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One of the most talked about books of the summer, if not all of 2019 so far, its not a small number of books, so by this stage it speaks volumes about subject matter stands out from the pack and book clearly has to far and thats in part because its far broader than covering that stone, within the epic book covering political terrain, you see the Republican Party bitterly grappled with nominee for 2016, but you also see fallout from division to stand behind him and the partys internal changes in the years running up to that election that eventually landed trump on their doorstep, opening with mitt romney overtaking john mccain as gop candidate in 2008 and closing in 2019 with romney once more, what lingers at the end of the book is recent personal encounter as hes reeling from the indictment of trump adviser roger stone and mueller investigation, one of themes like that in the book as alberta includes exclusive interviews, paul ryan, john boehner, Mitch Mcconnell and the president himself, joining alberta jonathan, fellow political reporter himself covering the nation for axios, you have might have seen him a few times on hbo as well and known for breaking news and insider report of current administration, please welcome both speakers to politics and prose tonight. [applause] hi, how are you doing . Good. Fired up. Thank you for coming out to see jonathan, this is really excited. I have done interviews, i think this should become one of the indispensable books of the Trump Administration but more than Trump Administration tracing the origins of President Trump and how the Republican Party came to be, what the Republican Party is today, and one word that comes to mind is meticulous, its meticulously reported. I reached out as you do to some primary sources who were involved to check they are accurate. The response i got was jeez, too many people talk. You are not seeing a whole lot of denials, he went to the trouble to get firsthand primary sources. We there shouldnt be celebration that theres meticulous reporting but actually we do need to in this era where we have Michael Wolff publishing without making any efforts to backcheck, fiction under the banner of nonfiction, when you see something thats the finest of what we do and what we care about we should hold it up and respect that because theres too much stuff out there thats not reliable that hasnt been factchecked, congratulations on the book, tim. Thank you. I thought id start, you are getting all the accolades. I want to remind people that im an author as well and i wanted to read you because its germane to this theme, very germane, i want to read you a lead from a story i published today, okay, and its very germane to what we are talking about, so this is direct quote from the load of jonathan swan, axios. Com, President Trump has directed his administration to work to have rapper asap rocky freed from custody in sweden after Kim Kardashian west contacted white house adviser Jared Kushner about the issue as first reported by tmz. [laughter] how did we get here . Thank you for being here, how did we get here. I think its important to note that donald trump did not materialize out of thin air, we are living in news environment thats moving so quickly that it is difficult to take a step back and take a deep breathe and contextualize what is happening and trace roots, theres argument to be made obviously that you could in talking about the modern Republican Party trace the roots back 50 or 60 years, you could certainly trace it to, you know, pat b, taking on bush. I believe you had this really phenomena events with the selection of sarah palin and the Republican Party, disconnect between the governing class and the base of the party and the angst and resentment out there simmering below the surface that not many people saw and then, of course, you had the financial collapse that fall with the bailout of the banks and a lot of americans even angrier feeling that washington and wall street were playing by one set of rules and Everyday Americans were playing by another and thought that the system had been rigged against them and obviously you have the election of barack obama, the nations first africanamerican president and you have such socioeconomic disruption and dislocation, millions of manufacturing jobs disappearing virtually overnight in Middle America, demographic transition sweeping the country in the likes which we have never seen before, Incoming Democratic president and super majority in congress that go about executing Progressive Agenda that certain elements to have country just were not ready for and when you layer the cultural and sock yes economic on top of political, this was building into something powder keg and became clear in early years of Obama Administration certainly and as it moved forward that this was building towards something. All of us covering politics, republican politics, 2010 campaign, romneys failed campaign in 12 and obviously the 14 campaign as well. We all had sense that this was coming for the party and it was already begin to go break down, battered down the gates and this wave was building and we werent sure who was going ride it and obviously President Trump round up riding it and its