Survived on the streets for a long time and i said what do you have on trump because i know that he covered them for the New York Post and had a lot off great resources in the new york state gop. He told me about the run in 2014, and ive lived back and forth between new york and la. I didnt realize how serious he took that and almost how serious that was. I handed him a copy of this oral history, which i am a fan of that format, and it turns out that he had a great resources. He brought his political sources in iraand ive got a lot of meda sources and in the end we produced a book that has 114 on the recor record and on now on s sources telling the story of how trump was deliberate and methodical in his political strategy, but this wasnt something that he just decided a few days before the famous escalator ride into this wasnt a joke. He wasnt trying to get a tv channel at the end, and that surprised look he might have had on Election Night was a surprise that he actually won, not surprise that now im really president. Hes wanted to be president for a long time. Hes talked about it and thought about it since an interview he did it come with the entertainment reporter. He talked about how, and i will stop talking eventually and we will talk to these great panelists but he talked about how he would want to be president and he would be honored to do it, but he wasnt sure how the guideline with his liabilities and unusual views might win the office and you can see if you read our book i do not think you can come away with any conclusion that he was serious about it and that he figured it out. We will get into all of those permutations of that. One of the things that it its nonpartisan as a strategist and what he had to do to get elected or to even run a viable campai campaign. I dont just mean the Mental Health spectrum although partly, the political spectrum. We have everybody from Gloria Allred to steve bannon, Tucker Carlson to tell sharpton. Everybody all over the place. Im going to ask everybody, we already heard little introductions, but what i really want to know, lets read a quote from the book to show do sort of what the format is like and how entertaining it is as a read, and this is where it all lends up and i would like to go through and ask everybody to tell me what role you played over the last 15 years. The context i think i southaven it could have been five times, eight times we were talking on the sit downs. Long sitdown. I get requests for books and it got to the point on the last one i am sitting across from him and i said, i will read this to you that i basically said this is it. Im not talking ever again about this book. I dont want to hear about it. I dont care about it. Its your project, not mine. Then of course i gave him some documents and he called a couple days later saying the usb that i gave him didnt work. The last quote is mine and anyway, im done with these expletive interviews. This is the last time i talk about them. This is it. Its going to say i work for donald trump. Now you have to understand my personal feelings its water under the bridge is because i think it on National Tv Im not going to read the review. I love that day. You know me, i love that they. They know im not a lowlevel part time consultant. [applause] who are you and how do you figure into the story of donald trump and his family . Its after he introduced us to the editor for starters. I was the editor in chief to the new York Observer from 2011 to 2012 or 18 months which hilariously ate me the second longest running editor and now i am a democratic strategy consultant partly because trump got elected. Before that i was journalist for 17 years, so also this thing that will be in my tombstone is that when i was 24 hour editor. I am part of the 200 some people that helped turn trump from a tabloid sort of back page secondary character to the National Mind through the apprentice elevated to seem like this is genius and all these people who have serious credentials sucking up to him all the time on tv. So i think that folks from all over the country, i ran for congress in ohio and people would come up to me all the time id hes a genius isnt he. This is cincinnati all the way to portsmouth so you are talking two hours outside of cincinnati and just the level that people have for him and thinking that he is a just the most successful businessmen in america. America. A lot of that traces back to the apprentice. My name is jessica and as i said im a political consultant and when however the part that i was somewhat involved and most consequential potentially into the governors race in 2014, working and also interested in running a cat and mouse game that ended up with trump not running for governor. But im sure we will talk about that was a very influential moment in his political career. What is your version . Lets ask some questions. One of the things i did this botched some seasons of the apprentice that were not just season one, which is the most famous season of the top ratings. There is a scene in the book that wasnt actually on camera that you and i talked about where there was a dinner with Wolfgang Puck and he discussed running for president at that time. This is 2006. One of the things about being around him its like hes constantly talking about random stuff. He could be talking about running for president or governor or something and the next minute telling us he flew to vegas for Sylvester StallonesBirthday Party or something. Then he starts talking about a helicopter and what they are going to have. Its one of many topics he talked about in its ironic within the news now about refugees or the progressive congressmen talked about they should go back to where they are really drawn to fix those countries without saying that but wolfgang wanted to talk to us about being an immigrant pitch now is kind of ironic i guess. You took it as something that came out of his mouth and i think another thing the people in the media over the years have assumed the same thing its another thought that passed through his mind. A few days later we went to the playboy mansion and this is the guy that says to hugh