Thanks for coming to the bookshop, thanks for joining us at east city bookshop. Who is here for the first time . Welcome. Thanks for stopping by. We are excited to have you. Just so you know, we have one to two author events every week plus or weekly book clubs, twostory times per week and a variety of social gatherings like coloring books and wine so if you enjoy your time here tonight please check us out on social media on facebook and aims to graham and on twitter and sign up for the newsletter and you will hear about all the other cool things we have coming up. But tonight it is our pleasure to welcome douglas lee, the New York Times bestselling author. Hes been an adviser to two american president s and is one of the few living historians to have written about all of the american president s. Hes interviewed six u. S. President s, 71st ladies, coauthored a book with one, has entertained too in his own home and served on the white house staff as special assistant to the president. He cofounded the charity with nancy reagan and he is here to talk about his new book game of forms with tenet wh kenneth siel introduced shortly. After our talk we will have a qanda from the audiencq a fron you are welcome to purchase a copy of the book to have signed. Thanks for joining us. It is my privilege to introduce the president of the White House PressCorps Association that on the big dinner that donald trump refused to attend this year. One of the most prestigious event in washington, d. C. And he has covered how many president s . Six president s in the white house as part of the White House Press corps. Hes worked at u. S. News for how many years . 33 years. And a Senior Writer he has had almost every title and position you can sing god. He is a remarkable journalist. He may be a mom they are almost extinct i will put it to you that way. Four or five journalists that i know of who i dont know where he stands politically. All the others i could tell you if they are left or right. I cant tell you where kenneth is because hes absolutely objective and pursues the story whatever it may be. So i guess we can call him a traditional journalist were oldfashioned journalist, but its a profession thats disappearing pretty quickly and only had a brief time that it flourished so i will turn it over to him. Hes the author of many books in his own right and one that i loved is the history of all the places where the president s lived like nixon and the kennedys. Hes written a book on that which you can find at the bookstore and another book i love is the celebrity president he writes about how president s have become celebrities and thats part of their power today. The extension of the bully pulpit and he has out his new book if we can ask them to see what that is and then we will get started. Im a traditional journalist, so i hope that by the end of this discussion you dont know my politics and that ive succeeded in that for 31 years covering the white house because i dont think i could have covered the president s ranging from Ronald Reagan to clinton and barack obama and now donald trump unless i could talk about things like that in the middle. The other thing i want to mention as weve known each other for 25, 27 years now and so i hope he can conduct our wer talk like the talk over lunch. We will sort of the informally and wbe informallyand we welcome questions afterwards and i find whenever we have lunch and i do this with many sources, the best information comes in a more informal give and take which is what i hope we will do so, with that, its a very interesting time for the book to come out. He was kind enough to mention i have a book coming out called ultimate insiders about white house photographers, the staff photographers and personal photographers that are the ultimate flies on the wall and they hear things no one else hears and sees things no one else sees so that is my next book coming out in september. But its an interesting time for this discussion and for the book because the town is just the biggest parlor game in washington now its what is donald trump all about. What is he going to do next, what is going to happen, what is the Republican Party anymore and i hope doug can explain a little bit about that as we go on. What has become of clinton and so on but really it is donald trump has 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. Because he puts them out there so this is another layer of coverage thats been added but i want to start by asking basically the basic question you talk about in the book at great length. What did donald trump do right. After spending eight to one if you count the soft spending money. They spend it all. The ceo on google is in charge of social media and had academia and ahead of wall street and had the banks, 240 newspaper endorsements, he had 19 but he had a message and it was burned like a brand. Everybody in america knew what his message was. Everybody didnt know if you ask them what is the message that the new Donald Trumps message make America Great again. And what i would say to them at the trump tower they would say we are on message because he was not a politician and i think the American People were tired of politicians. They have the last two president s, ric the rich got ri, the poor got poorer. When you talk about the clinton advantage there really wasnt an advantage. She had all these things going for her. They outnumbered the rallies and intensity that it really doesnt tell you how the election is going to come out. The rallies do matter and it turned out that the data. And id wonder if you saw that coming and felt that intensity around the country. People said if they went to these