Transcripts For CSPAN2 Art Of The Deal Roundtable 20160619

Michael cruz, what can we learn about donald trump from reading the art of the deal . We can learn a lot, i think, and we should. When you are studying donald trump and i think everybody in this country should be studying donald trump, the art art of the deal was a foundational document and at this point it reads in wreck tropes backed like a Campaign Playbook. I think he is selling fantasy and he is doing that using hyperbole. Those are his words not mine. His words are that he plays to peoples fantasy fantasy. People may not think big themselves but they can still get very excited by those who do. Thats why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular and i call it truthful hyperbole. I think thats exactly what he is doing. Thats what he does. Ive worked for him his whole life. I wrote an article for the wall street journal and asked him if this was his playbook hiding in plain sight and he first was a little taken aback and then he said you know, it is automatic and it comes naturally to me so i guess youre youre right. Then he said running for office, running for president , the first office hes ever sought is like the biggest deal in my life. So i called this campaign by negotiation. If the not all the way through. Right now is that hes trying to get the gop elite to come to his side. Its just a series of more negotiation. He does a little bullying, he does a little cozying up and sweet talking, all the things that are in the book. [no audio] when you read the art of the deal last summer what did you think . He is the deal. Its not his buildings, hes the pitch. Its all about the aura he presents. Whether hes dealing with politicians or developers he is his own deal. If these were books of the bible , this is genesis. This is the beginning of trump. I figured he sold me on that. Has he been consistent since he wrote this book . Consistent in his book. In his behavior . I think theres a lot of him that we are seeing today. He says, for instance, sometimes you have to win and get ahead. We see that in the campaign whether its the other republicans in the primary or members of the press and so, i think he has been far more consistent in terms of living up to what he says in the book. When it came out, i think you are you are at that age and thats who he was. He also set the pace to be a little wild. There are lines of this book now, watching last year, this campaign that just jump out at you. Youre watching him be what he said he was in this book. The context of when this book comes out is pretty interesting. This isnt just a handbook, a way to understand or try to understand him, it sits in a particular point in the broader scope of his life. In 1983, it was sort of his opening, crowning achievement. It made him a big deal in new york city and you can talk to this more than i did. This is what made him a big deal beyond new york city. And, such a big deal that the following year, he started making series of deals that put him in a tight spot and hugely over a leveraged him. He bought a casino in a lot of other things. Theres so much confidence coming out of the art of the deal. I think we can learn as much from the art of the deal. We can also learn a lot from what happened the year following the art of the deal and what he did with that confidence and some might even say overconfidence. Not to get away from part of the deal, but the second book is called surviving at the top and it covers a little more of, of all his books its the only one that vaguely introspective that he admits things arent so easy in his business dealings and personal life. He and ivana had separated and that was the most interesting of the books to me. Then he writes a third one. He says in the introduction, dont Pay Attention to surviving at the top. My heart it wasnt in that book and he wants you to forget that you ever wrote that. This third one, this is what you need to know. His books, put together are very revealing. Surviving at the top comes out in 1990. Its about a man who was neither at the top and who was barely surviving. But whats in there, whats in surviving the top is a lot of introspective stuff that hes ever said or written. He sort of vulnerable which is not something he likes to be and not something he shows hardly at all. The art of the deal is sort of the beginning of that trilogy, when hes out at rallies when hes at the rallies, hes very bombastic and a lot of bravado that everybody sees. When hes in his office, he is more thoughtful and hes more composed. When hes talking to other people and when ive spoken to him. He answers like a normal human being which a lot of people think, he just cant be that, hes hes not that person but he can be that, however to get him to be introspective is a little more difficult and i have tried to do that but i think hes just beyond that. He doesnt look back. Hes always looking forward. Where my going to go. One of the things thats big in the art of the deal is that i think big and i push and i push him a push until i get there. Lets read that quote. I like thinking big. I always have and its very simple. If youre going to be thinking anyway, you you must think big. Most people think stop small because they are afraid of success and afraid of winning and that gives people like me a great advantage. The first time i met ivar cook, many people think his three Adult Children are pretty good kids. Theyre running the Trump Organization in his place right now. The first time i met his daughter she said my father always taught me if youre going to be thinking anyway you might as well think big and i thought really, thats what he told you as a little girl and then its in his book. That i talked to eric, the the other son and he said this is really how we grew up in don junior said i would grow up in the office and this is what i would hear. He didnt take us out to play, he took us in the office to play and i had to listen to this day in and day out. Then the campaign staff, his Communications Director has read this three times. Campaign manager read this book. Everybody is reading it. Switch over to the campaign trail and when you say people are afraid of success, even though hes so successful, i would go to a rally with him, get out of the plane the Trump Force One because its better than obamas plane because it has the 24 gold caret fixtures and we get out and the first people had been in line all day long are a lot of bluecollar workers. So i would go up to them and i said why are you so crazy about donald trump. I just got off of this goldplated leather seated plane and they said he understands us. He is going to make us better. He knows we need to be successful and we have a chance with him. Hes playing to the fantasies and they think im not to be a billionaire but maybe i could make a hundred thousand dollars this year. Its worth pointing out that someone else who read the art of the deal was mark burnett who had done survivor and wanted to put trump into a survivor type reality show which turned into apprentice which in my opinion turned into this campaign. Without the apprentice he would not have been able to run nearly as successfully for president. Maybe you disagree. No because he became a household name and everybody at his rally, without exception had seen a princess. He was on that show, portrayed as what he wanted to be seen as which is the ultimate boss. So you can trace back, even the apprentice to the art of the deal, if it were