Should have seen it coming. I would like to start with what was my personal favorite moment in the book which is the first meeting between donald trump and steve bannon who would become a very influential political strategist in his world where he explains to trump that he cannot if hes thinking of running for president he cant do it as a traditional republican. Can you describe the scene . First of all, thank you for having me. One of the things you have to remember is donald trump didnt come into this he had been thinking about running for president for years but he wasnt sure, he did to have an identity. Sometimes he was democrat, sometimes republican, someone independent. By 2012, he was getting serious about it and a conservative activist, was a friend of Donald Trumps and he decided to talk about running for president and they took their friend who didnt know donald trump at that point up to new york at a meeting to talk about the possibility. If he ran as an outsider, how would he do it. David sits down and says heres the way you run as a traditional reagan republican which was kind of the way all republicans ran at that point and steve speaks up and says something different. Thats not going to work anymore. If you are going to run you need to vote as a populist. They basically said theres a new populist mood in the country and donald trump looked at him and says youre right, thats what i am, a popular risk and kind of gets the terminology mangled of course he doesnt decide to run in 2012 book four year2012 but fouryears later tht he does. In the meantime between 2012 and 2016 he starts that populist message and i think theres a lot of starting points for the trump revolution if you will. Thats at least one of the points. It has been all about the writings. Guest very much so. He doesnt have an ideology. I interviewed gingrich a couple of times. He is fascinating and has a lot of insight into the period. It tells the story of a 40 year period of the revolution from Ronald Reagan in 1979 when he starts to run for president to the arrival than where we are today. Newt gingrich has a lot in that whole period. One of the things he said to me though is donald trump is not a conservative. He is an antiliberal and thanks a lot is nonsense but he doesnt have the philosophy to read the review which is kind of the bible of modernday conservatism. He is an interesting player and that is all fine with his supporters and one of the things we learned in 2016 you dont have to be traditional or evenideology. What you are up against at this point is as important as what you are for. One thing that makes this different from so many other political books is that there is also an autobiographical threat that goes through it and even the title, you should have seen it coming, first person. But how did you come up with the title and what were you attempting to do . Guest thats interesting because it wasnt my plan. You are a journalist and i am a journalist. To think about something is the first person is exceptionally uncomfortable and not what i intended to do but when i got into this project it was a way to explain where did donald trump come from. I got interested in the starting point and the starting point i decided it was 1979 when the carter presidency kind of collapses. He gives the speech, kind of throws up his hands and says we are in terrible trouble and the country is then prepared to turn to Ronald Reagan who wins the presidency and i think that began a four decade period of conservative influence so it was through that period of the mostt interesting and perhaps most powerful movement at the times so i decided that was the story that i was going to tell how the conservative Movement Rose to prominence and power under Ronald Reagan 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 basically thats the arc of your career, isnt it. I arrived in washington to cover washington for the journal in the spring of 1980 and then id been kind of following the story ever since. The story said to me you should put your self in the book. You witnessed a lot of this. You should tell us what it was like and so thats how that came about its good to occasionally say i stole this convention and heres what it looks like or i hope it humanizes the story a little bit but its not a natural or comfortable way for journalists to land. Ronald reagan represented a number of things, very traditional conservative principles, free trade, smaller governments, stronger military. 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 that you write about its a shot of selfconfidence that the country really needs in that moment. Guest people were saying the president is too big a job to handle the. He said this is nonsense this is america lets pull ourselves together and move forward. The philosophy was conservative. 1976 just four years earlier he tried to take the nomination away from gerald ford and the party decided and the country thought thats too far out there but by 1980 Ronald Reagan had moved but the country was ready for it and it had to do with carters failures but there you have it. What really happened that i didnt appreciate until i did the book as ronal is ronald reaa basic core message he developed and expanded it and flushed it out. His economic philosophy became clear and said basically im 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 than he united and people forget that hasnt happened. That was a revolutionary idea that people would get out of the churches and into the political movement. That hadnt happened before certainly on this scale. This was the second leg of the stool he had economic conservatives and then made common cause that hawkish democrats and Foreign Policy were antisoviet and he brought them into the coalition and thats where the kind of anticommunism that held the group together for so many years kind of provided the glue that kept it all together. He created a coalition and suddenly it wasnt just a conservative message but there was a fully formed conservative platform and that is what reagan brought to the table. Although it isnt entirely clear, he gets through