Matt, and your most recent book, insane, president , youre right about President Trump quote, he is no ordinary conman, he is way above average in the american political system is his easiest mark ever. That was early in the campaign. I think that was it in march of 2016. It was just around the time that he was filling up the republican mom nomination. The the purpose of this article was to try to explain the trump phenomenon to people who were for the first time having to take it seriously and having to come to grips with the fact that this was happening. I took a different approach to trump and try to listen what his supporters were saying. My take on him was that he was a Brilliant Media manipulator and he was perfectly suited to play on all the weaknesses of the american political media. That turned out to be true. I wish i had stuck to my guns on that because i thought he was going to be president. And then later on in the book i do not believe that. The day after the election you wrote, did not see donald trump coming. Everybody thought that. Well, they did. I did see a long time ago that we were going to have a problem with this post factual media atmosphere. For which trump was perfectly suited. I even wrote a book about a long time ago called the great arrangement. I never thought donald trump specifically, he was a unique character what was unique was his insight was that the american president ial election was a reality show but a bad one with bad characters. He made it impossible to miss the reality show was perfectly suited for. Host along that line you recognize that any program that tried to make stars out of the human sedatives like scott walker and Lindsey Graham needed new producers in a new script. Guest exactly. We had been drifting away from substitute policy reporting and we had more and more played off the storytelling the pageantry, the debates, we had pregame shows for people prognosticator to is going to him. We had amazing graphics showing how the person was doing according to what he or she was saying. And trump wind it be cool if its put this in the middle of it and thats what he did. I think a lot of the professional politicians are good enough on camera. Theyre able to deliver his speech but theyre not able to improvise what trump does to a degree that hes able to do. When you are covering this for Rolling Stone did you develop a respect for his Campaign Style or his ability respect is an odd word. I definitely understood and appreciated what he was doing. Also early on that trump was operating on a different level than the candidates. Theres this scene i described were Plymouth State UniversityNew Hampshire and the press is always in the middle of the hall and theres a roped off area and the cameramen are standing there. Jumpstarted to make as part of the act. What he would to us that he would interrupt and self inside look at these jerks and vultures. They hate me. They never traveled so far for an event. They didnt believe i could do this well. In the crowd would physically turn toward us sometime would start to boo and his and i got very menacing. To me was incredible because trump was taken something incredibly boring which is really very lifeless with a swift and careful delivery and turned it into this physical men in the scene wwe star performance and it was very memorable for people. They left the hall and worked up into a lather. That was unusual for a political event. It was hard enough not to miss how effective it would be. Host you relate the story to say it was a reporter. I said yes and i had a lot of experiences like that. And to be fair this is been happening for a long time before trump came on the same. Or maybe reporters had been more and more on popular over the years. Trump use the unpopularity and a interesting way. 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 he presented us as the elitist upperclass enemy. What he basically said his we hate these people and so that trick of bringing us into the speech and making us characters in the story was incredibly effective. We sell to the accessibility problem. Host you call the american political system an easy mark, what you mean by this . Guest again, for example what trump did, our political system is set up in a way thats irrational and doesnt work well for ball and the politics. Almost all the people covering the president ial election need to get ratings and hits in order to make money. So anybody who does those things is going to have a massive advantage over anybody else. Doesnt matter what your policy is. If youre making money theyre going to cover you more. That was a major factor early in the race. Theres always a statistic that trump got 23 times the amount of coverage that Bernie Sanders did. That was not for any substantive reason but because trump was making the newspapers money. That vulnerability that we had to somebody who is a good commercial vehicle made it easy for someone like trump to come in and take over the entire spectacle. Host whats it like to travel in the president ial Campaign Reporting bubble . Its a very difficult and frustrating assignment. The first time i did for a long stretch was in 2004. He basically stuck in the same environment with the same people over and over again for days and days and weeks on end. Especially the later stages of the campaign when the secret service gets about you are literally trapped in the environment. You cant leave the line you have to stay with the same people and talk to them. Youre stuck with the candidate, their aides, and other reporters. Theyre the only people youre getting information from. What happens and i think this is a big factor what happened is that you dont spend a lot of time talking to and important people. We get our information from things like polls. Thats how we take the temperature of the people. Its not an accurate way of discerning whats going on. The public and be suffocating and strange. Its a weird atmosphere to live in. Host reading your