Im that stores Deputy Director of events. Welcome to politics and prose. Thanks for coming out tonight. If you havent picked up a copy of our monthly calendar, we have them for july and august. Those are at the desk in the center of the store. You can also go to the website, politics prose. Com and see a list of everything confirmed for the next three months at this point. So, in the moment if you could silence your cell phone that would be great just so everybody in the room has no distractions. Theres also cspan filming tonight and we are also filming for our Youtube Channel so you dont want to be the person whose phone is going off in the middle of live television. Also, so that your question during the q a portion is at the back half of the program make sure that they are heard on the recording. We want you to come up to the microphone set up at the end of the aisle to my left, youre right. Why do the microphone during the qanda so that everybody can hear your thoughtful questions and to keep them questions if that is okay. There will be a signing at the table and at the line will go from where im standing towards the back of the register. We have a whole bunch of the site you havent purchased a copy we recommend you pick up one, two, three, four, five for your self gift, for everyone you know. By as many as you feel. Again, thank you all for coming out. Tonight it is my honor to welcome the chief Political Correspondent for politico and whose book american carnage on the frontline of the american civicivil war and the rise of president of trump has become one of the most talked about books of the summer if not all of 2019 so far. Its not a small number of books that have so by this stage it speaks volumes when it speaks out from the pack. The book clearly has so far and that is in part because the canvas as the is broader than the scope. It is epic covering the years of political terrain over the course of 600 compulsively readable pages you see in the Republican Party grappled with the eventual nominee for 2016 but you also see the fallout from the position to stand behind him and the partys internal changes in the years running up to the election that eventually landed a trump on their doorstep. Opening with mitt romney overtaken john mccain as the gop candidate in 2008 and closing in 2019 with romney once more. What lingers at the end of the book is that recent personal encounter with romney as he is reeling from the indictment of the trump adviser roger stone in the course of the investigation. One of many scenes like that in the book i was other figureheads examining the situation paul ryan, Mitch Mcconnell. Joining us Jonathan Swan fellow reporter himself covering the nation in the Current Administration pleased join me in welcoming both speakers to politics and prose. [applause] how are you doing. Fired up. Thank you for coming out to see jonathan. This is exciting. Ive had the pleasure of reading this already. I think this will become one of the indispensable books of the Trump Administration tracing the origins of how the Republican Party can do the order of the Republican Party is today. One word that comes to mind when i read this book is meticulous. Its meticulously reported. I reached out as you do to primary sources. The response i got was too many people talk so you dont see a lot of denials because he went through the trouble of getting to primary sources and the reason i make such a thing about this is that it shouldnt be a celebration that is meticulous reporting but actually the kind of do need to in this area where they are publishing without making any efforts to fact check fiction under the banner of nonfiction so when you see something that actually is the finest of what we do and what we care about we should hold it up and respect because is too ch stuff out there that isnt reliable so congratulations on the book. Now you are a celebrated author. Its very germane to what we are talking about so this is a direct quote from the league of Jonathan Swan, ask the host. Com. President trump has directed his administration to work to have been freed from custody in sweden after a te tim kardashiad last contacted white house adviser Jared Kushner about the issue as first reported by tmc. [laughter] how did we get here . [laughter] with a blazing introduction. Thank you all for being here. Seriously, this is great. How did we get here. So i think its important to understand donald trump did not materialize out of thin air. We are living in a news environment that is moving so quickly its difficult to take a step back and take a deep breath and contextualize everything thats happening and why and sort of trace its roots. To trace their roots back 50 or 60 years you can certainly trace it to pat buchanan taking on george w. Bush or Newt Gingrich and the revolution of 94. The reason i chose to start the book in 2008 is because they believe you had a phenomenal convergence of events with the selection of therapy when is the running mate and this gives schism between the governing class and base of the party and the inkstand resentment that was out there simmering below the surface that not many people saw and of course you had the financial collapse this fall with the bailout of the banks and a lot of americans even angry or feeling as though washington and wall street for playing by one set of rules and they felt the system had been rigged against them and obviously you also have the election of barack obama the first African American president and you have such socioeconomic disruption millions of manufacturing jobs. Virtually overnight in america. You have a demographic transition sweeping america the likes of which weve never seen before. An Incoming