He was here for the first time . Welcome, thanks for stopping by. Were excited to have you for tonights event and just so you know, we do have one or two author events every single week plus our book club, twostory times a week, social gatherings like coloring books and wine so if you enjoy your time here tonight, check us out on social media, thats the city bookshop on facebook and instagram and the city books on twitter and the sign up for our newsletter and you will hear about the other cool things we have coming up. Tonight its our pleasure to welcome doug wead. Doug is a New York Times bestselling author. He has been an advisor to two american president s and is one of the few living historians to have written about all the american president s. He is interviewed six us president s, seven first ladies, coauthored a book with one, has entertained sue in his own home and has served on the white house staff as a special assistant to the president. He cofounded the Charity Awards with first Lady Nancy Reagan and he is here to talk about his new book game of thorns with Kenneth Walsh who he will introduce shortly. After our talk we will have a q a from the audience and you are welcome to purchase copies of the book so thank you very much for joining us. Thank you very much hannah, its my privilege to introduce Kenneth Walsh. He was the president of the White House PressCorps Association that they put on the big dinner that they refuse to attend this year, one of the most prestigious events of washington dc and he has covered how many president s, ken . Six president s. In the white house as part of the White House Press corps. Hes worked at us news for how many years . For 33 years. 33 years and senior writer, he said almost every title you can think of that us news. He is a remarkable journalist. They are almost extinct, id put it to you that way. He may be among four or five journalists that i know of who i dont know where he stands politically. All the others, i can tell you if there left or right. I cant tell you where ken is because hes absolutely objective and pursues the story whatever it may be so i guess we could call him a traditional journalist or oldfashioned journalist but its a profession thats disappearing pretty quickly, it only had a brief time so im going to turn it over to him. He is the author of many books in his own right, the one that i love is a history of all theplaces where the president lived. Like nixon in san clemente and the kennedys in hyannisport, hes written a book on that which you can find in this bookstore and another book that i love is the celebrity president. He talks about how president s have become celebrities and its part of their power today. An extension of the bully pulpit, and hes got a new book out, ill ask him to say what that is and will get started. Thank you bob. Im a traditional journalist so i hope that by the end of this discussion, you dont know my politics and whether i succeeded in that for 31 years in the white house because i dont think i could have covered president s ranging from Ronald Reagan to clinton to barack obama to both bushes and now donald trump unless i could talk about things right down the middle but the other thing i wanted to mention is doug and i have known each other for 25, 27 years now so i hope that we can conduct our talk here we talk over lunch, that it was going to be informal, we welcome you to ask questions afterwards and find it whenever we had lunch and i do this from many sources, the best informationcomes from more give and take. So with that, its a very interesting time for dogs book to come out. I have a book called coming out called ultimate insiders about white house photographers, the staff photographers, personal president s photographers who are the ultimate flies on the wall. They hear things no one else years, see things no one else these thats my next book coming out in september but its an interesting time for this discussion and for dogs book, game of thorns because the town is the biggest parlor game in washington now is what is donald trump all about . What is he going to do next . What is going to happen, what does the Republican Party mean anymore and i hope doug can explain a little bit about that. Whats become of clinton is a man so on but really its donald trump who dominated the daytoday and with his tweets, the overnight because in every News Organization you basically have to have somebody covered donald trump from 11 pm to 4 am because he tweets out then. So theres another layer of coverage thats been added but i wanted to ask dog, basically just a basic question which you talk about in the book at great length. What did donald trump do right and what did Hillary Clinton do wrong . What jumps to the top of your mind as to how this election turned out, so many people were wrong, so many pundits were wrong, so many people in my profession were wrong, people of both parties were wrong. What happened . I rattled off numbers but she out staffed him 5 to 1, outspent him 8 to 1 and trump did have a super pack that got started and ed rollins and jesse penns got something going but she raised 32 million. Her super pack raised more money than any super pack in American History and they spent it all. She had a ground game with 960,000 volunteers on the ground and it exceeded Barack Obamas ground game. She had eric schmidt, she had the ceo of google in charge of social media she had hollywood, she had academia, she had wall street, she had the banks. She had 240 newspaper endorsements, he had 19 but he had a message. And the message was burned like a brand. Everybody in america new what his message was. Everybody in america know, if you ask them right now what is hillarys message . But they knew Donald Trumps message, to make America Great again and