these massive tax cuts but then the next thing that happens is he gets hit by a big recession and has to then pull back on some of those economic policies he implemented so what does that do to the movement . That is a good point. He cut taxes and everything came back to life. That wasnt true at all. It was almost what he asked for and was considered dangerous and revolutionary and it didnt work right away. The deficit exploded. Republicans were crazy nervous with what happened. The session continued. The economy was going down and it looked like for a while that it might be a colossal failure and in fact so much so that more conventional conservatives led by among others bob dole and howard baker pushed this through congress a tax bill that took back some of those tax cuts because they were worried about the deficits opening up and then eventually the combination of deficit spending frankly finally kicked in and things started to take off but there was a period in which it looked as if this might be a gamble that wasnt going to work. It was not an instant success by any stretch of the imagination. Host you also write about how at this time there was an infrastructure being built so that. Can you talk a little bit about that those that were traveling with him and the establishment of the think tanks and outside organizations. When you do a book you get the chance to look through the Rearview Mirror and things are clearer. This is one of the things i didnt appreciate at the time but it happened so instrumentally i didnt really grasp it. One of the things that happened in the first term was the construction of a conservative infrastructure that could support the reagan revolution and it didnt really exist. Liberals had an infrastructure, think tanks and networks of supporters and Many Organizations and 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 say for example grover norquist. A new organization created at the behest of the Reagan White House that wanted a grou the grt there in society somewhere to support the taxcutting regimen and lend some firepower for outside to support what we are doing so that gets created. Go pack which is a sleepy Little Organization that tried to recruit republicans to run for the state legislature. Newt gingrich takes it over and puts it on steroids and all of a sudden you have a giant Foundation Wide team of conservatives being developed at the state level and house races and they are all being fueled by this idea. Described the technology by which they are doing this because i have long thought that the happiest coincidences was the fact that he and the cspan cameras arrived in the House Chamber practically at the same moment so hes spreading the message through cspan but talk a little bit about the tapes. One of them was 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 nothing was happening so they would give regular order speeches and start to basically spread the gospel because you have a platform available so he does that and also uses cassette tapes which seems ridiculous now but he figured out there were all these republican wannabes that needed some instruction and talking points so he figures out the way that i will do this is make tape recordings of things republicans should say and do and know if they are going to run and he sends them out by the thousands across the country to grassroots for the young republican politicians who are meant to take the cassette tapes, put them in their cars and listen to them and they are getting instructions and this turns a whole generation who are all playing by the same playbook so he says all those things and at the same time the nra starts to become a more Political Organization and john dingell who was an outdoorsman, very much guns rights kind of democrat who basically convinces the nra to defend gun rights and not just talk about outdoor conservation and hunting and fishing so that happens and then i think the other organization that gets created in this period is the Federalist Society which again was a completely novel idea and in organization of conservative legalist lawyers and law professors which created the conservative legal gospel and it then turns out its made to recruit the federal judges so the society is created during this incubator period and it starts to recommend people and promote conservatives who are nominated to be judges and now today the federalist societ socs the most important force pushing conservative judges in all of washington and basically running that part of the operation for the Trump White House and to some extent Mitch Mcconnell in the senate. All of that started during the reagan years. Host then you have another sort of funny story about the creation of the Heritage Foundation. Guest things going on beneath your nose that you didnt even know. There was a sense early on and this is before the late 70s some people had the sense that there needed to be a conservative machine in washington. One of the people interested in doing this very conservative, very interested in figuring out how to assert himself so he sent a letter to a colorado senator saying im going to come to town to talk about how to spend some money to spread the conservative gospel and 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 fuller among a couple of other people is aware of the trip and basically he hijacks the trip and it arranges to meet with joseph coors and says i have a better idea. We should have a very aggressive small conservative think tank in washington that doesnt just put out white papers people read and put on their shelf but thats out there Creative Action so he arranges a meeting to talk about this idea but ed fuller is a smart guy and realizes it would have more impact if it didnt happen in a restaurant or hotel in downtown but if it happens at the white house where Richard Nixon was still in office at the time. He was a likeminded conservative from california working in the white house so they arranged for this meeting to be held in the building to impress joseph coors. They walk into the meeting and he says these guys think i should give them some