Democratic president and a super majority in congress that go about executing a decidedly Progressive Agenda that certain elements in the country were not ready for and when you layer the cultural and socioeconomic on top of the political, this was building into something of a powder keg and it became clear i think in the early years of the Obama Administration certainly and then as it moved forward, this s was building towards something and i dont want to get too far ahead of jonathans question but i think all of us who were covering politics specifically republican politics in 2010 campaign and the 14 campaign as well we had the sense that the insurgency was coming and it was already beginning to break down the gate. The wave was building and we were not sure who was going to ride it and obviously President Trump wound up writing it and its really important i think for us to reckon with those forces i was describing a minute ago because donald trump is going to come and go he wont be president forever but those forces at work will be here long after hes gone and theres a conversation we all need to be having about how we deal with them. To what extent does he understand or think about these forces and understand his own rise to power in that context . It is a good question he isnt always a linear conversation. Youre the one whyou were the os when we were having breakfast the president responds to topics rather than questions so i was asking him about populism and nativism. The president seemed less interested talking about the forces at work and talkin than o the Republican Party itself i think is sort of and a proxy for those forces which is to say that they gave money in 2008 and then he was bitterly disappointed to watch as he characterized it john mccain and essentially vouching Barack Obamas character during the 2008 campaign he felt as though john mccain needed to get done idownin the mud and run a nastyy no holds barred campaign against obama and his chicago style machine politics. Mccain had a different outlook on how the campaign should be run and it was a similar story. Youve got to fight back and romney never did fight. He ha had polling presented on a number of occasions showing there was an opportunity to be had by going to the dark side of politics and playing the Identity Card against obama. He refused to do so and they mentioned as examples because he is really running after threatening to do so for decades trumped up and be convinced that the Republican Party was weak and spineless. Theres a lot of folks like they have been trampled upon and they were under siege and they needed somebody to get in and start throwing haymakers on their behalf and trump was great president and identifying that force specifically. It takes him seriously. Ben carson holds his hands like this. Donald trump didnt take these folks seriously. The one person he feared was ted cruz. He started to worry about his constituents back home. Trump could bring a nuclear weapon. There was nothing cruz could do but he wasnt going to go further with and i think identifying that weakness in the party was his greatest asset as he began his takeover of the gop. One of the things that stuck out to me in the book you spend timspenttime with paul ryan, jor in prefigured the last ten yea years. They misunderstood the tea party movement. This wasnt about fiscal conservatives or the animating feature and i thought one thing that was telling you talk to Newt Gingrich who is as keen an observer as anyone about how to sort of pleased and satisfied the republican primary voter. What did he learn in 2012 do you remember that . He tried just about everything to get the medias attention and gain traction in the polls. You may recall this was a long time ago in these political years he had done poorly in iowa and New Hampshire and he was hanging by a thread. There were two debates before the primary was being held and Newt Gingrich decided no more going after barack obama or mitt romney or any of these other tricks. He was going to turn his fire on the media and his devastatingly successful. He had these sort of nuclear confrontations first with Paul Williams of fox news and then cnn and then essentially rallied not just the crow crowd and the auditoriums behind him but an entire Television Audience and he wound up winning the South Carolina debate going away winning the primary i should say during a of a independent would have been a quick and easy campaign. If you were to look at the reasons he one i would be first in no particular order but i was the first is this incredible distrust of the Mainstream Media among the conservative base and ive written about that at length in the past politico magazine. Its hard to explain just how disdainful and distrustful many of them are on the Mainstream Media and not only without reason i should add. To tap into that in 2012, he effectively created a blueprint for donald trump four years later into to quickly touch on the party i do think its interesting to recognize when you watch the campaigns unfolding in 2010 the dozens and dozens of congressional candidates running under the banner of conservative first and a republican second. They believe the Bush Administration has been a betrayal of conservative principles Medicare Part of the no child left behind. It was the fiscal issues the country was going bankrupt and we know that was a farce because if you look at the voting records of almost all of these republicans who came to congress in 2010 as soon as barack obama went into donald trump came in, they suddenly didnt care much about the debt and deficit and that is putting it very generously. But the results of this cultural undercurrent in the Republican Party where