Start off on this recent quite a fascinating book of yours, the trump century, ive got to ask you a question. You worked on cnn for some 30 years, you have a variety of shows, you are not in orthodox republican, you are obviously yt a liberal democrat. Could you go back into that environment today or Something Like it or what was the formula that allowed you to exist for three decades, did you have a particular relationship with ted turner or just enlighten us a little bit on the development. Guest it was helpful i joined at the beginning as one of the founders of cnn, one of the fortunate ones who was present at the creation as they say. It was a spectacular place to work as they say because it was unflawed of before ted turner. The global cable newscast and he put it into action and institutionalized it. It was truly remarkable though it changed over time as these things do and we founded it in 1980 and by 1984, he was on the forbes list, the lobbyist list and had been basically on the verge of bankruptcy just four years later when they found it. So his position changed, so did ours. We were in the white house pool, growing, and over time, his commitment to a more liberal approach to the news became far more serious and emphatic, and by 1999, it was clear that it was going to be a tough balancing act, but at that point i wasnt so much an advocacy journalist. By 2009, when we had our final falling out, not with ted but with time warner, it was just simply a matter of ideology. I would say as many critical things about george w. Bush, perhaps more, than i ever said about barack obama. The truth is they were committed to a different approach. They decided it would be ideological that there was only room for one point of view instead of many voices. And i was the only conservative on the air and obviously that just didnt work out. And if anything its gotten an even more decided fashion to the left rather than to either end of journalism or moderation. As you know. Host one last question before we get to the details of the book, in this three decade evolution of cnn, you sort of brought in some more specific interest in business or the economy to a panorama of news and general politics, economics and started to have a certain worldview that wouldnt be easily categorized on issues. Did you ever think that there would be a candidate, not a thirdparty candidate but one of the major two candidates that would dovetail with this formula, this ideology that you had been over 30 years . Guest honestly i didnt think we would see it in my lifetime. I was hoping that we would, and i had known donald trump for as long as i knew ted turner but we were not friends. It was a professional relationship. I watched as he stepped out and by 2016. I have to tell you i rejoiced because he was independentminded. He was secular if you will. For me, that was exciting because first of all that meant he was aligned with the Republican Party or the democrat ideology but he was aligned with patriots and this country. I always every time i hear the expression White Nationalism in this country, it its nationali, its not white, it is every color, every creed weve got. Being an american nationalist means that you embrace the constitution, which is our great assurance of equality and equal opportunity, of respect for all citizens. He embodies that so i was excited to see him run and it brought me back to the Republican Party. I was independent, and i think a fierce independent in most respects. Host in the book, you outline these signature issues ensuring that immigration is measured, getting tough with china, favoring fair resident freetrade, you didnt buy into the idea that the industrial midwest was tired or played out but it could be denigrated and you are skeptical as i read the book of these optional military engagements specifically in the middle east and the cost benefit analysis didnt play out for us or the region, but there were other thirdparty candidates that had picked up on some of this. Pat buchanan may be. Maybe. What was it about trump, did he incorporate these issues in the broad fabric of traditional conservatism or was it his personality . Why did he succeed when these other thirdparty people had failed failure at this level . Guest i already mentioned pat because he was unreservedly an independent figure, irrespective of his political preference. The difference for donald trump is he was beholden to none of the establishment. This is a clash of so many influences in our society what we are contended with now. But fundamentally it is a clash in the establishment that controls both political parties, or dead, until the arrival of donald trump. Donald trump broke through and said i will take on the orthodoxies, i will be in the disruptor and represent the forgotten man and woman in this country. He pledged to do that and within days, he was doing that. He has he is one of those surprises and delights in politics. He is a man who said what he meant and kept his promises and that drives the left, the establishment o mad, because hes taking on this multi trillion dollar Business Roundtable. Its 135, 140 ceos that control a huge part of our gdp. He took on the chamber of commerce and the ridiculous mantra that freetrade is the boom to the american economy. But it was certainly not. We finance the rest of the world certainly, and wall street did great, but one of the reasons a working man and woman in the country didnt share in that for some 20 years before trump and had to stagnant wages in the last opportunity is because it was a financial benefit for the elite but not the middle class which is the foundation of the country. Host you have a chapter jobs jobs jobs and that is one thing in the trump century its true he had record unemployment for minorities in 2019 i think it was down to 3. 