not for mark burnett reading this book when he was down in his luck trying to make it in tv and then thinking about the art of the deal when hes trying to to come up with his next survivor. There is a line between the art of the deal and the apprentice in this campaign. You think youre gonna pick this up and theres no be great wisdom of dealmaking, but at other moments he almost contradicts himself. He says you cant get too greedy. You go for a home run with every pitch but youre gonna strike out. Sometimes i go for triples and doubles. So after the trilogy of the memoirs, he wrote a lot of Business Advice books and even in those, its like pursue your dreams and less is never gonna happen. Thats the kind of advice for dealmaking. Its understandable but its not always actionable. He writes in the art of the deal, it irritates me that critics who neither designed nor built anything themselves are given Carte Blanche to express their views in major publications whereas the targets of criticism are almost never office offered space to respond. He managed to carve out space to respond. Through social media and in many different ways. At the same time he is so dismissive of critics and he focused on architecture critics in the book, he is very cognizant of the power of the press. He was obsessed with the architect critics at the New York Times at the time of this book. This campaign has seen a lot of tension between trump and the press but this notion of him hating the press is overblown and kind of a myth. Hes very smart about cultivating the press. Hes very clear about that in this book. He says look, he said the worst thing is to be ignored. Even bad stories are good for business. Do you both agree with that . In this book, he doesnt believe that there is any such thing as bad publicity or bad press. You would rather get good press over bad press but bad press works good too. All attention is good attention. To this point, not just in this campaign, the last 30 years of his public life, he has not been wrong. In 1990, the business stages are reporting on his looming financial catastrophe. The tabloids are reporting on the break up as his marriage and his infidelity and it diminished him a little bit but he emerged stronger on how he could take that into a larger public persona. All of these things that should have killed him, have not only not killed him but he has amplified his persona or the aura of donald trump the candidate. I think in the art of the deal, a lot of it, all the chapters after one and two are going through different transactions or things that he has accomplished the first one was the day in the life and the second one was trump cards, elements of a deal and thats the 1i went through point by point with him. Even though that was the deal, these were about specific elements that he practices. They work splendidly in this campaign. To follow up on you, the one about getting the word out, be outrageous, be controversial. Then you will get attention. A temporary ban on muslims and immigrants from mexico. Hyperbole . But they were controversial. Even attacking senator mccain as not being worthy of a war hero. Every time he said that he that in the water. No, the next week he got another 5000 people at these rallies that were attracting. The other thing he did is mastered the use of twitter. It has come back to bite him a few times recently but he was the first of the candidates to really exploit twitter and weve seen hillary in recent weeks try to use twitter herself. We will see if she will try to answer him on that. I think this is still the latest social Media Version of what hes been doing his entire life. Exactly. In the 70s he use the New York Times Society Pages and then the tabloid era and tabloid and trashy tv comes in in the 90s. Wherever he needs to be, however he needs to exploit the media or the press, he has done that this is a little bit far afield from the art of the deal but i think what we will see is whether he has reached a point where the level of scrutiny and seriousness is so high im not so sure its going to play out that way where all publicity is good publicity in the long run but itll be interesting to see. It seems to me your strategy has been hiding in plain sight. Lets look at the first page of your book, what i highlighted. If you would just read a little bit of that. Okay, its dont do it for the money. Deals are my art form. Most. Most people are surprised by the way i work. I play very loose. I dont carry a briefcase. I try not to schedule too many meetings and i leave my door open. You can imagine at the entrepreneurial ship that you have two batch of structure. I plan to come to work each day and see what develops and what happens per thats true. Do you think if you become president. [no audio] deals are deals and theres levels of sophistication, but it wont change quite as much as people think. That was at the end of february in virginia, and i sat down with him before he went out to a rally. We were in a Little Library and the interesting thing is, i gave him him the book and i highlighted, your version i think i have handed him i gave it to him and i could see out of the corner of my eye his staff is like what the heck is she doing. After words they told me, if we had handed him a book he would say what the heck, dont give me something to read, but he did read it and he agreed with it. You know i mean, and he still is very much like that which is why i wanted him to fess up that he is still very much that way because ive been observing about him and we all know he is so looseygoosey out there and he likes to see and go with the flow and he became a master of that out on the campaign trail, sometimes to his detriment but most the time to his benefit when he would read the crowd. He would react to the crowd. He was always doing that. One of the things, one of the elements of the deal is know your market and the market that he knew better than any other republican candidate was this market was angry, it was antiestablishment it was tired of being believed around the world and he knew it and struck that card court. Theres a lot of insight to his management style which you are bringing up that is evident in the art of the deal. He brags about how you can just get to him directly. And a lot of big illnesses, to get an answer you have to go through seven layers of executives and were probably just all unnecessary anyway. He says you can come to me. The flipside of that is that its micromanaging. He, the sort of looseygoosey way that the campaign has been run, he says i dont like a lot of number crunchers or eggheads or fancy market surveys. I go from the gut. No committees and consultants. Its all him. He will listen to people to a point but its ultimately his decision. Thats the way should be, it is the Trump Organization. Fast forwarding to january when he moves into the west wing, not sure how well that open door will work. That is a phrase that comes up often over the last few decades. You heard him say its not going to change that much if he were to become president. Sometimes you need an open door but sometimes you need a closed door and the overall office. Theres just too much stuff coming at you is going to be the problem. His business is sprawling and has become, its something to some extent he has been able to corral with his capabilities and i think the oval office is going to be a little bit different than the 264 trump tower. He has run the campaign that way, just the way he has run