bring back our military, can take care of our vets. our vets have been abandoned. we also need a cheerleader. >> 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 at this point in the country should be studying donald trump, "the art of the deal" is the foundational document and at this point it reads sort of, in retrospect, like a campaign playbook. first and foremost what i think we can learn from "the art of the deal" is that he is selling fantasy and using hyperbole. those are his words, not mine. >> in fact his words are i play to people's fantasy. people may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. >> that's why a little hyperbole never hurt. if people want to believe something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular, i call it truthful hyperbole. >> i think that's exactly what he is doing. he's not fishing to say that's what he does. it has 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. 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 you're you're right. then he said running for office, running for president, the first office he's ever sought is like the biggest deal in my life. so i called this the campaign by negotiation and you've seen it all the way through and he's trying to get the gop elite and gop donors to his side and it's just a series of more negotiation pretty does a little bullying in a little cozying up and sweet talking and all of the things that are elements of the deal in this book. this comes naturally to him, it worked to get him to this point to be the gop nominee. we will see if it works with hillary clinton in the general election. >> when you read "the art of the deal", last summer, what was your reaction? >> my reaction was that he is the deal. it's not his building, is not his tv's show, he's the the pitch. it's all about the aura he presents, whether he has dealt with politicians or developers or construction crews, he is his own deal. it's his own, the book is really sort of the foundational document, this would be the beginning, this would would be the beginning of trump and it was the first time i had read it. i read it because of that clip because he said we need a leader who can write "the art of the deal", has he been consistent in his behavior. >> i think there is a lot of him that we are seeing today that you can see in this book. he said, for instance, sometimes you have to denigrate your opponent to succeed and ahead per we've seen that in the campaign whether it is the other republicans in the primary or his members of the press and so i think he has been somewhat consistent in living up to what he says in the book. when it came out, i think you kind of are who you are at that age and i think that's who he was. it also pays to be a little wild and there are lines in this book that just jump out at you, you are watching him be what he said he would be in this book and when this book comes out it's pretty interesting it's not just a handbook or a way to try to understand him, it's a very particular point in the broader scope of his life. and it made him a big deal and this is what made him a big deal beyond new york city and such a big deal that the following year he started making deals that put him in a tight spot and hugely overleveraged his properties. there was so much confidence coming out of "the art of the deal" and how much it sold that i think we can learn as much from "the art of the deal" and we can also learn a lot from what happened the year following "the art of the deal", what he did with that confidence and some would say even overconfidence. >> not to get away from art of the deal, but his second book is called surviving at the top and it covers that. of all his books it's the only one that sort of vaguely introspective that he admits that things aren't so easy and his business dealings and his personal lives, he and ivana had separated and then of course, he writes the third 1 penny says in the introduction, don't pay attention to surviving at the top. he's back and he wants you to forget that he ever wrote that. art of the deal in this third one, this is what you need to know. forget this other book. >> these three books taken together are a surprisingly revealing and in large part because of surviving at the top, it's called surviving at the top and he's a man who wrote surviving at the top when he was neither at the top or surviving. what's in there, what's in surviving the top is some of the most introspective stuff he's ever said. he sort of vulnerable which is not something he likes to be and it's not something he shows hardly at all but it's sort of the beginning of that trilogy. >> he plays out at rallies, and i've i've been on many of them, and the person he is at the rallies is very bombastic, all the bravado that everybody sees day today. when he's in his office or he's been in his penthouse or on the plane, he is more thoughtful. he's more composed and when he's talking to other people and when i've spoken if, this is really how we grew up. don junior said this is what i heard. he didn't take us in the office to play, we had to listen to this thing day in and day out. his communications director read this three times. before he went to his first meeting, he read this book. everybody is is reading it. switch over to the campaign trail and it says people are afraid of success, even though he's so successful, i would go to a rally with him, got on the plane and get out of the plane, trump force one because it's going to be better than obama's playing playing because it has the 24 gold ^-caret fixtures, et cetera. the people who have been online all day long are a lot of blue-collar workers. i would go up to them and i said why are you so crazy about donald trump heard i just got off 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. he is playing to the fantasies and they think i'm not going to be a billionaire but maybe i can make a hundred thousand dollars this year. >> it's worth pointing out that somebody else who read "the art of the deal" was mark burnett who had done survivor and then wanted to put trump into a survivor -type reality show which turned into the apprentice which, in my opinion turned into this campaign. without without the apprentice he would not have been able to run nearly as successfully for president. >> he became a household name and everybody at these rallies almost without exception have seen the princess he might even without being a household name, he was on that show per trade is what he wanted to be seen as which was the ultimate boss. you can trace back even the apprentice to the art of the deal, if not for mark burnett having read this book when he was sort of down in his luck out in california and trying to make in tv and then thinking about "the art of the deal" when he's trying to come up with the next survivor, there is a line between "the art of the deal" and the apprentice in this campaign. >> it's amazing. in the book, you think you're gonna pick this up and learn this great wisdom of dealmaking and the gemzar fairly subtle. he almost contradict himself he says you go for a home run with every pitch and you're going to strike out a lot. sometimes i settle for triples or doubles or even singles. after the memoirs he wrote a lot of business advice books and even in those, it's like for see your dreams, unless it's never going to happen. it's that kind of advice for filmmaking so it's understandable but it's not always actionable. >> he writes in "the art of the deal", it irritates me that critics with neither design or have built anything themselves are given the ability to express themselves in major publication where is the targets of criticism are almost never offered space. he managed to carve out the space to respond. through social media and many different ways. at the same time he is so dismissive of critics and he's focused on architecture critics in the books, he cultivates them he is very cognizant of the power of the press. he was obsessed with the architecture critics of the new