hefner and his playmates all over, which of these women are yours and which one is mine. They are talking about the contestants that are in the job interview. So someone that is constantly looking at the women, staring at their breasts, things like that. You dont think that he is going to run for president , do you. Like i didnt. Who could possibly do that stuff and when. How do you take it when you hear people say hes just associating his add. What is your answer to that . I think he does, but on the other hand i had to compete with his other intern from his other job so im competing with him being interviewed by billy bush and then there was politics into something roger stone told me if things were a lot different once he became more famous and he wasnt just concentrating on his business and he was concentrating on his celebrity, and i think that is where he lost focus on the details although he said he saw a difference there. What year were you you didnt do anything for him other than politics. What year did you come in to his orbit . I met him when i was young. This is a funny story very quickly, his father used to use a real estate firm, prominent real estate firm. The firm went belly up and my father were at that firm if you read the art of the deal and how hes talking to jerry when they brought me during the new york Gubernatorial Race because i was working in opposition of what we were calling the ground zero mosque and i think that was his first into the rightwing politics. He made an offer to buy the mosque and he got a lot of National Press and that is also planning started receiving the clipping emails which hes famous for and he still does in the white house by the way. You have a meeting with him and then he gets a clipping and you get an email. I used to get them from his secretary and it would Say Something he circles what he wants and says great. He would sometimes sit there at his desk in trump tower all day sending messages to people. Thats why he doesnt directly used email. That is the equivalent. You were editing the observer and i think theres Something Interesting in the book where you say to jared, can you tell me the story . He started, people forget donald trump technically ran for president every cycle since the 90s. He just didnt have any traction or credibility. Running again it didnt seem remarkable because we had seen him do it before. He would do it for a few months and then drop out and build his brand, then he would begin. This stuff had been out there for a while when i got him the job. After he dropped out of thi this was 2011. Right. We got into one of several fights about the coverage where we had to put a disclaimer on anything because as a part of the owner of the paper they would seek technically trump owns part of the paper and there was no way to cover him other than to just acknowledge that and say this is what we think anyway. So, he didnt have enough traction that he was in the news every day to say that he was in the last cycle. But reporters would do things with aggregation pieces, here are the top five political stories of the day and invariably everything about trump was negative because he couldnt stop punching himself in the face publicly. So my politics staff with aggregate a story about donald trump doing something bad, and jared would call and yell at me and say this is an editorial twist and we just had it in for him. So we had a recurring fight about this. We had a sitdown about it and he said i think your issue is you dont really understand him. If you spent time with him, he would change her mind. I said first of all, even if it were true, it wouldnt change the coverage because that is until journalism works. Second, i dont think that would be true. There are many things hes done that i find appalling if you set like what. The birth or stuff, it is horribly racist and awful. He looked at me, rolled his eyes and said she doesnt believe that he just says its because he thinks the republicans are stupid. That is kind of a test to jared because they are are a bunch of possibilities there that say the piece telling me the truth and this is what donald trump believes, it still makes him a racist and it makes jerry at a racist for thinking that this is okay and its kind of ludicrous that he thought it was exculpatory. Very interesting story. And we just reached out of ive known him a little bit and he didnt want to give any comment for the buck. Our book was only taking people on the record so this is the story as it stands and hes welcome to dispute it. So, when news comes to you and start, can you tell us a little bit about how does this idea of trump running for a governor in 2014 come around . It wasnt his idea. There were activists in the buffalo area that wanted someone conservative who could pay for their own campaign to run against andrew who had 20 Million Campaign treasury so the list of conservatives who can find themselves in new york and who were charismatic arguably is very, very small. So they were placed republicans that got together. Donald trump came to them very early and they decided to start writing about this. Lets say donald trump should be the republican candidate for governor, and of course like anything that gets his attention he wasnt the only person who wanted to run for governor. There was the Westchester County also running and he wouldnt go away. So what happened is . He just won reelection to the executive in 2013 by big margins despite it being a democratic county, got a majority of the hispanic vote, spoke spanish, was very much seen as a rising star in the Republican Party, someone that could appeal to democrats and independents. Now almost 30 million at the time that matched his degree with someone that had a good connection and could raise money and had a story to tell and had done some National Things as well that caused hi this profilo rise over the years. The party at the time i think was divided and it still is a little bit in the sense that the previous candidate or nominee fe for governor was like this going around the state very conservative may be more extreme than. They were not conservative enough and