of testimony on us military strategy in the asia-pacific region focusing on north korea, that is at 9:30. follow live coverage from the senate armed services committee on c-span3, online at c-span.org and streaming on the c-span radio apps. now a look at the trump presidency and how it compares to previous administrations your presence here is true of every hour of every day of your life for other people who are in your presence conjures up the specter or the memory or the muscle memory and some of us of the experiences for decades ago with watergate. as we sit here in the tent tentk or the beginning of the 11th week of the trump presidency, obviously one of your themes over the last 70 days has been this question of whether the trump presidency is an unprecedented event, or whether it evokes, uncomfortably, evokes the period in which you were a major actor. do you think that we are in uncharted territory, or is the territory all too charted, shall we say? >> well, we are not at watergate 2.0, yet. i find echoes of what happened in the past. i find tremendous differences in what happen in the past. i find the two presidents are very different personalities. mr. nixon was well schooled in the presidency before he arrived in it. he had been a vice president. he had been a member of the senate and a member of the house. he was a lawyer, trained and argued before the supreme court. so he came into the job understand it, and on the run. his campaign transition was very quick. i find the trump administration about 180 degrees away from there. they seemed surprised to win. they had a very weak transition. to weather didn't get themselves prepared to take over. and the takeover for the first couple months has been awkward at best. so i find that difference, but we've never had a president, in my knowledge, i'm a student of the office as well, coming with the kind of baggage that mr. trump is carrying, that he arrived on the scene with unfolding scandals and a disposition that's very different from what we are used to in the presidency. >> the disposition question is where this analogy, this idea that there's an analogy between donald trump and richard nixon because of course nixon's public persona until we discovered what was on the tapes, whitey said in these secret recordings and in all the things that you testify to and we have learned from haldeman and from ehrlichman after the presidency about his behavior and late-night ranting sessions and orders that were never carried out. and then we have donald trump who is doing some of that in public. that's what's different. no one would ever, richard nixon comported himself with a great deal of personal dignity at oval office features. he was always very cognizant of the grandeur of the office. >> allergy to a small example of how to that was in respect to the office. i once went to a press conference in eastern. stand in the back. he had just hired a new pr man to sort of change his image. one of the things that had been suggested is that he wear like you're wearing, a blue shirt. because he was told it wouldn't be quite as stark a comparison as, tend to have a 5 o'clock shadow. he told his pr man, he said, presidents do not wear blue shirts. >> so thi this is a dispositionl question. in other words, may be what we see in trump in his public behavior echoes a lot of us uncomfortably, but that was nixon's private behavior, that he would never have shown that face up to the public. but trump has no, obviously not only no compunction but seems to revel in doing it. >> he can't help himself. the public trump and the private trump are differentiated only by a slightly more elevated use of language in the public. he hasn't mentioned yet from the presidential podium. this is unprecedented. there's never been, even chester a. arthur was better prepared for the job than donald trump. he seems almost proud of his ignorance. so we had a man with very bad character here who is prone to lying, who is ignorant, who seems to know nothing about how the government works. and so it's a test. it's a test of the institutions that we have, because they're going to be subjected and are already being subjected to tremendous strain by this. >> we were talking about this just before we got on stage, and so, rick, you're talking about the institutions, th, the separn of powers, the ability to enforce such things as the emoluments clause, the question at what level the president is or is not subject to law as we understand it, in some context. but then we had the institutions, the separation of powers of congress, legislative, judicial, how they all interact. i think the campaign, what was revealed in the campaign over a year and a half and in donald trump's ability to get 63.5 million votes and to win 30 states was that many institutions in the united states have already failed or already in a condition of failure, the institutions that would've made it such that a president caught on tape and then, access hollywood tape, would it somehow any previous time come together and forced him out of the campaign. i don't just mean like the republican party for this or that, but -- >> not all prior presidents have had russian bots working for them to take care of the negative impact of a story like that. >> right, but what they also had, or had to keep them playing within the lines, was the fact that if you violated certain kinds of social mores, there itd be a kind of institutional, you couldn't do it because the institutions