the Trump Organization. He makes his own decision. If i were on the plane with him, ten minutes when we sever to land, thats when everybody would buckle up, he would write down six words of the points he wanted to make. He has never had a speech, he never had a briefing book nothing. He would come up with six words. One time i got my iphone and just copied it. I copied it and attached it to one of my stories. He did it that way. I remember his Campaign Manager that took him almost to the end until he hired paul at the end of this when he got rid of ted cruz. The slogan on the office of his whiteboard is let trump be trump and thats what he did. Thats what trump wanted. His longtime reporters said yall look familiar with the white house and management of the white house and heres our message of the day, heres our message tomorrow, how much attention do you pay . Does trump pay . No do you pay as a working reporter. Im looking at his looseygoosey management style versus managing a candidate in managing a president. Something ive actually been thinking about and working on a little bit of lately is that the president is in charge of the west wing of the white house. At some time there such a volume thats coming at you of important and consequential things. To play so looseygoosey, to go seatofthepants as he has done in many cases for many years is dangerous and full of previous president s who have been more inclined with that side of the spectrum. It hasnt worked well and they had to adjust their thinking. Bill clinton came in and preferred an open door and sort of looseygoosey and his own way and the chief of staff was someone he brought from home essentially. At some point he needed to say im the president and this is Serious Business and i need to make some adjustments and did. I think should he be president that is something that all of us should be watching for. How this management style which has worked, to some extents with mixed results for 30 years in trump tower, how that would translate or not translate to the oval office. How it has worked in the campaign is that its got to be hard for him to say look, this is working. People might be expecting him to make a pivot but hes leaning into the same direction. He used the teleprompter a few times. I think it will continue when he gives the socalled policy speeches a little bit. I was in his office a month ago about just before he was going to use it and it was set up in a conference room. He was practicing peer he is trying to think that way. The people that he has brought in wanted him to practice a little bit and hes done it maybe three times or so. I think its going to be hard to persuade to him and hard for him to think that he needs to change because look, no one thought, when he came in to the race he was ninth on the pole. He was like the sideshow. He be those who are supposed to be the most depth the most serious in the republican field and so not only have we not seen a pivot, but i dont dont know who will persuade him that he needs to change until he is actually there. I think thats going to be a hard sell. He talks about listening to his own advisors and his small collection of Vice President s but also how he talks to cabdrivers and workers in the street, just just people that he runs into and gets sort of a Critical Mass of voices that then allow him to make sort of a gut. Thats how he makes his decision. Now, i dont think a President Trump would walk outside on pennsylvania avenue and Start Talking to people and then make a decision. It just wont, it just just cant work. There is a bureaucracy, congress, all these things that a president needs to navigate in a much more complicated way than anything he has done. One of the things, and this comes out in the 70s, its four years after trump tower came out. Trump tower is a shining example of trumps management style of opening it up. He is the project manager who was a 30 something woman at the time. Its an interesting collection of people who made trump tower work. You see less of that, i think as trump goes on. He transitions from a guy who builds things, he built trump tower from the ground up, to instead to instead a guy who puts his name on things and is clearly a genius level marketer and licensor but may be a less disciplined manager. Thats the trendline of his 30 plus years of the character he has created as donald trump read. He, in his business, business, and perhaps if he were to become president , but its been true in campaign, he does go outside the box and he does not bring in consultants, the standard people. The person who is his social media guru who expands all his twitter and facebook to brazilians of people, he started as trumps golf caddie. His press secretary, she was a model that evolved to brought into work on her line and now she is her the press secretary. The guy who runs one of his hotel used to drive his bus. He does think outside the box. Eric and don junior told me that they had to work at construction sites since they were 11 or 12 years old. He does look at people and other things and isnt afraid to put them in the mix. I dont know if he can do that at a president ial level, but he has done some of that. He has put high expectation on people who are by the book, underqualified. Then of those people succeed, thats great and it looks great. If they dont byebye. Youre fired. I think loyalty. One thing he says in this book as he prides loyalty over integrity. Loyalty is the most important thing. Thats why he stood by corey landau ski. Thats also why he is loyal to family. Theres nobody hes more loyal to most the time than family. His brother robert, at least as we see in the art of the deal is a key component and now his three children are people who are extremely important in the Trump Organization. I have a very simple rule, heme rights, when it comes to management hire the best people from your competitors and pay them more along with bonuses and incentives based on performance. Thats how you build a firstclass operation point he says in my life there are two things i found im very good at, overcoming obstacles and motivating good people to do their best work. One of the challenges ahead is how to use those skills as successfully in the service of others as i have done up to now on my own behalf. There is the Trump Organization in terms of the broader strokes and then there are other subsidiaries that are very large. I dont know that he overcame obstacles super well in Atlantic City. He writes in the art of the deal, i love casinos in the glamour and the cash flow, its very Good Business being the house. Yes, it should be and it almost always is for everybody except it wasnt for trump, kind of. It was kind of good for trump individually but for people who worked for him for Atlantic City overall or investors and shareholders, it was was decidedly less good over the course of time. Before we can talk about the management gems that are in the art of the deal, there has to be some sort of corrective, and again this was written in 1987, year he had not experienced failure at that point. It starts happening in the late 80s and early 90s and then there are portions of his Business Record that have been the opposite of success overtime carlos risotto writes in here i fight when i feel i am getting screwed. Even if its costly and difficult. There seems to be a sense of right and wrong in this book that, plus the fact that he writes about helping that woman who was losing his family farm and he held