A previous oped by the author gets at least this particular person into details about some anecdotes. In an anonymous book as opposed to with your name attached to it or keeping it to your self and thats an issue a lot of people are going to be looking at or keep quiet until youve left the administration. Host you are at the white house every day. What did you learn . Guest . Over the last two and a half years. People were asked to boil down their talking points to one bullet point even as opposed to three or five. That is known at this point. It doesnt make the book less important but its not i dont think landing with a major impact because a lot of what is in here is stuff that has become conventional wisdom. Host is there anything that you said thats not true . Guest im not in a position to say that about some of the things in here. We get a lot of access that we are certainly not in the room for everything for all of the comments that he make us. So im really not in the position to judge. The book is written within era of authority which is to say theres a lot of interesting details and somebody that knows what the white house complex is like. You spend more time than i havee pubut those ring true and some f the details are quite interesting. The way you go about preparing a speech for example. The description of what happens the description of how has been true throughout the last 40 years at least as described in some detail and i think described correctly and that is a detail if youve seen some of it from the outside it rings true. You have both covered white houswhitehouses in the past. Are all of them chaotic . Guest the level of chaos described not only in the bookplate others that cover the white house and that are watching the white house closely is not something that we have seen. They are different the two of them. Its true theres there is a df chaos and so far you are making decisions and there are things going on at a moments notice and that creates a certain amount of chaos because of being at the epicenter of the world that is a different chaos from what this book describes from what we have seen in terms of how President Trump governs. I wouldnt use the word chaos necessarily. I think that there is crisis because things dont get to the white house unless they take the results someplace else and certainly the difference is the speed of the crisis and regularity seems to be a different characteristic of this white house versus others but that is probably characteristic of the political system in general. Things tend not to get blown up and we are in a hyper partisan hyper polarized deeply emotional time most of it does reflect the demand created by the white house and that is different and that atmosphere is reflected well inos this book. Host in the tech asked they talk about how this is a threatis to democracy. The author takes a strong position on whether or not President Trump is qualified for the office thats he holds in hs trying tods give advice to peope that are i eagerly awaiting ther choices for 2020 and his or her strong suggestion is anyone who may have supported him before should rethink that decision this next time. That case is bolstered by the evidence that he or she lays out in this book but you will also see reaction. They dismiss what is inn this book and say the fact that they thought otheyve caught up inthn anonymity makes it not credible there are many supporters of President Trump who will consider that a line of criticism as well. Some people who dont like President Trump will make the same or similar arguments which iis within this morning to use the title of the book bee more effective if it has a name or face attached to it such as a esonymity and i thin think in tt sense it critiques from pro trump and antitrump would be somewhat similar. Someone call this cowardicese that its written anonymously. My feelings are not heard this accusation. Do you think it would have been more effective . Guest that is a judgment call. I understand why they chose to do this anonymously because i think the argument thats made in the i book for anonymity when he goes back to the writers of the federalist papers alexander and james madison, they put their concerns about the process of anonymouslyon because that depersonalized them and said itdemand is thatits not about. Its about the issue. I understand that as a reasonable argument. The other side is if you feel that strongly shouldnt you stand up . I dont think that is a presumptuous kindre of tone he s simply making the argument sometimes when you want people to focus on the substance of what one has to say as opposed to the personalities attached, anonymous works better. I think any of the points are spot on. The debate about the anonymity piece will obviously affect this book. Certainly if the author decided to attach a name it would add greater meaning because at this point it isnt clear if they are still a Senior Trump Administration official or former. Its easy to some extent to say im doing this or that to affect policy without actually being able to attach your name and allow Fact Checking and other journalists to do our own reporting and say is that true that he or she do this and can we double check some of these scenes. A zoo that is impossible because of the anonymity. Is it being read by the White House Press corps . Guest it just came out and theres a lot going on right now. Thats probably affecting the book as well. The fact that this is coming at a time when there are y. Of hearings going on with people who are not anonymous and those that are describing their interactions either with the president with his team about a policy issue that has risen to the level of coming to an impeachment inquiry would say it makes them look less courageous and whether it is about courage or not, the timing of the book landing in the middle of that makes a difference. If resignations to me which is to