money to start a conservative think tank but i think there is already one in town. Why dont i give them my money. They arranged this ahead of time lynn walks over to his bookshelf, pulls off the shelf and aei study on something or another, blows the dust off of it which was put on the study ahead of time to show its been gathering all these weeks and months, he blows it off and says this is what we do with aei studies here. You should give money to these guys, so joseph coors cuts the check, gets a townhouse 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 trying to figure out what to call it and he sees a group called the heritage home so they call it the Heritage Foundation and the rest is history there is now giant multimillion dollar a year conservative think tanks. It drove the reagan agenda and its still active today. There were times conservatives thought they had to bulk up if you will. Another thing you see happen over the 1980s going into the 90s is the language of politics begins to shift. It becomes a darker kind of lingo people are using and Newt Gingrich is a leader in this sort of coaching the way they should be framing these things. Host that is a big change and it is driven by Newt Gingrich more than anybody else. Ronald reagan had a kind of all shocks quality about him. He would 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 democratics after the day was over. He was the kind of republican that wanted to get along with everybody and was liked even by people who thought he was shallow and a warmonger. Newt gingrich arrived and said conservatives and republicans have been to content for too long to be the minority party. Weve accepted that. We just go along with the majority in congress and its time for that to end. These people have taken advantage of us and so he starts to basically develop a more futuristic style. This happens in particular when he decides to go after the then democratic speaker of the house and he sets up to take him down and does so by accusing him of ethical shortcomings associated with a book that he had written for which he was getting proceeds arranged by his office basically political profiteering if you will. He goes out and uses the time we talked about earlier and basically turns the tenor in a different direction. That has a lot of impact within the Republican Party because basically this plays out in part while George Hw Bush is president and he is also a very kind of mainstream personality yet the party is slowly being taken over by the forces that are pushing a much harsher and combat of view of the world its not inconsistent with the message philosophically but totally it is quite different. And i talked with ron imanuel who was the mayor of chicago and white house chief of staff for barack obama and leading member of the house for several years so he worked with and against going back to the clinton years and he said i thought a rival of Newt Gingrich as the main figure in the republican and conservative movement is when the era and did not win donald trump arrived but when Newt Gingrich became basically the leading spokesman for the movement because he represented such a departure in tone and style and substance that that was the end of the period. Host but then we begin to see a few figures who do in fact depart from what William F Buckley and Ronald Reagan would recognize as conservative philosophy. You see for the first time those strains of populism showing up. Can you talk about where that came from . Pat buchanan was a Nixon White House aide and Ronald Reagan loyalist. He loved Ronald Reagan. His email address is a variation. He was the ultimate reagan soldier but by the early 90s he decides that the conservative message missed a beat. Its not looking out enough for the working class americans and those are the people that have begun moving to the Republican Party foparty for cultural reas, prayer in school, against abortion rights, they dont like liberals and so they are moving into the Republican Party and pat buchanan thinks that they are being hurt by our economic message. We are closing down factories so they can move to mexico and we have to stop that. Immigrants are moving and driving down wages and we have to stop that, tomac. Hes 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 and antifree trade and antinafta. Its very much antiimmigration and antiimports from abroad. Its pro american lets promote american industry. These are all basically heresies to the traditional conservatives and pat buchanan pushes them very hard when he runs for president in 92 and at that point hes kind of dismissed as a cultural warrior because he is alshesalso very much pushing te agenda of the religious right at the same time so i think a lot of people dismissed him as nothing but a cultural warrior somebody pushing a social agenda when the importance was the economic message he was pushing and its from that point it really hurts him in that campaign but you ca that you caa Straight Line from that campaign to donald trump in 2016 in fact the republican pollster who does polling for us at the wall street journal said to me donald trump is just pat buchanan with his own airplane that is how similar the messages are. That to me is the first sign theres not only a movement turning more populist but also the potential for a spokesman to crystallize the movement. Pat buchanan was a little ahead of his time. Host we also see the emergence of the celebrity billionaire washington outsiders as well. Talk a little about ross perot and where does he come in with all of this . He really was donald trump before donald trump. A billionaire businessman, very much a loner and independent person with no real political connections at all. A little paranoid and conspiracy minded. But he has a very kind of unlikely way to connect in the vernacular of the working people so a billionaire who talks to the working class people and isnt resented for his wealth but admired for it, that is donald trump and he brings the same message basically he starts interestingly by saying the federal spending is out of control, its kind of very much a