. In part because of the schism opening up in the Republican Party because George Hw Bush wasnt as skillful handling the domestic economy, he loses to bill clinton in 1992. Two years later Newt Gingrich hasnt gotten anything and two years later for the first time. The held belief at this point is that there was a potential conservative majority in the country and republicans should be in control of the house. We will make sure that we take that congress and people are skeptical as you know. But Newt Gingrich puts together a contract with america that basically steals ideas literally out of Ronald Reagans speeches and puts them together in a list of ten, doesnt mention the word republican in the contract with america at all so this wasnt a, this isnt to be seen as a republican document but a conservative governing document for all of america. He lays that out and against the backdrop of a very disorganized and disjointed somewhat scandal ridden early Clinton White house and says we can govern as conservatives and heres my proof i have a contract with you all and this is what we are going to do so it goes from he tries to take the conservative movement from being an Ideological Movement to a governing platform and he produces that platform. And it works. They win back the control of the house. Its a shock to the entire system in washington. I couldnt tell then and i still cant tell now if he succeeded or not. Nonetheless, it happened and it was an earthquake. It was the biggest thing that happened in this town since reagan himself was elected so he is basically taken over as the successor and the leader of the conservative movement. He then proceeds to dominate the agenda and they become these two baby boomers that are destined to collide but before they do and the reason i think that Newt Gingrich didnt succeed in establishing himself and his leadership for the long run was he got outmaneuvered by somebody that wasnt an even smarter and better politician, bill clinton and he realized gingrich has a point. The country has moved to the right and ive moved the Democratic Party to the right a little bit and i going to move it more so he moves to the center and plants of flag in the center between 1994 and 1996 and basically takes over that part of the country and ideological spectrum by basically moving towards gingrich, not finding it but coopting him and that turns out to be very successful. I think people who were not in washington at the time probably dont remember how this just completely reoriented everything. At one point bill clinton actually stands up and declares the president is still relevant. He also declared along the way on the same stretch that the year of the Big Government is over. So he basically decides i am going to basically follow him to the right and he takes the Democratic Party there with him and it takes a while because he was a dominant force in town. One of the anecdotes i tell in the book at the wall street journal we discovered because we do the readership surveys, in the old fashion of the wall street journal we have the used line drawings of people and if you put the name an in the heade and put a drawing and bedded in the story, the leadership of the story immediately shot up. He was that fascinating to people, they hated Newt Gingrich and they were fascinated by him. He had all that power at his disposal and to some extent he was coopted and squandered it by basically wearing people out and overdoing it essentially. He overreaches by basically two backtoback government shutdowns that the republicans got all the blame for and i think that the polling suggested the impeachment of bill clinton was a big overreach by august of 98. They wanted clinton to be centered and get back to the government. Overreaches the right word. And in a way, bill clinton let him overreach. Bill clinton basically says you want to shut down the government. It happens twice and the republicans got the blame for it. And im sure bill clinton didnt want to be impeached but it was in overreach. It was seen by americans as basically a stupid fight between two baby boomers over Public Policy and the reaction to that was harmful because Newt Gingrich is seen as the guy that pushed it down that path and so by the end of 1998, theres an election and the democrats took up seeds contrary to what you would expect in the middle of the second term of the incumbent president. Newt gingrich is blamed by many in his own party and hes gone. So for years after the contract with america, its all over in that sense. And he is sitting in his home district and bill clinton is in the white house and Newt Gingrich says to somebody i quote in the book is quoted as saying so bill clinton broke the law and purged himself and hes in washington in the white house and im down here, what happened thats what happened. Six it startit starts to dis. George w. Bush is very, very much an established candidate. Hes been the governor of texas getting together to sort of annoying him to go forward and in those harsh terms compassionate conservatism so they are starting to resemble what was recognizable for decades. More than that its kind of an updated version of this. He walked the walk better and talked the talk better. Conservatives believed he was one of them. And he was an evangelical, not an episcopal evangelical christian. He came from texas. He really was from texas, not greenwich connecticut. All those things kind of spoke to who he really was and they embraced him. And interestingly, one of the things i came to appreciate george bush a little bit more in retrospect because he came into office wanting to basically update the message. Compassionate conservatism wasnt just a catchphrase. It was an idea that conservatives need to not just be on an ivory tower with a bunch of philosophies they got out of the pages of the national review. Its we need to be connected with people more. The conservatives lost their way. They lost their connection with people so we have to worry about what is happening to the poor black kid in the Innercity School and we