say a lot of the conversation about the impeachment process that has to do with the activities doing with ukraine and dumping it begins to the establishment fought putting pressure on ukraine to get what some see as political favors was an impeachable offense. That has a lot of people who are fans decrying what they called the deep state which is to say the Foreign Service and civil te Civil Service and government professionals were in the otablishment and that is kind of a dynamic and the author says i think it is not as a deep state of steady state and our job is to keep the government moving straight and steady while we go through this windstorm so the idea that he or she is making an argument for people who do this as being steady and not deep state that does designate given the dialogue. It was 1996 another anonymously authored the book came out but was 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 because it resonates with what happened to you in 96 . I havent read this book yet and a second let me say comparing to what this author has done is like comparing apples and freight trains. I wrote an entertainment satire inspired by a certain sense of victorian. It wasnt meant to be taken seriously. This is allegedly a nonfiction account about an actual person and recognizable person. As the other panelists have pointed out and i pointed out in a Washington Post oped a few weeks ago, i am a proud father r of a Foreign Servicece officer d there are people who were my sons colleagues who over the last few weeks have risked their career by stepping forward and telling the truth. Do you think that a lot of actual details of truth were withheld in this book in order to protect the offers anonymity and whaauthorsanonymity and whe in greater detail about whats going on in the white house if this person had just said the scent of his or her name on its . I think the answer to that is yes. If you know who is in the room, and the persowho the person is e he or she can say i hold this position in government or held this position in the white house that lends it credibility and has filled up the picture of what the author is trying to say and they talk very much about the fact that he or she has withheld details that would be okentifying and that makes it pretty clear if we had seen a name on the front cover. Thats probabl probably limie impact of the book and thehe factual details this person knows he or she could not have reported in order to maintain their anonymity. If the identity of the author unknown and the response to the book would be up to address the substance of the book and that would be the argument for doing it this way and that is the argument of the author. Its not about me if i put my name on it it will be about me. I am not taking one side or the other. The argument for anonymity is it ifa name is attached to it on te cover, the name becomes the story, not the story so i could argue that either way and i dont know what the answer is. R the author had to pull punches and describes the anecdotes and meetings and episodes where you know you are missing the details because they would give away the identity to the person telling the story. Wasnt a fun process because of the nature of the book lacks caller i was shocked indeed. I was working at newsweek at the time and he said books like this never so and random house which published it, they were shocked because they kept lowering the printing untold it was published and exploded like a bomb and i think the bomb explosion caused me to have some lighthearted post Traumatic Stress and impaired my judgment over the next six months. I probably stayed anonymous too long. It did become a matter in our family we had young kid and my wife was adamant that i dont come out because there was going to be a circus on the front lawn and there were kids walked Public Schools within a block of our house and she thought it would endanger them so it became also really, really exhausting buying you to my friends not telling the truth to my friends. So, in my case what had been a hoot in entertainment became darker because a lot of my colleagues in the pressgu misinterpreted what i was doing. They saw it as an expose and i intended it as a satire. There were no revelations in the book and it became an important lesson for me once i was exposed. Did you have any reaction at the time . I have plenty since then. I will send banned from the white house after that. I continued to do my reporting. I think that over time i talked to both Hillary Clinton and bill clinton about it. He gave me many hours of of interviews in 2000. Hillary clinton and i spent a lot of time talking about the military matters. From what i heard, she kind of liked the book. She thought it was funny. Host is there a chance that a a journalist with this guest i dont think so. If a journalist wrote this book than it is a lie because it is written under the guise of somebody that is genuinely on the inside. We are not on the inside. Journalists get to see us being witnessed a lot of history about triggering the 25th amendment or Something Like that, journalists can witness to describe and testify too what we have seen, but if this is written by a journalist, then it would be very hard to take it seriously. Host the 25th amendment, did that surprise you . Guest it is referred to in the New York Times oped. I dont think that is a very central part of the story. I dont take it all that seriously. There are people talking in apocalyptic terms all the time in this town and i dont think that is the burden of the story which is that people are about to invoke the amendment. Ithats not really the charactr of the story. Its a much more subtle story than that. That is a sensational tidbit but to be fair they want us to focus on other things than that. But i agree with jeff and i know this is true we go back a long way and i was around during iperiod. A lot of the conversation will