traditional conservative balance the books message but pretty soon he moves on to a and i trade message and becomes the person who picks up the pat buchanan scene and talks about nafta moving all of our jobs out of the u. S. To the south and he picks up a following there. You and i probably both wrote about the army in 1972 and 1976. He was pushing back against what was a bipartisan establishment belief in the virtues of free trade and he ran as an independent and thirdparty figure, got in an amazing 19 of the vote and probably stop George Hw Bush from getting a second term, really sends a shiver down the spines of the business constituencies and traditional conservatives but then ultimately it collapses because of its own personal flaws. Hes paralyzed, cant keep his advisors around, hes scary to people but has a message that again like buchanan is a sign of things to come and interestingly the parallels are up and down the line. He figured out a way to find a soapbox for his views was to go on cable tv constantly and talk about it. Thats donald trump two decades later, three decades later. Its the same playbook just the country wasnt ready for ross perot but by 2016 it was kind of ready for donald trump. Guest host ross perot was kind of mesmerizing on tv and kind of the same way. It was part politics and part performance. Host guest the other thing that was similar i did a fair amount of reporting and that period and ultimately ross perot created the Patriot Party so these were people i got to know who became kind of regular foot soldiers up in pennsylvania. These were people who felt their part had been hurt by factories closing down and moving overseas particularly textile factories and who really believed ross perot had a point that he was right about the country hurting itself letting free trade to get in the way of what was good for regular americans but what was interesting when i looked back at some of the stories during that period they had kind of the same feeling that a lot of Trump Supporters have about donald trump just to say they saw his flaw and recognized he was kind of an egomaniac and a little paranoid and erratic and they wished he would talk nicer and wasnt so crude all the things you hear Trump Supporters say about donald trump they say hes the guy that can carry the message so we will put up with his flaws because we believe he is the messenger we need right now and that was another interesting parallel i realized going back between ross perot and donald trump the people who followed him were starry on it and kind of mesmerized. They were hardheaded and realistic about the messenger they had chosen that the best one available. Host in part because of the schism opening up in the party and because George Hw Bush was not as skillful handling the domestic economy as he was on the International Stage two years later Newt Gingrich hasnt gotten anywhere and for the first time in 40 years, republicans take over the house with Newt Gingrich as their leader. Host the belief at that point was a potential conservative majority in the country and that by all rights republicans should be in control of the house if not the house and senate. George hw bush failed because he wasnt conservative enough. We are going to make sure we take back congress and people were skeptical as you know 1994 that was possible. But Newt Gingrich puts together a contract with america that basically steals ideas literally out of Ronald Reagans speechess and puts them together in a list, doesnt mention the word republican in the contract so this isnt to be seen as a republican document but a conservative governing document for all of america. He lays that out against the backdrop of a very disorganized disjointed early Clinton White house and he says we can govern as conservatives. I have a contract with you all and here is what we are going to do so it goes from he tries to take the conservative movement from an ideological to a platform and he produces that platform. They went back control of the house. Its a shock to the entire system in washington but i couldnt tell then and i still cant tell now if its a shock that he succeeded. He wont admit that nevertheless. It was one of the biggest things that happened since reagan himself was elected and so hes basically taken over as the successor. He then proceeds to dominate the agenda and they become these two baby boomers destined to collide. The reason i think Newt Gingrich didnt succeed in establishing himself and his leadership was he kind of got outmaneuvered by somebody that was an even smarter and better politician. Bill clinton realizes he has a point. The country has moved to the right. Ive moved a little bit but im going to move it more so he moves to the center and plants a 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 and that turns out to be very successful. Host people that were not in washington at the time dont remember how this reoriented everything. At one point bill clinton stands up and declares the president is still relevant. Guest and somewhere along the same stretch that the Big Government is over so basically he says im going to basically follow him to the right and he takes the Democratic Party there with him and it takes a while because gingrich was a dominant force in town. I tell one of the anecdotes in the book at the wall street journal during this period we discovered that in the old fashion of the wall street journal we had these line drawings of people and if you put the name in a headline it immediately shot up even people that hated him were fascinated by him. He had that power at his disposal and he was coopted and squandered by wearing people out and overdoing it essentially. Host he overreaches in the Government Shutdown that the republicans got the blame for and i think it was suggested that the impeachment was also in overreach by august of 98 it suggested people wanted clinton to be censored and get back to government. Guest and overreaches exactly the right word. In a way bill clinton let him overreach and says basically you want to shut down the government you are going to take the blame for