have an answer for that, school choice. We need to update the welfare state but not by being so cruel about it we are going to cut the law. We have to create work opportunities. There was this idea that conservatism, the conservative message has become a little sterile and disconnected from people. So george w. Bush comes into office, and its controversial because a lot of it isnt conservatives think its too much government power and liberals are very skeptical i think just as an advertising slogan. But he starts in 2001 and is moving down this path of reforming and updating the conservative message and then 9 11 happened and that pretty much ended that experiment because it becomes completely secondary to a whole new agenda. And the era of endless wars began. Its interesting because george w. Bush campaigned by saying we need to pay more attention to whats happening here. We should pay less attention and not engage in nationbuilding. That is the phrase used at the time. Its a mistake and waste of resources. We have our own to do here at home. Thats what im going to do. So 9 11 happens and the neoconservatives, the Republican Party who werparty who were Pope National security position in the Bush Administration and by the way who had somewhat lost their reason for existence when the soviet union went out of existence and communists went into history as reagan predicted it would, suddenly they had a new reason, islamic extremism, islamic terrorists. And they basically see used the levers of power in many ways in the Bush Administration and pushed towards the war in afghanistan which that was a consensus. But more controversially and fatally for george w. Bush to the war in iraq, which was not necessarily and clearly ill advised and something im sure, who knows george w. Bush would tell you if we shot him full of truth serum but something he will wish he didnt get into. This brings us to the end of the bush presidency, the second bush presidency and two gigantic things happen. I mean, one is the biggest economic crisis since the great depression, and all the disruption that that brings into peoples lives. And the second is the election of the democratic president , the first africanamerican one which has underlying racial tension, and one who has a very, very vigorous agenda starting with healthcare. So, how does that really set the stage for donald trump . The first thing that happens is the republicans nominate in 2008 somebody thats a wonderful American Hero and equipped for all kinds of things but not too handled in economic crisis, and that is john mccain. In the 2008 campaign he doesnt really have an answer to what just happened which is the financial industry meltdown. Barack obama and the democrats do because this is, you know, a crisis like that calls for Government Action and democrats are ready for that. So, barack obama wins. He sets out to do two things. One is to have a giant economic rescue with a huge stimulus package and the other is to reform the Healthcare System so he does one thing because it is necessary and another thing because democrats have taken control and they have been wanting to do this for 40 years and they finally have their chance to do it. He sets out to do both at the same time and by the way he does not deal with the immigration problem because that is more [inaudible] all of those were kind of fateful decisions. What it does is leads the conservatives sputtering because billions and billions of federal money is going out the door and deficit spending, this all sounds familiar. Benefiting wall street with an economic crisis. These are all the things donald trump has been doing right now by the way. But the democrats are blamed for blowing up the deficit and expanding the size of government and that makes the conservative republicans crazy. At the same time there is under way what is seen as a giant government takeover in the Healthcare System which leaves conservatives sputtering. They lose sight of the fact a lot of obamacare which is what it became known as basically embraced the conservative principles. Insurance marketplaces are a conservative idea that the individual mandate that says everybody has to pull his or her own way to making sure they are covered as a conservative idea and these are incorporated but the whole package is seen as a giant Government Program and for the purposes of the story that i am telling, the main impact is that it leaves conservatives beside themselves. They cannot believe this is what has happened. Its so far away from what they thought that the country was headed towards in the 90s and in the Newt Gingrich period. And there is certainly a racial overlay to this. They cannot see barack obama as an entirely legitimate president. And it basically leaves the Congressional Republican leadership set out to more than anything else just make sure barack obama is not a twoterm president. So first, the party tries doing what theyve always done. They nominate the next guy in line, mitt romney, traditional republican in so many ways, except he also does a little bit of sort of tickling the immigration issue. And when he loses, the Republican Party commissions which is now known as the autopsy and just we have to become a more forward thinking, inclusive party. Weve got to bring in hispanics and defend [inaudible] donald trump is sitting there at trump tower, six days after the election filling out the paperwork to trademark the phrase make America Great again. Very backward looking and looking back at White America essentially. What is he seeing that they are not seeing . We have to remember that in the meantime in 2009, 2010, the tea party erupts which is a populist movement. We are tired of the government bailing out the guys on wall street and investment banks and people that overspend on oversized houses. Im not getting anything. I lost my job and my house. Its a genuinely angry populist uprising but when republicans try to harness the power of that without adopting it so they nominate mitt romney that is a great guy and Great American but the least populous