york times at the time this book so this campaign has seen a lot of tension between trump and the press, but this notion of him hating the press is, to me, sort of overblown and kind of a myth amiss. he's very smart about cultivating the press. he's very clear about that in this book. he says, look, we'd rather be written about nicely but the worst thing is to be ignored. even bad stories are good for business. >> do you both agree with that? >> so throughout his literature over the last three decades, in this book, it pops it pops up over and over again, he has a belief that there is no such thing as bad publicity or bad press. he would rather get good press over bad press but bad press works 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 pages are reporting on his looming financial catastrophe, the tabloids are reporting on the break up of his marriage and infidelity and it diminished him a little bit, but he emerged somehow stronger because of the attention and his ability to leverage attention of any kind into a larger public persona. fast-forward to the last year, all of these things that should have killed him have not only not killed him, they've amplified this aura and persona of donald trump the candidate. >> i think in the heart of the deal, the chapters after one and two are going after different transactions or things that he has accomplished. to me, the first one is the day in the life and the second one, to me, it was called trump card, elements of a deal and that's the 1i went through point by point with him and i found that even though elements of the deal were about specific elements that he practices, i found they they work splendidly in this campaign, and to follow up on you, the one that would get the word out, he was like be outrageous, be controversial and you will get attention. the temporary ban on muslims, the illegal immigrants from mexico. >> truthful hyperbole? >> well they were controversial. >> even attacking senator mccain is not being worthy of a war hero. every time he would say stuff like that people would say he was dead in the water. no, the next rally he would attract 20 or 30,000 people. he would do that. the other thing he did in getting the word out, he mastered the use of twitter. now it has come back to bite him a few times more recently but he was the first of the candidates to really exploit twitter and we've seen hillary in recent weeks trying to use twitter herself. so we'll see if she's going to try to answer him on that. >> think twitter is just the latest social media version of what he's been doing his entire life. >> exactly. in the mid-70s he use the new york times society pages and then page six sort of ushered in the tabloid area era and then tabloid and trashy tv comes in in the '90s and now social media. wherever he needs to be, however he needs to exploit the media or the press, he has. he has done that very ably and i think this is a little far field from the art of the deal, but i think what we will see here is whether he has reached a point of a level of scrutiny and a level of seriousness. it's so high that this still works and his abiding belief that all publicity is good publicity, i'm not sure it's going to play out that way between now and november 8. then again a lot of us have been wrong a lot of times along the way. before we get too far, i want to show some video with monica langley of the wall street journal and if you'll just under explain what this is after we watch it. >> it seems to me your strategy has been hiding in plain sight. let's look at the first page of your book, what i've highlighted, if you've just read a little of that. >> okay, it's don't, it's don't do it for the money. deals are my art form. most people are surprised by the way i work. i play a very loose. i don't carry a briefcase. i try not to schedule too many meetings. i leave my door open. you can't imagine the entrepreneurial ship, etc. i prefer to prefer to come to work each day and just see what develops and what happens. true. >> do you think if you become president, and you're doing so well to this point, do you think you can still leave your door open, be so loose or do you think that's going to have to change. >> it won't change as much as people think. deals are deals and there are levels of sophistication, but it won't change quite as much as people think. >> when was that? >> 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 the book and i could see, out of the corner of my eye, his staff was 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? don't give me something to read. but he did read it and they agreed with that. he still is very much like that which is why i wanted him to fess up that he is still very much that way. i had been observing that about him. we all know he is so loosey-goosey out there and he likes to go with the flow and he became a master of that, sometimes to his detriment, but usually to his benefit when he would react to the crowd. he was always there seeing what they were doing. one of the elements in his book is know your market. 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 of being weak and he knew that market and he struck that court. >> there is a lot of insight into 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, in a lot of biz big businesses, to get an answer you have to go through seven layers of management who are all unnecessary anyway, at the trump organization, you can come to me. the flipside of that is that it's micromanaging. but in the loosey-goosey way that the campaign has been run, he says i don't like in lot of number crunchers and a lot of eggheads and a lot of fancy market surveys. i go for the gut. >> no committees and consultants. it's all him. he will listen to people, to a point, but it's ultimately his decision. >> that's the way should be. it is the trump organization, but i think were fast forwarding to next january when he moves into the west wing, i'm not sure how that open door will work and that is a phrase that comes up often over the last few decades. >> you heard him say it's 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 in the open -- oval office. his business, as sprawling as it is, it has become something that he, to some extent has been able to corral with his capabilities and i think the oval office will be a little different than the 26th floor of the trump tower. >> he has run his campaign that way, just the way he run the organization. he makes his own decisions, if i were on the plane with him, ten minutes when when they said were going to land, that's when everybody will buckle up, he would write down six words of the points he wanted to make. he never had a speech, he never had a briefing book, nothing. he would come up with six words. one time time i got my iphone and just copied it and i asked and i attached it to one of my stories. he did it that way. remember as campaign manager that took him almost till the end until he hired paul, his campaign manager, the the message on his campaign whiteboard was let trump be trump and that's what he did and that's what trump wanted. y'all were familiar with the white house and the management of the white house and the press management and here's our message of the day, here's our message tomorrow, et cetera. how much attention to that do you pay? does trump pay? >> no do you pay as a working reporter. >> something i've been thinking about and working on a little bit lately, the president is the president. there's no question who's in charge of the west wing of the white house. at the same time there is such a volume that's coming at you with important hugely consequential things that to sort of play it so loosey-goosey, to go seat-of-the-pants as he has done in many cases for many years, is dangerous and for previous president to have been more inclined, it hasn't worked well and they've had to adjust, i'm thinking of bill clinton who came in and preferred an open door and was loosey-goosey in his own way and had somebody he brought from home