a fundraiser for her he said she worked hard all of her life in here she is losing her farm, its just not fair. So what did he do . He describes that in the first chapter of art of the deal. He calls the bank and says he wants to pay off her mortgage or do something and they say look, its too late. She, who knows how the conversation transpired but thats what hes describing. What does he do, he brings a lawsuit. He says i am going to slap a huge lawsuit on you for murder because you drove this poor woman husband to suicide. He talks about, he cant believe its getting so much attention about this thing that he did but of course he putting it in the first chapter of his book. He immediately lashes out with his standard weapon which is the lawsuit. In the first chapter he threatened a lawsuit and is being deposed and another one just in describing his week. Thats how it goes. That combativeness that we are seeing in the campaign and that which is justness attentiveness. The playbook for that is in the art of the deal and that is one of the things that is inconsistent. If he does something that he doesnt like her says something he doesnt like, he goes after them. Look at the Trump University litigation. He is hammered on that. To a fault somewhat say. If he had settled this. He says i dont settle. Which he does. But he doesnt settle this so the question i think is pending as we move into the summer in the thick of the general election whether that was the right move in the situation. If he had settled we wouldnt be talking about this rule wouldnt be talking about it nearly as much. He cant accept that he might have been wrong in this case so it is a full assault on the judge and on down. Anybody who is critical of how Trump University, of how he handled that entire episode. When he discusses stakes in this book, its always in his failure to see how stupid other people were. That that kind of thing. Or i never realized, he was an owner in the shortlived usfl. The alternative football league. His biggest mistake he said is that he didnt realize how weak the other owners were. Those are the kind of mistakes to which he is able to admit. He chalks up being lost in the course in the nfl versus the u. S. Fl and he says that the jurors almost took pity on the injured dog nfl. Its just laughable. If theres one person who ruin the chances, secondary professional league it is donald trump. He is the reason it didnt work. Donald trump is the reason that the u. S. Fl didnt work when it didnt work, the way it didnt work. Did you find it to be accurate, his description of the deals to be accurate . Selectively truthful as i think a lot of people are. He selectively truthful. I found it totally in line with the person that i have come to know. I didnt know him back then but i found it totally in character with his truthful exaggeration like he calls it. He loves to be the best, show that hes the best, all that. I will say, because i write about ceos and billionaires for the wall street journal, i think all of the ceos and billionaires that i cover have some of donald trump and donald trump has some of them. They all occupy a rare character. One reason when i first met him in august, everybody thought he was crazy and had no chance and i went into his office and introduced myself and he knew who i was because he had read some of my profiles of others. So we got along and i said look, im going to treat you legitimately because you are a ceo and billionaire. From that point on i knew that i could work on a level Playing Field with him differently because i knew the ground he walked. It is a little different. He is much more ego and a little more craziness but i think all have these tendencies. It should be fact checked and people, he was politically attuned and engaged when he wrote this book. I think theres just also a lot of memoirs and books like this from public figures. They are public hands. They are not meant to be very detailed accounting of a life or career. I wouldnt limit that to art of the deal, i would limit that to any Campaign Time political books. Theyre usually not very good and they tell very selective truths as you put it. This one is entertaining. I would rather read this and then some of the other campaign memoirs. This is interesting. Early in the primaries when i was reading a lot of these sorts of books, i enjoyed enjoyed the art of the deal relative to the other books by some of the other candidates which are just dreadful. At least this one is fairly entertaining. Did you all pick up in this book why its the Trump Organization and not trump incorporated. This started when it was donald trump and that is the key thing. He is just himself but he needs to be the Trump Organization to start very early business deals when he had nothing to sell. He had you for the aura. Its all about the aura. I think it was just kind of a business for malady. Marketing. He said people can sitter consider it to be more worth. A huge part of his ability to talk to these people and make early deals in the 70s is his father and his fathers political connections and his fathers Business Record. If you would just donald trump and fred trump had not been fred trump and had not done what he had done in the queens brooklyn building, theres theres no way donald trump would have gotten years of those people to start those early deal. At the same time, he distances himself from his father quite graphically. And for good reason. We see this in the campaign. I am a self made man. This is something he has overplayed in his life. Downplaying the role his father had, specifically, politically and especially in his early success, he could not have started doing the work he did on the grand hyatt and even into the early portion of putting together parcels for trump tower. I think it wouldve been much harder without his fathers influence. His father is exceptionally important, including with money. Its in his best interest. Hes not necessarily a selfmade man man. What he is is a selfcreated character. I think those two things get inflated in the publicity of donald trump. My father had done very well for myself but he didnt believe in giving his children huge trust fund. When i graduated from college i had a net worth of 200,000 most of it tied up in buildings in brooklyn and queens. Was that accurate . Is that a full statement . I havent research that to know if thats true. I dont know if its precisely 200,000 when he graduated college but i think we should pause and acknowledge that most people, i did not have a net worth of 200,000 when i graduated college. Thats a lot i graduated college. Thats a lot of money and were talking about the 1960s so to say that as a defense, my father had only so much do with my success, my buildings tied up in brooklyn and queens built by fred trump to say that as a defense for his selfmade persona. I think he learned a lot from his father from everything he did in queens but clearly he trumped his father on what he ultimately did, he learned a lot from his dad, he did get a break start from his dad, no no matter what the amount is. I havent looked to find out what the amount is but he did learn a a lot and learned got some of his money. He says my father is the man who influenced me and i learned from him and he doesnt want to diss dad in this kind of family sense, but he doesnt want to create this in a business and professional sense. In the book and on the campaign he talked about how my dad said never go to manhattan, its too tough, youll