President trump, quote, he is no order con man. He is way above average in the american political system is his easiest mark ever. Guest yeah. This was that was early the campaign. I think that was in march of 2016. So it was just around the time when he was sewing up the republican nomination and the purpose of that article is this is a come. Com compilation of articles to explain the trump phenomenon for people who were having to take it serious come to grip watches the fact this was happening. So i took kind of a different approach to trump and tried to really listen to what his supporters were saying and try to focus on what he was doing, and my take on him is that he was a Brilliant Media manipulator and that he was perfectly suited to play on all the weaknesses of the american political media, ask that turned out to be truism was i had stucks to my guns on the piece. Thought he would be president and then later on i didnt believe that. Host well, the dave after the election you wrote i did not see donald trump coming. Everybody wrote that, though, didnt they . Guest well, they did, yeah. Yeah. I mean, its funny. I did see a long time ago that we were going to have a problem with this sort of postfactual media atmosphere, and that were for which trump was perfectly suited. I even wrote a book about its long time ago called the great derangement. Never saw donald trump specifically. He was a unique character and what was unique was his instant sight was that the American Insight was that american president ial election was just basically a big reality somehow show, but a bad rat show with bad characters and he made it engrossing and impossible to mitt reality show and was perfectly suited for the medium. Host along that line you write that Donald Trumps innovation was to recognize what chabad tv show the campaign was, any show that tries to make human stars of a human sedatives, like scott walker and lindsey graham, needed new producers and a new script. Guest exactly. We had for a lime time in the media been drifting away from substantive policy reporting and we had more and more played up the storytelling aspect, the production values aspect of it, the pageantry, debates that were covered like sports contests. We had pregame shows where people sort of prognosticate who i would win. Amazing graphics with the die surveys dial sue surveys showing what the person was doing depending on what they being saying. Trump said wouldnt it bit amazing if you had professional reality actor in the middle of this and took advantage of the stage craft, and thats what he did. A lot of the professional politicians, theyre good enough on camera and able to deliver a speech thats been composed by for them by their staff, but theyre not able to improvise and dot do what trump does and attract attention to the degree he is able to do. Host when wow covered this for Rolling Stone did you develop a respect for his Campaign Style or his ability to guest im not sure respect is an odd word. I definitely understood and appreciated what he was doing. I think i saw early on that trump was operating on a different level from the other candidates. Theres a scene i describe in the book where at Plymouth State University in new hampshire, and the press is always in the middle of the hall. Were roped up, behind a rope line and theres risers and the cameramen are standing there and trump had started to make us part of the act. What he would do is he in the middle of his speech he would interrupt him and say, loom as these jerks these vultures, never head my. Never traveled so far for an event. Didnt believe i would do this well and the crowd would physically turn towards us and sometimes boo and hiss and throw things and it was amazing. Trump was taking something that was incredibly boring, the american political stump speech, which is usually a very lifeless event with this very scripted, careful delivery, and he turned it into this immediate physical menacing wwe style performance, and it was very memorable for people. You could see they left the hall sort of worked up into a lather and that was very unusual for a political event. It was hard not to miss how effective that would be. Host how relate the start 0en election day you were at trump tower and somebody asked you if you were a cincinnati i think he i said yes. I had lot of experiences like that on the trail. And this to be fair had been happening for quite a lock time, before trump even came on the scene. Reporters had been more and more up popular over the years, and trump used our unpopularity in a really interesting way, because being a billionaire from new york, he theoretically had a huge accessibility problem with ordinary people in quoteunquote flyover country. He made a common enemy out of the media. And he presented us as the elitist, you know, upper class enemy, and he what he basically said is we both hate these people and that was his link to the common man, basically. So, that trick of using us, bringing abuse the speech and making us characterness the story, was incredibly effective for him women solved his accessibility problem. Host you called the american political system an easy mark. What do you people by senate. Guest well, again, the for example, the what trump did our political system, especially our system of political media, is set up in a way thats totally irrational and doesnt work well for the body politic. Were a commercial system of media, which means almost all the people covering the president ial election need to get rate examination subscriptions and eyeballs and hits to make money, and so anybody who does those things, gets ratings for the media has a massive advantage over anybody else. Opportunity matter your policies. If youre like donald trump and making money for the networks theyll cover you more. That was a major, major factor early in the race, i think. There was a statistic that trump got 23 times the amount of tv coverage Bernie Sanders did and that was because trump was making the tvs and the newspapers and magazines money, and that vulnerability that we had to somebody who was a good commercial vehicle, maded very