It seems to be a completely different characteristic versus other ones but i will say that is characteristic of the political system in general. Things tend not to get resolved and blow up and we are in a very hyper partisan, hyper polarized deeply emotional time in the National Debate and a lot of that is reflect it in and created by the Trump White House, so that is different and i think the atmosphere is reflected well in this book to the extent thats what you see in thand kind of what you get wn you see the white house. Host anonymous calls his or her book a warning, and it protects and talks about but this is a threat to democracy. Guest they definitely take a strong position on whether or not hes qualified for the office that he holds and is trying to give advice with a titlthetitle of the warning to e who are valuing their choices for 2020. And his or her strong suggestion is that anyone who may have supported President Trump before should rethink that decision this next time. And that case is bolstered by the evidence that he lays out, he or she, in this book. But, you know, i think that you would also see reaction and i had an email with white house officials about this before coming on the show. They dismiss what is in this book and say that the fact that the author has clouted himself were personal and anonymity makes it less well, makes it less credible. So there are many supporters of President Trump who will consider that a legitimate line of criticism as well. Host and some people, by the way, who dont like President Trump will make the same or a similar argument, which is a wind this morning, to use the title of the book, the more effective if it had a name and face attached to it as opposed to anonymity. So that takes from both sides pro trump and antitrump would be somewhat similar. Host from the buck symbol of his cowardice that its written anonymously, my feelings are not hurt by this accusation. Do you think it would have been more effective . Guest a name attached to it, i think that is a judgment call. I can understand why the authors chose to do this anonymously, because i think the argument thats made in the book for anonymity is that sometimes those arguments are more powerful and he goes back to the arguments of the federalist papers. Alexander hamilton and john james madison. They put their concerns about the process of anonymously because that depersonalized them and said its not about me. This is about the issue, and thats the argument the author makes. Its a reasonable argument. The other side is if you feel that strongly, shouldnt you stand up host did you take it as the author comparing himself guest i didnt take it that way. I think that is a presumptuous kind of tone i dont think thats it. He was making the argument sometimes when you want people to focus on the substance of what they want to say as opposed to the personalities attached to it, anonymous works better and that is the argument. Host anything to add to that, jeff mason . Guest i think those points are spot on. The debate about the anonymity piece will obviously affect the scope and effect the impact that it has. Certainly if the author had decided to attach a name to it it would add greater meaning. At this point its not clear if the person is still the senior trump official there is also easy to some extent to say i am doing this or im doing to protect or to assess policy without being able to actually attach your name to it and while Fact Checking of that. Allow other journalists to do our own reporting and say is that true, did he or she actually say or do this. Can we check with some of these quotes. So, that sort of rigor that one would apply to the public that is impossible because of the anonymity. Host is it being read by the White House Press corps . Guest it just came out is. That probably is affecting this book as well. The fact this is coming at a time when there are live impeachment hearings going on, and people who are describing their interactions either with the president or his team about a policy issue that has risen to the level of coming to an impeachment inquiry makes the author look even less courageous and whether it is about courage or not. They see political invaders as it impeachable offense. The Civil Service and government professionals who are embedded in the establishment and have it out for the president , that is a kind of dynamic of the current debate. What the author says if i think of it is not as a deep state of steady state. Our job is to keep the government moving straight and steady while we go through this and a storm of the Trump Administration. So the idea that hes making an argument or she, whoever the author is, making an argument as being steady and not deep state. That does resonate in the dialogue that we are hearing a another of anonymously authored the book can out. It called primary colors and it was about the bill clinton election of 1992 and the author turned out to be joe klein, a longtime columnist. Any feelings about this new anonymous book and visit was made with what happened to you in 1996 . Caller ive not read this book and second of all let me say that comparing what i did to this author has done is like comparing apples and freight trains. I wrote in entertainment, satire. I was inspired by a certain sense of victorian. It wasnt meant to be taken seriously. This is allegedly a nonfiction account about an actual person. As the other panelists have pointed out and i point out in a Washington Post oped a few weeks ago there or people are im the proud father of a u. S. For an officer and there are people who were my sons colleagues who over the last few years have risked their careers by stepping forward and telling the truth. Do you think a lot of actual details of truth were withheld in this book in order to protect the authors anonymity . What we know more in greater detail about whats going wrong in the white house if this person had just put his or her name on it lacks i think the answer to that is yes. If you know who is in the room because she can say i hold this position in