Recent book insane clown met iab in depth, your most recent book insane clown president dispatches from the 2016 circus. You write about donald trump, quote, no ordinary conman, he is way above average, the american political system is his easiest mark ever. That was early in the campaign. That was in march 2016. It was around the time he was sewing up the republican nomination and the purpose of that article, this is a compilation of articles to try to explain the trump phenomenon to people who were for the first time having to take it seriously and come to grips that this was happening. I took a different approach to trump and tried to listen to what his supporters were saying and focus on what he was doing. My take on him that he was a Brilliant Media manipulator who was perfectly suited to play on the weaknesses of the american political media and that turned out to be true. I wish i had stuck to my guns. Later on in the book i didnt believe he would be president. Host the day after the election you wrote i did not the donald trump coming. Everybody felt that way. They did. I did see a long time ago that we were going to have a problem with this sort of post factual media atmosphere and for which trump is perfectly suited. I even wrote a book about it a long time ago called the great derangement a terrifying true story of war, politics, and religion but i never thought donald trump specifically. He was a unique character and what was unique about him was in sight was the american president ial election was a big reality show but it was a bad reality show with bad characters and he made it an engrossing impossible to miss reality show that he was perfectly suited for it. Host you write Donald Trumps innovation was to recognize that a bad tv show the campaign was, any program tries to make stars out of human sedatives like scott walker and Lindsey Graham needed new producers and a new script. Exactly. We had for a long time in the media been drifting away from substantive policy reporting and more and more played up the storytelling aspect, production values aspect of it, pageantry, debates covered like sports contests. We had pregame shows where people instead of prognosticating who would win, these amazing graphics with surveys showing how the person was doing according to what he or she was saying and trump looked at that format and internally he said wouldnt it be amazing if you put a professional reality actor in the middle of this and took advantage of this stagecraft and that is what he did. A lot of the professional politicians are good enough on camera, able to deliver a speech composed for them by their staff but they are not able to do what trump does and attract attention to the degree he is able to do. Host when you are covering this for Rolling Stone did you develop a respect for his Campaign Style or his ability . Guest respect is an odd word. I definitely understood and appreciated what he was doing. I saw early on that trump was operating on a different level than other candidates. Scene i described in the book where State University in new hampshire, the press is always in the middle of the hall, behind a rope line and there are these risers and camera men are standing there and trump started to make up part of the act. In the middle of his speech he would interrupt himself and say look at these vultures, they hate me, never traveled so far for any event. Didnt believe i could do this and the crowd would physically turn toward us and sometimes start to boo and hiss and it got very menacing and to me it was incredible because trump was taking something boring, the american political stump speech which is usually a very lifeless event with very scripted, careful delivery and turned it into this menacing wwe style performance and it was very memorable. You could see they left the hall and worked up and it was very unusual for a political event and hard not to miss. Host you were standing at trump tower and somebody walked up and asked if you were a reporter. I think he swore at me and when i said yes i have a lot of experiences like that and this is been happening for quite a long time before trump even came on the scene, reporters had been more and more unpopular over the years, 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, but what he did was made a common enemy out of the media and presented us as the elitist upperclass enemy, what he basically said as we both hate these people and that was his link to the common man. That trick of using us and bringing us into the speech and making us characters in the story was incredibly effective. We solved his excessive only problem. Host you call the american political system an easy mark. What do you mean . What trump did, our political system especially our system of political media is set up in a way that is totally irrational and doesnt work well for the body politic. We are a commercial system of media which means almost all the people covering the president ial election need to get ratings and descriptions and hits in order to make money and so anybody who does those things, who gets ratings for the media will have massive advantage over anybody else. Doesnt matter what your politics are. If you are donald trump, you working making money for the network they will cover you. That was a major factor early in the race. There was a statistically trump got 23 times the tv coverage Bernie Sanders did. That wasnt for any substantive reason. It was because trump was making money. That vulnerabilities that we had to somebody it was a good commercial vehicle made it easy for someone 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 . Very difficult and frustrating assignment. First time i did it for a long stretch was in 2004, you are basically stuck in the same environment with the same people over and over and over again for days and weeks on end and especially in the later stages of the campaign