and at some point he needed to say i'm the president and this is serious business 90 to make some adjustments and he did. i think should he be president, that's something that all of us should be watching for. how does this management style, which has worked to some extent with mixed results for 30 years in the trump tower, how would that translate or not translate to the oval office? >> think it's going to be hard for him to say look, this isn't working. people are are expecting him to make a pivot after the primaries to the general. he's leading into the same direction. i think. >> he needs to use the teleprompter some time. >> i think it will continue when he gives the policy speech a little bit. i was in his office right before he was about to use it. it was set up in the conference room and he was practicing. he's trying to think that way. his people, some of the people he had brought in wanted him to practice a time or two. he's done it a couple times. >> i think it's going to be hard to persuade him and hard for him to think that he needs to change because look, no one thought when he came into the race, he was ninth in the poll and it seemed like a sideshow, and he won. he beat those who were supposed to be of the most depth in the most serious in a long time and so, not only have we not seen a pivot, i, i just don't know who is going to persuade him that he needs to change until he's actually there. i don't know. i think it's going to be a hard sell. >> we talked in "the art of the deal" about listening to his own advisors and is sort of small collection of vice presidents, but also how he talks to cabdrivers and workers in the street and people that he runs into and get sort of a critical mass of voices that then allow him to make sort of a gut decision. now, i don't think president trump would walk outside on pennsylvania avenue start talking to people and make a decision. it just can't work. there's a bureaucracy and all these things that a president needs to navigate in a much more complicated way than anything he's done. one of the things, this comes out when it's four years after trump tower and trump tower is a shining example of trump's management style, style, he's opening a up in his the project manager with a 30 woman at the time and there's an interesting collection of people who made trump work. you see less of that as trump goes on and he sort of transitions from a guy who build things, he built trump tower from the ground up to instead a guy who who puts his name on things and is clearly a genius level marketer and licensor but may be a less disciplined manager. that's, i think, think, the trendline of his 30 plus years of the character that he created as donald trump. perhaps if he were to become president, he does go outside the box in his hires and he does not bring in the consultants or 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 trump's golf caddie. his press secretary was a model that a vodka brought in to work on her line and to do other things as they were marketing for that line and now she's the press secretary. i think people think she's been a fairly honest broker through this campaign. that's on down through the grown children that the guy who runs the las vegas hotel used to drive him to school. he does think outside the box because he used to grow up on construction sites and he had to work as a construction site. eric and don junior told me they had to work at construction sites since they were 11 or 12 years old. he does look at people and other things and isn't afraid to put them in the mix. i don't know if you can do that at the presidential level but he has done some of that. >> he has traditionally put high expectations on people who are, by the book underqualified. if they succeed, that's great but if they don't. >> one thing he says in this book is that he prides loyalty over integrity. loyalty is the most important thing. >> it's also why he is so loyal to family. there's nobody he is more loyal to most of the time than family. his brother robert, and as we see him in "the art of the deal" is a key component and now his children that he and ivana made are people who are extremely important to him in the trump organization. >> have a very simple rule when it comes to management, hire the best people from your competitors in pay them more than they were earning give them bonuses and incentives on how they are performing. that's how you build a first-class organization in my life there are two things i found i'm i'm 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 in the service of others as i've done up to now on my own behalf. >> so there is the trump organization in terms of the broader strokes and then there are other subsidiaries, some very large like atlantic city and i don't know that he overcame obstacles super well in atlantic city. he writes in the art of the deal, i, i love casinos in the glamour and the cash flow and it's very good business being the house. yes, it should be and it almost always is for almost everybody except it wasn't for trump, kind of. it was kind of good for trump individually but for people who work for him, overall or investors and shareholders, it was decidedly less good over the course of time so before we sort of talk about the management gems letter in the art of the deal, maybe there needs to be some sort of corrective, and again this was written in 1987. he had not experienced failure at that point. it starts happening in the late '80s and early '90s and there are portions of his business record that have been the opposite of success over the course of time. >> he writes in here, i fight when i feel i'm getting screwed, even if it's costly and difficult. there seems to be a sense of right and wrong in this book plus the fact that he writes about helping that woman who was losing her family farm and he held a fundraiser for her. she worked hard all of her life and here she is losing her farm and it's just not fair. 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, it's too late. >> who knows how the conversation really transpired. so what does he do? he threatens a lawsuit. he says i'm going to slap a huge lawsuit on you for murder because you drove this poor woman to suicide and he talks about how he can't believe it's getting so much attention, this thing that he did but of course he's putting it in the first chapter of his book as well. he immediately lashes out with his most standard weapon which is the lawsuit. in that first chapter he threatens a lawsuit and is being deposed in another one. just in describing his week, that's how it goes. that combativeness that we are seeing in the campaign and that litigious this and the threat of suing are very telling. >> the playbook for that is in "the art of the deal". that is one of the things that follows his inconsistencies. that is an absolute consistency. if the somebody does something he doesn't like or says something or write something he doesn't like, he goes after them >> on the trump university litigation, he is hammered on that. >> to a fault, some say say. if he had settled. >> but he says he doesn't settle. >> while he does but he doesn't settle this and the question i think, is pending, as we move into the summer and the thick of the general election, whether that was the right move. if he had settled we wouldn't be talking about this nearly as much. he can't accept that he might have been wrong in this case and so it is a full assault on the judge and on down. anybody who is critical of how trump university, how we handled that entire episode. >> when he admits mistakes, it's always in his failure to see how stupid other people were. that kind of of thing. i never realized, he was an owner in the short-lived you s fl. that was the alternative football league. his biggest mistake is that he didn't realize how much weaker the other owners were. >> he lost in court because the jurors almost took pity on the other owners of the u.s. fl. other would say if there was one person who grew in the