easy for somebody like trump to come in and take over the entire spectacle. Host what is it like to travel in the president ial Campaign Reporting bubble . Guest its very difficult and frustrating assignment. The first time i did it for a long stretch was in 2004, and youre basically stuck in the same environment with the same people over and over and over again, for days and days and weeks on end. Especially the latest stages of the campaign when the secret service gets involved, youre literally trapped in this environment. You cant leave the rope line. You have to stay with the same people and talk to them and youre stuck with the candidate, the candidates aides and other reporters and theyre the only people you get information from. So what happens is n this environment i think this is big factoff with trump you just dont spend a lot of time talking to actual people and you mace lot of important phenomenon going on out there. Some we get our information from things like polls. That tells it what is going on and thats how we take the temperature of the people. But its not an accurate way of kind of discerning what is going on, and that kind of bubble can be very stifling and suffocating and strange. Its weird atmosphere to live in for a long time. Host reading your most recent couple of books, tell me if im wrong but can you draw a direct line from howard dean to ron paul to Dennis Kucinich to donald trump . Guest i think so, yeah. I mean, there were they were all protest candidates to begin with. The difference was that in the old days, the press had the power to kind of take these protest candidates candidates af marginalize them. If we thought the establishment media collect testify live decide collectively decide a person like Dennis Kucinich was not a fit for the presidency they would describe him as not really a candidate and it would be sundayle subtle sometimes, and not subtle other times they were describe as a fringe candidate in text, other times didnt cover the speeches and who would signal to audience who is the real candidate and not the real candidate. So we had the frontrunners and these are the curiosities. What happened this time around was that there was so much animosity toward the system and the establishment media and this whole kind of beltway complex kingmaking group that decided who gets to be president and who doesnt, that the voters poured all their energy into candidates like trump and Bernie Sanders, whose main selling point was i dont belong to that club. They stood up in front of audiences and said these people over here want to tell you who your president is going to be, and im defying that and vote for me. People flocked to those candidacies. So in the old days, yeah, i watched this as the press basically tore apart candidates like dean and kucinich and also ron paul, and they tried to do it to trump this time except he defied the instinct. We tried to get rid of him and he just wouldnt have it and he wouldnt exit the stage. Host do you feel that rowling stone and yourself are part ore the main stream media. Guest yes and no. We have been around for so long i guess were called legacy media. Were not corporate media. Thats an important distinction. We are privately owned. So, our coverage is a tradition. Now its been around for 50 years, and you wouldnt describe us as a threat bearer alternative media. Were somewhere in between. Host if somebody rent back and read hunter s. Thompson from 1972 could they relate to it today . Guest absolute limit Hunter Thompsons books are timeless, and they i think of them more as being like great works of fiction than i do journalism becomes irrelevant in a very short period of time. Its pretty hard to read journalism 50, 60 years later and really get into it. But Hunter Thompsons books are like great novels. The fear and loathing on the campaign trail issue always think of as i wrote this once for one of the introductions to one of the books it remind me of a book like the castle or the trial because its this incredible story of this guy kind of searching for meaning and justice in this horrible construction of fakeness and lies and treachery and with these awful villains populating the landscape, and he is never quite able to get there to find happiness and truth and validation. Those books are incredible to me. I think theyre theyll last for 100 years. Host lets go back to 2009 and your book the great derangement movement eye you write we were really losing faith in our political and National Institutions at that point. Guest yeah. This is something that i saw a long time ago and worried about a lot, that there was a trend on both the left and the right, and unfortunately in america we have to use these catch phrases like left and right because theres no other shorthand for owl politics. Its inaccurate sometimes but we have. To but people were increasingly, i think, tuning out the quoteunquote Mainstream Media and going and seeking out their own stranger, sometimes more conspiratorial sources. The internet is an incredible invention but is really good at matching people with their opinions. So, when people read the news those days, instead of just turning on abc, cbs, and nbc, like in the 70s, now they can kind of craft their own realities. They can say these are the five publications that describe the world in a way that i agree with, and they go on to the internet and read 0 those five things. What started to happen at the end of the 2000s was that people were beginning to retreat into their own camps and they increasingly didnt have common set of facts we were debating, and that i think was the precursor to this election. We just couldnt agree on what the facts were. Host is that a negative . Guest i think so. I think its a bad thing when the entire society cant even agree on the terms of an argument. Right . We dont really debate each other on issues or policies anymore. We disagree on the literal facts of the argument. And that its a very difficult place for us to be if we cant even agree on what happened, then it becomes very, very difficult for people to come to any kind of anything more substantive than that, and