Should have seen it coming. I would like to start with what was my personal favorite moment in the book which is the first meeting between donald trump and steve bannon who would become a very influential political strategist in his world where he explains to trump that he cannot if hes thinking of running for president he cant do it as a traditional republican. Can you describe the scene . First of all, thank you for having me. One of the things you have to remember is donald trump didnt come into this he had been thinking about running for president for years but he wasnt sure, he did to have an identity. Sometimes he was democrat, sometimes republican, someone independent. By 2012, he was getting serious about it and a conservative activist, was a friend of Donald Trumps and he decided to talk about running for president and they took their friend who didnt know donald trump at that point up to new york at a meeting to talk about the possibility. If he ran as an outsider, how would he do it. David sits down and says heres the way you run as a traditional reagan republican which was kind of the way all republicans ran at that point and steve speaks up and says something different. Thats not going to work anymore. If you are going to run you need to vote as a populist. They basically said theres a new populist mood in the country and donald trump looked at him and says youre right, thats what i am, a popular risk and kind of gets the terminology mangled of course he doesnt decide to run in 2012 book four year2012 but fouryears later tht he does. In the meantime between 2012 and 2016 he starts that populist message and i think theres a lot of starting points for the trump revolution if you will. Thats at least one of the points. It has been all about the writings. Guest very much so. He doesnt have an ideology. I interviewed gingrich a couple of times. He is fascinating and has a lot of insight into the period. It tells the story of a 40 year period of the revolution from Ronald Reagan in 1979 when he starts to run for president to the arrival than where we are today. Newt gingrich has a lot in that whole period. One of the things he said to me though is donald trump is not a conservative. He is an antiliberal and thanks a lot is nonsense but he doesnt have the philosophy to read the review which is kind of the bible of modernday conservatism. He is an interesting player and that is all fine with his supporters and one of the things we learned in 2016 you dont have to be traditional or evenideology. What you are up against at this point is as important as what you are for. One thing that makes this different from so many other political books is that there is also an autobiographical threat that goes through it and even the title, you should have seen it coming, first person. But how did you come up with the title and what were you attempting to do . Guest thats interesting because it wasnt my plan. You are a journalist and i am a journalist. To think about something is the first person is exceptionally uncomfortable and not what i intended to do but when i got into this project it was a way to explain where did donald trump come from. I got interested in the starting point and the starting point i decided it was 1979 when the carter presidency kind of collapses. He gives the speech, kind of throws up his hands and says we are in terrible trouble and the country is then prepared to turn to Ronald Reagan who wins the presidency and i think that began a four decade period of conservative influence so it was through that period of the mostt interesting and perhaps most powerful movement at the times so i decided that was the story that i was going to tell how the conservative Movement Rose to prominence and power under Ronald Reagan somehow evolved to picking donald trump to be the standardbearer by 2016. When i talked with my editor at random house about it he said basically thats the arc of your career, isnt it. I arrived in washington to cover washington for the journal in the spring of 1980 and then id been kind of following the story ever since. The story said to me you should put your self in the book. You witnessed a lot of this. You should tell us what it was like and so thats how that came about its good to occasionally say i stole this convention and heres what it looks like or i hope it humanizes the story a little bit but its not a natural or comfortable way for journalists to land. Ronald reagan represented a number of things, very traditional conservative principles, free trade, smaller governments, stronger military. He also comes along with a sort of optimistic upbeat view of the world and something that the country after jimmy carter and the period that you write about its a shot of selfconfidence that the country really needs in that moment. Guest people were saying the president is too big a job to handle the. He said this is nonsense this is america lets pull ourselves together and move forward. The philosophy was conservative. 