[inaudible conversations] good evening, ladies and gentlemen and welcome to barnes noble upper west side. Joshua green is Senior National correspondent for bloomberg this week, focusing on political coverage for the magazine and bloomberg news. Previously he was Senior Editor of different and has written to the new yorker, esquire, Rolling Stone and other publications. He brings us tonight a new book, devils bargain steve bannon, donald trump, and the storming of the presidency. Which the New York Times called deeply reported and compulsively readable. As of this coming week it is a number one New York Times bestseller. With further a do please join me in welcoming joshua green. [applause] thank you, i am always amazed, with all the donald trump and steve bannon we are subjected to in our daily lives the people want to come out and get more of it in person but i am gratified. I have been advised people at Nonfiction Book readings dont want to hear the author read his Nonfiction Book so ill read a couple short scenes and move ahead to the question and answer period because people have lots of questions about steve bannon and donald trump. I will read two short scenes from the book. They have been carefully chosen because i figured a month ago in my precocious 10yearold daughter wanted to do it, this wasnt a book that kids could read or that would be easy to read at a public reading because trump and steve bannon are the most profane men i have ever met in my life. Even the my daughter is not allowed to read the book she did figure out the very first word of the first chapter of the book is the worst word you can say, the f word. I will skip ahead and read two scenes. One is from the night steve bannon was hired to run the Trump Campaign. The other is a scene from right at the end of the book after james comeys letter came out in the closing days of the campaign when clinton and her staff wake up to the realization she might be in real trouble. Let me set the scene a little bit here. In mid august 2013 everybody in my profession and everyone in politics, to head to a blowout, had just come off of a dark Republican Convention doing okay in the polls for a few days and he decided to start fighting with megan kelly, fighting with fox news, attacked the con family, the parents of the slain us soldier, and every day trump seemed angry and distracted by some new and different self generated standoff, seem to be losing 8 to 10 points in most National Polls and the big talk on the campaign trail and in washington was when the Republican National committee would pull the plug on trump, take away all the money they were backing him with and redirect it to try to save what were thought to be floundering house and Senate Members weighed down by terrible anger at the top of the republican ticket. In the second week of august, one of Steve Bannons mean patrons, a woman named rebecca mercer, was the daughter of a conservative billionaire named robert mercer, a Second Hedge Fund magnet funding a lot of conservative causes and funded Donald Trumps campaign to the tune of millions of dollars, mercer was so frustrated with the way trump was performing, she got on a helicopter and flew out to east hampton to trumps fundraiser and sits trump down and tells him you are headed toward the defeat unless you make a change right now and i know who you should hire, you should hire steve bannon to be your campaign manager, you should bring Kellyanne Conway as your pollster and david bossi who is a republican operative. All three had worked for mercer for a long time, she knew them well. Trump agrees but in classic trump fashion doesnt tell anybody else so pick up the story on the night of august 13th when mercer has brokered this new Campaign Team and trump calls bannon on the phone. Let me pick up the scene here. That night, august 13th, trump and bannon spoke by phone and agreed to a deal, bannon would take over the campaign, forgoing the salary as paul mandalayfort had and bossi would later join as Kellyanne Conways deputy, trump told bannon to meet him at his golf club in new jersey. He next day, sunday, trumps top advisers gathered at Trump National golf club in bedminster unaware of the leadership change that had been instituted the night before for the bosss foul mood where chris christie, Rudy Giuliani, roger rails who is advising trump, paul manafort, jared and ivanka were yachting. Trump who had been stewing about chaos in the campaign exploded at manafort, how can anybody allowing article that says your campaign is rfed up . I will self censor here, that is not precisely what trump said. It was more graphic. Trump demanded to know furious at his portrayal and reports his aides were going on television in an effort to reach him. You think you got to go on tv to talk to me, he shouted . You treat me like a baby. Am i a baby to your . I said her like a little baby and watch tv and you talk to me . Am i a baby . The room fell silent. Manafort took it in stride. Was not the first time trump had lost his temper. While he had been demoted he had not been fired. Manafort to his condominium, there is a printout of an article set to run the next morning in the New York Times, explained how Ukrainian Government and Anticorruption Team made a secret handwritten leisure. And 12. 