when the secret service gets involved you are literally trapped in this environment, you cant leave the rope line. You have to stay with the same people and talk to them and you are stuck with the candidate, the candidates aids and other reporters and they are the only people you are getting information from and so what happens in this environment, this is a big factor was trump, you dont spend a lot of time talking to actual people and you miss a lot of phenomena that are going on out there. We get our information from things like holes, that tells us what is going on. That is how we take the temperature of the people but it is not an accurate way of discerning what is going on. That kind of bubble can be stifling and suffocating and strange. It is a weird atmosphere to live in for a long time. Host reading your most recent couple of books, do we draw a direct line from howard dean to ron paul, Dennis Kucinich to donald trump . I think so. They were all protest candidates to begin with. The difference was in the old days the press had the power to kind of take these protect candidates and marginalize them. The establishment media collectively decided a person like Dennis Kucinich was not fit for the presidency they would just describe him as not really a candidate. It would be subtle at sometimes, unsubtle at other times, sometimes the candidate would weigh the edge in is the debate and other times describe them as a fringe candidate but other times host cover the speeches and signal to audiences who is the real candidate and who isnt the real candidate. We have the front runners and these are curiosities. What happened this time around was there was so much animosity to the system and the establishment media and this whole beltway complex kingmaking group that decided who gets to be president and who doesnt get to be president that the voters for their energy into candidates like trump and Bernie Sanders who made in selling point was i dont belong to that club. That is what they did. They stood in front of audiences and said these people over here want to tell you who your president is going to be and i am defying that. Vote for me and people flocked to those candidacies so in the old days i watched as the press basically tore apart candidates like howard dean and Dennis Kucinich and ron paul and tried to do it to trump this time except he defied the instinct. We tried to get rid of him, he just wouldnt have it. He wouldnt exit the stage. Do you feel Rolling Stone and your self are part of the Mainstream Media . Yes and no. We have been around for so long, i guess you would call us we are not corporate media. That is an important distinction. We are privately owned. But our coverage is kind of tradition, it has an around for 50 years. He wouldnt describe us as a threadbare alternative Media Publication anymore. That would be an inaccurate description. We are somewhere if someone read Hunter F Thompson from 1972 would they relate to it today . Absolutely. Hunter thompsons books are timeless. I think of them more as being great works of fiction than i do journalism becomes irrelevant in a very short period. Hard to read journalism 50, 60 years later and really get into it but Hunter Thompsons books are like great novels. Fear and loathing on the campaign trail i always think of. I wrote this once for one of the introductions to one of those books, reminded me of a book like the castle or the trial because it is an incredible story of this guy searching for meaning and justice in this horrible construction of fakeness and lies and treachery with these awful villains populating the landscape. Never quite able to find happiness and truth and validation. Those books are incredible to me. They will last another 200 years. Host in your book the great derangement a terrifying true story of war, politics, and religion you write you were losing faith in political and national institutions. This is something i saw a long time ago and worried about a lot, that there was a trend on the left and the right. In america we use catchphrases like left and right because there is no other shorthand for politics. It is inaccurate but we have to. People were increasingly tuning out the, quote, Mainstream Media, they were going and seeking out their own stranger, sometimes more conspiratorial media sources. The internet is an incredible invention but one of the things it is good at doing is matching people with their opinions. When people read the news these days, instead of turning on abc, cbs or nbc as they did in a 70s, now they can craft their own realities, these are the five publications that describe the world in a way that i agree with and go on to the internet and read those five things and that is how they get their news. What started to happen at the end of the 2000s, people were beginning to retreat into their own camps, there was no common set of facts we were debating and that was the precursor to this election where we couldnt agree on what the facts were. Host is that a negative . Guest yes, i think so. It is a bad thing. It is a bad thing when the entire society cant even agree on the terms of an argument. We dont debate each other on issues or policies anymore, we disagree on the literal facts of the argument. That is a very difficult place for us to be if we cant even agree on what happened, then it becomes very difficult for people to come to anythings more substantive than that. This is been going on a while now and it is a result of the fracturing of the media landscape which is only getting more fractured as time goes on. Now you rarely see a News Organization that tries to reach the entire population. We go demographic hunting. We say here are our readers or viewers and we will craft the news that audience, they are going to love us and these people wont and that is unfortunate. Host in a recent Rolling Stone column, the title of it, you wrote roger ailes was one