person you can think of to be the standardbearer in 2012. And as you say, he tickles the emigrationimmigration, antiimmn sentiment to some extent, and he loses. And again, republicans are sputtering. They thought 2012 was winnable. Barack obama should have been beat and he wasnt and it makes them crazy. Then the conservative movement in the party at that point as you suggested hit the big fork in the road. The Party Establishment says lets go this direction and say we need to be more inclusive and be friendlier. We need to get more hispanic votes because the demography of the country is changing. We need to have a more soothing message on the comprehensive immigration reform. That is the path towards changing the message to adapt. Donald trump arrives with a few others and says the exact opposite. That is wrong. We should go this way. We should go back to a more basic message that says we will make America Great again and stop immigration and reduce, stop trade agreements. We should recognize the tea party showed us that there is a populist mood in the country and we are going to take advantage of it. The party hits that fork in the road and donald trump is kind of all alone out here and we saw what happened. So, here we are, less than two months away from an election. We are in the home stretch. Donald trump is in the white house not for one minute of his presidency. So where are we going. When you write volume two, what is it we should be paying attention to . What is going to be tested now . I think that its hard to know for sure until you know the outcome but its an obvious answer. A lot of people in the Business Community will have to decide where they go. I think the key question right now is whether democrats have a message that is basically reassuring enough to counter that. The odd thing about donald trump, and i dont know if this is specific or kind of generically true about where we are right now, people who dont like him are prepared to vote anyway. People want to like they are voting for because hes going to be in their living room through the tv every night. That is not the truth donald trump. People say hes only got a 42 or 43 personal Approval Ratings of he cant possibly win. He can. Im not saying he will but he can because people dislike the way that he operates will still vote for him because they like his attitude. Can democrats counter that that is the question. Theres a whole generation of conservatives. How do you combine the unmistakable populist urges to capitalize. They are trying to come up with things like for example lets support an industrial policy. Lets get off the libertarian kind of message that says the government cant get involved in the private sector and say we do want to save Manufacturing Industries and plants in this country. It will be used for good and taken away for the traditional straightlaced conservatives. Trump was such an unconventional candidate. But once he gets into this enormous office and responsibilities hes going to have on his shoulders hes going to have to govern like a much more conventional president and sort of grow into the office. But he is very much the same person. Does that surprise you . Very much so. Ive been wrong about many things. That was one of them that, you know i assumed he would adjust and he hasnt. Hes become even more trump like. I wrote for the journal no jourg ago you cant just put trump back in the bottle. It doesnt mean that it will be this way forever but he has changed the Republican Party in ways that will be lasting and hes changed the way people operate as president. It doesnt mean every succeeding president will be on twitter 45 or 50 times a day, but there is a way of communicating with the public and a style of communicating and a kind of tone that he is created that isnt going to go away overnight. Love him or hate him you have to say he has turned or has been presidency to his style more than the other way around. I didnt see that coming and im still surprised by how much he does that and how much people accept that. I thought people would rebel at the idea you could have a president who says things the way he says things and you could have somebody who diminishes the currency of the statement to the point that he has which is to say he says things for effect and not because they are literally true. I thought that that would be so jarring to people. That isnt going to just go away overnight. He has changed the institution in ways i would not have anticipated. What about some of the norms. Will people release their tax returns or shut down their private businesses. For the most part i think theres a desire to return to some of those norms and strengthen the institutions. It isnt going to go away. Hes changed some of these patterns forever, but i think people in both parties quietly worry about institutions. What about the separation of powers and limited executive power and the fbi and the national securitnational securit about the independence like the fda and cdc. I think quietly some of that will be restored because i think that people in both parties are uncomfortable with some of those, the shattering of some of those norms, but not all of them. I think that you will probably have institutions like the state department that will feel more beholden to the president and less independent for a while after this because that is what donald trump has done and what a lot of people say they want and we will see how that lasts, but theres a kind of level of concern about stability and future of basic institutions to an extent that i think some of that will turn back in the other direction. Its hard to believe that we are out of time here. Its been such a fascinating conversation and you have written such a fascinating book so congratulations. Thank you. Its been an interesting period to live through and chronicle so i was glad to have the chance. Thank you for the conversation. This program is available as a podcast. All after words programs can be viewed on the website at booktv. Org. On the seventh of december or the eighth in 1941,