never make it. Stick. Stick to queens and brooklyn, but i wanted to be big so he sort of suggests yeah my dad taught me so much but even he didnt see what was possible. He didnt think big. The book is dedicated to his parents, fred and mary trump. Not to his children. Yes but there is a ton of money to be made using government subsidies and he took advantage of that bigtime. Most things had dried up by the time donald came around. So what are you going to do but go to manhattan and take advantage of it down economy in the mid to late 70s which is really what launches him. There is an aspect of timing in addition to any sort of skill. Make no mistake, there are undeniable skills and his skill set. He has a full toolbox in terms of ability to promote and ability to build buildings and understand what the public wants heres a crazy factoid. The new trump hotel thats gonna be in the Old Post Office that hes making into a luxury hotel on pennsylvania avenue. I was in it recently with him and he saw some molding and he was like thats crooked there. I was like what . Did you followup . Was it cricket or was he sort of nono. Then he got the guy and he said is that crooked and he said not really if you look at it like this and the guy was obviously feeling checked on and then he went to another room and he says i dont like the way this turned out but its too late to change. The manager said yes its too late to change. He does Pay Attention to details and we know he goes through all the things that go out on the campaign which is one of his elements of the deal is contain the cost. He ran his campaign for 40 million which is unheard of. Jeb bush had 150 million in super pack or whatever. You know he looked at every single expenditure that went out. You Pay Attention to the details he cant micromanage the federal government like that so his big argument to the public is im a great businessman, read the art of the deal. I will manage the country like ive managed business. I dont know if he can do that. One of the things in the book, one of the early details is that he talks about how he had been he was in charge of the holiday decoration at trump tower. He also explained why. He said trump tower had a purpose and he wanted to make sure it had the christmas decorations. Its right next to tiffanys, tiffanys as part of it. It is a big deal. He does get involved at that level or hes telling us he does i can see a mixture in this book and other books and real life, if you will, between i cant be bothered big picture and the smallest micromanaging, like the wreath. Typically in my read he micromanage is the most when it comes to things that are very aesthetic and thats what we saw he says sometimes, not often, sometimes less is more. Rarely less is more. He says he likes having earth tones more than primary colors or maybe its the opposite. I can remember. Hes a vast level of detail. When he talked about how he managed and who we might pick for Vice President , he has said he need someone who really knows how to do stuff in washington because he sees himself as more of chairman of the board, right. He sees the presidency of being the chairman of the board rather than the ceo or chief operating officer whos in there getting his hands dirty. I think thats a fascinating transformation or a fascinating way to take the, vote for me because im in a successful business leader, to see how that would work as president. Sometimes you can be chairman of the board and sometimes you need to make the call. He said i know how to do deals. I can make deals with congress. The question is, when hes made deals its usually with another person who also wants to get the job done and dealing with congress when there are so many people different people with so many different agendas is going to be a horse of a different color. He talks about how he doesnt like negotiating with the japanese. Its always eight or 12 people in the room and sometimes you can convinced three or four people but its hard to convince 12 people. You have to convince a lot of people. Congress has more than 12 people. To suggest that im a great deal maker because im great oneonone, that may be true. It is utterly inapplicable to the job he will face as president. He will just trot them all in one by one. Thats what he will do. Monica langley, are you somebody who has access to donald trump, are you worried about crossing him and getting kicked off the campaign trail . Getting kicked off the list of access . Know im not. If he decides to do that, the case that you showed was at the same rally where the secret service, who was traveling with him did a chokehold on the photographer for the times that was supposed to get back on the plane with him to do the cover shot for time. I actually, because i had been with him earlier, we actually had good access. We werent in the pen with all the reporters so we had video of it. The campaign asked us for the video so they could decide what kind of statement to make because everybody was like your campaign, your secret service its not their job to put down the press. That guy was not a threat. They asked me for the video and i said you can get it when its on our website. You know i mean. They were pitstop about that. They get pitstop and hes not like several things that ive said and done or when ive called when i got an exclusive when he decided to stop self funding the campaign and all the staff were saying he is still weighing the decision about whether to go get fundraising like all the other candidates have so i call them directly on his phone and i said donald, are are you going to quit self funding. I could hear he was on speakerphone and i could here people saying well, were Still Deciding it. I said donald, im talking to you. Are you going to quit self funding . Or are you want to sell a building . Its going to cost 1 billion. He said well monica im going to quit self funding but i meant to put a lot of money in it myself and then im going to help the rnc. It wasnt like he was ready to say that or wanted to say that and i could kiss him off but i knew i needed to get that in a it ran against his brand. All these people are sucking up to special interest and im not. He kept telling me to stay away and stay away. Yes that can happen but my first responsibility is the wall street journal and our readers and not donald trump. He knows that. I think if he felt otherwise he would not respect me. If you thinks you are weak and he is going to nickname you, youre dead. Two quotes quotes from the art of the deal and for you carlos, sometimes part of making a deal is denigrating your competition and i dont go out of my way to be cordial to them. I think he wrote it then and he has proven it during the campaign. It certainly not one of the press. Its insults to his primary opponents,. I think denigrating is a pretty good word for what we have seen. Lying ted, crooked hillary, low energy job. Hes never gotten rid of that from august when he started that. Little marco. Some of them, talk about art. He does manage to capture something with these very juvenile nicknames or these throwaway lines. Hell say its always a mess with hillary. Bill say yes theres always a lot going on. I always wonder what the donald trump nickname would be for himself. Hes very good at that. You remember it and he just repeats it incessantly. Low energy was his thing from day one when he was way down in the polls. He was talking about jeb and he cant be president. Hes lowenergy. Its just kind of