5. He almost got 3 or did almost annual gdp. And the point im making is what you say is a twopronged assault on the left and the right and a populace empathetic message, what do you think if he gave say pick one example, innercity youth for the first time in our lives they were being bid on, their labor was being bid on and why do you think that empathetic message or attitude never resonated, he didnt emphasize it, why do we not think of we being the public as the most empathetic concerned president about the lower middle class . Guest because he doesnt speak in the same language as the elite of both parties. They have a lexicon all to themselves and its programmatic. Its about what they will do to make a number of assumptions. They are talking about the dependency of those who are low income and thats the basis. Its a condescension of government. Its wrapped up in the idea that without dependency, what is the role for government and we have a huge permanent bureaucracy that requires dependency on the part of a goodsized number of people. Theyve gotten use t used to itr 65, well since 1965 with the war on poverty, we spent over 22 trillion, and we have everything that a measuring bureau, and metrics bureau for success. No one wants to follow up on black youth in the innercity and what happens to them when they go to these Public Schools run by unions rather than by their communities. Its a strange world weve created and one that both parties have been perfectly content until now to permit to continue the status quo in perpetuity. Host another thing other than the Trump Program and jobs and success and creating employment we hadnt seen in 50 years is china and you talk in a variety of ways about china. Prior to trump, i think everybody felt, everybody meaning among the elite to bipartisan, that the more concessions we gave to it, the more they would repay the gratitude they would become wealthy and democratize. They would take over the world in a general way and we would manage the decline as obama put it. You come along and say trump stopped that but what im interested in and the general idea, you never suggested china was that strong and predetermined to rule the world in intrinsic weaknesses we either didnt see or didnt want to see but i never got from your book that you felt there was a steamroller that was inevitable, that there were contradictions you were trying to warn people about. Guest i started talking about the red storm rising. We had known for a quartercentury china had the Country Companies operating with only one purpose, and that was to steal our technology and military secrets, take them back to china and exploit our technological advances. They saved themselves a lot of money investing in education, Actual Research and development of their own, and thats what theyve done. We built china in some respects as the president put it. We literally built it. They are taking 600 billion a year from us in our intellectual property stealing it. They have been running deficits with this country since the beginning of the relationship. We have been in deficit to them and trade and we have shared our technology both openly and willingly as well as permitting their theft. Its been extraordinary and an unprecedented relationship between the wealthy power and the merging one. At no time was it required of us that we be the global chomp that we played. And we did it under clinton, bush, obama. You couldnt have asked for a trifecta of worst president s to put together in the national security. Its devastating from what we have squandered. And we did so with the knowledge of Joseph Stiglitz who was a nobel prizewinning economist for the adventurism in iraq it ended up being 6 trillion and counting in addition to the lives we lost. We have gone through a period of madness that is remarkable. And donald trump to step forward. Hes the only one who wasnt deranged in the entire city of washington. Its quite something to behold. Host one of the things you point out is how insidious this is and we saw it with the development of the 5 billiondollar market with the offset losses but it changes the ideology that the nba itself were more critical about misdemeanors in the United States and they ignored the felonies of human rights and education camp, hong kong and china, the same we found out recently with hollywood, that part of the anger at the racial makeup of movies was in part a reaction to directors who were under orders or at least perceived orders from china that they wanted lighter skin actors. So, how do you in your book you have a lot of ideas, but how feasible is it given the insidious presence that we dont even feel, we cant even detect because they seem so much more than during the cold war. I infer from your question that you are suggesting that we cant change what we brought because we are so inextricably intertwined which insidiously as you suggest has enmeshed itself in our economy, in our society and even in our culture. Hollywood right now is editing their films and shooting their movies in many cases with beijing because they want the International Market to be excited about their product. Its no longer for a u. S. Audience. Its no longer a u. S. Product. We went through a long period where it was always an american product before an international audience. That product coming out of hollywood now is a international and chinese product and the United States market sort of tags along behind it. Its a major change in our society and our culture and business of entertainment and media because this gives inordinate influence of their values being represented in movies and many cases much more than u. S. Traditional american values. The world knows it. They see it and by the way, they are accepting it. Host one of the things you talk about is the china lie and the wuhan virus, that it didnt really emerge until january but we knew it was far in the fall 2019 it emerged accidentally at a wet market and we know that narrative has been discredited, but i think there is a consensus that it came out of a lab. But whether it was accidental or whatever the narrative goes, why do you what was the attitude about it and why did they allow direct flights say for 12 days after you couldnt go to wuhan for anywhere forget about the origins or whether