[inaudible conversations] thanks for joining us at the east city bookshop. If you are here for the first time, welcome, thanks for stopping by. We are excited to have you here for tonights event and just so you know we have one to two author events every single week plus the weekly book club, twostory times per week and a variety of special gatherings like coloring books and winds with you enjoy your time tonight, check us out on the social media at east city bookshop on facebook and insta graham and city books on better andsign up for the newsletter and youll hear about all the other cool things we have coming up. But tonight it is our pleasure to welcome doug, the New York Times bestselling author who has been an advise advisor to to american president s and is one of the few living historians to have written about all of the american president s. He is interviewed six u. S. President s, second to first 71s, coauthored a book with one, has entertained too in his own home and served on a white house staff of special assistance to the president. He cofounded the chickadee awards with first Lady Nancy Reagan and is here to talk about his new book with Kenneth Walsh that he will introduce shortly. After our talk we will have a qanda from the audience and then you are welcome to purchase a copy of the book to have signed. Thanks for joining us. Thank you very much. It is my privilege to introduce doug. He was the president of the White House PressCorps Association that they put on the big dinner donald trump refused to attend this year, one of the most prestigious events in washington, d. C. And he has covered how many again . Six president s in the white house as a part of the White House Press corps. Hes worked at u. S. News for how many years . Thirtythree years and a Senior Writer he has had almost every title position you can think of. He is a remarkable journalist. They are almost extinct i will put it to you that way. He may have around four or five journalists i know of that i dont know where he stands politically. All the others i can tell you if they are left or right. Tim is absolutely objective and persons the story whatever it may be. So, i guess we can call him up as a traditional journalist were oldfashioned journalist. But its a profession that is disappearing quickly and had a brief time that a florist. Im going to turn over to him. Hes the author of many books. One that i loved is the history of all the places where the president lived. You can find them here in this bookstore and another one is a celebrity president he writes about how president s have become celebrities and that is part of their power to yo and he has a w book out. Guest i am a traditional journalist and i hope by the end of the discussion ive succeeded at that after 30 years in the white house i dont think i could have covered president s ranging from Ronald Reagan to clinton and barack obama and now donald trump unless i can talk about things right down the middle. The other thing i want to mention as we have known each other for 25, 27 years now and so i hop hope that we n conduct our talk like we talked over lunch that we are going to be sort of informal and we welcome you to ask questions afterwards and we find we do this with many sources, the best information comes in the informal give and take. Was that, we are at a very interesting time for the book to come out. I have a book coming out called ultimate insiders about white house photographers, the personal photographers who are the ultimate flies on the wall and they hear things no one else hears and see things no one else sees, so that is my next book coming out in september. Its an interesting time for this discussion and for the book because the town is the biggest parlor game in washington now. What is donald trump home about. What is he going to do next . With going to happen, what does the Republican Party mean anymore and i hope you can explain that as we go on, where the democrats go and really it is donald trump has sort of dominated the day today because in every News Organization we basically have to have somebody cover donald trump from 11 p. M. To 4 a. M. So there is another layer of coverage that has been added but i want to start by asking the basic question you talk about in the book at great length. What did donald trump do right and what did Hillary Clinton do wrong just at the top of your mind how this election turned out. So many people were wrong, so many people in my profession were wrong, people in both parties. What happened . Guest she outspent him in soft money and he did have a super hack that got started, ed rollins and jeffrey got something that raised 32 million. She, hers raised more money than any other in american history. And they spent it all. She had a ground game with 960,000 volunteers on the ground and it exceeded barack obama. Ground game. She had the ceo of google in charge of social media, she had academia, wall street, she had the bang this. She had 240 newspaper endorsements and he had 19. But there was a message and the message was burned like a brand. Everyone in america knew what the message was. Everyone in america didnt know if you asked right now what is hillarys message, they knew his message, make America Great again and we are going to get jobs back. What i would say to them at trump tower, what was the one about and they would say we are on the message because part of the message is hes not a politician, and i think that the American People are tired of politicians. They had the last two president s of the rich got richer and the poor got poorer and some argue it helps Free Enterprise was dead that you had to be an insider. They saw it as corruption both on the left and on the right and here was somebody ironically a billionaire but a troublemaker, and they wanted to see everything ive said so in a funny way, as off message there was