places like pennsylvania and ohio and some instant wisconsinbased office finds and in washington it was dismissed but that doesnt indicate whats going to happen. When you saw it coming i have bob here by the way who will have the next book party and he told me he signs all over pennsylvania and i said i dont see him. The things i kept thinking of is i remember George Mcgovern had a very intense rallies and i cant forget George Mcgovern saying i dont believe the polls. I see the enthusiasm and the crowds. You cant tell me this doesnt equal eight to something so i heard that echo in my mind. I kept remembering George Mcgovern who was misled by those rallies. But i have to admit it took me off guard. I am portrayed as one of the few that said he might win. Its been a specialty of mine the evangelical vote and my wife, i think her because she was running everything on the book and my daughter is around here somewhere taking pictures, they were helping me do the research on the buck that one of the things we hit was the evangelical vote and a mistake that baracthey missedit but bard he called up their towards the end and said you are losing the white evangelical vote and you dont have to and they laughed at him. After the election was over, one of obamas assistants wrote an oped in the Washington Post said why did hillary lose the evangelical vote and the headline is she didnt ask for it. The fact turned out to matter because ed 1 of them voted for donald trump and i can tell you from our experience and they were very conflicted right up to the end. He wasnt someone they wanted to support at november 4 when a bunch of celebrities got together and they started using the f. Word and all kinds of profanities and getting out the vote and using jesus i thought what wait a second with a bunch of celebrities get together and use the name mohammed in a Campaign Song what kind of reaction but you get, 1 are muslim and 70 are christi christian. Is that going to work . They dont Pay Attention to this so it doesnt matter but it does matter in most flyover states. Trump didnt have the role model qualities. He didnt live his life as evangelicals and conservative christians were practicing catholics feel someone should live their life as far as to studio 54 hedonistic lifestyle and how he talked about winning and so on. How did people get past that . There was a moment in the book where hes at the trump tower and is depressed and despond and misses this old preacher who was a presbyterian, very positive guy on fifth avenue. He would go down to the church and listen and he missed it so hes watching tv and sees this sexy blonde televangelists come on and talk about hope. He calls her up on the phone and says bart trevithick. 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 rent. He wouldnt buy. Then he would hit the pavement, walk around and listen to people, talk with people, wouldnt buy a thing sometimes for several years and then when he thought he knew the area he would buy. Well, this televangelists walked him around the evangelical neighborhood and he knew the different subcultures. When you talk about 26 of the American Population and compare that to africanamericans, 12. 9 there are a lot of subgroups. He understood those and when he gave his speeches and he would say things that would be hints about what go over the heads of the Washington Post and New York Times at one point, he said to paula jones, this was donald trump u. Should know, ive been married three times and she said me to. So she wasnt judgmental to him. That is a story that has hardly been told. Then the catholic story was theres a story where bill clinton takes the cell phone and throws it off the roof of his president ial pad in little rock arkansas because hes so mad at hillary and the staff. He wanted her to go to notre dame and Saint Patricks day to give a speech and she wouldnt do it and then wen then when tha emailemails came out, you cane it on russia but when they came out, the catholic spring, that was damaging and bill clintons answer was the need t you need t in front of that and speak up and basically the idea was once the get into power we are going to set up the kennedys and we will coopt the Catholic Church and influenced the doctrine to make it a catholic spring. Host more of a liberal socially acceptable. A lot to think its one thing for you to separate church and state and get mad at us for talking about social policy, but youre going to take over the church . Bill clinton wanted her to get in front of that and say this is wrong. I denounce that. 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 bill clinton said you cant do that. Its out there. Its going from bishop to bishop. You have to get out front and say absolutely not we have nothing to do with it. You mentioned some of it came out in that email. 22 of the population are catholic. And this is part of that email, massive amounts of email from the Clinton Campaign and john podesta and jennifer was part of that both of whom were catholic as i remember which is why they had the expertise to deal they could influence. So how much was the week, how much difference did it make . If you think back to when george h. W. Bush won with a tremendous landslide and he split the catholic vote 50 50 and yet he won a landslide because of the evangelicals he had, trump took the catholic vote substantially over Hillary Clinton. She could have gotten a portion of that as barack obama said afterwards if she had asked and then bill clinton felt she would have gone after them so she could have had some of those. So i think those emails did have a big impact and i think that they have belatedly come to that conclusion. I