 I'm Alan Gingel from the Crawford School here at the ANU and I'm delighted to be here with one of our guests for the Crawford Australian Leadership Forum, Bill Schneider. There is probably no more eminent political commentator in the United States than Bill, who served for about 20 years as the Chief Political Correspondent for CNN and is now a Professor at George Mason University and a visiting professor at UCLA. We just learned, Bill, that you've been covering presidential elections since 1976, I think, so you've been around this track before. Let's begin with a question on everyone's mind. What accounts for Donald Trump's appeal? Trump is the un-Obama, the un-Obama. This is not unusual in American politics. When Americans are, for any reason, dissatisfied with the performance of any president, they look for someone who is completely the opposite. That's how Obama got elected. He was the un-Bush. Bush was not particularly thoughtful. He was reckless. Obama's not like that at all. People who wanted a more serious, thoughtful, informed president voted for Obama because they couldn't stand Bush. Well, a lot of Trump people are voting for Trump because he seems like a guy who can get things done. And the criticism you hear about Obama all the time is he's thoughtful. He's serious. He knows what he's talking about, but he's just ineffectual. Trump is seen as a guy who gets the job done. Where do Trump's views about foreign policy come from? Is he part of a longer tradition in American policy, or is he something entirely new? Obviously, he's attracted the attention of America's allies in this part of the world. He is very much in line with a long tradition in the United States. It was always called isolationism. He doesn't like that title, so he grabbed an even more controversial title. He said, I'm an America firster. Without realizing that America first was an isolationist movement to try to keep the United States out of World War II, they didn't want to fight fascism. Well, he says he's an America firster, but what this is is consistent with the avoidance of involvement and responsibility in world affairs that characterized the United States for its first 150 years until after World War II when the threat of communism emerged and the United States assumed leadership of the free world because Britain, which had always had that role, could no longer assume that role. Trump is an isolationist, period. He calls into question commitments, alliances, security arrangements. He says it's too expensive for the United States. We can't afford it anymore. He says if other countries like Europe and countries in Asia like Japan and South Korea want us to protect them, they're going to have to pay us more. Hillary Clinton said, well, that means he's turning alliances into a protection racket. But he says he will renegotiate all our agreements. Does he speak to a growing constituency in the United States, do you think? I don't think it's growing because Americans are becoming better educated, more knowledgeable about the world. But it's a constituency that is always there, and it's never gone away. A lot of Americans believe that what we do for the rest of the world is expensive, pointless, unappreciated, and often blows up in our face. And they look at the Vietnam War, they look at the war in Iraq, and even the war in Afghanistan as ventures which cost American lives and a lot of American money and didn't really work out. So a lot of Americans are very skeptical about the mission of the United States to save the world, and Trump is very much in line with that tradition. In the campaign so far this year, we've of course seen the Democratic Party divided between Bernie Sanders on the left and Secretary Clinton on the other side and the Republicans all over the place. Is this a transformative period to think you sometimes hear people saying this is the end of the Republican party, the coalition that bound it together can no longer hold and we're going through a through a sort of step change in U.S. politics. Do you hold to that view or not? Well, certainly the Republican party is in a crisis. Donald Trump is a hostile takeover of the Republican Party. It's being taken over by people who threaten conservatives. Trump is not really a conservative. He'll say a few conservative things. He has no ideology. He has no principles. He'll change his views on any issue, any time. It really is a hostile takeover of the Republican Party, and that could split the party. If Trump were somehow, and I wouldn't expect this to happen, but if he were elected president, it's not impossible. I just say it's unlikely. If that would have happened, the Republican party would split wide open, which is why a lot of Republican conservatives secretly say we'd rather see Hillary Clinton become president because the minute she takes office, number one, Trump would be obliterated from history. And number two, conservatives would be completely united and so would Republicans against Hillary Clinton, and that would reconstitute the Republican Party. Great. Bill Schneider, thank you very much for joining us.