important for us to reckon with the forces i was describing a minute ago because the presidency is office, donald trump is going to come and go, he wont be president forever but i think those forces at work will be here and a conversation that we need to be having. As you know, jonathan, you spent time with the president , hes not always a linear conversation im putting it generously. The president tends to respond to topics rather than questions. So i was asking him about populism or asking about nationalism or nativism and the one thing that struck me when we were touching on themes was that the president seemed less interested in talking about those forces at work than in talking about the Republican Party itself assort of proxy for those forces which is to say that donald trump gave money to mccains campaign and bitterly disappointed to watch as he characterized john mccain vouching for Barack Obamas character during 2008 campaign, he felt as though john mccain need today get down in the mud and needed to run a nasty against obama and his chicagostyle machine politics, if he was going to win, mccain had a very different outlook on how campaign should be run and in 2012 it was a similar story, romney define bid the Obama Reelection Campaign successfully so and trump who famously came out and endorsed romney in one of the most awkward moments any of us had seen in politics, romney was telling campaign, they are slaughtering and romney never did fight back and romney showing and trump pulling the trigger and really running after threatening for doing in decades, the Republican Party was weak, it was spineless, that these standard bearers of the party were not willing to fight and intangible quality in politics but impossible to quantify for me or for your or for some of the colleagues who traveled the country and talked to Republican Voters, after 8 years of obama conservative voters across the country who felt that they had been trampled upon, they were under siege, they needed somebody to get in the arena and start trying hay makers on their behalf and trump was identifying the force specifically and tapping it into a way that nobody else was willing to. He look at 2016 primary field and he said, jeb bush, the guy cant stand up straight, hes a wimp, marco rubio, 58, sweeting on stage, ben carson, folding hands like this, you saw snl skit. The one person he took seriously, the one person he feared was ted cruz because he knew that cruz would go outside the lines, cruz was willing to do things and say things that most politicians werent except cruz an elected official, he still had some barrier to entry there and he still had to worry about his constituents back home. Cruz if he was bringing a knife to the fight as i say in the book, trump could bring a nuclear weapon, theres nothing that cruz could do that trump wasnt willing to go further with, identifying the weakness in the party was trumps greatest asset as he began his hostile takeover of the gop. One of the things that stuck out to me in is book, you spent time in the book with paul ryan, john boehner, every leading republican figure over the last 10 years, certainly a lot of the establishment figures and some of the tea party aligned figures, almost all of them you can tell, even if i dont they so explicitly recognize that they misunderstood the tea party movement, this was not really about fiscal conservative, feature of a lot of the voters, i thought one thing that was telling and you could tell the audience about it is you talked to Newt Gringrich who is probably as observer about how to sort of, you know, please and satisfy the republican primary voter, what did he learn in 2012, do you remember that . Yeah i do, i do, Newt Gringrich was at cross roads in his primary campaign for the presidency in 2012 and tried just about everything to get the medias attention and gain traction in the polls and you may recall this, a long time ago in the political years but Newt Gringrich was heading into the South Carolina primary, he had done very poorly in iowa and New Hampshire and campaign was hanging by a thread, pulling in Single Digits in South Carolina which, of course, votes third and excuse me, Newt Gringrich decided that in South Carolina two debates before the primary was to be held and newt decided no more going after barack obama, no more going after mitt romney, no more going into any bag of tricks, Newt Gringrich was going to turn the fire on the media and it was devastatingly successful in back to back debates Newt Gringrich had the nuclear confrontations first with juan williams, fox news and then with john king of cnn and essentially rallied not just the crowd in those auditoriums behind him but entire National Television audience and newt grinning gruch wound up winning the South Carolina debate, winning South Carolina primary going away and that was really what prolonged that campaign had romney won there it probably would have been quick and easy campaign. So gringrich tap intoed the other force. 