government were i held this position in the white house, i worked with jared and the various chief of staff, then that lends a credibility and filled out the picture of the author is trying to say in this book. And i think in the introduction of the often talk about the fact that he or she has withheld details that would be identifying. And so that makes it pretty clear the details are not in the book that otherwise would have been if we saw an actual name on the front cover. Host can you repeat that . Caller thats probably limits the impact of the book, the factual details that this person knows he or she could not have reported to maintain the anonymity the flip side of the argument is that the identity of the author were known, then the response to the book and the part to a candidate for the people who support President Trump would be to attack the offetheauthor and not address te substance of the book. That would be the argument for doing it that way the author makes it isnt about me if i put my name on it will be about me. I wanted t want it to be about e problem that i see and that ive described here. I am just saying that the argument for anonymity if the name is attached to it on the cover, the name becomes the story so i could argue that either way. I dont know what the right answer is. The author clearly had to pull punches as jeff said in some cases. He or she discards the anecdotes in the meetings. The details would give away the identity of the person telling the story. Host you and i probably remember 1996. About six months when you and i were still anonymous was it a fun process because of the nature of your book . Caller it started out as fun. I was working at newsweek at the time. Thats like this never so. Random house, which published it, they were shocked because they kep kept coming over in onf printing up until the moment it was published and it exploded like a bomb. And i think that caused me to have some very lighthearted satiric post Traumatic Stress and impair my judgment over the next six months. I probably stayed anonymous too long. It did become a matter in our family we have young kids and my wife was adamant that i not come out because there was also going to be a circus on the front lawn and orchids walk to Public Schools within a block of the house and she thought it would endanger them so also it was really, really exhausting lighting to my friends come and not telling the truth to my friends. So, in my case, would have been kind of a food and entertainment became something far more darker because i think a lot of my colleagues in the press misinterpreted what i was doing. They saw it as an expose, and i didnt i intended it as satire. There were no revelations on the book. So it became an even more painful experience, but a really important lesson for me once i was exposed. Host did you have a reaction from the Clinton White house with the tying . Guest i continued to go in there and report, do my reporting. I think that over time, i talked with both Hillary Clinton and bill clinton about it. We joked about it. Bill clinton, the president gave me many hours of interviews in 2000 for the piece i was doing in the new yorker about what he actually accomplished in the white house. And Hillary Clinton and i spent a lot of time talking about military matters after she became a senator and i returned to journalism after 9 11. So, from what i heard, she kind of liked that. She thought it was funny. Host is there a chance a journalist wrote this book . Guest i dont think so. If a journalist with this book, then it is a lie because the book is written under the guide of somebody who is genuinely on the inside. We are not on the inside. Journalists get to see and be witness to a lot thats not the same as saying you are in on decisionmaking or you are in a position to have a discussion with fellow cabinet members or Staff Members about perhaps triggering the 25th amendment or Something Like that. We can write and testify to what we have seen, but if this is written by a journalist, then it is very, very hard to take it seriously. Host the 25th amendment, the triggering of the 25th amendment part of this book. Did that surprise you . Guest it is referred to in the New York Times oped piece people can make of it what they want. I personally dont think it is a very central part of the story. I dont get all that seriously. There are people that talk in the apocalyptic tone all the time in this town. I dont think that is the burden of the story which is that the people on the inside or just about to invoke the 25th amendment. That isnt really the character of the story. The story is a much more subtle stories in it. And i do think that is a sort of sensational tidbit, but i think that the author, to be fair, he or she wants people to focus on other things than that. But i agree with jeff, we go back a long way and i was around during that whole period. Period. A lot of the conversations in the town now will be simply detected fro from them and stufd who did this. People will look at specific. People will wonder. A lot of the conversation isnt going to be about the substance of the book but that was. I asked for it and if you write a book anonymously there is another distinction, the current anonymous writer is claimin wrie a chump insider. I didnt claim to be anything. I didnt claim to be a journalist. I just claimed that this was a novel and novels are fiction and it was fiction. I made up every line of dialogue in it and it was very, i felt very honored when elaine that wrote the screenplay for the movie took many of the largest speeches word for word from the book. I found out that i was pretty good at reading dialogue. Host did you find yourself at all ostracized by previous colleagues . Caller yes but i thought they were being utterly ridiculous. One thing i found there were several things after i had a press conference and was just turned into a pariah for about 15 minutes but my relationships with people as i assume they all survived and prospered and i have a great many friends in the business but its interesting to me