a reassurance to them host you talk about the hillary advantage and clinton advantage. There wasnt an advantage in the end, was their . Guest though, she had the advantage of experience and all these things going for her but there was some hubris. I was out covering the rally is for both sides and i remember people in washington saying they are intense and there are giant crowds far outnumbering the rallies and numbers and intensity but it really doesnt tell you how it is going to come out. He said the rallies do matter and it turned out that he did and i wonder if you saw that coming and felt the intensity around the country. A lot of people also said they went to these places in the rust belt states like pennsylvania and ohio and wisconsin they saw the trump signs and in washington was dismissed people just pujust put the signs out bt doesnt indicate whats going to happen on election day. I wonder when you saw it coming that he was going to win, your self. Guest the next book party was telling me there are signs all over pennsylvania. I said i dont see them. The thing i kept thinking of was i remember George Mcgovern had intense rallies and i cant forget George Mcgovern. I see the enthusiasm of these crowds. You cant tell me that this doesnt quite do something so i kept hearing that in my mind when i would say and say these rallies i kept thinking George Mcgovern who was misled by the rallies. But i have to admit that it took me off guard. I am portrayed on youtube as one of the few that might win. I could see its been a specialty of mine that evangelical vote and i have to say my wife, i want to thank her because she was running everything while i was working on this book, and my daughter is around here somewhere taking pictures, they were helping me do the research on the book that one of the things we had was that evangelical wrote. Barack obama sought out and called towards the end and said you are losing the evangelical vote and you dont have to. After the election was over one of his assistants wrote an oped in the Washington Post that said why did hillary wins the evangelical vote and part of the headline was she didnt ask for it. Turned out that didnt matter because 81 of them voted for donald trump, and i can tell you from our experience, they were very conflicted right up until the end he wasnt someone they wanted to support. On november 4 when a lot of celebrities got together, they started using the f. Word and all sorts of profanity. I thought wait a second, what a bunch of celebrities get together and used the name mohammed as a curse word in a Campaign Song lacks what kind of a reaction would you get . 1 are muslim, 70 are christi christian. Guesthat going to work . Host it does matter in those flyover states. Guest trump didnt have the role model qualities. He didnt live his life as evangelicals and conservative christians or practicing catholics feel someone should live as far as the studio 54 lifestyle and how he talked about women and so on. How did people get past that . He knew some of the buzzwords and there is a moment in the book where he sat trump tower ir and depressed and despond and and mrs. Dispersed. Very positive guy he would go down and listen to him, hes watching tv and sees a sexy blonde evangelist come on talking about hope so he calls hecalledher up and says you are terrific. Can i get you up here and he flies her to new york city and she walks him through the neighborhood so to speak because when you study his life, he would always move into a neighborhood and france, he wouldnt buy. He would rent and then hits the pavement, Walker County and listen to people and talk to people, wanting to buy a thing sometimes for several years and then when he thought he knew the area, well, this evangelist walked him around the neighborhood and he knew the different subcultures when you talk about 26 of the American Population and compare that to the 12. 9 , there are a lot of groups. He understood those and when he gave the speeches, he would say things that would belittle him that they would pick up on at the Washington Post and New York Times and at one point, he said to paula jones you should know ive been married three times and she says me too. So she wasnt a judgment call to him. They were kind of soul mates, so that is a story that has hardly been told and then a catholic story was theres a story where bill clinton takes his cell phone and throws it off the roof of his president ial pad in little rock arkansas because he is so mad at hillarys and the staff. He wanted her to go to notre dame to give a speech and then when the emails came out, blame it on russia but when they came out, what was in it, it was damaging and bill clintons answer was unique to get out in front of that and speak up and basically the idea was once we get into power, we are going to set up in these committees and coopt the Catholic Church and influence their doctrine to make it a catholic spring. Host more of a liberal or socially acceptable host one thing for you to separate church and state for talking about social policy but if you take over our church, while bill clinton wanted her to get out in front of that and say we are not going to do that, this is wrong just like a republican would denounce a donation from the wrong person, but her fear was there is no reason to call attention to this. A lot of people dont even know about it. The news media isnt covering it so lets keep it under wraps and he said you cant do that, its out there going from bishop to bishop. You have to get out front and say absolutely not, we had nothing to do with this. Host say 22 of the population are catholic and this is part of the email, so massive amounts of emails from the Clinton Campaign and john podesta and jennifer was part of that as a Communications Director both of whom are catholic as i remember which is why they had the expertise