7 million and previously undisclosed cash payments. And aligns with former president victor yannick overage, manaforts clients. And the attorney advising against it. Manafort is having doubts, and the Trump Campaign, kept it from his wife. And trump had had enough and demanded manafort, the french revolution said roger stone, longtime trump advisor, they set off at the beginning, god their own heads cut off at the end. That is how bannon took over the campaign. I think most people at a reading like this would be familiar with the kind of things bannon did and said and encouraged trump to do, i wont rehash crooked hillary and the dark conspiracies bannon wrote about one thing to do is give the perspective of how the campaign unfolded inside the campaign itself and polling and give contemporaneous view of what trump folks were seeing. This is after james comey has unexpectedly opening the investigation into Hillary Clintons email server. And this is a couple days later and trump had a team of data scientists in san antonio, florida. They were to track the effect and had very sophisticated instruments that are political richter sales state by state. Here we are five days out, and they ultimately decide the race. Distinct character types consider representative of the election, the dispossessed factory worker reregistering for trump, the elderly woman longing to see a female president , the competition between the campaigns for voters of less vivid you, trumps Data Analysis gave them a nickname, double haters. They traditionally, and the 15 million voters across 17 battleground states, that were persuadable. Many indicated support for the thirdparty candidate gary johnson, and a televised flubs including the admission he didnt know what aleppo was, i know all of you know that aleppo is a city in the middle of the syrian civil war. After his aleppo flub, they largely abandoned johnson. What made it so vexing to trumps analysts was there intentions were difficult to discern. Many refuse to answer pollsters questions or declared themselves undecided, the Clinton Campaign thought of these persuadable voters as being pocketbook republicans, people whose votes were driven by Kitchen Table economic concerns but were deeply changed by trumps sexist and racist outburst, these were the voters clinton hoped to shear off of trump by her speech condemning the all right and steve bannon in august, quote, what we found out is they were very fickle, they toggle between telling pollsters they were leaning clinton depending on where the news cycle was that week. This was the largest piece of follow we ascribe, ending the campaign on a note where people were reminded of our very first controversy, we saw fickle republican leading voters that we did not successfully attract drop a general election revert to trump at the end. This was the decisive block of swing voters. Comeys letter convinced haters to choose an affiliation or in the case of many who had been leaning toward Hillary Clinton choose to stay home. One of trumps data scientists told me, quote, what we saw is a gave them a reason to vote against her instead of voting for him. All those double haters and lastminute undecideds breaking heavily toward trumps polling and research when deep down they were going to vote for him anyway. They had a reason and there was nothing clinton could do. And open up to questions, if you want to stand up. We start over here. I am happy to take political speeches. My question is about bannon himself. Does he have political chops . In his past up until this point is he the kind of guy who could go into a room with real politicians and do what trump can and make deals based upon the entire governmental seen being in government . What bannon has is a kind of personal charisma that you dont get from the public portrayal he cultivates as a kind of darth vader machiavelli and figure. He comes out of the world of 1980s Investment Banking at Goldman Sachs, almost a caricature of 80s wall street banker, very smart, very funny, very alpha male and so i was surprised he was named to run trumps campaign, it made a lot of sense to two of them would connect. If you are a wealthy grad, steve bannon is not your cup of tea, but if you are a steak eating new york City Real Estate developer and want to be alpha male like donald trump that is the kind of guy you would connect with. That is the power bannon has. It is not political, it is more personal. I was fascinated by the Research Institute bannon and the mercers put together to research hillary, as a possible model for Research Institute to investigate trump and the trump family. How much money was put into that, how do they organize that . How do they set this up . I say in the book, trump will hate this, without steve bannon, donald trump would not be president. I make a contingent between 2 reasons. One, bannon is the avatar, populist nationalisms a trump ran on that resonated so deeply with millions of voters who in previous elections has been interested or turned down. That is way number one. The other way bannon helped trump win the election wasnt initially intended to help donald trump specifically, rather it was meant to tear down Hillary Clinton. What drew me to bannon originally was he had what struck me as a very astute analysis why conservatives failed to stop bill clinton in the 1990s. Bannon argues that conservatives had become so convinced of their own righteousness, so whipped up in a theory against bill clintons that they became trapped in a kind of bubble. They were all talking to each other and didnt realize werent bringing along people in the mainstream, democrats, other politicians, and were surprised they lost seats in the midterm election, Newt Gingrich was ousted as speaker. Steve