that sort of help undergird the civil society in the united states would have chewed you up and spit you out and that did not happen with donald trump. >> it was never tried before really. because of his utter shamelessness, which meant that the revelations that came out about the access hollywood tape, for example, he blustered his wife right through that. i think the institution, the media gets a lot of blame here, but it's not really come it's because of the failure of the business models of the traditional media. i think that is the problem that is like you, sort of stove piping where people, if you get your news solely from fox news and talk radio, i think talk radio has been underestimated, then you don't really know about most of these things. you have a whole different knowledge base that if you read pretty much any standard newspaper or standard news website. but even with all that i think we should lose sight of the fact that his victory in the presidential election was a product of that electoral -- and old institution, namely the electoral college. hillary clinton got almost 3 million more votes. so it can't be said that this was a choice that was made by the medical people. >> there was something of a fluke about his election, because of the way the forces happen to come together where things like the hollywood, access hollywood tape got discounted because it was topped by new skin or something else breaking so quickly, and no one could absorb it or even react to it in time -- new scandal. >> i heard someone say, i can't member who, that trump's genius in this case was to place before people a binary choice and say, we are both awful. we are both awful, and so the question is, who is least awful to you? and that sort of maybe is what is tied to do right now with the fight between him and the democrats and the media about russia and the "new york times" is, you don't like me, you shouldn't like them either. either it's a wash or pick your side because everybody, everybody is a player, everybody is a partisan, everybody is a liar. i'm a liar, they are a liar, everybody is a liar. so this binary choice thing -- >> crash and the whole system down. >> but that's the secret to success, was the notion of saint the system stinks. everybody was bad. obama was bad. bush was bad. iraq was a disaster. obamacare is a disaster. everything that is happen before me is disgraceful, disgusting and a failure, and edwin is a loser, and i am the only, and so i am going to come anyway because look at all these losers before me. if they could've only want if the system had not broken down. >> how long will that play out at the presidential level? >> what do you think? >> i guess everybody is wondering if he can last the full four years, and if not, how will his exit be brought about? i can't see it happening unless and until the republicans in congress decide that it is in their individual political life or death interest to get rid of president donald trump and replace them with vice president pence. >> there's a great difference, right, between trump and nixon. nixon had a democratic house and the democratic senate, and he had a democratic senate and house investigating him for two years. and trump -- >> very, very different democratic party. the south was still highly democratic. all those people who were seven democrats during nixon today would be members of the republican party. and he played on that. he made no effort whatsoever during the 1972 campaign to try to win congress because he was happy with where congress was. the son of the block with strong enough him join the republican party, -- southern block -- often loses some of the progresses in the republican party, but to get much of his legislative agenda enacted he relied on the same protection, prevented him from being impeached. >> think about 1972 and now, not to belabor this point, but when you go back and read about the origins of watergate, which is of course the burglary -- >> that's the origin, not the name. >> what i mean is that originate factor that made these investigations possible and that initiated the specific cover up that open a pandora's box of everything else that was going on. you look at it and you think that happe happened in june 197. in november 1972 nixon won the second largest landslide in american history. he won 61, -- >> everything but massachusetts and the district of columbia. >> right. you think why on earth, why would you be so paranoid as you think you need to break into, listen in on the democratic national committee? >> there was no white house direction for that stupid act. >> so the whole world of politics still briefed and lived in that kind of paranoid but it was all hidden. so the whole thing about trump is he takes up x and everything is on the surface. you have literally no, why doesn't he say i don't like putin? we should put sanctions on putin. even if he's a proven agent, wouldn't that be the thing to do like the cover your tracks a little bit? that's not his game. he covers no tracks. >> imagine if the shoe were on the other foot and it was -- if it was hillary clinton, president of the clinton being identified as a russian intelligence asset. >> well, he's working on that. he said it this morning. [laughing] >> last night he said something about why are you not investigating her? the oil -- >> uranium. >> the uranium sale where, why don't you talk about that? how does he know about that? >> and the foundation he wants investigated. >> watergate