they were making too many deals. The feedback with th was a gun l bill people stayed were upset about so that was kind of the whole groundwork that caused these couple of guys that really were not influential in new york politics, they were kind of backbencher assemblymen who were very new, definitely not seen as power brokers in politics, so they hatched this plan but they already started laying the groundwork and the way the process works is that you have to get the support of the county chair to get on the ballot and there is a convention. When this stuff started surfacing that was the feeling that he was floating around again, and rob have a relationship with indicted ggolgolfof together occasional. So there was a relationship there and you know, we were getting a lot of feedback at the time that no one else viewed this seriously. Im going to give a call to get together and see if we can hash this out. We went to trump tower to meet with him if there was a very gracious meeting. It was very nice. They got along very well. It was the take away that he wanted to run for president unequivocally. He said there are these guys pushing him to run for governor and in order to run for president you need to have that steppingstone of the Electoral Office and then being the editor of the state would be the best way to do it. So goin going and it was to cals bluff a little bit and is he really serious about this and stroke his ego a little bit to get him to talk about being president sends to the governor. So they talked at some point about im going to trump is running for governor, you be my lieutenant and in a year i will be out of here. Im going to run for president and isnt that the greatest thing ever. So yes, that is the conversation they had. The people recording this probably didnt realize what they were dealing with with the subway noise so that is what the noise is the genuine new york city subway sounds. Dick morris was supposed to be here but he got stuck on a train. If trump is such a fascist, why are they running on time. What you were completely opposed to this idea, why and how did this come to you next we took this initial meeting as a courtesy from michael who worked for filipino and we had bill o. J. Who and this guy is very evangelical, religious, the type of election thats absolutely ridiculous and i had to load the room up and i got some other people in there including an assemblywoman to run for mayor now and they did what was best to tell them this is going to be in the race to tell them that winning the presidency would be a cakewalk and andrew could be ten which i thought all of it was untrue. After the meeting i remember going up stairs and sitting in the office and he said this is the best thing hes ever heard. He wanted to parlay that into running for the mayor which jessica can attest to. Hhes talking about michael cohn who is now wanting to be the mayor and we heard he might have been interested in being lieutenant governor. There were rumors about that. The bottom line was he went from 2011 is technically still number one in the polls that he was pulling him quickly from the white houswhite house the whitee Correspondents Dinner where obama i exacerbated in. He went from saying hell do i get out of this thing gaining how do i get out of running for president , not realizing the backlash he was going to get from the tea party when he announced that in 2011 he felt rodney was going to win. Including the fact barack obama had no chance of winning the reelection. A lot of people dont remember this in the primary, i dont think romney would have gotten the nomination if they hadnt helped him beat Rick Santorum of all people in michigan and wisconsin. The point is, but im getting to is at that point he said i went for governor, i win or lose, i get this out of the way system. He thought it would be an easy race. The irony, running for governor in new york was going to be more expensive for them than running for her president. He gave himself a 70 milliondollar loan at the end of the last week. He would have had to spend 100 or 120 and he would have lost me 20point. One of the reasons you say that it would have been less expensive if he was a master at the free media. Also just the way the primary states were. Its amazing. People dont realize how cheap it is to run for president. Its cheaper than running statewide races. The democratic primary would s say. To talk about how i worked in a lot of publications one of them was the New York Post. I knew him and had interviewed him back in the 90s and he was a master of placing items, confrontational items, blasting people and my contention, one of the things we talk about in the book, we interview a lot of people t that work at the pagess that mastery of page six and the daily news and newsday were great trading for twitter. It was supposed to be funny journalism so my editor called me one day and said to try for the apprentice so i did and i got fired immediately. There was some trivia based on what subsequently happened. My entire job is to trick to make it funny in some way. People that live in new york though this and are credulous about it, but hes not particularly good at it in the sense that hes playing three d. Chess which is the way people covered in. Its that he understands how to get a reaction. Somebody gave an explanation that i think is correct. The one thing you have to understand about him is that thihisfather was very abusive ad would say things to try to get his father off his back. He would try anything that would work and anything that didnt work he doubled down on. If you think about it in that way, it explains both the inconsistency in what he says and why like with todays news when he says some racist and gets highly amplified response, he doubles down on it. He gets reaction youve just doubled down on it. This was one of the things. I worked for him diligently for four years i dont think he would have run for president or had a campaign. And i tell you this is somebody that doesnt giv get a penny ofe white house area i dont think that he would have run. When they handed him the primary they decided they would be