1976 just four years earlier he tried to take the nomination away from gerald ford and the party decided and the country thought thats too far out there but by 1980 Ronald Reagan had moved but the country was ready for it and it had to do with carters failures but there you have it. What really happened that i didnt appreciate until i did the book as ronal is ronald reaa basic core message he developed and expanded it and flushed it out. His economic philosophy became clear and said basically im not for balancing the budget, im for a big tax cut so he had a conservative message that suddenly had a little more to it than he united and people forget that hasnt happened. That was a revolutionary idea that people would get out of the churches and into the political movement. That hadnt happened before certainly on this scale. This was the second leg of the stool he had economic conservatives and then made common cause that hawkish democrats and Foreign Policy were antisoviet and he brought them into the coalition and thats where the kind of anticommunism that held the group together for so many years kind of provided the glue that kept it all together. He created a coalition and suddenly it wasnt just a conservative message but there was a fully formed conservative platform and that is what reagan brought to the table. Although it isnt entirely clear, he gets through these massive tax cuts but then the next thing that happens is he gets hit by a big recession and has to then pull back on some of those economic policies he implemented so what does that do to the movement . That is a good point. He cut taxes and everything came back to life. That wasnt true at all. It was almost what he asked for and was considered dangerous and revolutionary and it didnt work right away. The deficit exploded. Republicans were crazy nervous with what happened. The session continued. The economy was going down and it looked like for a while that it might be a colossal failure and in fact so much so that more conventional conservatives led by among others bob dole and howard baker pushed this through congress a tax bill that took back some of those tax cuts because they were worried about the deficits opening up and then eventually the combination of deficit spending frankly finally kicked in and things started to take off but there was a period in which it looked as if this might be a gamble that wasnt going to work. It was not an instant success by any stretch of the imagination. Host you also write about how at this time there was an infrastructure being built so that. Can you talk a little bit about that those that were traveling with him and the establishment of the think tanks and outside organizations. When you do a book you get the chance to look through the Rearview Mirror and things are clearer. This is one of the things i didnt appreciate at the time but it happened so instrumentally i didnt really grasp it. One of the things that happened in the first term was the construction of a conservative infrastructure that could support the reagan revolution and it didnt really exist. Liberals had an infrastructure, think tanks and networks of supporters and Many Organizations and activists all through the new deal era and beyond that supported what they were doing. Conservatives didnt have that and they sort of created it and it took various forms say for example grover norquist. A new organization created at the behest of the Reagan White House that wanted a grou the grt there in society somewhere to support the taxcutting regimen and lend some firepower for outside to support what we are doing so that gets created. Go pack which is a sleepy Little Organization that tried to recruit republicans to run for the state legislature. Newt gingrich takes it over and puts it on steroids and all of a sudden you have a giant Foundation Wide team of conservatives being developed at the state level and house races and they are all being fueled by this idea. Described the technology by which they are doing this because i have long thought that the happiest coincidences was the fact that he and the cspan cameras arrived in the House Chamber practically at the same moment so hes spreading the message through cspan but talk a little bit about the tapes. One of them was cspan cameras. He figured out if you show up Late Afternoon on the floor of the house, the cameras were on and cspan was showing what was happening to the country but nothing was happening so they would give regular order speeches and start to basically spread the gospel because you have a platform available so he does that and also uses cassette tapes which seems ridiculous now but he figured out there were all these republican wannabes that needed some instruction and talking points so he figures out the way that i will do this is make tape recordings of things republicans should say and do and know if they are going to run and he sends them out by the thousands across the country to grassroots for the young republican politicians who are meant to take the cassette tapes, put them in their cars and listen to them and they are getting instructions and this turns a whole generation who are all playing by the same playbook so he says all those things and at the same time the nra starts to become a more Political Organization and john dingell who was an outdoorsman, very much guns rights kind of democrat who basically convinces the nra to defend gun rights and not just talk about outdoor conservation and hunting and fishing so that happens and then i think the other organization that gets created in this period is the Federalist Society which again was a completely novel idea and in organization of conservative legalist lawyers and law professors which created the conservative legal gospel and it then turns out its made to recruit the federal judges so the society is created during this incubator period and it starts to recommend people and promote conservatives who are nominated to be judges and now today the federalist societ socs the most important force pushing conservative judges in all of washington and basically running that part of the operation for the Trump White House and to some extent Mitch Mcconnell in the senate. All of that started during the reagan years. Host then you have another sort of funny story about the creation of the Heritage Foundation. Guest things going on beneath your nose that you didnt even know. There was a sense early on and this is before the late 70s some people had the sense that there needed to be a conservative machine in washington. One of the people interested in doing this very conservative, very interested in figuring out how to assert himself so he sent a letter to a colorado senator saying im going to come