chances to be a usfl to be a secondary professional in this country, it was donald trump. he is the reason the usfl did not work. it may not have worked because it's just become a behemoth since then, but donald trump is the reason that the usfl didn't work when it didn't work in the way it didn't work. so when you all read the art of the deal, do you find it to be accurate? did you find his description of deals to be accurate? >> selectively truthful. i think he is selectively truthful, as a lot of people are. >> i found it totally in character with the person that i've come to know. i didn't didn't know him back then, but i found it totally in character with his truthful exaggeration. he loves to be the best, show that he's the best, all of that. i will say, because 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 rarefied air. they are all full of themselves to that point. they have had to knock away competitors, they've had to think differently and so one reason when i first met him in august when everyone else thought he was crazy and had no chance and i went into his office and introduce myself and he knew how i was because he had read some of my profiles of others so we got along and i said look, i'm going to treat you legitimately as you're a ceo and billionaire. from that point on, i knew that i could work on a level playing field with him in a way, differently, because i kind of knew the ground he walked. it is a little different little different. he is much more, his much more ego and maybe a little craziness, but i think all ceos and billionaires, to some extent have these tendencies. >> when you look at a book like this, it should be fact checked and people should look at up, but i think, like like a lot of books, certainly, he was politically attuned as a politician when he wrote this, but i think with a lot of political memoirs and books like this with major public figures, their propaganda. they're not meant to be a very detailed honest accounting of a life or career. so i wouldn't limit that to art of the the deal. i wouldn't limit it to any kind of political books. they are usually not very good and they tell very selective truths as you put it. this one is actually, it's entertaining. i would rather read this then whatever tim valente's memoir was. >> early in the primaries, when i was reading a lot of these sorts of books, i enjoyed "the art of the deal" relative to some of the other books by other candidates which were just dreadful. at least this one is fairly entertaining. >> did you pick up why it's the trump organization and not trump ink or anything else. >> trump organization started when it was donald trump. that is a key thing. >> 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 an aura. it's all about the aura. >> i think there could be a business formality of why you call it one thing or another. >> it was marketing. >> he said people consider you to be more worth dealing with, to my my point about being selectively truthful, what he doesn't write is that a huge part of his ability to talk with these people and start making some of his earliest deals in the 70s is his father and his father's political connections and his father's business record. if you were just donald trump and fred trump had not been bred trump and had not done what he had done in the brooklyn building, no way donald trump would have gotten years of some of the people he was able to talk to to start some of those early deal. >> at the same time, he distances self from his father. >> and for good reason. we've seen this in the campaign. i am a self-made man. this is not just a campaign thing. this is something he has sort of over protested in my opinion throughout his public life. he's downplaying the role that his father had, specifically, politically and financially, especially with his early success. he could not have started doing some of the work he did on the grand hyatt and even into the early portions of putting together the parcels for trump tower. i think it would've been much much harder without his father's influence and his father is exceptionally important, including with with money. it's not in his best interest. he's not necessarily a self-made man. what he is as a self-created character's i think those two things sometimes get inflated. >> my father had done very well for himself, but he didn't believe in giving his children huge trust funds. when i graduated from college i had a network of $200,000 and most of it was tied up in buildings in brooklyn and queens. is that accurate? is that a full statement? >> i haven't researched that to know. >> i don't know if it was $200,000 when he graduated college but i think but i think we should pause and acknowledge, most people did not have a net worth of $200,000 when i dollars when i graduated college. that was a lot of money and were talking the 1960s so to say that as a defense that my father had only so much to do with my success, to say that as a defense for his self-made persona is sort of grit, i think. i think think he obviously learned a great amount from his father from everything that he did in queens, but clearly he trumped his father but he learned a lot from his dad and he did get a great start from his dad, no matter what the amount is. i never look to see what the amount was but he did learn a lot. he said my father's the man who most influenced me. he didn't want to sort of discs his dad in this kind of family sense, but he wants to create distance in a business and professional sense. in the book and on the campaign, he talked about how my dad said never go to manhattan, it's too tough, you'll tough, you'll never make it. stick to queens and brooklyn, but i wanted to be big so he sort of suggest that my dad taught me so much but even he didn't see what was possible. >> he didn't think, the book is dedicated to his parents, fred and mary trump, not to his children. >> a selective trump, there was a lot of money to be made to build middle-class home using government subsidies and he took advantage of that big time. things had dried dried up by the time donald came around so what did he do but go to manhattan and take advantage of a very down economy in middle to late 70s which is really what launches him. there's an aspect of walk-in timing in addition to any sort of skill and make money no mistake are undeniable skills in his skill set. he has a full toolbox in terms of ability to promote, and in the earlier stages of his career, to build buildings based on what the public really wants. >> here's a crazy factoid. he actually, i was with him when he went through the new trump hotel which will be in the post office that he's making into a luxury hotel on pennsylvania avenue so i was in it recently he saw some molding and he said that was crooked. i was like what. >> was it? did you follow up? wasn't cricket? >> or was he. >> oh yeah. he got the guy and he said is that crooked. they took it out and said well, not really if you look at it like this. the guy was obviously feeling checked on peer he went through another room and set i don't like the way it turned out but it's too late to change now. the manager said yes, it's too late to change now. he does pay attention to detail 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 to contain the cost. he ran his campaign for $40 million which is unheard of jeb bush had $150 million in super pack or whatever. we know he looked at every single expenditure that looked out of the campaign. whether it's paying attention to the details of the construction or the details of the expenditure, he does do that. now he can't micromanage that in the central government so his big argument to the public is i'm a great businessman. read "the art of the deal". i will manage the country like i manage business. >> we see that. in the book, one of of the early details he talks about how he has been, he was in charge of the declaration, the holiday decorations at trump tower. i remember reading, i wrote in the margins, he does that? >> he