it was accidental or intentional, what was the mindset about it that unleashed this and it destroyed the western economy in a way that we never thought would be possible . As you say, this virus was unique. Was it engineered plex we still cant say scientifically with great empirical evidence or judgment what it was. Was it natural, was it manmade . But we do know for a fact whether accidental or engineered, communist Chinese Government knew for months that it was transmissible, and they knew very early on that it was deadly. They hid those truths from their own people of course and very importantly they hid the truth from the rest of the world, the who, the cdc. What folks may not realize is the u. S. , the Public Health institutions and some of the best doctors in all the world, our great friends and colleagues of doctors in china and thats fine, but we also took apart in funding the research. Think of this, we also helped them design their version of the cdc. There was a certain cockiness on the part of american doctors that they would be forthcoming. They had a professional medical relationship with individuals that they thought would obviate the institution in beijing or wuhan. They truly believe in my discussions with them from january on with those doctors, they were very, very certain that they would know best about what would be going on in wuhan, even as that virus was unleashed by the Chinese Communist party on the world, an unsuspecting world, and didnt acknowledge it. I declared on my show, victor, that it was a viral pandemic two weeks before the who would move to that point. The cdc wouldnt call it a pandemic because the who hadnt called it a pandemic. The madness of this moment is, again, like so much of this is stunning. We had so much to catch up with. Host you suggest in the book the fact that we were in Election Year 2020, and we were engaged in each trade war with china at the time served as a force multiplier of the acrimony or the world hysteria or the divisiveness back home and inadvertently or by design they helped lower this acrimony and hysteria that played out in a certain way because we were not able to focus in a unified manner and what the at what theg and what they were saying and what the who was. But it was kind of coincidental we were right in this trade war that you spend so much time eloquently defining and then you say there was this virus in the middle of it. Historically its very odd. Guest its very odd because they encounter they are counter events that are not necessarily a conflict as far as the chinese are concerned. You can almost see the death and of chinese intelligence in all of this. Its not a reach at all to consider the possibility of this being engineered and purposeful in the chinese interest because they have managed vertically or otherwise to have taken down the economies of europe, the United States, all of the chief competitors in the global marketplace. They have killed hundreds of thousands of people across the world and infected others. But we do know that they have been the beneficiary of it all and they are the ones responsible for this infection, this pandemic that has claimed so many lives and second so many civilians and cost trillions of dollars and lost gdp for the world, not just the United States. So, im very suspicious about the coincidence, the convenience of who benefited from it because we also know that the chinese shutdown travel outside of wuhan and encouraged International Travel to europe, to the United States. We were having it come back into this country from europe as well as from china and asia. I dont get lost and whether or not they are being engineered. The reality is theyve made an unconscionable decision to not warn the world of what they do and knew he was a deadly virus that they had unleashed upon it that is a moral responsibility. It is a conscious moral decision that they took. Host another thing that characterizes the achievement on the economy theres this theme you keep going back to globalism versus nationalism. A couple more questions on the Foreign Policy when you look at the world and see the United States withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord and the iran deal in a way that really got people angry to up there 2 and then we move unilaterally to jerusalem. Now we see this new nexus between some of the gulf states and israel and iran seems to be out in the cold. What is your assessment not just on the ideology but the efficacy. What does he do when he decided to pursue no worse enemy attitude abroad part of this we are all the brotherhood of man . I hear people sort of dismiss that as a business mans hard edge reasoning. I call it just intelligence and knowledge of what is actually transpiring internationally. The first act by the way by this congress was the tariff act and he exploded the idea that it would destroy the economy. Its interesting to think of the things we no longer hear spoken about. You dont hear people saying that nonsense anymore. You dont even hear the expression free trade because now the whole country knows the chamber of commerce, the Business Roundtable were lying through their teeth when they said hardly a zerosum game. This makes us rich and wealthy and powerful while weve built up a huge external trade debt and cost trillions of dollars in Economic Growth as a result of the deficits particularly with china. He applied that same reasoning and Clear Thinking to the wall of mexico. At the same time, negotiating with the president of mexico to join forces and put tens of thousands of mexican troops on the borders of mexico to stop illegal immigration. Does he get credit for that, no, but its what he did and as a result, illegal immigration into the country, despite the recent surge is the lowest in decades, so he has been endsley successful but the media wont credit him. Whether its nato or the middle east as you say, this is a man that gets nominated for two Nobel Peace Prize is for two separate advancements of the interest of peace and he cant even get the media t