3 primary reasons that trump won, i would say, first, and theres no particular order, first i would say is this incredible distrust of the plain stream media among the conservative base and i have written at that at lengths and hard to explain distrustful republicans are of mainstream and not always without reason i should ask, for gringrich to tap into that vein in 2012, he effectively created blueprint for donald trump 4 years later and trump turbocharged it. I do think its really important to recognize, folks, when you watch campaigns unfolding across the country in 2010 you had dozens of congressional candidates running under a banner conservative first and republican second, many criticizing george w. Bush in Campaign Even more harshly than they were criticizing barack obama because they had been Bush Administration betrayal, no child left behind, two wars, this was a real revolution within the Republican Party and basing much opposition to obama and galvanizing force was fiscal issues that the country was going bankrupt, too much spending and we know that that was largely a farce because if you look at the voting records of almost all of the republican who is came to congress in 2010 as soon as barack obama left and donald trump came in they suddenly didnt care much about the debt and deficit and thats putting it very generously and i was asking republicans in course of conversations for the book, some who are still in office, well, what changed, what do how do we make sense of this and obviously there was some degree of resistance, if not a significant degree of resistance of barack obama because of skin color, theres no question about that but there was also this cultural that people felt as they did not recognize the country they were living in anymore and that has only accelerated in the years since and especially during Obama Presidency and when i talk with some of the leading conservative movement figures they said the same thing, look, candidly, knowing what we know, 2010 had nothing to do with debt and deficit and fiscal restraint, it had everything with people looking around and realizing that is not my country anymore and when donald trump came down that escalator and said make America Great again and tapped in the vein in a way that nobody else could have. I want to get you to read one paragraph because it cuts into the heart of all of this, ive never seen this interview but you found it and i think it really narrows, read the paragraph there. Yeah, good one. As u quick background, tom masse congressman, curlyhaired, former mit robotic who has grin on his face and character in congress. Says he was excluded from Freedom Caucus for being too crazy conservative, unquote, said it best in interview with washington examiner, quote, all this time i thought they were voting for libertarian republicans who backed rand paul in 2012 and paul 4 years later but after soul searching i realized when they voted for rand and me, they werent voting for libertarian ideas, they were voting for the crazy son of a bitch in the class. [laughter]. They thought there was an army of voters out there who wanted nothing more than that. Turns out, they white the social security. Theres an amazing thing in this book, which i want you to describe, you are having breakfast with john in the summer and you ask him whether the Republican Party will survive or outlive trump is him and what does he say . He stopped himself. He stops without hesitating and says, there is none. You were about to say there was no Republican Party. He said there is on paper but what does he mean . So many of his institutional this came up in an era which they were all symmetrical. There was a red team and a blue team. As ugly or us one double as it may have been, parties were strong. Leaderships were strong. They have the ability to get into a room and smoke a cigarette and have a bourbon and cannot a deal. That reeks of this politics and im not here to suggest we need to bring that back, and that it will solve all of americas problems but the weakening of america is a huge reoccurring seen throughout the book. I would start, when you think about the institutions being weakened, hundreds organized religion, public education, the government itself, john mccain hes to say blood relatives. We think that the institutions that matter, Political Parties dont come up where they should. It is vitally important to have strong Political Parties. Trump would not have been able to take over a strong Republican Party. He hijacked Republican Party ready to be hijacked. Theres another scene where the rnc chairman, hes doing everything he can think of to appease donald trump because trump in 2015 was threatening to run as an independent. He thinks the republicans are done then. Trump will peel off these votes and clinton look at the house. He will do anything he can to appease trump and convince him they will not hold it against him. He comes up with this idea and its a loyalty pledge, they will have all the candidates sign a pledge, swearing allegiance to the nominee of the Republican Party. I will not run as an independent. Trump gets on the phone and says, ill sign your pledge but im too busy to come down to d. C. You need to come here. This is symbolic but important because when his advisers hear this, they say, dont do it. You are the party chairman, party boss. Tell him to get down to d. C. , we will march him in so the cannot see him, youll find the document and you declare victory. Thats not what happened. They just said it didnt matter. We go