most interesting couple of books, can you draw direct line from howard dean to ron paul to dennis to donald trump . Guest i think so. They were all protest candidates to begin with. The difference was, in the old days the power to take this protest candidates and marginalize them. If the establishment media collectively decided that a person was not a fit for the presidency, they would just describe him as not really a candidate. The be subtle sometimes and unsubtle other times. Sometimes they would describe them as a french candidate, other times they would not cover the speeches. And they would signal to audiences whose the real candidate and who isnt. So we had the front runners and these are the curiosities. What happen this time around is there so much animosity toward the system and establishment media into this whole but way complex group who decides who gets to be president who doesnt that the voters poured all the energy into candidates like trump and sanders whose main selling point is that i dont belong to that club. They stood up it front of audiences and said these people over here want to tell you who your president is going to be. Im defying that. In the old days i watch this is the press and also ron paul, they tried to do to trumpet he defied the instinct. He just wouldnt have it. Host do you feel like Rolling Stone and yourself a part of the Mainstream Media . Guest yes. Yes and no. We been around for so long that i guess you a call this legacy media. Were not corporate media. Were privately owned. Surf coverage is kind of a tradition. Its been around for 50 years and you would not describe us as a threadbare alternative Media Publication anymore. I think that would be inaccurate. Were somewhere in between. Host if someone went back and read Hunter S Thompson from 72 could they relate to today . Guest absolutely. His books are timeless. I think of the moors being great works of fiction. To do so because you will put in a short time. Its hard to read journalism 50 or 60 years later and get into it. But his books are like great novels. I wrote this once for one of the introductions to one of those books and it reminded me of the book like the castle or the trial. Is this incredible story of the sky searching for meaning and justice when this horrible construction of fakeness and lies. The treachery and with these awful villains by plating the landscape. Hes never quite able to get there to do find happiness, truth, and validation. Those books are incredible to me. They will last for another 100 or 200 years. Lets go back to 2009, the great arrangement. You write that you were really losing faith in our political and National Institutions at that point. This is something i saw a long time ago and worried about a lot. There is a trend on both the left and the right and unfortunately in america we have to use the catchphrases because theres no other shorthand for our politics. People were tuning out the Mainstream Media. They were seeking out their own stranger sometimes more conspiratorial media sources. The internet is an incredible invention. One thing its good at doing this matching people with their opinions. When people read the news instead of turning on abc, cbs, nbc like they did in the 70s they cannot craft their own realities by saying these are the five publication that describe the world in a way agree with. And then thats how they get their news. Was started to happen at the end of the 2000 says people were beginning to retreat into their own camps. The increasingly did not have a common set of facts they were debating. That was the precursor to this. Is that a negative . I think so. Its a bad thing when the entire society cannot agree on the terms of an argument. We dont really debate each other quite issues or policies. We disagree on the literal facts of the argument. Thats a difficult place for us to be we can even agree on what happened that it becomes difficult for people to look at anything more substantive than that. This is been going on for a while now. Its only getting more and more fractured as time goes on. You really see a News Organization that tries to reach the entire population. We go demographic hunting now. We say here are the readers, the viewer so we will craft the news for that audience and they will love us and these people will not. Host in a recent Rolling Stone column the title of it he wrote, walter was one of the worst americans ever. Guest i was thinking about his famous obituary of nixon which, and obituary contribute interesting thing to write. I remember but he said he was so crooked that he needed people to help on screws pants in the morning. Is trying to do something similar for roger ailes. But to me roger ailes was the main driver of this phenomenon. Lets target the demographic and give the news that they like and forget about the other people. He talked about it and said my audience is age 55 ted. They dont even want to hear about working women are liberals, they dont want it to exist. And they crafted a program that started us down the road of this divided media landscape where a population is split into camps and we each have our new sources of and dont agree on anything. I think he was a pioneer that factor. Go back to the 70s when we all listen to the same news, was a good that nbc, abc and cbs controlled what we heard and saw . No. It was an information monopoly. I read manufacturing consent when i was young person and i 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. There almost always in line with the policy objectives of the government of the united states. All of that was tremendously negative, it wasnt diverse. I grew up in the media, my father was in the media. Was a different kind of news landscape. The only thing i was saying its favors that they had a different attitude toward the purpose of the news. The original conception of how the news was supposed work was if you go back to the Telecommunications Act of the 30s the ideas that government leave this