people felt as though they did not recognize the country that they were living in anymore and that has only accelerated in the years since, especially during the obama presidency. And when i talk with some of the leading conservative movement figures they said the same thing. Thing. But, candidly, knowing what we know now that 2010 has nothing to do with the debt and deficit fiscal restraint fo but everythg to do with people realizing this is and my country anymore. When making the biggest computer and make America Great again it tapped into that in a way nobody else could have. Id never seen this interview that you found it and i think it narrows this down. As a quick background, hes a congressman from kentucky and he is a character. He is a curly haired former mit robotics engineer who always has a mischievous grin on his face and is very unique in the congress. He was excluded from the Freedom Caucus for being too crazy conservative strategist in an interview for the examiner. All this time they were voting for libertarians and go back to ron paul in 2012 and ron paul but then after some soulsearching i realize when they voted for rand and yvonne and me and the primaries they were voting for libertarian ideas, they were voting for the craziest in the face into donald trump won the best in class. [laughter] you go through the book int ande scene after scene of these republicans who were seemingly grounded in a petri dish at the Heritage Foundation and were cultivated and thought that there was an army of voters out there who wanted nothing more than entitlement reform and it turns out they quite liked the Social Security in their animated like attacking the media and like immigration at all these other things. Theres an amazing scene in the book that i want you to describe which gets to this. You were having breakfast with john in the summer and you ask him whether the Republican Party will survive our outlet trump, and what does he say . He stops himself. Without hesitating, he looks up and says there is no he stops and says he were about to say there is no Republican Party and he says there is on paper but what did he do any more . There was a red team in a blue team and as ugly or unpalatable as it may have been, parties were strong, pretty, pretty leas were strong they had an ability to get into a room, smoke a couple cigarettes, hammer out a deal and thats too many of us is distasteful and too many of us read this sort of insider politics and look, im not here to suggest we need to bring back the smokefilled back rooms and thats going to solve all of americas problems, but the institutional beginning of america is a huge recurring theme throughout the book and something we should all be quite concerned about. And the lack of confidence in the american institutions, whether it is organized religion, public education, the government itself, obviously john mccain use used as to say l of congress is now. When you think that the institutions that matter, Political Parties dont often o, as they should because it is important to have strong Political Parties. Donald trump wouldnt have been able to take over a strong Republican Party that is really worth understanding. He hijacked the Republican Party that was ready to be hijacked. Theres another scene in the book where the rnc chairman is doing everything he can think of to appease donald trump because in the late summer of 2015 as you may recall is threatening to run as an independent in the trump runs as an independent, he thinks that the republicans are done because trump will peel off all the conservative votes and Hillary Clinton will coach the white house said hes trying to do anything he can to appease donald trump and convincing they are not going to stack the deck against using he comes up with this idea in concert with his advisers and it is a loyalty pledge they are going to have all of the candidates sign a pledge swearing their allegiance i will not run as an independent and trump gets on the phone and says i will sign your pledge but im too busy to come down to washington, d. C. I need you to come here to new york. This is a symbolic but its incredibly important because when the advisers hear this they say to him dont do it. You are the party chairman. Tell him to get down to dc. We will call to march hi both me camera see him. He will sign the document and then you go to the cameras and declare victory but you have teamed donald trump does and what happened. He said that doesnt matter. And he goes up to new york to the trump tower, he signed the document and the then shoved hif the back door and goes on and addresses the cameras by himself and declares victory. Im not saying thats why he won the nomination but when you think about the 2016 campaign nomination, who were the two candidates that energized the party base is the most . Donald trump for the republicans and Bernie Sanders for the democrats. What do those two have in common . Neither of them ever belonged to those parties. Thats something we all have to reckon with. The institutional beginning of the two parties have only just begun to see its getting worse and where that takes us is a political system is very scary to think about. You have the 2012 election and the result is misunderstood. The republican establishment do an autopsy. They have a great plan to win over the minority voters and hispanic voters and trump does the exact opposite we can talk about the destiny of that discussion but which of it is a deeply reported in spite of the rain documentation of the Republican Party doing everything they can to stop this trashing over their autopsy, doing everything that the consultants told them they couldnt and this brings me to my favorite quote