it. Im sure bill clinton didnt want to be impeached but it was in overreach it was seen by america as a stupid fight between two baby boomers. The reaction to that was hard for a lot because hes seen as the guy who pushed it down that path and so by the end of 1998 theres an election and democrats actually pick up the seats contrary to what you would expect in the middle of the term. Newt gingrich is blamed for this by many in his own party. He is gone so for years after the contract with america, its all over in that sense. Hes sitting in his home district in georgia and bill clinton still in the white house with his popularity going up. Newt gingrich says to somebody so bill clinton broke the law and hes in washington and in the white house and im down here. What happened . Host the schisms in the Republican Party also start to disappear again. I mean, george w. Bush is very, very much an establishment candidate. Then the governor of texas and fellow governors get together and sort of annoying him to go forward. He doesnt speak in those sort of really harsh terms. He talks about compassionate conservatism so for a while doesnt it look like the Republican Party is starting to resemble what was recognizable for decades . Guest more than that kind of an updated version. George w. Bush unlike his father was seen by conservatives as a genuine conservative. He walked the walk and talked the talk. Conservatives believed he was one of them in a way that they never thought his father was. He seemed more genuinely antiabortion, for example and he was an evangelical christian. He came from texas, really 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 him a little bit more in retrospect he came into office basically wanting to update the message. Compassionate conservatism wasnt just a catchphrase. It was an idea that conservatives need to just not to be in an ivory tower with a bunch of philosophies they got out of the pages of the review. We need to be connected with people more and the conservatives lost their way because they lost their connection with peoples we have to worry about what is happening to the poor black kids in the Innercity School and we have an answer for that. School choice. We need to update the welfare state and create work opportunities. There was this idea that the conservative message had become disconnected from people so george w. Bush comes into office and its controversial. Hes moving down this path of updating the conservative message and then 9 11 happened and that pretty much ended that experiment because it becomes secondary to a whole new agenda. Host and the endless war began. Guest he campaigned by saying we need to pay more attention to whats happening here and we shouldnt engage in nationbuilding. That was the phrase used at the time. We have our own work to do here at home. So, 9 11 happened and the neoconservatives populating the National Security position in the Bush Administration and had somewhat lost their reason for existence when the soviet union went out of existence suddenly they have a new enemy, islamic extremism, islamic terrorists and they basically receive the levers of power and push the war in afghanistan which was a consensus for but more controversially to the war in iraq which wasnt necessary and illadvised and something who knows if we shot him full of truth serum but something he will probably wish he didnt get into. Host so that brings us to the end of the second bush presidency and two gigantic things happened. One is the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression and all of the disruption that brings into peoples lives and second that election of the democratic president and one who has a rigorous agenda starting with healthcare so how does that set the stage for donald trump . Guest the republicans nominate someone wh whos a wonderful american and hero equipped for all kinds of things but not to handle a crisis and that is john mccain and in the 2008 campaign he doesnt really have an answer to what just happened which is the financial industry meltdown and barack obama and the democrats do because this is a crisis like the calls for Government Action and they are ready for that so barack obama wins and he sets out to do two things one is to have a gigantic rescue with a stimulus package and the other is to reform the Healthcare System so he does one because it is necessary and another because democrats have taken control and wanting to do this for 40 years and finally have the chance to do it. He sets out to do both at the same time and if it doesnt deal with the immigration problem but all those things are kind of faithful decisions and what it does is leaves conservatives just sputtering mad because hundreds of billions of dollars is going out the door. This all sounds familiar, right. Its benefiting wall street. These are all the things donald trump is doing right now by the way. But the democrats are blamed for blowing up the deficit and expanding the size of the government and that just makes the conservative republicans crazy and at the same time there is what is seen as a giant government takeover which leaves the conservatives sputtering. They lose sit sight of the factt obamacare basically embraced the conservative principles. Insurance marketplaces are a conservative idea. The individual mandate that says everybody has to pull their own way tweight making sure they are covered as a conservative idea and these are incorporated into the whole package is seen as a giant Government Program and for the purposes of the story that im telling the main impact is that it just leaves conservatives beside themselves. They cant believe that this has happened. Its so far away from what they thought the country was headed towards and there is an 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 make sure barack obama is not a twoterm president. So first the party do what they always do they nominate the next guy in line, mitt romney, traditional republican in so many ways but he also does a little bit of sort of tickling the immigration issue and when he loses, the Republican Party decides we need