Independent publishing and bookstores. Before we begin just a bit about matt. Matt taibbi is the author of New York Times bestsellers the divide and the great derangement. Derangement. Hes an editor for Rolling Stone and the wind of it 2007 National Magazine book magazine book columns and commentary. Please join me in welcoming matt. [applause] hello . Thats better. Here we go. Thank you very much. Thank you, everybody for coming. Before you start tonight, im speaking tonight with a bit of a heavy heart. I just got the news on the way here that the great Investigative ReporterWayne Barrett has died this afternoon. Wayne was my first boss in this business. He was a mentor to me and hundreds of other reporters and other media people in this city. He dedicated his life to rooting out corruption in new york and i think new york is a better place because of him. Its a very sad day. I think its also, no journalist in america knew more about donald trump than wayne. He was his first biographer, and part of me thinks that he just couldnt face tomorrow. Hes been ill for a long time, but anyway i think its almost good he was spared, he took the election very hard. I thought i would tell a story about this, wayne represented an oldschool approach to this job that is kind of rapidly disappearing. I thought i would tell a story about what it was like working for him. When i was 17, wayne was obsessed can his thing was to get obsessed with like evil characters and then they can do everything they did and hope to find something. At the time he was obsessed with donald manis who was the queens Bureau President and involved in the spiraling corruption involving cable television. Davey luigi, ladies and gentlemen. Wayne wanted me to find something on manis sleep first he sent me to dig up an application he made for permission to build a Swimming Pool in his backyard. I got all the plans for that, the permits and brought it back to an well, did you go to the house . I said what youll recode 2004 . To see if he built a brick i had to go down to the house. Theres an enormous bids and also yet to pass through his property to the back of house to get to the fence. So you cant see the Swimming Pool. I went back to wayne and i told him i couldnt see the poker he sent me back there and insisted i climb over the fence to see if it was, in fact, a pool there. Thats oldschool journalism. Wayne wasnt into the internet. He was like seeing it with your own eyes. Hes like one of the last great ones. Anyway, goodbye, wayne. So trump. When i was getting ready to do this speech i dug up my notebooks from last year. And this is New Hampshire 2016. I used to write down comments and jokes from journalists who were standing next to me in sort of the peanut gallery. This once as a year from now when youre giving a speech about the trump administration, this shit will cms funny. [laughter] will not seem as funny. Typically what he used to is i used to, this side of the page would be the actual speech and then the site would be the peanut gallery, some of the people in the media. So for instance, you have one that says trump is saying the heroine problem, the drug problem, all the stuff they are bringing in here, its incredible, its incredible. Heres the hair one coat and over and says i want some now myself. [laughter] theres another one where trump is getting a speech and while he was talking a microphone without pics the first thing he said was we are not going to pay the rent. If the mic doesnt work, im not going to pay the rent. You wont get anything from me. Here it says everything is a freaking conspiracy with that guy. Really funny stuff. Its funny, its kind of an interesting thought exercise me to go back, if you combine his stream of consciousness, crazily thinking with my bad handwriting, you get this amazing sort of stream non sequiturs. Like, this is a polymer. I like to call it the trump not taken. Its just trumps ramblings youre not going to do that. We dont want your cars. I saw tens of millions of condominiums. They send it back and they dont want the beef. We dont make televisions anymore. [laughter] its funnier, i dont know. Thats the problem with the trump is that, you know, on the one hand it simultaneously the funniest story in history and also the most horrible thing ever. Unfortunately like funny corbel is my own personal professional niche portable. Even though i was working on other books throughout most of this time. I kept getting sucked into the vortex of trump thought the last couple of years and gravitated over and over toward it. And in the end all of these reports that we ended up writing for Rolling Stone ended up becoming the core of this book. This is the fourth president ial campaign that ive covered for Rolling Stone. I set this up earlier in the week in the magazine, covering the campaign trail for Rolling Stone, its kind of this sacred iconic job that is passed down from generation to generation. Its like being the dread pirate roberts. Ive never not been conscious of the tradition how and the amazing work that came before me. The highlight of course is Hunter Thompsons coverage of Richard Nixon in 1972. That was the Gold Standard and it always will be, and its hard not to be conscious of it when you work for a magazine because every time you come in, the first thing you see is this amazing tapestry of original illustrations by Ralph Steadman of people like nixon and george wallace. This is the tradition of Rolling Stone. This is what chuck to us by edge of all the time. So for both myself and for victor you lost to the illustrations, the amazing, weird, freaky illustrations for this book, weve always been conscious of the idea that this is what we are aspiring to in this job. The problem is, i think what made Hunter Thompsons work in 1972 special and what made it art as opposed to just really crisp, snappy magazine writing was that thompson had this level of obsession, hatred love discussed. He had this relationship with nixon that was far beyond the pale and get anything he fell for any