Along the word near the rio grande valley. Before we dive into this topic, please remember to silence your cell phones and please share your experience on social media using the tx book fest. Also remember that after this conversation the authors will be signing books in the booksigning tents, two tents over, you can buy the book and get it signed to the next tent, a portion of every book spent supports mission and all courtesy of book people. Joining me today are two of the authors of this book, i want to start with my far right, michael, White House Correspondent in the washington bureau. Police call correspondent before coming to the times in 2010, 18 years writing about local, state and National Politics at the washington post, it was part of the pulitzer team that covered Virginia Tech shootings in 2007, to my immediate right, julia davis, congressional editor of the New York Times and deputy times editor, covered policy in washington for 22 years, she joined the times in 2014 as White House Correspondent after bloomberg news, associated press, Baltimore Sun and congressional quarterly, she won the 2009 mckinley award for distinguished reporting of congress, please join me in welcoming our two guests today. First off, i wanted to congratulate you all on fascinating book, i have to admit i finished reading it last night, but it was really insightful and im wondering how you all came decide to write this book. Please. Well, can everyone hear me, thanks, first of all thank you for the kind of introduction, exciting for us to be here, as carlos said, i think both of us [inaudible] particularly in the last several years the issue of immigration and when we saw the president ial campaign that donald trump ran, it became clear to us that this was a central element of his of his message, of his presidency if he were to win which none of us expected that he would but once he took office, once he won the election, we realized that this is going to be really the issue that really drove a lot of his focus in his first term. We both as White House Correspondent covered a lot of the initial moves on immigration, starting transition when they quietly put in place a set of executive orders and potential legislative proposal that is they wanted to see move and i think it was very strike to go us from the very beginning how unusual his approach was, how unusual his rhetoric about the issue and then as the presidency got underway, what i think both of us noticed was that the things that made President Trump approach immigration unusual, the things that made his his moves on the issue controversial were in many ways the same things that made his entire presidency so unsubstantial, the sort of shoot from the hip style that the president had, reaching for the most radical proposals he could possibly find, his disdain for professional career Government People who are specialist in the area, chaotic way that west wing went on, all the feud that went on, all the things that came together in immigration policy and thats what got us interesting in a deeper look at how this is playing out. Was there a sense going into this project that by focusing on one area of his presidency you were painting such a clear picture of leadership style. Hello. Hello, no its not on. Hello, hello. Better, no . Yeah, okay, sorry. Yeah, i think as she said we, by the time we decided to work on the book at the beginning of 2018 there had already been a lot of reporting about the chaos inside the white house and the nature of presidency and we wanted a way to capture that in a way that wasnt just another book like that, in a way that dealt with the topic that was that was important, that was central to the American Experience and and we wanted to to use that topic to capture what the presidency was all about and our goal going into the book was, if we could talk to enough people and get behind the themes and enough of the meetings, figure out the motivations behind what the president was doing on immigration and how his aides were putting it together, that we would that we would have something important to say not only about immigration but the president and how he makes decisions more broadly and, you know, we sat down one evening over a couple of glasses of wine and looked at each other and i think we should write a book about this. One of the things that most appealing about this book is the vivid insider account that you are able to provide throughout the book, did you have difficulty getting people to talk about and share that those inside reviews of what was going on . Yes and no. How the policies came to be and the president came to be preoccupied with this issue of immigration was that there was a lot of resistance to being seen, nobody wanted to go on the record, the president himself ended up going on the record with us at the very end of the process but his aides current and former were very reluctant to do that. A pretty strong sense of wanting to get the story out, why things had gone down the way they had, there was a lot of feeling that, you know, their whole approach had been misunderstood, they had been pushed to do things that in many cases they didnt either feel were appropriate or practical, there was a lot of frustration among people inside the administration and outside who share President Trumps views on immigration who believe in more enforcement and less Legal Immigration even that felt that he had squandered his opportunity to actually accomplish those things in hazard way in making policies, all of those things conspired so that that ultimately helped us find the people we need today really flush out the story, it wasnt pushing on an open door, it took a lot of investigating and a lot of long interviews to get to the point where people were willing to share with us the insights