be detected who done it kind of stuff and people will look at the specificid episodes and onef the things i would also add is s the book is quite well written and people will wonder is that really journalist because it is written. If you write a book anonymously there is another distinction claiming to be a trump insider. I didnt claim to be a journalist. I claimed that this was a novel and novels are fiction. I made up every line of dialogue and i felt very honored when she took many of the largest speeches word for word inor the book did you find your self ostracized by previousrs coffee is . Guest caller after i had a press conference and was turned into a pariah for about 15 minutes although i must say my relationships all survived and prospered and i have a great many friends in the business still. But it was interesting to me the publications reaction. I received m a series of phone calls after i came out. They have absolutely no ideological consistency. They ranged from people like Newt Gingrich on the right to Paul Wellstone on the left to people i didnt even know. The message was always the same. We understand what you are going through. Its rough to be attacked in this way but the way that we deal with it is by keeping our head dowheads down and going ahh our work and thats what you should do, too and by the way it came pretty close as a guest about how things operate. It makes me wonder as well would it beel like if you had written that kind of a book in the era where we have the social media that we do now. The attacks that you face in no doubt would have been amplified ten, 100 or 1,000 fold. The social media attacks that are going on right now against people like Alexander Van men are far more serious than the attacks that i took. People calledd me a liar and thats one way to look at it. You would have to call jane austen a liar for saying her first novel sense and sensibility was writtenen by a lady. That was the tradition i thought i was perpetuating. What is going on now in the social media and the attacks on the steep standing up they are just reprehensible and frightening, and i want to say i want to dispute jerry just a little bit about the speaking business as usual. I think that we are in a real crisis in our country right now and im pretty pessimistic because what President Trump has done is conducted an allout assault on the truth. As a journalist, ive learned ir time that neither sidee had a monopoly onon the truth. You could have legitimate differences and discuss them. What President Trump does is call the reporting that many of my formerme colleagues are doing such his courageous reporting and honest reporting, he calls the fake news. You hear people all the time saying i dont know if you can believe. And when you get to that point in 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. I understand that and i wasnt tryingan to suggest thatt was business as usual or normal. We are in an abnormal phase for sure on many levels. I think the issue was as their chaos in every white house and i guess that we were talking out their little but yes to islam, at there isnt constant prices day after day and minute by minute. That is different and its not healthy for anybody in the ecosystem that we are living. There was a lot of attention given to the book 100,000 copies sold prior to its publishing. A record. Back in 96 did your book have that kind of attention or did it just come onto the scene . Guest i think they wound up publishing the first was like 35,0035,000 were they started of around 60 but the salespeople were not getting very much reaction from the booksellers and they kept lowering thehe prt run and also my boss had warned me this book is a lot of fun but books like this dont so and then all of a sudden it exploded in a way that i. , you know, i hadnt anticipated and i dont think anybody had an had indicao prinand they hadto print a millo weeks. Host the president in this book is described as a moral having a questionable mental state, no focus or concentration, a bully, not fit, no selfcontrol, redfaced, weakness for strongmen, 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 electe elected pt of the United States with these quantities . The answers is yes. I mean, we have now three years after his election a body of work and the work of journalists and others have written about thisis and a very, very robust d long record that explain who and what President Trump is about. So the review that youve referenced is true and now we know who President Trump is and a lot of people like that. A lot of people dont, but a lot of people saw it in 2016 and believed it was disqualifying and a lot of people saw it and believed ita was exactly what te country needed. And this author apparently was a supporter initially wanted to at least be a supporter and that is why he or she came into the whitee house and viewed all thee things now as being disqualifying. And certainly we will find many people who agree with that but theres also lots of people who dont. And i certainly see that when i am traveling with i the presidet when he does his rallies around the country. He is very proud of the good crowds that he is able to generate and you know what, those crowds are real and the people that attend the rallies edith write up and they are supporters and they are an extra minute to. The president knows that, and that gives him a lot of frankness whether or not that is enough strength electorally to win the election again in 2020 of course we dont know the answer to that. To the extent that this book or other warnings from democrats or republicans, from others will have an impact on that as something we will not be able to judge until election day next year. If i could add something here. When i return to journalis retun 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 and i spent a lot of time with those great kids all of whom had a strong sense of ci