of the worst americans ever. Guest roger ailes died and get it back to Hunter Thompson i was thinking about his famous obituary of nixon, and 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 hands in the morning. I was trying to do something similar for roger ailes but roger ailes to me was the main driver of this phenomenon of lets target a demographic, give them news that they like and forget about these other people over here. He talked about it, my audience is age 55 to dead. They dont want to hear about working women or liberals, they dont want them to exist. They crafted a news program for that audience and that started us down the road of this divided media landscape where we are basically a population split into camps and we have our own news sources and dont agree on anything and he was a pioneer of that. Host to go back to the 70s when we all listened to the same news, was it good at nbc, abc and cbs essentially in many ways controlled what we heard, what we thought . Guest look, it was an information monopoly, i read manufacturing consent, i agree with the premise of the book that it is very easy to control the opinions of population if you only have a few media sources and they were always some pad ago, in line with policy objectives, permanent government of the United States, all that stuff was tremendously negative, it wasnt diverse. I grew up in the media, my father was in the media, it was a very different kind of news landscape. The only thing in its favor was they had a different attitude towards the purpose of the news backs and. The original conception of how the news was supposed to work was if you go back to the Telecommunications Act of the 30s the idea was government would leave the airwaves to these private companies and in exchange these private companies were supposed to provide a Public Service in the form of meaningful news. They were supposed to make their money doing entertainment or sports and news was supposed to be a loss leader and it didnt have to be profitable and they were only there in their minds to present something factual and useful to the public. Even though it was incredibly biased and led us into wars like vietnam and excluded lots of voices, there was an urge their to get the story correct that isnt necessarily true now. Now we are crafting an entertainment product for people and people consume the news the same way they consume entertainment which is unfortunate. Host back to the great derangement a terrifying true story of war, politics, and religion, the derangement i describe in this book kicked off when americans finally figured out they had been a trade by the mainstream political system that still failed to abandon the old paradigm. Guest yes. Wasnt like we had a revolution, right . There was a frustration with people, they didnt trust their politicians, they didnt trust the media but they didnt have an alternative they trusted either so there was a lot of incoherent frustration and anger in the population looking for an outlet and i think that left us ripe for things that happened last year with donald trump, there was an enormous number of people who were discontent and they were looking for any change, almost irrespective of what the change was. We saw amazing polls last year the two of three people favored a new direction and didnt care what the direction was. That hugely favored somebody like trump. He came in and his main argument to people was whatever you think of me, i am not what you 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 you supported Hillary Clinton . Guest that is unfortunately a consequence of how again how americans consume the media now. It is assumed that if you write something negative about one party is a must support the other party and that is the consequence of politicized media that i think people like roger ailes pioneered. If you Say Something negative about the clintons you must be a conservative. That unfortunately is the kind of materialist view of what news is as opposed to just being sometimes people have negative feelings about both candidates or are trying to be objective and call things as they are, it is not a political act to cover somebody in a positive or negative way. Host from insane clown president dispatches from the 2016 circus. Where did that book come from . Guest there is a band called insane clown posse. I was trying to come up with something that would hang on donald trump for a year, not want to be subtle in your marketing ideas. Who did the drying on the front . Guest of insane clown president dispatches from the 2016 circus to give victor youhaas, illustrator for Rolling Stone. We have worked together for a decade now. He has the same basically disturbed sense of humor that i do. We had a lot of fun during that. Host from that book the clintons should have left politics the moment they decided they didnt care what the public thought about how they made their money. Guest that was an amazing detail in some of the reporting that his come out. Among other things in books like shattered, they describe this moment where Hillary Clinton essentially said when she was trying to decide whether or not to accept what turned into over 100 million in speaking fees by taking his this tour of various banks and big corporations, she said they will write negative things about me whatever i do. That was the substance of the quote. Cant remember exactly what she said. When you are in that place with a politician, basically saying it doesnt matter what i do anymore, people are going to hate me no matter what, what that means in my mind is you are no longer really worrying what the public thinks about you which is a dangerous place for a politician to be. Host good afternoon and welcome to booktv on cspan2, this is our monthly in depth program. This is where we invite one author to talk about his or her body of work and we have Rolling Stone correspondent and auth