to really explain how this had all happened. You often find resistance from people who dont want the stories that theyre telling you to be in the newspaper the next day and one of the things that the book does that this is our first book, both julie and i and what we discovered is that being able to talk to sit down over a long dinner with someone and say, this isnt going to appear until 7, 8, 9, 10 months from now, im mindful of the story, one of the stories in the book which you all may have heard about which is the idea that President Trump had building along the border and filling with alligators and snakes and we got that initially from somebody who we talked to in one of these long interviews and we would have never gotten from the one person if they thought we would put it in the New York Times the next day and it was, you know, it was those kinds of, kind of agreements and understandings of the people that we were going to put the stuff in context, it wasnt going to be just a headline but in the context of 400 page book that helped to explore those things and i think really made the difference in some peoples willingness to talk. And theres an irony here, you point out that immigration as a focal point of Trumps Campaign wasnt necessarily his idea, can you explain kind of the evolution of how immigration became central component of his campaign . Yeah, its interesting because watching the campaign and then watching how President Trump approaches the issue when he took office you would think that this is something that he had always been, you know, worked up about but the fact is that when he started to run for president long before 2 years before 2016 anyway, the wall was never really a focus for him, he would talk about ilLegal Immigration, it was something that had weighed on his mind, he talked about it before as private citizen and as he started to make appearances, political events. Dont worry about it. [laughter] china. Russia. Is that better . Hello. Go ahead. Okay. So he obviously he thought about immigration and talked about immigration but wasnt so much about the wall, it was really about this real sense of us versus them, you know, what this is doing to our country and what his advisers realize that these were powerful things that people were responding to when donald trump would talk and they started looking for a way to remind him because this is not a president or at that point a potential candidate who likes to speak from scripted remarks ever or likes to take a briefing to remind him what the talking points that he should hit are. So they started looking for for a way how can we remind him to talk about the issue and always hit on this very powerful topic to really capture the emotions and the visceral sort of reactions of his crowd and they decided because hes a real estate guy and loves to talk about building something beautiful and hes the greatest builder that if it could make him remember that hes talked about a wall, then he would launch into discourse of immigration, immigrant that would really get him going and then he was off to the races, they mentioned it to him, he started talking about it and what he loved was the feedback that he would get, really strong response, lots of cheers from the crowd, they would start chanting and thats what he ultimately found irresistible and why he kept coming back and back to the topic to the point where he became president , fore gone conclusion that he would focus on the wall because he had been talking for a couple of years. One of the first events that he got sort of visceral feedback from the crowd was here in texas, one of the texas the texas patriots. A convention in 2015. Julie characterized them as advisers recognizing the potential of immigration, but initially they werent advisers, correct . This was an informal trio of people who recognized that one of their Top Priorities would sink well with President Trumps priorities, can you tell us about Jeff Sessions, steve bannon and steve miller. Right, so this is its really actually amazing, we sort of start the book with this because we are back in 2013 and january 2013, its right after president obama has won a second term and you have this trio of people, bannon, miller and sessions who were at the time on fringes to have Republican Party and they dont they dont have any chants of really wielding powers, sessions is in the senate, miller works for him, bannon is kind of working at bright bart and lobbying hand grenades at the Republican Party which at the time the Republican Party bound and determine today reach out to hispanic voters and broaden their appeal, they sort of thought thats why romney had lost to obama, again, so they meet at ban on the townhouse in washington, they meet for dinner, they eat for 5 hours and, you know, populist revolt as they are eating and sipping martinis and the whole dinner was about how do we find somebody, the term they used the chapter that we title the chapter, they needed to find a vessel, a vessel to take two major issues, immigration and trade and and essentially hijack the Republican Party to take what they viewed as a Republican Party that was, sort of in bed with the corporate interest and in bed with the democrats to the extent that they sort of were all kind of one side of the spectrum and kind of hijack that and take it away, they didnt think of donald trump then, they really just thought of other people, they thought of sarah palin and lou dobbs and even sessions himself maybe talked about running but the but they sort of plotted, it was the beginning of the takeover that at the time if you think that julie and i had known of the dinner at the time we would have thought absolutely no chance in hell that theyre going to actually make this work and, of course, you know, a few months