was not that big a story during -- >> it wasn't a story at all. >> until mid-73. >> in april 73 is when it becomes a story. watergate runs roughly 900 days from the june 17 to break in to the last trial of haldeman at ehrlichman and mitchell for the cover-up where there convicted in january of 75. during the initial period the only newspaper coverage was the "washington post." they didn't crack any of the story. what they do is made it an important story in the beltway. we see right now the media is very confused about how to handle trump, what to emphasize, what you deemphasize. we really have two papers in competition this time, both the "new york times" and the "washington post" are doing some of the best journalism that's happening. >> i would argue when we get to this institution breakdown, the immediate responsibility, that trump is playing on real emotions, real feelings and justified once about how the issues and concerns of a great many people associate with the more conservative part of the ideological spectrum feel as though they are disrespected, falsely covered, dishonestly covered, impugned by the mainstream media. so when he says don't listen to them when they talk about me and russia, it's just the same old nonsense, and the way they have treated conservative issues all along. that has residents though perhaps it shouldn't and -- >> are conservatives really embracing his position on russia? >> no, they are not but the question is when he rallies his faithful, it is, we know, we're polling data, but when he says don't listen to them, they are lying, don't trust them, they are lying, there's a great many, there's a lot of historical experience that conservatives have you back that argument up. he's using it i think completely opportunistically to say don't pay attention to things you ought to pay attention to but it still resonates. >> he doesn't select any conservative i've ever known for a long time, and i know many of them. -- he doesn't sound like -- >> i don't find any driving ideology or core police in the name. he said positions at almost all sides of all issues at different times in his life, and slides her an even today as president on different issues. >> i don't disagree with that at all but that doesn't mean that's not his base and that's not who he is playing too as he attempts to distract and sort of tell people not to pay attention to the things that -- >> what can he deliver this space and how long will they stay? >> we don't know. that's part of the test in some odd way that you're saying that we're in the middle of peer we don't know. >> i think it goes a lot deeper than the media or any recent current events. i would kind of blame the framers for this. [laughing] we've got a system of government that was designed in 1789, and it was state-of-the-art political technology. and we still have that same machine even though there's been a lot of experience on that democratic governments work since then, a lot of new technology, new electoral technology, new governmental technology. we still have the old one. a we talk about how darn it, it's worked well for 225 years, or whatever, or whatever it is, but that overlooks, for example, 1860. the machine that was created could not solve the main problem of the united states. it was incapable. it had to be solved by what was up until then the bloodiest war in history. and i think if you look at systems around the world that are based on our model, the presidential model and, with the congress and separation of powers, most of them end up military dictatorships at some point. >> no one has adopted an electoral college. >> look, -- >> the cardinals. >> one of the thoughts i have is we are six states away as you know from another constitutional convention, which is made even more terrifying than living with the constitution that we have. >> the late philosopher sidney hook who delivered the jefferson lecture when he won an award from the national endowment for humana's in the 1980s made this passionate pitch saying everybody's terror comes from social convention itself, a mark of this total lack of trust in her own system because of course it's built into the system that you can have one. i'm scared about what people might want to play around with the first amendment. example if you do it, but nonetheless it you can pull it off, that is part of the system -- >> the articles. >> obviously the state-of-the-art system has been altered over the course of 225 years to the amendment process. we now have direct election center to spirit wear started 1913. we have the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments which changed -- >> we still have a machine that requires the president, a congress and the supreme court, all of them separately chosen, separately elected to agree. and it has to do with so many places where will organize interests can get their piece of the pie that it designs incoherent public institutions. obamacare is not what obama or me or probably you would like for our country. i mean, i would like something like france has got more like canada has got, works fine, very understandable. you don't have to spend your life filling out forms and trying to decipher hospital bills. but this has to be jury rigged so that it pleases enough interest to get it through this enormously difficult process. and that in turn, i think that in turn counts for only some of the public cynicism. people have been trying to get a century socialized medicine