also explained why and it was because trump tower had an aura and a purpose and he wanted to make sure that the christmas decorations. >> and that's how people walk by, that's what they see. >> it is a manhattan denmark and crowds walked by. it's right next to tiffany for tiffany's as part of it. it is a big deal. >> he does get involved at that level. >> or he's telling us that he does get involved at that level. >> there's a distinction between i can't be bothered big picture and the smallest micromanaging, like the wreath. typically, in my read and in some of my reporting, he micromanage is the most when it comes to things that are very aesthetic and that's what we saw with that gold reads. i think in that part of this book, he says, sometimes, not sometimes, not often, but sometimes less is more. >> rarely less is more. >> he tells us how he likes earth tones more than primary colors or the opposite. he's at that level of detail. now when he talked about how he managed, he talked about who he might pick for vice president and he had said that he need someone who really knows how to do stuff in washington because he sees himself more of the chairman of the board, he sees the presidency as being the chairman of the board rather than the ceo or chief operating officer who's in there getting his hands dirty. i think that's a fascinating information or fascinating way to take the, vote for me because i'm a successful business leader, to see how that would work as president. sometimes you can be chairman of the board but sometimes you need to make the call. >> but that's when he said i know how to work the deal. i can make deals with congress. the question is, when he's made deals it's usually with another person who also wants to get the job done and dealing with congress when there are so many different people was so mini different agendas is going to be a horse of a different color for this man. >> he talks about how he doesn't like negotiating with japanese. it's because they always bring in a group of people. there's always eight or 12 people in the room and sometimes you can convince two or three people but it's hard to convince 12 people. >> you have to convince a lot of people. congress has more than 12 people and to suggest that i'm a great deal maker because i'm great at the one on one, that may be true but it is utterly inapplicable to the job he would face as president. >> will just bring them in one by one. that's what he'll do. >> monica langley, are you someone who has access to donald trump, are you worried about crossing him or getting kicked off the campaign trail or getting kicked off the list of access? >> no, i'm not. if he decides to do that, the tape that you showed was the same rally were the secret service, they were traveling and the secret service did a chokehold on the photographer with time who was was to get back on the plane with him to do the cover shot for time. i actually, because i had been been with him earlier, we actually had good access and we went in the pen with all the reporters and 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, it's 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 it's on our website. do not i mean, there they were pitstop about that. they get the stuff, he does not like civil things that i've said and done or when i called when i was the one who got an exclusive when he decided to quit self funding the campaign as he went into the general election and all the staff were saying he still weighing the decision about whether to go do fundraising like all the other candidates have. so i called him directly on his phone and i said donald, are you going to quit self funding. i could hear him on speaker phone and i could hear people saying well were still deciding it. i said i'm talking to you. are you going to quit self funding. or are you when to sell a building be. it's going to cost $1 billion dollars potentially. he said well monica, i'm going to quit self funding but i'm going to put a lot of money in it myself. so it wasn't like he was ready to say that or wanted to say that and i could pick them off, but i knew i needed to get that because that was the next day and it ran against his brand. all these other people were sucking up to special interest, and i'm not. i wanted to get that and they kept telling me to stay away, stay away and i just called him directly and asked. he could've said leave me alone, i'm not going to talk about it, whatever, so yes that always happens but i feel my first responsibility is the wall street journal and our readers. not donald trump. he knows that. think if he felt otherwise, he would not respect me. i think the whole time, if you think your wheat week and he's going to nickname you, i think you're dead. >> two quotes from "the art of the deal", sometimes part of making a deal is denigrating your competition. >> i think he wrote it then and he has proven it during the campaign. it's insult to his primary opponents, i think denigrating is a pretty good word for what we have seen. >> lying ted, crooked hillary. >> low-energy job, he never got rid of that from august when he started with that. >> little marco. >> some of them, talk talk about art, he does manage to capture something with some of these very juvenile nicknames or these throwaway line spirit he'll say, it's always to mess with hillary i always wonder what the donald trump nickname would be for donald trump. he's very good at that. you remember and he just repeats it incessantly like low-energy was this thing from the very beginning from day one when he was talking about jeb. he can't be president, he's low-energy. it's the kind of macho thing, but he's talented at that. he certainly done it with the press. he's done it overtly with megan kelly but we also, what's his current relationship with the washington post. >> he severed the relationship with the washington post in the sense that he's evoking access to his event. now that doesn't mean that we can't cover him, we will continue to cover him aggressively. they issued a short but direct statement saying this is a repudiation of an independent press but we are going to continue covering him aggressively like we have done throughout the campaign. >> were not the first. >> could you have predicted him doing that given some of the washington post 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 he's bragging about crowd size all the time, in "the art of the deal" he brags about how many reporters come to his press events. we had 50 reporters, 200 reporters local and national. from this book, i might have guessed that he might have found ways to cultivate particular journalists and news organizations rather than just shut them off. were certainly not the first. political politico has experienced this as well. it's not surprising because of how aggressively he goes after enemies, but it is slightly surprising in the sense that he seems to have very symbiotic relationship with the press. cutting it off hasn't been a strategy that he has really employed in the past. >> so in "the art of the deal", he writes that he doesn't take verdicts too seriously unless and until those critics get in the way of his objectives and right now i think you're seeing that with the press, not just with the post. political, usa today, lots of places have. they are his enemies now. they are his critics and they are literally in the way of him becoming president because the amount of resources that have been put onto the donald trump seat is unprecedented. what has changed is the context in which the man in the story sit. for a generation, he has been famous. he has been famous for a long, long time. he's never been important. maybe you disagree. he's never been this important. >> now he is very important. he is hugely consequential. he is a man of global importance and so because of that, i think he is being covered in a way that he has never ever been covered, not even even close and it's starting to make him uncomfortable because i think he judges