later bannon sees speech that trump gives saying all the things that the 3 had said, you know, a few months earlier and before you know it, they all 3 of them are part of the campaign and ultimately part of the administration that, you know, works beyond their wildest dreams. And the case that they are making in this dinner, this is right after some of you may have remembered the autopsy or as the Republican Party was doing to autopsy of why mitt romney lost in 2012 and general consensus that hispanic [inaudible] and the 3 of them, one of them had this article that conservative writer had written, called the case of the missing whiteworking class and the argument was mitt romney did not lose because he had not reached out broadly enough, he lost because he alienated, he was not popular, he could not get a consensus from the whiteworking class who saw him assaults as bad as democrats because he was out of touch, he didnt understand working people and he hadnt spoken directly enough to their concerns, thats what they thought he could do if they ran populist play and looking for someone who could do that rather than what the whole rest of the establishment was needed to happen. As you point out immigration was the third rail of politics, explain a little bit about why it was a third rail and why Neither Party really wanted to touch it . Yeah, so the first my first exposure covering administration, george w. Bush administration, he talked obviously about comprehensive immigration reform, he talked about being a compassionate conservative and there seemed a consensus among democrats and some republicans that there should be sort of a compromise over what to do with the at that time, i think the number was 12 million undocumented people that were in the country but reordering the system that it was more functional and efficient for the future, a big effort to try and do that and what both parties found was it was really hard, extremely divisive issue in both Political Parties because you had democrats who at the time were divided between labor unions that were skeptical of some immigration reforms that they thought could hurt American Workers and another sort of strain of the Democratic Party that felt that this is a compromise that needed to happen, ted kennedy was the person who really carried that forward during the debate. Then you had republicans, the bulk of the party was as mike was saying sort of chamber of commerce approach, really strong immigration who felt this is going to hurt and because such an emotional issue, you had a dangerous combination of divisions in both parties, republicans on one side would say, you know, amnesty, democrats on the other side would say, this is going to hurt workers and between the two of them they, you know, it became a very dangerous issue that people were afraid that their constituents were going to turn against them if they embraced a compromised like this, they confirmed all the fears and certainly once President Trump comes on the scene, i think everyone sees the power of this issue to really motivate voters. Right, he crosses lines like even intense and difficult fight over immigration over the last 10 or 15 years, he crossed line that is nobody was willing to cross before, from the moment he comes down and talks about, you know, mexicans as rapists on the elevator and he takes the debate to a police that, you know, if not nobody, only the people on the fringe had been willing to do. To be fair, president obama was famously deporter in chief, and it was when he was in office the initial family surge Central American in 2014, is that why immigration became such a resinate issue 2 years later in 2016 or was it more because trump was willing to embrace that issue . I think it was both. I mean, i think that, you know, its true that president obama got a lot of blowback from the way he handled the initial surge of Central American migration, they didnt separate families but detained families for long periods of time and a lot of the immigration advocacy groups that have been the most critical of President Trumps policies were also very critical of the Obama Administration during that time and he did in his own ways, obama did what the Trump Administration, the Trump Administration tried to do in much more aggressive ways to figure out ways to deter people and if you come youll be sent back and obama got criticism for that but i do think that, you know, this idea of having candidate who was going to take a populist Message National and having trump be that person that was what really drove the immigration issue to the core of the 2016 election and thats why i think its been such a driver of his presidency because i think his advisers and President Trump himself felt very strongly that he could never kind of lose faith with that message if he had a chance of being reelected. I was going to say, one to have people that we talked to during the course of the book told me at one point that theres that the way he distinguished what president obama did in terms of confronting the migration crisis and what President Trump and his administration did was that the steps that the obama people took to try to as julie said deter folks toward them up inside, we talked to a lot of the obama both julie and i covered that period in the Obama Administration and they did things that really, you know, they thought were necessary but that tore them up inside whereas on the trump people, the trump advisers were much more eager to put in place the kind of policies that they that they ultimately did, i think there was a difference in motivation and a difference in the limits that the obama people kept trying to put limits on themselves whereas the trump people kept limits off. Immigration hard liners were always cognizant of the criticism of xen