since the wilson administration. every president elected since truman, every democratic president elected speeders nixon as well. >> nixon, i wish we had that one because it has gotten worse since then. nixon's plan now would look like bernie sanders. >> may i ask you a question? you came in with an administration that really wasn't a washington-based group. >> worked for the carter administration as a speechwriter. worked for the nixon initiation and i work for the reagan administration so you run the gamut here of what -- >> but i'm curious when you came in as really a non-washington group, did you have the kind of organizational breakdown that we are seeing with this administration? i don't recall that as part of the carter startup. >> no. it sort of felt that way inside, a kind of felt that way. but basically, the machine was still working well. it's true that the white house staff was probably the most inexperienced ever until now. we were damaged by our ignorance of the way this machine worked and so we had speedy what was the learning curve? how long did it take to begin to understand how that machine does work? >> about three and half years i guess. [laughing] >> that's what i thought. >> i should say that he did go back and read george stephanopoulos memoir, all too human, if remember he was what other people who is credited with having gotten bill clinton elected in 1992 and although clinton was not, didn't have people come no one got more votes that he did but he became president. he was a minority president, he got 43% of the vote to win and he brought in a very inexperienced staff. the first three to six months of that administration were a disaster. >> they raise all the wrong issues at all the wrong times. there was no issue discipline. clinton himself had little discipline. they didn't know how to work the levers of government and they made stupid mistakes and had a chief of staff who literally had never worked in washington before, didn't know what to do. it's a very interesting portrait to remind you quite a lot of what is going on with the trump administration, except the difference is that it's not trump, of course, and that's come it's not that clinton wanted chaos and so he wasn't sure how to be president yet. of course trial breeds chaos and there's this bizarre theory about this administration that there are now 520 confirmable positions andmajor offices throughout the cabinet, for which there isn't even a nominee. >> apparently on some, not even an intention to find somebody for those. >> right. u.n. effort -- you have an effort, it's either purposeful, i don't think it's perceval, it's just that cancer is such that they cannot even fill even the most corrupt understand why you want to be president, which is to let give all your friends jobs. they don't even com, they can'tn do that. [laughing] it's a very odd thing, like that's the easy part. there are ten people everybody in the administration, there's some job at labor you never heard of, the department of labor that their 20 people whose life ambition it is to be that assistant secretary and you should be able to pick one out of a hat. >> virtually, those people were all part of the republican establishment. they were all state parties, think tanks. the republican party, the people who are the kind of people you withdraw this cabinet from were all against trump. many of them were -- >> holding against him for being against him. >> that's right is still yet to step a government spirit within done is, it's my understanding is they have minders, lower levels that they put out to launch cabinet officers that are there to make sure that they are not bad mouthing the present. >> it's like in the soviet -- have administered within yet the party chief. >> that is exactly what's going on. they don't need all the sub cabinet officers because they have -- >> although in the soviet system there's this overarching ideology that at least tropically guided people in a policy direction, whereas in this case, what do you know what the policy of the department of commerce is? >> it's going to be all executive orders all the time. >> right. so this is the question about the institutional strength at least in governmental terms. there are some signs that the institutions are fighting back, to executive orders on the travel bans, courts have prevented it. you could have a showdown in which trump asserting executive supremacy, which is not an irrational doctrine constitutionally would say, you don't have any right, national security act of 1962 gives me very strong powers, executive powers over the immigration system. courts have no right to intervene. you are not even using a constitutional framework for legislative framework to say that what i'm doing is wrong. some just going to ignore you and put the travel ban place. >> code a 37% approval president dare take on the entirety of the federal today sherry? >> yes -- judiciary. >> another one of the peculiarities of our system is of the existence of an essentially sovereign court where it wasn't designed to be this way, but that failure, the supreme court you might say was forced to do the job that the other branches couldn't do. for example, legal segregation of schools in the united states of america. there was a problem that the congress and the president could not solve, and this is a problem that was damaging to say the least to our side in the cold war. the court solved that problem by fiat, and the court is a place