airway to the private companies in exchange the private companies were supposed to provide a Public Service in the form of meaningful news. Theyre supposed to make their money doing entertainment or sports in the news was supposed to be loft leader and it did not have to be profitable. They were only there their minds to present something factual and useful to the public. Even though it was incredibly biased and let us into wars and excluded lots of voices, there is still an urge there to try to get the story correct that is not necessarily true now. Were basically crafting an entertainment model for people and people consumed the news the same way they consume entertainment. Host back to the great arrangement from 2009. The drainage and i describe in this book kicked off when americans finally figured out that have been betrayed by the mainstream political system but still failed to abandon the old paradigm completely. Yes, it wasnt like we had a revolution, there was a frustration with people. They do not trust their politicians, they didnt trust the media but they didnt have an alternative that they trusted either. Theres a lot of incoherence frustration and anger that was looking for an outlet. I think that left us ripe for things that happened blaster with donald trump. There was an enormous amount of people who are discontent they were looking for any kind of change irrespective of what the change was. Two out of three people favored a new direction and they didnt care what the direction was. That usually favors somebody like trump. His main argument to people was what everything committee im not what you have experienced before. That was attractive to people. Host because you are critical in your writings about donald trump do people assume he supported Hillary Clinton . Unfortunately thats a consequence of how america consumes the media now. Its assumed that if you write something negative about one party that you must support the other party. I think people like roger ailes pioneered this, if youre saying something negative about the clintons, therefore you must be a conservative. That is this materialist view of what news is as opposed to just being sometimes people will have negative feelings about both candidates whether trying to be objective and call things as they are. Not necessarily a political a to cover someone in a positive or negative way. Gritted the name of that book come from . Guest there is a band called insane clown posses. Is trying to come up with something that hang around with donald trump for year not want to be settle in your marketing ideas. Who did the drawing . Guest that is victor you house . Is illustrator for Rolling Stone. Hes amazing. Weve worked together for over a decade now. He has the same basically disturbed sense of humor that i do. We had a lot of fun. And from that book, the clintons probably should the left politics moment they decided they did not care what the public thought about how they made their money. Guest i thought that was an amazing detail in the reporting that has come out. Among other things in books like shattered they describe the moment where Hillary Clinton essentially said which is trying to decide whether or not to accept or turned into over 100 million in speaking fees by taking a tour of the various banks and corporations, she said theyre going to nate right negative things about me or whatever i do. I cant remember exactly what she said. But i think when youre in that place is a politician business and it doesnt matter what i do, people will hate me no matter what, then what that means is that in my mind you no longer bring about what the public thinks of you riches a dangerous place for politician to be. Host good afternoon and welcome to book to be in cspan2. This is our monthly in depth program. Invite one author on to talk about his or her body of work. This month from our new york studio Rolling Stone correspondent author, matt. Hes the author of several boo books. His first one came in 2000 called the exile. Sex, drugs, and liable in the new russia. Spanking the donkey. Dispatching from the gun season came in 2005. Smells like dead elephants cannot 2007. The great arrangement which we have talked about a little bit. The terrifying true story of war, politics, and religion in 2009. Most recently his grip at topia, the stray bankers, politicians, and the most audacious in history. The divide came on 2014. American injustice in the age of the wealth gap and finally, insane clown president dispatches from the 2016 circus. This is your chance to call in and talk about his work. [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] host how did you get into the business . Guest its a family business. Most everybody i knew was a reporter. My father was a News Reporter starting from the age of 18. He works here in new york and he does a little bit of work for tbs but was in the business for 50 years. My stepmother was an anchor cnn for a while. Business anchor. A lot of my Family Friends growing up loo worked at placese the International Herald tribune. The child was like the movie anchorman. I spent most my former years and local Television Affiliates with bad facial hair and stuff like that. Never wanted to do this for a living but i wanted to be a novelist. When it turned out my fiction was pretty bad i fell back into the family business. Host what did you know you are a writer . Guest from the agent may be 11 or 12 i knew i wanted to be a writer. I had a really deep love of books when i was growing up. I was the only child. We moved a lot. Books were tremendous. I was depressed a lot. And i started to learn to write i became obsessed with the idea. Writing is like a religion. If you get into it you can never really complete the task of being perfect at it. You have to constantly try to practice Getting Better and better. I became addicted to attend a young age. I wanted to be a comic novelist. My heroes were funny writers. People like saki and the guy who wrote hea