accurately that this is problematic. if the coverage continues this way, which it will, it will eventually put him in a position of weakness, which is the position he hates heading into november. >> there was no twitter in 1987. there was no way to directly address the crowds that you wanted. >> there was no round-the-clock cable either. now he can dominate cable. >> he can call into any show when they want. cable is desperate 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. she is going on to twitter when something bad about her. she responded recently, delete your account. it was the most read tweet by her ever when she responded directly to him. so we'll see if she can go toe to toe with him and if it's the right thing for her to do. >> from the art of the deal, one thing i learned about the press is that they are always hungry for a good story and the more sensational the better. it's in the nature of their job and i understand that. the point is, if you're a little different or little outrageous or if you do things that are bold or controversial the press is going to write about you. >> 1987 so this question that we've been discussing, in the media and beyond for most of this point, did we, because there is a week, week, did we create donald trump? : it has to start in 1976 and honestly, you can talk about twitter and how he's use that very effectively. you can talk about how often he is sort of unbroken speeches on c and n, fox and all those places but before april and before twitter it was people magazine, it was page 6 of the new york post. it was playboy. he has always identified away to have a certain omnipresence in different kind of media and a less serious media and i think what has happened over the last 25, 30 years is that there is less of a distinction between page 6 and this is the business pages of the new york times. people used to sort of draw that distinction and there were two separate donald trump's. there was the donald trump on page 6 in people magazine, and then there was lifestyles of the rich and famous and then there was atlantic city, donald trump, big-city donald trump being covered in the new york times. what happened now is it's all just stuff, it's all just content so he has used that reality to create confusion. people are already confused and he's taken advantage of that. >> go-ahead. >> he was one of the first rich and famous to be featured on lifestyles of the rich and famous. he's been famous, as a business leader and i think i read that in your paper, he's been famous longer than bill gates. right? think of any sort of living business leader. his run of fame as extended as long or longer then any of them and it's not just been business. it's the whole trump persona. so you're right, i think that's a smart way to look at , did the media create trump trope and if that's the case, it goes back far longer. >> i remember as a young kid in the midwest learning about donald trump through an ice rink, it's something he cited again and again in the art of the deal, did that make his or national reputation? >> i had, my daughter was born in new york city and i've lived there for many years. >> from tennessee. >> from tennessee originally but rolling ring is a perfect example for him to show success because it was a nightmare. it never worked and then he took it over and made it a success in months, not years and it was my daughter's favorite place to go as a toddler and child so it shows government gridlock, which he is fighting today. it shows he is a can-do person on low dollars, ahead of schedule cells is a classic trump success and no wonder, it's tiny but no wonder he brings it up all the time. >> not only "the art of the deal", he brings it up in every book he writes. >> my daughter who is now 17 would say it was her favorite place in central park to visit. >> it is a simple story with a simple storyline , it was yes, a success but it is so small potatoes compared to some of the other things that trump has done and many of those things, so many other people have done though it's this very straightforward tale of the success of private enterprise over the incompetence of the public sector and he has milked that rolling range since 1986 for all that it's worth and then some. i think we can all agree. >> when i would see him talking about that story it's in so many of the books that he writes. i would rememberwhen mitt romney would talk about the olympics , you know? yeah, that was a big deal. the olympics is a bigger deal than fixing the skating rink but after a while i was like, you can't have so much on that. that doesn't prove to me that you would be, you know, terrific at all these other things. and there's a larger record but people love the olympics. you know? people love ice skating rink's. kids, it's like this morality tale. you hated the mayor and he showed him up and so he loves writing about it. >> he also writes in "the art of the deal" about television city. what is television city? >>television city , well, what it would have been is a plot of land on theupper west side and you can certainly this. he had actions on it not once but twice . it sort of never really did even close to what you wanted to do initially. it was one of the first possibilities he had. he was trying to get nbc to say in manhattan, of course it didn't ultimately anyway but he was trying to get it to move from midtown up to his gargantuan trump rounded city within a city, never really amounted to the variety of plans that he laid out over the course of decades, really. >> there was the threat, it's the way he talked about trade deals and stuff. were going to go new your jersey, were going to go to new jersey and that's what he kept saying if he didn't get what he wanted. then europe was going to, would cease to be the media capital of the world which has not last i checked occurred area. >> in the second grade donald trump writes i actually gave the teacher a black eye. i placed my music teacher as i didn't think he knew anything about me and i almost got expelled. has he ever talked about this story since? >> definitely. as i understand it not a thing that actually occurred. was he a difficult child? absolutely. he also discusses something that other people have confirmed, his brother building a tower out of blocks when they were boys and then using roberts blocks and moving them together so that all the blocks would be donald's blocks in the formof the building . he admits what seems to be the reality that he was difficult, confrontational child and of course as a teenager was sent to upstate to a militaryacademy by his father . not sure we've ever been able to confirm punching his second grade teacher in the face story. >> what's interesting is that the story that he, he's not proud of it but he said it because in the subsequent sentence he says this shows you from a very early age i wasn't afraid to voice my opinions and tell it like it is. >> and so it's just odd that you are in the situation where things that you do as a kid you weren't really proud of become these points of pride because they show that you are unconventional, that you tell it like it is and you're not afraid to voice your opinions. it's memorable. a memorable detail, whether it's entirely accurate. >> thisis 1987. a lot of superlatives in this book. it like listening to a donald trump speech. he uses a lot of superlatives . >> also, you know, losers. the world's losers are the people who are jealous of you, right? the only drawback due to fame and excess is that you get all the people who are jealous of your success. i called them the world's losers, right? a lot of the same rhetoric area it hasn't changed all that much. >> so there has been consistency. >> he gets into it more later . later in the trump literature, this becomes more of a theme , this idea that the world is a zero-sum place . for me to be a winner, the other guy must necessarily be a loser so you can see the groundwork for that worldview in the art of the deal and certainly he's taken that