where we actually have a coup d'état already. >> at eisenhower enforced it, too. >> you have a separate power structures and each are supposed to have their own separate but equal power structure. and though we look at trump everything okay, he's going to test this as never has been before tested in the early going, his testamentary issued executive order and just as was true with obama and the dream act court order, he hasn't said i'm ignoring you because he is not ready pick the other thing i think -- >> before you leave executive orders, i paused to read a couple of them and they are very thin. they are more come with going to do and we're going to study. for example, i was interested in the one that nixon tried which was an executive reorganization. he failed because he knew he needed the congress and he couldn't do it by pure executive action. a lot of time was spent on trying to design executive boarr to get ready. i read trump's reorganization and it's really a press release or a study of how we might do it. [laughing] >> travel ban is only thing that actually specifically directs his government to doing various -- a very specific policy act that involves people right now. >> a very short time. >> the cops -- by cops? the court stopped it. if you haven't been briefed on the system is going on at this conference, we now are in a position where we can invite actually a couple people to come up on the stage and participate briefly come in, ask a question, have a seat at the table and talk, if anybody wants speedy but you don't get water. [laughing] >> yet. i have a cold show i will not share mine with you. but if anyone, we will go on but if anyone wants to come up. i still think that if you go back and look at where what he's done, because his domination, got the nomination by ignoring and destroying the republican establishment. and it turns out all these supposedly powerful institutions like the republican national committee and the governors and endorsements by other politicians and all of this, once they were tested by somebody who said i do not recognize your authority, they were -- >> that is not really new. nixon, for example, ignored the republican national committee. he ignored the republican national party. he didn't put up support for the he didn't raise money for them. >> but that was after got elected. >> no. this is how we got elected in the first in 68 and dedicate in 72. he got his own organization. he didn't think the republican national committee could do anything for him and he could do it better. that's why he had his so-called committee to reelect and did it all in separate at the expense of the party. he sort dictated to the party what he wanted a didn't really expect much out of them. so it's not running knew what trump is doing. >> and trump became the nominee by the rest of the republican party splitting itself into so many written pieces that he could win these plurality states and emerge at the end of the process at the last one standing, even though he was the one that was explicitly disliked by the majority. >> became known as wedge issues. drove them apart. >> but i think again in terms of this institutional thing, imagine in a different time, in the 1980s were something like that, or even use gary hart as a counterexample. gary hart dared the media to find out if he was monkeying around and then he was on a yacht, the monkey business with donna rice -- >> monkeying around. >> this giant scandal that seems preposterous today just because we've advanced so far beyond anything like that. but had he really sort of like got into the 1980 election like he was a serious candidate, sort of imagine like the combined force of even just like the voice of the catholic church, like, you know, archbishop saying adultery is a great central something like that. but have an enormous impact in 1980. the largest denomination in the united states, 50 million out of 200 men said said their catholics and 259 said they were regular. had an enormous, and that if an archbishop were to say donald trump is it an appropriate person for president, even though they don't put it that way, with that have made a difference? are there those institutions no longer have the kind of moral veto over our politics that they once did. >> i think you have an audience member. >> come on out. >> i'm an idiot, but -- >> i'm sure not. >> go ahead. >> you don't need it. you have a mic there. >> apparently this is not working very well. i have to use this one. >> i'm not particularly astute, you know, a person who cares and reacts. >> just like the trump white house. [laughing] >> that's not -- [laughing] >> right. well, certainly when i'm looking for the overlap of the diagram and where can identify as a human, certainly i see that. i'm someone who i am certainly, i extrapolate kind of a breakdown of our social interactions, even what we lose more about each other with cell phones and settle or overt cues and i become a russian industry by people not abiding by the proper line system, but i do extrapolate that to a lack of concerns and awareness beyond a very limited view. some peoples life. like they just, you know, there's just not a lot of really caring about this stuff and the trickle-down. as important and as significant as these institutions can vote kill us will make us stronger. that fear is it will kill us spirit here can talk about this tribal is a show in? >> made a tribal thing and what's the percentage of nonvoters, nonregistered