like this macho thing. He is talented at that. He has certainly done it with the press. Hes done it overtly with making kelly. Whats his current relationship with the Washington Post . He has severed the relationship with the Washington Post. In the sense that he is revoking Washington Post access to his events. Now that doesnt mean that we cant cover them. We will continue to cover him aggressively. Our executive editor who, by the way has gone toe to toe with the Catholic Church and the nsa, im feeling pretty good about this. They issued a short and direct statement saying this is a repudiation of the independent press. We will continue covering him aggressively and honorably like weve done throughout the campaign. Were not the first. Could you have predicted him doing that given some of the coverage by reading the art of the deal . He really cultivates the press. He talks about how he cultivates the press in the art of the deal. You know how hes bragging about crowd size all the time, he brags about how many reporters come to his press events. So from this book, i mightve guessed that he would find ways to cultivate particular journalists and news organizations rather than just shut them off. Were certainly not the first. Politico has experienced this as well. Its not surprising because of how aggressively he goes after enemies, but it is slightly surprising in the sense that he seems to have a very symbiotic relationship with the press and cutting it off isnt something hes done before. In the art of the deal, he writes that he doesnt take critics to seriously unless and until those critics get in the way of his objectives. Right now i think youre seeing that with the press, not just with the post. Lots of places have done some good investigative work. They are his critics and they are literally in the way of him becoming president because there are months more in the amount of resources that have been put onto the donald trump beat is unprecedented. What has changed is the context of which the man in the stories fit. For a generation he has been famous. He has been famous for a long time. Hes never been in this important. Maybe you disagree. Now he is very important. He is hugely consequential. He is a man of global importance because of that, i think he is being covered in a way that he has never ever been covered, not even close and its starting to make him uncomfortable but because i think he judges, accurately that this is problematic, that if the coverage continues to sway, which it will, it will eventually put him in a position of weakness which is a position he hates heading into november. There was no twitter in 1987. There was no way to directly address the crowds that you wanted to reach. There wasnt aroundtheclock cable either. Now he can dominate cable. He can call into any show. Cable is despete to have him on. Now Hillary Clinton is trying to play that game. In the last week, every time he goes on, she goes on. When he says something bad about her, she responded by saying delete this account. It was the most read tweet by her ever when she responded directly to him. We will see if she can go toe to toe with him and if its the right thing for her to do tivates did we create donald trump . No. We are talking about the republican nominee and Republican Voters created donald trump. The media did not create donald trump. But if we are going to talk about the press role and the medias role in the creation of the successful candidate donald trump has been, that conversation cant start in june of 2015. It has to start in 1976. Honestly, we can talk about twitter and how he used that effectively. How often he has sort of unbroken speeches on cnn, fox, and all of those places. But before twitter and cable it was People Magazine, play boy, page six of the new york post. Hoe has always identified a way to have a certain presence in the media in a less serious media. I think what has happened over the last 2530 years is there is less of a distinction between that is page six and then the business pages. There was celebrity donald trump on page six in People Magazine and then there was Atlantic City donald trump, trump tower donald trump covered inside the New York Times. Now it is all just content. He has used that reality to create confusion. He was one of the first rich and famous to be he may have been on the first show. It was like he has been famous as a business leader, he has been famous longer than bill gates. Think of any sort of living business leader. You know, his run of fame has extended as long or longer than any of them. It is not just in business. It is the whole trump persona. I think that is a smart way to look at did the media create trump trope. If that is the case it goes back far longer. Host i remember as a young kid in the midwest learning about donald trump through an ice rink. He comes back to it time and time again. I had a daughter who was born in new york city. I have lived there for many years. From tennessee . From tennessee originally. But the rink is a perfect example for him to show success because it was a nightmare. It never worked. Then he took it over and made it a success in months, not years. It was my daughters favorite place to go as a toddler and child. So it Shows Government gridlock which he is fighting today. It shows he is a cando person ahead of schedule. It is a classic Trump Success and no wonder it is tiny but no wonder he brings it up all of the time. He brings it up in the art of the deal and every book he writes. My daughter who is now 17 will say it was her favorite place in central park to visit. It is a simple story with a simple story line. It was, yes, a success. But it was so small potatoes compared to some of the other things trump has done and so many things other people have done. It is this very straight forward tale of the success of private enterprise over the incompetence of the public sector. He has milked the rink since 1986 for all that it is worth and then some. I think we can all agree. When i would see him talking about that story, it is in so many of the becomes, you are right i would remember when mitt romney talked about the olympics and it was like that is a big deal. But after a while it was like you cant hang so much on that. That doesnt prove to me that you would be, you know, terrific at all of these other things. There is a larger record. But you know, people love the olympics. People love iceskating rinks. Kids, you know . It is like this morality tale. He showed up the mayor and so, yeah, he loves writing about it. Host he also writes in the the art of the deal about television city. What is television sate city . What it would have been was a plot of land on the upper west side. He had auctions on it twice and never really did even close to what he wanted to do initially. It was one of the first plots of land he had in the 70s. He was trying to get nbc to stay in manhattan, which it did ultimately anyway, but trying to get it to move from midtown to his new trump branded city within the city and never amo t amounted to the variety of plans that he laid out over the course of decades, really. There is this threat. It is the way he talks about trade deals. They are going to go to new jersey. That is what he kept saying. If he didnt get what they wanted then, you know, new york was would cease to be the media capitol of the world which has not happened last time i checked. Host in the second grade, donald trump writes i gave my teacher a black eye. I