bannon thought that happened because bannons solution to this problem is to find a way to hack the Mainstream Media and get this message out of the conservative sphere, into broader Public Awareness and the way he did that was by trying to find a set of facts that would impugn clinton rather than the crazy conspiracy theories that circulated in the 1990s. He established or helped to establish nonprofit Research Institute in tallahassee, florida called the Government Accountability institute, i went and visited a couple years ago, they had teams of lawyers and forensic investigators and pr people and what they did for two years, they went out and amassed all the information they could about clintons entanglements or donations she had gotten through the Clinton Foundation from foreign donors of dubious character and intent and took this information and put it into a surprise bestselling book called clinton cash by peter schweitzer, conservative scholar and investigator of the gia. The book was time to come out on the eve of Hillary Clintons announcement for president but because it contains fact that were documentable by investigative reporters in Mainstream Media outlets these stories penetrated in a way stories in the 1990s had not. What bannon did that was so interesting to me was he took this information and went to investigate at the New York Times and said listen, here is what we found. I will hand you the book and information, you go your self and decide if this is worth reporting on and a week before the book came out the New York Times ran a frontpage above the fold story about a uranium magnet who donated millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation, bill clinton traveled to keswick stand to introduce him to the autocratic president and it seemed to suggest some dark, nefarious it was published on the front page of the New York Times, meant that all the other publications talked about on cable news and by doing this he was able to spread these negative stories about clinton in a way that would resonate with mainstream voters and democrats who might become disillusioned and either not show up or support someone like bernie sanders. What do you think Rudy Giuliani meant when four days before the comey letter he said we have a couple things up our sleeve that may change the outcome and why was hillarys reno speech buried after one day . You mean the all right speech . I dont know what Rudy Giuliani was referring to because the tough thing with trumps advisers in the campaign, you would have these seasoned operatives that would make very clear to reporters we are going to give a big speech on foreign policy, here is what we are going to say and how to stick about it, with the trump guys they would fire off at random and knew what they were talking about and issuing empty threats. I dont think anybody knew what Rudy Giuliani was talking about. He is a little unstable to begin with. The other part of the question, clintons advisers when steve bannon took over the campaign in august thought that this represented an opportunity for them to steal away what the Trump Campaign called the double haters, people who were probably republican but made deeply uncomfortable not only by the racism and sexism but the beating of protesters, the antisemitic imagery that was flying around the Internet Associated with trump, so they decided to give a big speech about it. Is that a rooster . Steve bannon trying to sew chaos and ruin my book reading. They decided to give a speech about it attacking bannon and Breitbart News where he was chairman frontally of the Clinton Campaign had a big debate, do we put this term in the title of the speech because most people never heard of the all right. In the end they decided yes, lets do this because reporters are going to freak out and readers will want to know what is this all right and it will generate a series of stories that will reflect negatively on the Trump Campaign. So clinton gave a speech to crying steve bannon and the forces of hatred and division and racism and antisemitism. And two days of coverage as she hoped, but with trump and the campaign he can always do some things that would step on a negative story and so all he had to do was send a tweet or take megyn kelly and the media was on something else. The other problem with that speech, i got the internal polling from the come the Trump Campaign. It got a lot of political attention but didnt seem to hurt trump with voters. Bannon tells me at one point, pretty sure this is a direct quote, we polled all that stuff. It doesnt matter, the people who are offended by charges of racism are already on her team. Shes not bringing over any new voters and i suspect that was right. In the book which im halfway through you mentioned this Internet Army bannon became aware of in the videogame industry. What i would like got a lot of press. I wonder if you have a sense of how important they really were in terms of that and if you have a sense of how important trump thinks they were . The old right didnt exist in most peoples awareness, certainly not mine a year and a half ago or two years ago. Basically there is no definition of what it is, clintons speech crystallized it as being these armies of online trolls who would attack anyone including politicians and journalists who didnt support donald trump and would say all sorts of racist things, send antisemitic imagery, the sort of thing is like catnip to cable news so it got a lot of coverage. I tell a story in the book of how bannon helpe