were going to get jobs back. I would say to them, at trump tower, you are off message and they would say we are on message because part of the message is not a politician and the American People were tired of politicians. Theyhad the last two president s, the rich got richer, the poor got poorer. I would argue it felt like Free Enterprise was dead, you had to be an insider. They saw corruption both on the left and the right and here was somebody ironically a billionaire but a troublemaker and they wanted to see everything upset so in a funny way, his off message, equates mistakes were reassurances to them that this guy. You talk about the clinton advantage, what was that and it really was an advantage in the end, wasnt it . It wasnt an advantage. She had the advantage of experience, all these things going for her but there was hubris obviously and yes. As i was out covering the rallies for both sides and i remember people in washington saying yes, the values are intense, there are giant crowds and so on that far outnumber Hillary Clintons rallies but really it doesnt tell you how the election is going to come out. Trump said the rallies do matter. And it turned out they did. I wonder if you saw that coming, if you felt that intensity around the country . People said if you went to these places in these rust belt states like pennsylvania and ohio and wisconsin they saw all the trump signs. No signs for Hillary Clinton and in washington it was dismissed, people put signs up but that doesnt ended indicate whats going to happen on election day. I wonder when you saw it coming that trump was going to win yourself . I had bought here who by the way is giving the next book party, he was telling me there were trump signs all over pennsylvania and i said i dont see them and the thing i kept thinking of can was i remember George Mcgovern, he had very intense rallies and i cant forget George Mcgovern saying i dont believe these polls, i see this enthusiasm in these crowds, you cant tell me this doesnt equate to something so i kept hearing that echo in my mind when i hear trump say these rallies, i cant remember George Mcgovern who was misled by those rallies and the impact of those rallies but i have to admit that it took me off guard. Im portrayed on youtube as one of the few that said he might win. I couldnt see, its been a specialty of mine the evangelical vote and i have to say my wife miriam, she was running everything but was working on this bookand my daughter chloe who is around here somewhere taking pictures, they were helping me. Do the research on the book but one of the things we had on was the evangelical vote and they dismiss it, barack obama saw that and he called up toward the end and said you are losing the white evangelical vote and you dont have it and they lacked that and after the election was over, one of obamas assistance wrote an oped in the Washington Post that said why did hillary lose the evangelical vote vote, part of the headline was she didnt ask for it. That turned out to matter because 81 percent of them voted for donald trump and i can tell you from our experience, they were very conflicted right up till the end. He was glued, he was not someone they wanted to support but on november 4 when a bunch of celebrities got together and started using the f word and all kinds of profanity and then get out the vote, after this, after that and using jesus and i thought wait a second, with a bunch of celebrities get together and use the name mohammed as a curse word in a Campaign Song . What reaction would you get . One percent of the population are muslim, 78 percent are christian so is that going to work . Nobody in the flyover state paid attention to this but it does matter in those flyover states but trump did not have the role model qualities, he didnt live his life as evangelicals and conservative christians or practicing catholics feel someone should live their life as far as, the studio 54, hedonistic lifestyle and how he talked about women and so on. How did people get past that . Use some of the buzzwords, theres a moment in the book game of thorns where hes in trump tower and hes depressed and despond, he misses the soul preacher Norman Vincent po who is a presbyterian, positive guy on fifth avenue. He would go down his list, hes watching tv and he sees this sexy blonde televangelist, and shes talking about hope and he calls her up on the phone and says gosh, your terrific. He says can i get you up here . He flies her up to new york city and she walked in through the neighborhood so to speak because when you study Donald Trumps life he would always move into a neighborhood and rent, he wouldnt buy and hed rent and then he hit the pavement. Hed walk around and listen to people and talk to people. He wouldnt buy a thing sometimes for several years and then when you thought he knew the area, he would buy. This televangelist, she walked him around the evangelical neighborhood. Heknew the different subcultures. When you talk about 26 percent of the American Population and you compare that to africanamericans, 12. 