this has been going on for a while now and i think its a result of the fracturing of the media landscape, which is only getting more and more fractured as time guess on, i think. I think now you rarely see a News Organization that tries to reach the entire population. We go demographic hunting now is what we do. We say, here are our readers or viewers and were going to craft the news for that audience and theyre going to love us, and these people wont. Thats unfortunate. Host in fact in a recent Rolling Stone come almost, the title you wrote roger ailes was one of the worst americans ever. Guest yeah. I was trying to so roger ailes getting back to to Hunter Thompson i thought about famous obituary of nixon which an obituary can be a really interesting thing to write, and i always remembered what he said about nixon, that he was so crooked that he needed servants to help him unscrew his pants in the morning. But i was trying to do something similar for roger ailes, but roger ailes to me was a main driver of this phenomenon of, lets target a demographic, give them news they like and forget about the other people over there. And the talked about it. He said my audience is age 55 to dead. They dont even want to hear about working women or liberals. They just dont want them to exist and they crafted a news program for that audience ask that started down the road of died divided media landscape, we are a population split into camps and we each have our own news sources and we dont agree on anything and i think the was a pioneer in that. Host going back to what you called the 70s when we all listened to the same news, was good that nbc, abc, and cbs, essentially in many ways controlled what we heard and thought . Guest no. Look, it was an information monopoly. Read manufacturing consent when i was a young person and i totally agree with the premise of the book, which is that its very easy to control the opinions of the population if you only have a few media sources, and they were almost entirely simple the same, the permanent government of the United States and all that stuff was tremendously negative. Wasnt diverse. I grew up in the media. My far was in the media. It was a different news landscape. Would say in its favor was that they had a different attitude toured the purpose of the news. The original conception how the news was supposed to work was if you go bag to to Telecommunications Act of the 30s, the idea was that a government would lease the air waves to private companies and in exchange this private companies were supposed to provide a Public Service in the form of meaningful news. Were supposed to make their money doing entertainment or sports and then news was a loss leader, and it didnt have to be profitable, and they were only there to in their minds, to present something that was factual and useful to the public. And even though it was incredibly biased and led us into wars like vietnam, and excluded lots of voices, it still there was an urge there to try to get the story correct, that isnt necessarily true now. Now i think were basically crafting an entertainment product for people, and people consume the news the same way they consume entertainment. Host the deangel you described the book kicked off when americans finally figured out theyd been betrayed by their mainstream political system but still failed to abeen bon the old paradigm completely. Guest yeah. Well, one like we had a revolution. Right . I think there was a frustration with people. They didnt trust their politicians. Didnt trust the media, but didnt have an alternative theyve dust trusted either. There was incoherent anger in the population looking for an outlet and that left up ripe for donald trump. Enormous number of people who were discontent and looking for the kind of change, irrespective of what the change was. We saw these amazing polls that two out of three people favored a new direction and they didnt care what the direction was. And that hugely favored somebody like trump. He came in and his main argument to people was, whatever you think of me, im not what you have experienced before. And that was very attractive to people. Host because you were critical many times in your writing about donald trump, did people assume that you supported Hillary Clinton . Guest well, thats yeah. Thats unfortunately a consequence of how again, how americans consume the media now. Its assumed that if you write something negative about one party, you must support the other party and this is a condition sequence of the politicized media, that i think that people like roger ailes pioneered. If you are saying something negative about the clintons, therefore you must be a conservative, and that unfortunately is this kind of materialist view of what news is as opposed to just being sometimes people will have negative feelings about both candidates or theyre just trying to be objective and trying to call things as they are. Not necessary lay political act to cover somebody in positive or negative way. Host from insane clown president where did the name come from . Guest theres a band call insane clown possess see and i was trying to come up with something to hang around donald trump for a year, makes you not want to besot until your marketing ideas. That was it. Host who did the drawing on the front . Guest of insane clown president . . The illustrator for Rolling Stone. We have worked together for over a decade and has the same basically disturbed sense of humor i do. So we had a lot of fun during the campaign. Host from that book the clintons should have left politics the moment they decided the didnt care what the public thought about how they made their money. Guest i thought that was an amazing detail in some of the reporting that has come out. Among other things in books like shattered that described this moment where Hillary Clinton essentially said, when she was trying to decide whether or not to accept what ultimately turned into over 100 million in speaking fees, by taking this tour of all the various banks and big corporations, she said theyre going to write negative things about me whatever i do. Right . That w