to become a more forward thinking inclusive party. Weve got to bring in hispanics and be friendlier to women. Donald trump is sitting there up in 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 a White America essentially what is he seeing that they are not . We have to remember the tea party erupts. Basically we are tired of the government bailing out the guys on wall street and investment banks and people that overspend on oversized houses. I lost my house. It is a genuinely angry populist uprising but republicans try to harness the power of that without adapting to it so they nominate mitt romney whos the least populist person you can think of to be the standar standardbearer in 2012 and as you say he tickles that sentiment to some extent and he loses and again republicans are stuttering mad. They thought barack obama should have been beat and he wasnt and it makes them crazy. The conservative movement as you suggested hit the fork in the road where do we go from here. They say lets go this direction. Lets say we need to be more inclusive and friendlier and get more hispanic votes because the demography of the country is changing. We need to have a more soothing message on immigration, comprehensive immigration reform. That is the path changing the message to adapt. Donald trump arrives with a few others and says the exact opposite. The we should become not more inclusive and friendly. We should go back to a more basic almost 1950 style message we are going to make America Great again we have to stop immigration and 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 between 2012 and 2015 at a donal2015 addeddonald trump is l alone here and everybody else is going there and we saw what happened. Host so here we are less than two months away, donald trump is in the white house not for one minute of his presidency has he been above 50 approval in the gallup poll. So, where are we going . When you write volume two, what is it we should be paying attention to . What is really going to be tested now . I think its hard to know for sure. Its kind of an obvious answer if there are four more years, the nationalism and populism is the republican message and a lot of people in the Business Community for exempt and traditional conservatives will have to decide where they go. I think the question right now is whether democrats can have a message that basically is reassuring enough to counter that. The odd thing about donald trump and i dont know if this is specific to donald trump were generically true about where we are right now but people who dont like him are prepared to vote for him anyway. We grew up in a period in which if people voted for somebody they wanted to like who they were voting for because hes going to be in the living room through tv every night. That isnt true with donald trump. People say hes only got a 42 or 43 Approval Rating so he cant win. That isnt true. Im not saying that he will win but he can because people who dont like him will still vote for him because they like his attitude and can the democrats counter that, that is the question. Its hard to analyze. The future of the movement i write about so much in the book and future of the Republican Party depends on the outcome of this question but its not an ideological question. I wrote about this in the book some and i did excerpts for the journal. Whenever he leaves the scene whether its 2020 or 2024 theres a whole generation of conservative thinkers trying to figure out how do you come up with a new message, how do you combine the kind of unmistakable urges of the country that he is seizing and catalyzing on with more traditional conservative ways of thinking and basically protect american institutions in the process and lets support and get off the libertarian message that says the government cant get involved. We do want to save plants in the country and help them but we will do it in a conservative way with tax credits and things like that but we will acknowledge government power can be used for good and take it away from the more traditional straightlaced conservatives. Thats where i think things will probably head in the post trump era but if we are not yet in that era, there will be only one person that matters and that is donald trump. A. How can such anunconventionae is a sort of mindset in the way that he campaigned but once he gets into this enormous office ive been wrong about many things. I assumed he would adjust. I wrote not long ago you cant just put it back in the bottle. Hes changed the Republican Party and hes changed the way people operate. It doesnt mean that every succeeding president will be on twitter 45 or 50 times a day but its not going to go away overnight. Im still surprised regularly. I thought people would rebel you could have a president that says things the way he says them and you could have somebody that diminishes thats not going to go away overnight. Theres only one donald trump but hes changed the institution in ways i wouldnt have anticipated. Lets talk about some of the norms will the president s in the future release their tax returns or shut down their private businesses. I think theres a beneath donald trump and the Republican Party and theres a desire to return to some of those norms and strengthen institutions. Its not going to go away. Its changed political life in America Forever but i think people in both parties quietly worry about institutions, what about the separation of powers and what about the fbi and National Security council, what about the independent agencies like the fda and cdc. I think some of that will be restored because i think that people in both parties are not comfortable with the shattering of some of those norms, but not all of them. Those like the state department will be less theres a concern about the stability of the future of basic institutions to an extent that some of that will turn back the other direction. Is hard to believe we are out of time here. This has been such a fascinating conversation. Congratulations. Its been interesting to live through and chronicle so i was glad to have a chance. Thanks for the conversation