the politicians reaction to what happened to me. The message is always the same. The way that we deal with it is by keeping our heads down and going ahead with our work. Thats what you should do, too. By the way, you came pretty close as a guest on how things operate. Guest it makes me wonder as well would be like if you had written that kind of a bug in the era that we have the social media that we do now. I mean, the attacks that you faced no doubt would have been amplified ten of 1,000 fold. It might be a ta be attacks,e social media attacks that are going on now against people like Alexander Van men are far more serious than the attacks. People just called me a liar and thats one way to look at it. You have to call jane austin for saying that the first sense of sensibility was written by a lady. That was the tradition that i thought it was perpetuating. The stuff thats going on now in the social media and the attacks on these people who were standing up, they are just reprehensible. And i want to say that i want to dispute jerry just a little bit about this being business as usual. I think that we are in a real crisis in our country right now. And im pretty pessimistic because of President Trump has done his conduct an allout assault on the truth. You know come as a journalist, ive learned over time that neither side had a monopoly on the truth. But, you could have legitimate differences and discuss them. With President Trump does is call the reporting that, you know, many of my former colleagues are doing, which is courageous reporting and anonymous and he calls it fake news. You hear people all the time saying i dont know what you can believe. And when you get to that pointin a democracy, you are in big trouble. And so, because of the importance of this moment, thats why i think that this anonymous person and everybody else, all of those republicans in the congress who are shielding their true feelings about President Trump, they have a moral responsibility to come forward. Guest i understand that, and i wasnt trying to suggest this was business as usual or normal. We are not in a normal phase. Its an abnormal taste for sure on any levels. The issue was if they are chaos in every white house, and we were talking off the air a little bit, theres some but there isnt a constant crisis a day after day and literally minute by minute sometimes. Thats completely different, and its not healthy for anybody in this environment, in this ecosystem that we live in. Host there was was a lot of prepublication attention to this book, 100,000 copies sold prior to its publishing. Back in 96, did your book have that kind of attention or didnt just comdid itjust come onto th . Guest i think they published the first one was like 35,000 the start of a 60, but the salespeople were not getting very much reaction from the booksellers. So they kept lowering the print run. And also, my boss had warned me, he said this book is a lot of fun, but books like this dont do so. Then all of a sudden, it exploded in a way that i hadnt anticipated, and i dont think anybody. They had a million copies in just two weeks. Host jeff mason, the president in this book is described as a moral having a questionable mental state. No focus, no concentration, not the companies will control, redfaced, weakness for strongman. Carlos in his review of the book in the Washington Post says this can all be put in the category of stuff we already know. But can you be elected president of the United States with these qualities . Guest well, i mean the answer is yes. I mean, we have now three years after his election a body of work and the work of journalists and others that have written about this, in a very, very robust and long record of his tweets that explain who and what President Trump is about. So i think that review that you referenced is true in that we know who President Trump is. And a lot of people like that. A lot of people dont. But a lot of people saw that in 2016 and believed that it was disqualifying. Disqualifying. A lot of people saw it in 2016 and thought it was exactly what the country needed. This author apparently was a supporter, initially, or wanted to be a supporter and that is why he or she came into the white house. And the view of these things now is being disqualifying. And certainly we will find many people who agree with that. But there are also a lot of people who dont. I certainly view that when im traveling with the president when he does his rallies around the country, you know, he is very proud of the big crowds but he is able to generate. And you know what, that is real, those crowds are and the people that attended the rallies eat it right up and they are supporte supporters. They are a mixture of america. The president knows that, and that gives him a lot of strength now. Whether or not it is enough strengtstrength to elect orallyn the reelection again in 2020, and of course we dont know the answer to that command to the extent that this book were other warnings from democrats, republicans, from others will have an impact on that is something that we wont be able to judge until election day next year. Host do you have the chance caller could i add something here . When i returned to journalism on september 12, 2001, for very obvious reasons, i began to spend a lot of time with the u. S. Military. I embedded in both iraq and afghanistan. I spent a lot of time with those great kids. All of whom had a strong sense of citizenship, and of service and reality. They knew that politicians could send people off to die. It seems to me that the qualities and by the way, i spent last weekend with 19 of them, 19 iraq and afghanistan veterans who had been elected to ththe house, ten democrats and republicans. But there was a contrast between the way they see the country and the way the rest of the, many of the rest of the country do. We are trying to do democracy with a citizen. And there is a significant number of people in this country, i would say 30 to 35 , that supports trump no matter what cannot tell the difference between reality and reality tv. And unless