to feel they could influence. So, how much was that, how much difference did that make . Guest if you think back and remember george h. W. Bush won with a tremendous landslide and he split the catholic vote 50 50 and yet he won a landslide because the percentage of evangelicals, so trump took the catholic vote substantially over Hillary Clinton. She could have gotten a portion of that as he said afterwards that she asked and then bill clinton told if she had gone after them, she could have had some of those, so i think those emails did have a big impact and i think they came to that conclusion leaves and the first reaction was this is all jim cobeys fault, public statements, its all his fault and then later you wont hear them talking about him anymore, then it became the russians fault and in fairness, they gave money to Hillary Clinton, not to trump, but to the foundation and they got the Silicon Valley deal and the iranian deal. It was actually theoretically an exchange. There was no exchange with tru the first thing he does is increase military spending. What kind of a deal is that . Guest another thing i wanted you to talk about is the White Working Class because i know in the book you talk about how you picked this up and i was picking it up from the reporters standpoint on how Hillary Clinton was just completely missing the problem she was having in this rust belt states. They were confident they were going to win pennsylvania. Then the litany was always the republicans talked of winning pennsylvania that they almost never do. Guest they will never do that. We didnt expect it this time. Host i know into the you mentioned this i come from a workingclass background myself and you said people have been overlooked, despised, stomped on, taken for granted, this is their moment to speak. They have been shamed into telling the pollsters what they wanted to hear it in the privacy of the polling booths, they struck a blow. He isnt a workingclass guy and he is a business aristocrat. How did he send this and Michael Moore was right on the money he said i know what youre going to do and he laughed like they caught them in the act because they knew they were going to vote for donald trump. I think they presented being pushed into the conversation the media overplayed it and they just reacted. Dont tell me what to do. It might have worked but it might have been overdone and the media came off as a little desperate. They didnt like being called racists. They voted twice the same group all through those rust belt states. They took great pride in the fact that the union voters, twice they voted for barack obama and they were proud of themselves. They love to see that stigma of racism ended and they took pleasure in voting for barack obama and now they were being called racist because they didnt vote for another democrat who wasnt africanamerican . They thought im not going to be pushed into that. Host tk about the mont Hillary Clinton used that word to describe a lot of the supporters and it was taken as offensive by a lot of people. Guest i guess it shows the humor that it was overplayed as the people said you know, we are quick to think of the worst thing about ourselves until somebody says something about us and its critical we very often will say that is true and we will assume, but here the voters were defying it like deplorable, give me a break. They thought that was a little overreaching and kind of pushed back and took pride and wore it on their lapel. Host i wanted to get to more of what you make of what is going on contemporaneously with donald trump but before i do that, what did you learn about the country from the campaign . What did you learn about where the country is politically and what it wants from its government and how much change do people really want and what did you learn about donald trump . I would love to hear your answer to that question. [laughter] the senato senator and i talkedt that a lot. She worked for the Publishing Company who were terrific by the way and turn this around on a dime. They were very impressive to me about why it did it go bu didni took away is the american elected were on two things i couldnt believe they were onto and in some cases it was almost instinctive. They didnt know how the import and export think worked, didnt know how the Federal Reserve worked, didnt go into details e details of the stimulus plan which allowed the pushed by liberals and was obama. Plan that l of Major Companies to virtually ignore environmental regulation so they have it both ways they could say we are strong on the environment and they could with major monopolies disregard the law but keep them for small businesses. So, there was a modified dont know how else to put it but corruption and thats why towards the end they pushed trump into this drain the swamp because the average voter they couldnt explain what the details were that they had the sense that we were getting screwed and they had it on the left, Bernie Sanders people, the right with the ron paul people who would come out of the woodwork in 2012, and the lack of response when ronnie came forward i think was a bit of a shock. He thought this was going to be easy. So, i came away impressed with the fact that the average person out there has a good sense of smell and they sense something is wrong and that is why they are picking trump. Guest host i think that we tend to see things from the political prism if you look at the polling, our institutions are in big trouble with people as far as credibility goes and organized religion. The church has people, congress cut the news media, the presidency, the presidency has gone from 73 favorable rating in peoples minds in 1973 to about 20 today were 30 . Congress is like 9 . The only institutions that are above water and have a favorable rating on the military and the police. Just about Everything Else is aa tre