other politician. Thompson has an ear for evil that made him i think uniquely and maybe congenitally attuned to the particular vibe of moral death that nixon radiated. And as a result they had this kind of suck and the clink throughout their entire lives, and nixon touched a nerve that just made them almost physically convulsed in these amazing like funny observations came out. She even come toward the end of his life, started to talk about how he defined himself by nixon. In his obituary of nixon he said some of my best friends have hated nixon all their lives. My mother hates nixon. My son hates nixon. I hate nixon and this has brought us all together. [laughter] there was this other line he wrote that always just cracks me up. Nixon was so crooked he needed servants to open screw his pants on in the morning. Even his funeral was illegal. The thing about obsession is you cant force it. Its a onceinalifetime thing. Its a combination of discussed, physical and moral revulsion but also mixed in with fascination and attraction. For some people ugly is just uglagood but if there are other people who are uniquely sensitive to horrible side of life and endless gradations of ugly, i am unfortunately one of those people. Its the universe of beauty. Everybody in the world has a sense of beauty and if you grew up looking at thousands and thousands of faces until one day you see that one face that you feel is put on earth just for you and thats instantly, you fall in love and that moment. For me trump was like that except it was the opposite. When i first saw him on a camping trip i thought this is a person who is unique, horrible, amazing, terrible characteristics were put on earth specifically for me to appreciate or unappreciated or whatever the verb is. Because i really been spending a lot of the last 10 to 12 years without knowing it, preparing for donald trump to happen. In order to explain this i had to go back and get a little background about how the campaign trail works and a covering the campaign works. Even within the world of campaign trail reporters i had the unique Vantage Point on everything. Most people who get sent out to cover the campaigns have these hellishly busy schedules. On top of all the travel, which at the end of the campaigns can be really grueling. It can be from six am to midnight every night with three or four flights in between. You have to be constantly working. The newspaper people even dating back to 2004 that you write at least one story a day. Usually more. The Television People had to file and at least one report i i day. As the years progressed and the internet explored and there are different forms of media that workload expanded. Your people who were in the newspaper business and were not on writing a story for the newspaper but they were blogging. They had to tweet, do all these things. They had to do 10, 15 things i day and the tv people were the same. They had to constantly be cranking out material. So as were traveling from place to place, they were constantly busy, constantly writing. After every event we would have, they would heard all the press into these, whatever the worst room in every building was, they found it for the needy. They called it the filing room. They would put us in their and they give you like 4550 minutes to do your story, then they would drag us all out of that rim and take us to a bus and then to the plane and into another bus and into another event and then it is rinse, repeat again. All these reporters, they are constantly busy, never not focused on either candidate, what the candidate is saying or their writing it up. That was everybody in the plane, except me. Because i was a magazine writer and i worked for a negative that i very, very long lag time. At most i was writing once every two weeks. In reality it was usually less than that. It was usually either once a month or every once every six weeks. All these other reporters were working and working their asses off, i would literally be sitting doing nothing for almost the whole time. This started to arouse a lot of resentment in the plane. I remember in orlando when i was with, following john kerry, i got in trouble because i was too loudly flipping the pages of a Sports Illustrated while everybody else was working. This was back when actual magazines existed and you could just look online. I had a rubiks cube once in new orleans, and they were shushing me about that, too. Eventually i just kind of put it to the side. The only thing i could really do after a while was nothing. And i had to sit there and hour after hour, and just remember this is a supernaturally boring endeavor, watching politicians give the same speech over and over again. I had to sit there and just think. And all those, turned out to be hundreds and hundreds of hours of just watching this process. After a while i would else is focused on things like what is the candidate saying, you know, urging campaign trail questions like who is up in the polls today, with this or that running mate make a difference, is the person getting a convention bounce, or are these poll numbers just fake or whats going on tax i was having these darker more metaphysical thoughts like what are we doing here . What is this that were doing . What is this activity we are engaged in . I looked around and a sort of thoughts like wow, this cost a lot of money, all the stuff. All these people traveling around in this gigantic jet airplane and all this expensive equipment. The best food in the world. They cater it to it to you wherever you go. Who is paying for it and why and what the financial incentives of all this activity . Then if you unpack that i think about whats going on, its bizarre to think about what actually you are doing. Because theres really two things that are going on. Clearly, i think its obvious if were flying around the country and giving the speech of reporting what these speeches are, its a kind of traveling sales trip. Where selling something, ultimately. But what are we selling and you are the customers . You