into the campaign. for me to win, systematically, almost chronologically, these other people have to lose. i'm going to target jeb and he's going to be a loser and then ben carson and marco rubio and on and on. for me to win, you must lose. there's much more of a sense of competition then there is one of collaboration. >> i think in "the art of the deal" you can tell he's an avid competitor and he does use the word loser in "the art of the deal" and for example, when carson suddenly rose up to be almost number one with him or surpass him for a week, he decided on his plane, i'm taking him down today, tonight. okay. that's when he went on stage and talked about the belt, how could carson which he said in his autobiography have stabbed someone and the belt buckle stopped it from actually penetrating? because carson never revealed who it was so he said that just couldn't happen. it was the first night that trump had secret service, trump said somebody, on stage, come up here with a knife. i want you to try to stab my local and it won't prevent it. it will flip over and the knife would go in my stomach and the secret service is like this. you know, what he said so either he's lying about it or he has these tendencies and he's like a psychotic murderer, he has these tendencies that make him on, incompetent to be president. he would come with, i'm taking this person down next. anytime anybody got close to him, i'm taking him down. >> it's the difference between the primaries and what we see in the next coming months, this is a one-on-one situation now whereas in the primaries it was splitting upsupport , easier targets i think than hillary clinton. >> monica langley, you say you call donald trump what is followed in this office 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? >> yes, i can still get through.i think his schedule is much more precise now than at the beginning when most reporters really didn't care to get close to him and i was doing a profile of him early on but if i need to, i think i could still get him. when i call, when he was in washington last week speaking at the state for him or whatever, that's when i toured the post office building that's becoming a trump luxury hotel so i still try to keep in touch. i'm not one of the reporters who are embedded with him. we have other teams, wall street journal as other reporters who cover him on a daily basis. we usually do page 1 feature stories so i don't try to follow him every day, i just tried to jump in occasionally but you know, we have tried to do tough stories as well. we did a story about is he really worth what he says. >> mark when you look through his financials and we get a big piece that was, this is what his income really is and he actually couldn't self fund even if you wanted to all the way through and we've done stories about how he did not pay all his bills or kept extracting concessions from people that he didn't want to pay full amounts for the we are continuing to do that so i agree with you that the press is now going to get much more vigilant about what has been his practice, not just what he says or what he does. >> i also think this war on the press, as worrisome as it is, is the pun intended, a bit trumped up. it's funny because there's this incredibly long-term symbiotic relationship between the press and trump and in the case of politico and in the case of the post, he's going to re-credential these places if for no other reason than the story has turned a little bit. to the extent that he's sniffing about an ongoing narrative which i think he does, at some point you're going to say okay, okay. come on back in. he's like some sort of benevolent monarch . >> if you were hillary clinton, would you read this book? >> oh yeah, absolutely. or i get someone to read it and tell me what was in it, i don't know if she has time but i think so. i think it reveals a lot about him. and in the same way, more than any subsequent books, it's the same with hillary clinton, actually. the best book to read about her is still it takes a village. clearly not her memoir, this is the one that most clearly lays out her political ambition . >> when she cited the other night, when she became the presumptive nominee she said it still takes a village . so just the way he keeps citing "the art of the deal", she keeps citing it takes a village. they still cling to their original books so i do think that people who want to know i don't the heart of these two candidates, they can read their originalwork and find out a lot about them . >> 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 if they have time, reading and do it chronologically and not just the books he's written but the books that have been written about him. there are six very good, very worthwhile biographies or if you don't have time or the inclination to read entire books , there are oodles of really good, incisive profiles on donald trump starting with wayne barrett's work in the village voice in 1979 where lee brenner in new york magazine and in vanity fair, 1990 until kaufman for buzzfeed in 2014it's not that trump is not known . it's that all of this is known. he's been a public figure and people have beenreporting on him and not just in fluffy celebrity ways at all . for decades, put it into google. start reading. the way i see it, it is your homework as an engaged citizen between now and november. >> i can tell you, going to a lot of these rallies, one of the elements of the deal in chapter 2 is the last element of the deal is have fun and when i have seen donald trump have fun is in the rope line. he does have fun at the rally getting all these people excited. he goes in the rope line and sometimes he spends minutes in the rope line where people stand and talk to him. his favorite people to talk to are the people holding "the art of the deal" and there are so many people that say please sign my book, he signs every darn book that is out there. more than a hat that he makes money on, more than a sign is "the art of the deal" and it's probably the number one best-selling book out there . >> is that true? >> no but he says that. >> i think thetampa bay times did a whole look at this and found it was may 5 or sixth , which is still pretty good . among business books, how to make friends and influence people and joe carnegie is still the best-selling business book but i like what you're saying about fun. i suspect this is the most fun he is going to have in this process and i think something he says in this book, i think it's in "the art of the deal", it may be in one of the other two trilogy books, he says what he's really about is the chase and he says the same assets that excite me in the chase often once they are required leave me bored. the important thing is the getting, not the having. and i think that does he want to win? absolutely. he wants to run it in everyone's face. he wants to go and write an amazing campaign book, i'm sure we will learn all about that the notion of having to run this thing day today, as president? i suspect is probably a lot less exciting to him than winning it. >> a couple months ago, glenn brescia interviewed oliver stone, kind of a longtime political consultant for trump and glenn asked roger stone does he want to be presidenti thought that was interesting how roger stone answered. he said he wants to win . >> i never understood how janie carter became president, donald trump writes in "the art of the deal". the answer is that as poorly qualified as he was for the job, jimmy carter had the nerve, the guts, the balls to ask for something extraordinary. that ability above all helped him get elected president area . >> donald trump is exactly the same way, don't you think? it's all about having the balls to do anything. that's why i said if any reporter shows weakness to him, i approached him as an equal, we ought to do that. i have seen network anchors or correspondence, and say wait, spit it out. he moves on. he really has no tolerance for being nice if you're not strong. he is just all