punched my music teacher because i didnt think he knew anything about music and i almost got expelled. This was, as i understand it, not a thing that occurred. Was he a difficult child . Absolutely. He discusses something other people have confirmed, his brother, building a tower out of blocks as boys, donald and robert, and using roberts blocks and glueing them together so all of the blocks were donalds blocks. It showed he was a difficult child and as a teenager was sent upstate to a military academy by his father. I am not sure we have been able to confirm punching his second grade teacher in the face story. The second grade music teacher. What is interesting is that is a story that he said well, i am not proud of it, but he is proud of it because in the sentences following he said i wasnt afraid to tell it like it was. It reminds me of the controversy of ben carson and did he not stab one. Trump made a huge deal out of saying it could not be true and if it was what kind of a sick person brags about this. It is just odd you are in a situation where things you do as a kid thad you would not be proud of become points of pride because they show you are unconventional, tell it like it is, ask you are not afraid to voice your opinion. It is a memorable detail whether it is accurate. Host a lot of superlative in the book. Kind of like a donald trump speech. Also losers. The worlds losers are the people who are jealous of you. The only draw back to fame and success is you get the people who are jealous and envious. I call them the worlds losers. A lot of the same rhetoric. It hasnt changed much. Host so there has been consistency . He gets into it later. Later in the trump literature this is more of a theme. This idea that the world is a zero some place and for me to be a winner the other guy must be a looser but you can certainly see the groundwork for that world view in the art of the deal and certainly he has taken that into the campaign. You know, for me to win, systematically, chronlogically, these people have to lose. I am going to target jeb and he will be a looser, then ben carson, and marco rubio, and on and on. For me to win, you must lose. There is much more of a sense of competition than there is any collaboration. I think in the art of the deal you can tell he is an avid competit competitor. When carson rose up to be number one and surpassed him for a week he decided i am taking him down tonight. That is when he went on stage and talked about the belt. You know, how would carson, as a child which he said in his autobiography, have stabbed someone and the belt buckle stopped it from penetrating another child. He said that could not happen. It was the first night trump had disservice. He said somebody come up here with the knife. I want you to try to stab by belt buckle and it will not prevent it. It would flipped over and the knife would go in my stomach. The secret service was like this. So he said he is either lying about it or has tendency and he is like a psychotic or tendencies that should make him incompetent to be president. Any time anybody got too close to him, i am taking him down. In the primaries it is a oneonone situation now but in the primaries it was a selection of people splitting up support. Easier targets than Hillary Clinton. Monica langley you said you called donald trump on his personal phone. Are you still able to do that given how close we are to the conventions . Given how close we are to the general election . Yeah, i can still get through. I think his schedule is much more precise now than at the beginning when most reporters really didnt care to get close to him. I was doing a profile of him early on. But if i need to, i think i could still get him. When i call him, i called him when he was in washington last week speaking at the faith forum or whatever and that is when i toured or the post Office Building that is becoming a trump luxury hotel. So i still try to keep in touch. I am not one of the reporters who are embedded with him. The wall street journal has other people who cover him on a daily bases. I do page one feature stories so i dont follow him every day. I just jump in occasionally. But you know, we have tried to do tough stories as well. We did a story about is he worth what he says. When he looks through the financials and did a big piece that said this is what his income is and he could not selffund even if he wanted to all the way through. We have done stories about how he didnt pay all the bills and extracted concessions from people that he didnt want to pay full amounts. I agree with you that the press is going to be more vigilant about what has been his practice. Not just what he says but what he does. I think this war on the press as worrisome as it is, it is no pun intended, a bit trumped up. I think it is a little phony. There is this longterm symbiotic relationship between trump and the press and in the case of politico and the post he is going to recredeni these plac places. At some point, you are going to say, okay, okay, come on back in. If he is some sort of benevolent monarch. Host if you were Hillary Clinton would you read this book . Oh, yeah, absolutey. Or i would get someone to read it and tell me what is in it. But, yes, i think so. I think it rereals a lot about him. Reveals. Moreso than any subsequent books. The best book to read about Hillary Clinton is still it takes a village. This is the one that most clearly lays out her political vision. When she became the presumption democratic nominee see kept saying it takes a village. You know they both cling to their original books. So i do think people that want to know the hearts of these two candidates they are going to be picking in november could read their original work and find out a lot about them. Michael kruse . I think people should read not just Hillary Clinton and her staff but all people should read the art of the deal. Every voter should read the art of the deal and keep reading if they have time. Do the chronologically. And not just his books but the books that have been written about him. There are six worthwhile biographies or if you dont have time or the inclination to read books there are decisive profiles on donald trump starting with wane barretts work in 1979, Marie Brenner in 1980 and vanity fair and up to buzz feed in 2014. It is not that trump isnt known. All of this is known. He has been a public figure and people have been reporting on him and not just in celebrity ways at all for decades. Put it into google. Start reading. The way i see it is your homework as an engaged citizen twen between now and november 8th. Going to the rallies the last element of the deal is to have fun. When i have seen donald trump have fun is in the rope line. He goes in the rope line and sometimes spends 30 minutes where people stand and talk to him. His favorite people to talk to are the People Holding the art of the deal. There are so many people that say please sign my book and he signs every darn book. He is proud to say the art of the deal is the number one best selling book out there. Host is that true . No. I think the Tampa Bay Times did a look at this and found maybe it was the fifth or sixth which is still pretty good. Yeah, of alltime. How to influence people into carenegie is the best selling business book. I think this is the most fun he is going to have in this process. Something he says in this book, and i think it is in the art of the deal, he says what he is really about is the chase. He is the important