to town to talk about how to spend some money to spread the conservative gospel and he had in mind probably giving a big check to the American Enterprise institute which was the one notable conservative think tank at the time. This letter though was intercepted and ed fuller among a couple of other people is aware of the trip and basically he hijacks the trip and it arranges to meet with joseph coors and says i have a better idea. We should have a very aggressive small conservative think tank in washington that doesnt just put out white papers people read and put on their shelf but thats out there Creative Action so he arranges a meeting to talk about this idea but ed fuller is a smart guy and realizes it would have more impact if it didnt happen in a restaurant or hotel in downtown but if it happens at the white house where Richard Nixon was still in office at the time. He was a likeminded conservative from california working in the white house so they arranged for this meeting to be held in the building to impress joseph coors. They walk into the meeting and he says these guys think i should give them some money to start a conservative think tank but i think there is already one in town. Why dont i give them my money. They arranged this ahead of time lynn walks over to his bookshelf, pulls off the shelf and aei study on something or another, blows the dust off of it which was put on the study ahead of time to show its been gathering all these weeks and months, he blows it off and says this is what we do with aei studies here. You should give money to these guys, so joseph coors cuts the check, gets a townhouse on capitol hill and the Heritage Foundation is born and it gets its name because one of the partners is walking through his neighborhood in Fairfax County virginia suburban washington trying to figure out what to call it and he sees a group called the heritage home so they call it the Heritage Foundation and the rest is history there is now giant multimillion dollar a year conservative think tanks. It drove the reagan agenda and its still active today. There were times conservatives thought they had to bulk up if you will. Another thing you see happen over the 1980s going into the 90s is the language of politics begins to shift. It becomes a darker kind of lingo people are using and Newt Gingrich is a leader in this sort of coaching the way they should be framing these things. Host that is a big change and it is driven by Newt Gingrich more than anybody else. Ronald reagan had a kind of all shocks quality about him. He would talk about welfare moms and things like that but it didnt really last and people didnt think of Ronald Reagan as a fighter in the personal sense. They thought of him as the kind of guy who famously would go out and have a beer with the democratics after the day was over. He was the kind of republican that wanted to get along with everybody and was liked even by people who thought he was shallow and a warmonger. Newt gingrich arrived and said conservatives and republicans have been to content for too long to be the minority party. Weve accepted that. We just go along with the majority in congress and its time for that to end. These people have taken advantage of us and so he starts to basically develop a more futuristic style. This happens in particular when he decides to go after the then democratic speaker of the house and he sets up to take him down and does so by accusing him of ethical shortcomings associated with a book that he had written for which he was getting proceeds arranged by his office basically political profiteering if you will. He goes out and uses the time we talked about earlier and basically turns the tenor in a different direction. That has a lot of impact within the Republican Party because basically this plays out in part while George Hw Bush is president and he is also a very kind of mainstream personality yet the party is slowly being taken over by the forces that are pushing a much harsher and combat of view of the world its not inconsistent with the message philosophically but totally it is quite different. And i talked with ron imanuel who was the mayor of chicago and white house chief of staff for barack obama and leading member of the house for several years so he worked with and against going back to the clinton years and he said i thought a rival of Newt Gingrich as the main figure in the republican and conservative movement is when the era and did not win donald trump arrived but when Newt Gingrich became basically the leading spokesman for the movement because he represented such a departure in tone and style and substance that that was the end of the period. Host but then we begin to see a few figures who do in fact depart from what William F Buckley and Ronald Reagan would recognize as conservative philosophy. You see for the first time those strains of populism showing up. Can you talk about where that came from . Pat buchanan was a Nixon White House aide and Ronald Reagan loyalist. He loved Ronald Reagan. His email address is a variation. He was the ultimate reagan soldier but by the early 90s he decides that the conservative message missed a beat. Its not looking out enough for the working class americans and those are the people that have begun moving to the Republican Party foparty for cultural reas, prayer in school, against abortion rights, they dont like liberals and so they are moving into the Republican Party and pat buchanan thinks that they are being hurt by our economic message. We are closing down factories so they can move to mexico and we have to stop that. Immigrants are moving and driving down wages and we have to stop that, tomac. Hes quite eloquent about this. He says i began to develop a different view of what conservatism is and should be and it was very much early donald trump and antifree trade and antinafta. Its very muc