voters,% of people who just really, whatever. >> i will tell you in the 1980s when i was a kid and in the 1990s, one of the things that distinguished the right from the left, the way the culture was built is that people on the right like me, a lot of people like us, i used to say we are bilingual, whereas liberals were monolingual. that is to say, i knew my own site. i knew the issues of the right. i had read conservative text. i understood conservative policy prescriptions, but i also knew ricks side your rick was in the editor of "the new republic," and i knew where the left came down on things. i understood the vocabulary of the left. i read all their works also. we had a real advantage in some odd way because we were bilingual whereas the latter often very provincial, didn't kind to conservative ideas, was totally astonished by the rise and success of ronald reagan. things like that. now because of the rights of these stovepipes, it is entirely possible over the last 20 years to be a conservative who is largely ignorant of the things that liberals are concerned about, just as throughout much of my life that has been easy for liberals to understand what is the people who didn't agree with and don't live around thing. that's a a big change. it meant in terms of the ideological struggle between the sides that there was an advantage that the right had that it no longer has. now it's just a war of brute force. >> would you describe stove piping for those who are too young to be familiar with it? >> well, just living in a mental world of people who agree with you. through the media, you consume and the people that you talk to. >> right. >> you had an advantage. you speak really good liberal. you are very fluid and dad, but you and i are from the same gene pool politically. my father was on commentary for the first few years it was being published. i think that's the loss. i think you guys were kind of like any late commando core for the right -- elite. to go out there and sneak behind enemy lines and pick people off. i think we're reaching a point now where most conservatives can't speak a liberal. >> and not at all. >> most liberals can't speak conservative. it was a time when they could, but conservatives, lbj could speak conservative. all those southern democrats knew how to do it. but now we separate ourselves into these two blocks that don't touch each other and we just look at each other across no man's land. >> i am multilingual. most recently holding the goldwater chair of american institution and i'm not sure goldwater would be considered a conservative anymore. i think our guest makes a really important point, is that a lot of people are confused. uncertain. i think also particularly those of us who make a lot of commentary tend to talk down to trump supporters which i think is a very serious mistake and very troublesome to me, that these people have deep beliefs in this man and that he will accomplish everything he has promised. it's very hard for them to be told he just doesn't understand the process, he doesn't understand how it's going to work and is not likely to deliver as much as he has promised them. >> i just think the world, the really hard level trump supporter is much less policy driven that it is driven by a sense that the country is gotten away from them, that it is no longer their country. it's either been stolen or, in other words, largely it's been stolen by those who benefited from nafta, by trade deals, by wars. >> even the minor suggestions on nafta. >> but that's the point, is that it's all kind of an expression of this terrible thing that's happened, this is not the country i grew up in. i don't have the expectations i used to have it. somebody has got to do something. so he said i will do something. but i doubt he's going to do anything basically. >> and voting becomes just that, an expression of emotion rather than which program, which set of policies do you endorse? partly because people have lost faith in the government to really carry out those policies. can i ask you -- where do you get your information? >> those two stellar journalistic sources that you mentioned earlier. wnyc is sustaining supporters, the new yorker. but also work in the world, you know. i'm actually, i a professional fool. wonder the things i do is is i work in hospitals as a clown, and -- >> that's so nice. amazing. [applause] >> today is your national holiday. [laughing] >> sum of a friend who could not come today are out marching en masse in costume. but -- >> and it's been a tough year for clowns. [laughing] >> i can show you a picture. >> do you want to join in? >> i just wanted to basically challenge what has emerged during the campaign and and subsequent discussions including this table. because i feel basically it gets in the way, hinders really our discussion about what's going on. that meme is trump immediately tap into the frustrations of people who have been lied to by their institutions. and my feeling is that, in fact, the institutions have been lying as much as suggested by this meme. in fact, a lot of the real frustration out there comes from forces beyond the control of the government, of any particular institutions. organization, robotics and things like that, taking away jobs. and the problem is that people are told, not told enough about those forces, but because of fox news in large part, and other media outlets on the right, they are told it's all a problem of dysfunctional government. that to me as not an honest appraisal. so it's like everybody is against government among certain groups, but if you have, and this is well known, medicare, yes. do you like social security? yes. how many of them know that medicare is far more efficient, for example, then private health insurance companies? the overhead of medicare is about 3%. 