about being confident, moving on. he comes from a position of strength, you have to show strength and his children when they come into the office, they say we need to do this, this and this. they don't say oh dad, what about this? i've seen the kids come in and say i need you to meet with so-and-so about this deal. they're telling him this and this. they're not saying what about this and what about that? >> this thing about for jimmy carter, jimmy carter asking for money, after his presidency, i think from the carter library or something, he asked donald for a donation. and that's what impressed him, right? that he would have the guts to ask for a large amount of money. >> at the bottom of that page, a page that he tells the jimmy carter story gets into ronald reagan which at the time was the president and he says about ronald reagan, i think americans are starting to catch on that he's just a smiling pretty face and there's nothing much going on there. i'm paraphrasing but he is not tied to ronald reagan, sitting president in 1987 in "the art of the deal" which should be pointed out in the context of what hesays about jimmy carter aswell . >> iran contra, this was not a great time in the reagan administration . and the subsequent books, he gets religion and he talks about how terrific reagan was but in his foundational document as he put it, he's not a fan. he thinks he's an empty suit x "the art of the deal" two that comes out right before, right around the same time he kind of talks about running for president for the first time in late 1987, he went to new hampshire and gave a speech at a rotary club at a restaurant and did it because he was asked to buy a guy in new hampshire who wanted him to run for president, was going through some low-level formal process to draft donald trump. i don't know that he had ever really thought seriously about running for president at that time. i don't think he was even then in late 1987 but he knew he had a book to and it was coming out so he went up and gave this and no doubt, it helped move some product as did in september of that year and add he put in the new york times and boston globe and i think the post as well, criticizing american foreign-policy and saying basically a lot of the things he said in this campaign. all of this sort of injected him into the political bloodstream in late 1987 which then alerted people to his forthcoming book called "the art of the deal". >> is on that over and over again. he sort of flirted with running and there was always something at the time whether it was a book or show or something else. >> the america we deserve comes out in 1989 when he's having a dalliance with the reform party and crippled america, it's unique to donald trump what he was doing it even when he wasn't actually running for president. >> you know though, like six days after mitt romney lost in the last election, he filed for the trademark, make america great again. he was so convinced then that he could have done better. of course, romney is out there talking and soconvinced he could be better than trump . he is speaking of people he praised in addition to jimmy carter in the art of the deal, even praise sylvester stallone alone, right? in the art of the deal for creating these characters and so what did he create rocky and rambo, thank you two of the all-time characters along with the first donald j trump. >> hunting predicting at the republican convention, sylvester stone will make an appearance. he wants to bring some pizzazz, the showbiz, the reality star aspect, he wanted to be more fun. >> part of it being a celebrity is in proximity to other celebrities and the pictures in this book as well as every other book that has come out with his name on the cover, they are filled with pictures of donald trump with other celebrities area. >> i saw him at the resort, whatever number home in florida that trump has, not in this book but in other books he talks about everyone that he's had down there and you know, michael jackson and lisa marie presley, when they were together he talked about having inner with sinatra. he claims in this book he doesn't like going to parties but he loves being in that party to be seen and being seen with famous people because that's what, that's his shtick. he's not just a business executive, he's not just a politician, these all those things, and everything and he's kind of been this sort of exaggerated version of every big thing in america for the past several decades. in the 70s, he was partying in the new york clubs. in the 80s he was becoming really rich. in the 90s, he had financial struggles and family, everyone's having affairs in the 90s. 2000, suddenly he's a reality tv star and now he's like a twitter star. he's every obsession in america, he has capturedit . >> lozada, recently in the washington post you had a piece recommending to novels or two books that could be today. >> this thing you're seeing a lot is journalists writing their opus, how i missed the rise of trump and it's always a very on brand way that proves they were right these other ways but what you're seeing also is people referring to movies, to fiction, two years the movie that foreshadowed the rise of trump area and two that struck me were people referring to sinclair lewis's it can't happen here from the 1930s and philip roth's plot against america which showed these kind of oddly charismatic strongmen coming to power in the unitedstates. and of course, it's horrifying . it's very oppressive, dictatorial state and so i wanted to see what there was there in particularly in those two books, also watched idiotic receive this weird movie that people have been cited but i decided it wasn't worth writing about and you see glimmers of you know, the appeal. there was a famous, i don't know if it was after arizona, he's on tv and he's like i love the poorly educated because he had done so well in that demographic area and you know, in those books there are leaders that become these totalitarian figures. they really had strong appeal among you know, what we would now call low information voters, right? and so you see some parallels in the competitiveness with the press to the point that there's this expectation of fawning coverage, otherwise there's something wrong. these are very dystopian novels and they go further than i think donald trump would ever go but there are these kind of interludes in history , and sinclair lewis, what happens is that excuse me, in the plot against america, the philip roth book charles lindbergh comes to power and he runs the country or a believer two years and then disappears and then roosevelt comes back and the us enters a war and this picks up as we know it. which can happen in real life. so i was looking for inspiration in fiction and i think that there's certainly elements there that you recognize in trump's personal style and rhetoric and his appeal to the audience that he thinks he knows so well perhaps the most important thing i learned that working, mister trump writes, was not to be overly impressed by academic credentials. it didn't takeme long to realize there was nothing particularly awesome or acceptable about my classmates . michael kruse with politico, let's go back to where we started. is this a campaign playbook? >> i think it can be seen as such and there are lots of books that he has written or cowritten or have been written for him that all added up i think our campaign playbook for 2016 for donald trump . >> monica langley. >> i say definitively yes.i think it is classic donald trump and i think that elements of the deal are all the elements of his campaign. >> carlos lozada with the washingtonpost, michael kruse with politico, thank you for being on this roundtable on the tv.>> thank you . >> when i tune into it on the weekends, usually as authors sharing their new releases. >> watching the nonfiction authors on book tv is thebest television or serious readers . >> on c-span, they can have a longon

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