think the first reaction was this is all james fault and they said that, the fbi director. Public statements, its all james fault and then later as you will hear them, then it became the russians fault. In fairness, the russians gave money to Hillary Clinton. They gave money to the foundation and got the Silicon Valley deal. There was actually potentially theoretically in exchange. There was no exchange with trump if they help him locate using power and first thing he does is increase military spending. What kind of deal is that . The other thing i wanted you to talk about a little bit is the White Working Class because i know in the buck you talk about how you pick 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 the rust belt states they were confident they were going to win pennsylvania. The litany was the always talked about winning pennsylvania but they almost never did. And of course florida is a different area of the country that that happened in the working class. I know in the book i actually put a little tag on it because im from a workingclass background myself and i know you said people had been overlooked, despised, taken for granted, this was their moment to speak. They had been shamed into telling the pollsters what they wanted to hear but in the privacy of the polling booths they had struck a blow korea to talk about that. Hes not a workingclass guy, hes an American Business aristocrats. How did he sends this, and Michael Moore was right on the money when he did his event in ohio he kind of teased the audience if he remembered that he looked out and said i know what youre going to do and they all kind of laughed like he caught them like they were little kids and he caught them in the act because he knew they were going to vote for donald trump. I think they presented being pushed and the media, the condescension of the media. Some in the media may have overplayed it and they just reacted to that. Dont tell me what to do. It might have worked but i think it might have been overdone and the media came off as desperate. They didnt like being called racist. They voted twice for barack obama. The same group all through the rust belt states. They took a great pride in the fact the White Catholic union voters twice they voted for barack obama. They were proud of themselves and loved to see that stigma of racism ended and they took pleasure in voting for barack obama. Now they were being called racist because they didnt vote for another democrat who wasnt africanamerican . I think they thought im not good to be pushed into that. Talk about the deplorable moment where she used that word to describe a love of the Trump Supporters and that was taken as offensive by a lot of the people. It was worn like a badge by many people because it showed the humor that was overplayed. We are quick to think of the worst things about ourselves if somebody says something about us and it is critical we often will say thats true and assume, but here the voters were just defined like im deplorable, give me a break. They thought that was an overreach and they kind of pushed back and talk pride and wore it on their lapel. I want to get to what do you make of whats going on with President Trump but before i do that, what did you learn about the country from this campaign your self, what did you learn about where the country is or what they want from their government and how much change do people want and what did you learn about donald trump. We talked about that a lot and worked for the Publishing Company that was terrific. They didnt know how the import export bank works. The average person doesnt know how the Federal Reserve works, doesnt know the detail of the stimulus plan which allowed, though it was pushed by liberals and it was obamas plan is allowed to Major Companies to virtually ignore the environmental regulations, so they had it both ways and they could say we are strong on the environment and bake at what the nature monopolies disregarded the environmental ball but keep them for Small Businesses. So, there was a lot of i dont think how else to put it but corruption. Thats why towards the end, they pushed him into this drain the swamp because the average voter couldnt explain what details te details were, but they had this sense we are getting screwed and they had it on the left, on the right and when romney came forward i think that he was a big shock. I came away impressed with the fact they have a good sense of smell and sentenced to something is wrong. We tend to see things as in big trouble as far as credibility goes like organized religion. The church as people see it, congress, the news media, the presidency has gone from 73 favorable rating in peoples minds in 1973 to about 20 today or the 30 . Congress is like 9 . The only institutions that are above water and had a favorable rating or the military and the police. Just about Everything Else is a tremendous credibility problem or crisis. People said something has gone wrong here and for many, that question on the right action and the wrong track has been in a negative. People feel we are headed in the wrong direction and they got to the point they said donald trump is a flawed candidate but hes going to shake things up and i think to me that is one big lesson i drew from the whole campaign. But i wanted to ask about where we are today. Donald trump has talked about doing things republicans traditionally like such as increasing the military budget as you said can increase the Homeland Security budget but at the same time, he is opposed to the trade that republicans have liked for many years. He doesnt want to tamper with Social Security and medicare which a lot of republicans