3%. the overhead of private insurance, they spend so much money the nine claims, something like 27 or 30%. that's just a little example. >> but i totally agree with you on the point that there is then an effort to say that things that are gigantic civilizational, historical forces like globalization are the result of bad policies, that if you just done x, y and z and then then the other things than we would still have factories in the small towns in ohio, as opposed to the fact that the united states as a result of the oddity of world war ii ended up with 60% of the world and the actual production for 20 years and jobs that were working-class jeff sullivan became middle-class jobs because we were basically supplying the worlds entire industrial needs, or two-thirds of the world industrial needs and then as europe rebuild and japan rebuilt and then as over the course of time china and india came online as industrial players, the role of the united states was going to shrink inevitably. and, of course, the thing you're not supposed to say anymore, and that's a fantastic thing, there's been an alleviation of poverty over the last 30 years, worldwide poverty of the sort that the world has never seen with 1 billion people being lifted out of subsistence living into maybe not what we would consider middle-class life, but at least a life in which you are not likely, which is possible that your children might die of starvation. so this is actually a fantastic thing. >> sounds like a liberal. >> not at all. i think this is the result of market forces. however, what i would say is that saying that, when people like tom friedman who then took the fact of globalization and started saying this is great, the world is flat, every thing is to be wonderful, it's great for everybody. a lot of conservative thinkers, i don't mean like politicians and stuff, but our people from the '80s and '90s onward who talk about how community, humanitarian life, that thinks that bound us to each other and kept civilization going were dying because of all sorts of things that should've been going on. that wasn't just, the government is broken. was the idea that government was starting to take on a role that was harmful because it was playing too much of come is taking on the role of parents and churches that are best done there. i would also caution you to say that it's not just that fox news said government is broken. barack obama said government was broken. everybody said government was broken. you can blame republicans for everything, and fox news which has only 3 million viewers out of 330 million people and united states, it's not their fault government is -- that's also a large historical and impersonal force of things going on that he think is about the frank at institutions. >> often when you look closely at the analysis of public reaction to institutions, take congress which has the choice with a 1. single digit approval. but when you ask the same people how to feel about their own individual members of congress or members of the city, they like them. by and large even if they vote against them. you have a lot of conflicting views of the way the process works. i find striking ignorance about the way government really works when you talk to people in detail about how things happen in washington and don't happen. >> i just want to respond to what you said about fox. the reality, in my opinion, is that 3 million daily viewers doesn't sound like a lot but it has influenced well beyond that, just like the "new york times," you know, it's about 1 million subscribers efficiently or a little more. >> not failing anymore either. >> right. it's going up. to use maybe a tired expression, it reverberates, fox does, the liberal outlets. i think when fox, and my quarrel with them is that it's not just on the skepticism of government. it's giving a platform to uninformed frames about government, about obama personally with the common unit, he's not a citizen of the u.s. it was a platform for people to say things like that, and that's not helpful for honest dialogue. >> of the threads, they may overlap with fox viewers are others come is fundamentalist religious thinking which to me is kind of a manifest issue. that trump come in the interview, russia, look at us. we are not so great. but that's actually something that when will a rather people who are opposed on the political spectrum said that -- bill maher -- of the people in the army of those who are count supporters of this crazy opposite bill, that was, there at the position. now it's a proposition and it's a flipping and a disregard. i would say for me the use of the word conservative is erroneous. it's reactionary you know, nixon brought in the epa, right? >> he did. >> and china. >> that the conversion. that's a bizarre conversion of so much of what's going on into a cult of personality, in which some of that which is said by somebody that you decide you like is excused, whereas anything that is said by somebody that you don't like, anything negative that a set of somebody you don't like you accept immediately. and that's a species, that's human nature. >> yeah, but i think the inspection from that -- is significant. >> the evangelicals with the group in this country that approached this last election with most hardheaded lee. 81% of them went for trump even though trump is a very definition of -- >> roe v. wade came down during the nixon presidency in january of 73. there was almost no reaction in the nixon white house for that decision to go to person reacted was pat buchanan who was a good catholic and he saw it from that view, not necessarily from his right view. but if you watch what comes out of roe the way it spreads out and gives birth to the religious right and gives birth also to the no compromise. because these were now religious issues and they couldn't be compromise. this was the work of the devil, if you are on the wrong side, and it goes from there. >> but in terms of that when you talk about the hard headedness, what was to come why did they look at trump and say him and not her? you know -- >> the supreme court. >> i think the supreme court and then there's also the fact that during the obama presidency there was in the administrative state that steve bannon hate so much, they were regulations written to compel people of traditionalist religious beliefs to conform with modern morality in a way, the case about the little sisters of the poor and hobby lobby. we don't have time, we're almost done, but this is what people said they are going to tell me that i have to believe what they believe, and i don't want to do that. just like roe create a subculture that mainstream people did not know existed, they did not know it happened. it was not across any i ideological lines. most evangelicals in the 1970s were democrats like jimmy carter and his sister he was an evangelical preacher. astonishing enough, they were democrats, as republicans and democrats joined in this new movement that took, not everybody on their side because they didn't see it coming. just as in some way trump's ability to combine anti-trade with this sense that the country is being taken away and all sorts of racists points, too, not people for a loop. those of us on the right thought 2016 will be fantastic. we have an interesting candidates. this very hard right guy who was far from texas and the governor of wisconsin, the governor of ohio, the governor of louisiana, the governor of new jersey. these guys want all remarkable electoral victories. some of them in democratic states. what a fantastic job of stores the then this guy comes off the escalator and knocks them over. i mean, it turns out that things go on our bubbling on in the country that people who were going around saying that was really a good piece, rick, that peace that -- your piece is really good, too. in the country is like, what are you guys talking about? we haven't gotten a raise in -- >> it was better in the theater than the others. >> everything stinks and it turns out the message that everything stinks was a lot, we are all going, it's not too bad, 2% growth, you know. like my cousin just died of an opioid overdose. i don't think everything is so good. what did hillary do? trump had gave his incredibly dark convention speech and then hillary and obama, sunday it's like america's great, everything is wonderful. >> hillary did win the popular vote though. >> i think that is the best -- she won the popular vote but the whole thing is -- >> it was about the fourth closest in recent history. and the house and the senate, republican house and the republican senate are the product of more people actually voting for democratic candidates than republican candidates. so the house, for example, in a 50-50 election, republicans have an 11 seat majority. so i hate to keep coming back to the structural stuff, but if we just imagine what the public conversation would be if hillary had eked out an electoral vote -- >> trump was planning on that and making it hel held for her. >> the only other thing -- >> we would be in a horrible mood and everybody would be unhappy. >> the republicans, you would be saying, well, this has condi rice that won't. it turns out that you can't -- cauterized -- you can't win the presidency with the races, sexual predator. >> i don't think, in fact, i was certainly plenty before the election happened, on the next four years being a garbage show of dissension and the republican party splitting anyway. >> he would be who he continues to be and probably would have preferred that, because he could've run his life like a business without the accountability of the institutions that were examining -- >> it clear he didn't want the job. [laughing] >> go back to nixon. if you read kissinger is white house years, january 20, they get into the white house, there's a war between china and the soviet union. stuff is going on in india. they hit the ground running. this was all nixon cared about was foreign-policy, and they were -- >> his line to his domestic policy people were don't get me in trouble and do what you want to do. >> because he wanted to be president. he had a sense that he could manage the world spirit he wanted to be the peacemaker. >> eddie didn't like campaigning. he wanted to be president. it's exactly the opposite of trump. as president he continued to campaign and his favorite subject is i won, i've won, i won. >> or comes the hook. [applause] >> let's start a war with australia. >> that was absolutely fantastic. but, unfortunately, it has to stop. it could go on and on i think in terms of the depth of things. we are going to break now for half an hour. the