might think that the voters are the customers and the product is the boat, but its not really that way. Ultimately, if you think about it. There are two groups of actors who are in the plane in the campaign plane. There are the politicians and their staff, on the one hand. They are sponsored by a very, more or less a very small group of super wealthy financial donors, and am very particular interests. And on the other hand, the other group other reporters. They are ultimately supported by advertising dollars and by the general public. So what are the two commercial activities . The Campaign Donors, well, they provide a service basically. They are essentially employing these politicians to try to sell the public on policy prescriptions that they want. Why are they doing this . They are not doing it to help the poor and make life better in america. They are self interested. These donors of course they will give money to whichever candidate gives them the most stuff, policy wise. Conversely, the reporters financially, they are completely dependent. We are all paid according to how many eyeballs we can attract. We need ratings, hits, newsstand sales, subscriptions. Thats what were trying to do, trying to generate activity. Entertainment activity. So the entire time, even if reporters were unconscious of it, there was a huge unspoken financial subtext to all this activity, which was that we were unconsciously, most of the time, lifting up and embracing candidates who are entertaining and who helped us toward that goal of making money. Even if it were not conscious of it, thats what we were doing. The campaigns operated to these, it was sort of dualistic financial endeavor. The victors, the people who one president ial races had always been people who somehow managed to most effectively synergize these two dynamics that are going on inside the campaign plane. If you could find the switch between the candidate who is simultaneously the most eyeball grabbing on the one hand and on the other hand, gives away the most stuff to richard businessman, that typically with what mac rich what your major Party Candidate looked like. After a while reporters got a sense of what that was, what the thing was. We have a word for it. We call it a electability. We say we mean Something Else by that but in reality what we mean is when looking for somebody who was entertaining enough on the one hand and has a certain lets say more flexibility on the other hand. The candidate is sort of manages to toe the line between those two dynamics most effectively is always the one who wins. So these imperatives, they sort of exclude certain types of politicians automatically. They will have people who dont have the right look for television, people like dennis kucinich. Excuse me, i have a cold. Edit also rules out people who are two artist in the wrong way about their politics, and i can include somebody like ron paul and also for that matter Bernie Sanders. As a reporter with this whole idea of electability, its kind of like the goldilocks story. You are always looking the porridge that is just wrong. Not too boring but not too interesting and not too ideological but not complete you shall at the same time either. I would get into it intimate how donald trump fits into this because this whole dynamic was crucial to how we got elected. Another thing i started to notice over the years and all those years of sitting and watching the staff was the was an incredible dichotomy in terms of how much Mental Energy to the people in the plane were devoting two different types of activities. They were devoting a lot of thought to certain things and almost no thought at all to other things. So for instant the politics portion of the camping experience is just incredibly simplistic and stupid campaign most of you here if you listen to Standard Campaign rhetoric from the pass you probably couldnt even identify the party. Thats how cliche ridden it became. Going to read a couple of campaign cliches from previous campaigns and see if you can guess from which party they came from. For millions and millions of americans the dream with which i grew up has been shattered. The choice is between the right change in the wrong change, between Going Forward and going backward. We need Economic Growth that makes a difference for hardworking men and women. The dont need reminding that the economy is more than the stock market. We believe in preventing crime and punishing criminals, not explaining away their behavior. Ill give you he had come out last was a democrat, believe it or not. That was bill clinton. After a while if you listen to enough of these speeches, and think its a boring after a while that i ended up having like a coding system for the cliches. For instance, with howard dean i memorize all of his cliches. Im not just a product of the american dream. Im not just a dream come under party. His speeches i would write two, three, 19, 11, et cetera etc. I didnt even write it down anymore. And after a while you start noticing that over the years the speeches were becoming less and less specific and they were being written more and more haphazardly. They werent even come in a real sense, they werent even really rhetoric. They were just sort of strings of words piled together, almost randomly select candidates for delivery keywords and phrases that were pleasing to the ears of their voters. This was borne out later on. If you go out and look you will find things to go to google things like dial surveys, for instance, that campaigns would do things like bring in focus groups and have them listen to list of words and say if you like it, turn the dial this would be if you dont like it, turn the dial that way. They strung together speeches that were really just collections of an using words. After a while that to all you really here is just the keywords. Its blah, blah, blah, family values. Blah, blah, blah, work ethic, blah, blah, blah, men and women serving the country abroad. The dichotomy, the only way you can tell a difference between democra