thing is the getting not the having. I think does he want to win . Absolutely. He wants to rub it in everyones face and write an Amazing Campaign book. I am sure we will learn about this. But the notion of having to run this thing day to day as president i suspect is less exciting to him than winning it. A colleague of mine at politico interviewed roger stone and glen asked roger stone does he want to be president and i thought it was interesting how roger stone answered. He wants to win. Host i never understand how jimmy carter won but the real wragz is he had the nerve and dputs and balls to ask for something extraordinary and that helped him get elected president. Well, donald trump is exactly the same way. It is all about having the balls to do anything. That is what i said. If any reporter shows weakness to him, i pushed him as an equal and i think we have to do that. I have seen Network Anchors and corresponde corresponde core sponde correspondents come to him. He wants he comes from a position of strength and you have to show strength. His children when they come into the office a they say we need to do this, this and this. They dont say, oh, dad, what about this . I have seen the kids come in and say i need you to meet with so and so about this deal. They are telling him this and this. They are not saying what about this and what about that. The thing about jimmy carter, after his presidency for the Carter Library or something, he asked donald for a donation and that is what impressed donald. That he would have the guts to ask for a large amount of money. At the bottom of that page, the page in which he tells that jimmy carter story he also gets into Ronald Reagan who at the time of publish of this book was the president. He said about Ronald Reagan i think americans are catching on and he is just a smiling pretty face and there is not much going on there. I am paraphrasing but he is not kind to Ronald Reagan, sitting president in 1977, in the art of the deal which should be pointed out. This wasnt a great time in the reagan administration. And in subsequent books he gets religion and talks about how terrific reagan was. But in his foundational document as you put it he is not a fan and thinks he is an empty suit. There is a deal that comes out right around the same time he kind of talks about running for president for the first time in late 1987 he went up to New Hampshire and gave a speech at a rotary club and did it because he was asked to by a guy in New Hampshire who wanted him to run for president. Who was going through low level process to draft donald trump. And i dont know he had ever thought seriously about running were president at the time. I dont think he was even then in late 1987. But he knew he had a book to move and it was coming out. He went up and gave the speech and no doubt it helped move product as did in september that year an ad he put in the New York Times, the boston globe, and i think the post criticizing American Foreign policy and saying a lot of the things he said in this campaign. All of this injected into the political blood stream in late 1987 which then alerted people to this forthcoming book called the art of the deal. He sort of flirted with running and there was always something to pitch at the time whether it was a book or show. He is a valiance with the reform party and crippled america. He was doing it even when he wasnt actually running for president. Did you know, like six days after mitt romney lost in the last election, he filled for the trademark make America Great then. He was so convinced he could have done better. Romney is out there talking and convinced he could be better than trump. But i am speaking of people he praised in addition to jane carter and Sylvester Stalone for creating these characters. What did he create . Rocky and rambo. Two of the alltime characters he said. I am predicting at the Republican Convention Sylvester Stalone will make an appearance. The reality star aspect wants it to be more fun. Part of being a select is being close to other celebrities and the pictures on the cover are filled with pictures of donald trump with other celebrities. He is at the second home, or whatever number home, in florida that trump has, not in this book but in other books, he talked about everyone he has down there. And you know, Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley when they were together were there. He talked about having dinner can sinatra. He loves being in the party scene and loves being scene with famous people. He is not just the successful business executive, or a politician, he is all of these things. He has been this exaggurated version of everything big in america for the last several decades. In the 70s he was partying in the new york clubs. In the 80s he was becoming rich. In the 90s he had financial struggles and everyone is having affairs. 2000 he is suddenly, you know, reality tv star. And now he is a twitter feed. He is every obsession in america he has captured itch carlos lozada, you had a piece in the past Washington Post recommending two books that could be read today. When, you know, this thing you are seeing a lot is journalist writing manicopas for how i missed the rise of trump. What you are seeing, too, is people referring to movies, to fiction, to hear is the movie that foreshadowed the rise of trump. And two that struck me were people referring to Sinclair Lewis it cant happen here and phillip right, a pot against america which showed oddly charismatic men coming to rule in america. It is horrible. A depressive dictorial state. I wanted to see what was there. I watched iodacracy as well. You see glimmers of the appeal. I dont remember which primary, maybe it was after arizona, but he was on there saying i love the poorly educated because he had done so well in that demographic. And you know, in those books, the leaders that become totalitarian figures really had strong appeal among, you know, what we would low lowinformation voters. Call. You see the expectation of the fawn in coverage otherwise something is wrong. These are dystopian and go firthser than i think donald trump would ever go. But they are these kind of interludes in history and Sinclair Lewis, what happens is that, or excuse me in the plot against america, Charles Lynn Berg comes to power and runs the country for two years in a horrible way and disappears. And then everything picks up as we know it which cant happen in real life. So i was looking for inspiration in fiction and i think there is certainly elements there that you recognize in trumps personal style and rhetoric and his appeal to the audience he seems to know so well. Host perhaps the most important thing i learned at warton, mr. Trump, writes was not to be overly impressed by academic credentials. It didnt take me long to realize there was nothing awesome or exceptional about my classmates. Michael kruse, is this a Campaign Playbook . I think it be seen as such. It is an of piece. There are lots of books he has written, cowritten, all added up that are a playbook. Monica langley . I say yes. I think the elements of the deal are the elements of his campaign. Thank you for being on this roundtable on booktv. Thank you. Thanks. Cspan, created by americas Cable Television companies and brought to you as a Cable Service by your local cable or satellite provider. On this weeks after wards, professor fawaz gerges discusses his book isis a history which looks at the history and rise of the terrorist organization