9percent, theres a lot of subgroups. He understoodthose and when he gave a speech, he would say things that would belittle him that they would pick up on that would go to the heads of the Washington Post and New York Times. At one point , he said to paula jones , that donald trump, you should know ive been married three times and she says me too. So he wasnt judgmental to him. They were soul mates so thats the story that has hardly been told in game of thorns and then the catholic story was, theres a story in game of thorns where bill clinton takes his telephone and he throws it off the roof of his president ial pad in little rock arkansas because he so mad. Hillary ended staff, you wanted her to go to notre dame and give a speech, she wouldnt do it and when the emails came out, you can blame it on russia but when it came out what was in it, the captive spring, that was damaging and bill clintons answer was you need to get out in front of that, you need to speak up and basically the catholic spring idea was once we get into power, we are going to set up and use committees and coop and it will influence their doctrine to make it catholic spring. More of a liberal, more socially acceptable, a lot of bishops were taking away and something for you to separate church and straight and get mad of us for talking over social policy. Bill clinton wanted her to get in front of that and say were not going to do that, this is wrong. I denounced that, id just like republican would denounce a donation from the wrong person but her fear was , theres no reason to call attention to that. A lot of people believe and know about it, the news media is not covering it so lets keep it under wraps and bill clinton was saying you cant do that, its out there. Its gone from bishop to bishop to diocese to diocese, youve got to get in front and say absolutely not,we had nothing to do withthis. You mentioned some of this came out of that email, 22 percent of the population of catholics. But this is part of that email, the league of massive amounts of email from the Clinton Campaign and from podesta who was the campaign chairman, john podesta and jennifer call erie was part of that. Both of them were catholic as i remember. Which was why they had the expertise to feel they could influence. So how much was that, whether the leaks, how much difference did that make . I think they were big because if you think back, you remember when George Hw Bush one, he won with a tremendous landslide and he split the catholic vote 5050 with dukakis and yet he won a landslide because of the evangelicals he had. Trump, he took the catholic vote substantially over Hillary Clinton. She could have gotten a portion of that as barack obama said afterwards if she asked and bill clinton felt if she gone after them so she could have had some of those votes but i think those leaked emails did have a big impact and i think the clintons had belatedly come to that conclusion, i think their first reaction was its all jim comays fault and they said. They release public statements and said its all jim comeys fault. You dont hear them talking about jim comey anymore. Then it became the russians fault. In fairness, the russians gave money to Hillary Clinton, they didnt give money to trump, they gave money to her foundation and got the Silicon Valley deal, there was actually potentially theoretically and exchange, there was no exchange with trump. They help trump, okay, hes empowered. First thing he does is increase military spending. So the other thing i wanted to talk about a little bit done is the white working class. I know in the book, you talk about how you pick this out and i was picking up from standpoint on how Hillary Clinton was completely missing the problem she was having in these rust belt states. They were confident they were going to win pennsylvania. The republicans always talk about winning pennsylvania which they almost never do. I didnt expect it this time. Florida is a different area of the country but that happened with the working class. I know in the book i put a tag on it here because i propose and come from a workingclass background myself and you said if they had been overlooked, despised, taken for granted, this is their moment to speak. They had been shamedinto telling the pollsters what they wanted to hear in the privacy of their polling booth. They had struck a blow. Talk about that, hes not a workingclass guy, hes an American Business aristocrat. How did he sends this . And Michael Moore was right on the money. When mike moore did this event in ohio, he teased the audience if you remember that, he looked out at the audience and said i know what youre going to do and they all laughed like they were little kids and he caught them in the act because he knew they were going to vote for donald trump. I think they resented being pushed and they resented the media, the condescension of the media. This is how we want you to vote. The common media mayhave overplayed it. And they just reacted to that. Dont tell me what to do. For a little bit it might have worked but i think it might have been overdone and the media came off as desperate. They did during the reagan years and they didnt like being called racists. They had voted twice for barack obama, the same group all through those rust belt states. They took great pride in the fact that they were White Catholic union voters, twice they voted for barack obama, they were proud of themselves. They would love to see that stigma of racism ended and they took pleasure in voting for barack obama. Now they were being called a racist because, didnt they vote for another democrat who was an africanamerican . I think they thought no, im not going to be pushed into that. The deep robles moment, talk about that. Hillary clinton used that word to describe Trump Supporters and i think that was really offensive to a lot of people. It was worn like a badge by many people because i think the humor, it was overplayed. People said oh, we are quick to think the worst thing about ourselves but if somebody else says something about us, its critical. But here, the voters were just defiant. Like im deplorable . Give me a break. Thats overreach and theypushed back and took pride and wrote the word deplorable. I want to go into what you make of whats going on extemporaneously with President Trump but before i do that, what did you learn about the country from this campaign yourself . What did you learn about where the country is, what the country wants from its government, how much it changed t