 Good evening, I'll mark up to grow over the president and CEO of the OBJ Foundation. And it's my pleasure to welcome you here tonight. First a little housekeeping. I want to thank our generous sponsors, St. David's Healthcare, the Ford Foundation, the Moody Foundation, and Tito's homemade vodka. Are you applauding vodka, is that it? I also want to invite you to our upcoming Friends program on June 14th, when we'll be hosting Linda and Lady Bird Johnson's daughter, Linda Johnson-Rob, former LBJ aide and former president of CNN, Tom Johnson, and historian Kyle Longley, author of LBJ's 1968, For a Conversation on 1968, one of the most momentous years in American history. It will make for a fascinating discussion. I hope you can be with us. We have some great stuff lined up for the fall as well, including a program with Doris Kearns Goodwin on her new book on leadership, and another on the 50th anniversary of CBS's iconic show, 60 Minutes. More to come on those programs and others. And finally, I want to invite all of the friends of the LBJ Library members to a reception in the Great Hall that will follow this program. Tonight, we are delighted to welcome Jake Tapper, whose fourth book, The Hellfire Club, has spent four weeks since its release on the New York Times bestseller list. I hope you picked up the book, but if you didn't, you'll have a chance to do so after the program. Jake Tapper has been in Washington for two decades. He started his career in journalism at the Washington City paper, then moved on to salon and ABC News. In 2013, he joined CNN, where he is the chief Washington correspondent and hosts the lead with Jake Tapper and Sunday Morning's State of the Union. His excellence as a journalist has yielded him as a reputation for being one of the best in his very competitive field and has led to numerous awards, including an Emmy and Edward R. Murrow Award and three Merriman Smith Awards. The Washington Post recently called Jake the tenacious anchor of CNN, the merciless slayer of alternative facts, and, man, you're going to be clapping a lot tonight, and the dogged deflator of political egos. And Stephen Colbert simply called him the Jake Tapper of television news. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Jake Tapper. You do everything big here. This is Texas. Yeah. And it's LBJ. Right. So you got to go big. Before we talk about the book, I think the one question we all have is, how does a guy like you write a book? When do you have time with your schedule and all you're doing to write a book? Well, the idea for the Hellfire Club occurred to me years ago, and I've been working on it for the better part of three or four years, starting it, scrapping it, starting it again, working on an outline. So it's not like, even though I know it just appeared four weeks ago and people just heard about it four weeks ago, I've been working on it for a long time. So that's one. And then the second thing is actually, it was really fun to write. I was a history major in college. It was fun to do all the research. It was fun to escape from the political world that is nonfiction and go into the fictional one where I could control the politicians and what came out of their mouths and where I knew how it ended. I don't know how this one ends, if anybody's asking. I don't know. So it was a lot of fun. So your first three books are works of nonfiction. They were all nonfiction, yeah. The Outpost, which was a New York Times bestseller. Have you always wanted to write a novel? I mean, is it something you wanted to do? I wrote one in my 20s that didn't get published. But yeah, I always wanted to write one. But I didn't, after the one in my 20s that went nowhere, I didn't really have a good idea for one until I came up with the idea for this one. And then I said, OK, this actually is a decent idea. For those who don't know the basic plot, it's about a young congressman and his wife who moved down to Washington in 1954. And they get caught up in a conspiracy and there's a secret society. But I also have what was really fun also was to have my characters, my fictitious characters, interacting with real people from 1954. So Joe McCarthy is a character in the book. Minority leader, Lyndon Johnson is a character in the book and others. The Kennedys, the Nixons, Dwight Eisenhower, everybody from 1950s Washington. No spoilers, but yes. Right, right. Yeah, I know. I mean, it was a lot of fun to learn about these people and to try to figure out how to write dialogue for them by reading up on them, reading whether it's the Robert Carrow books or others, just to try to get into their heads. If LBJ were to meet my character and his intern on the Senate tram and overheard them talking about Estes Kiefover, who was a Democratic senator. Nobody's ever heard of him today. But back then he, well, maybe this audience because you're a gust and learned, but many a lot of people out there have never heard of Estes Kiefover. In 1952, he ran for president as a Democrat from Tennessee. He won all the primaries, but because back then literally it was rigged, the back room guys nominated Adlai Stevenson instead, and he was a frustrated guy and thinking about running for president again. Anyway, so what would LBJ say if he overheard people talking about Estes Kiefover? That was, I shouldn't make that mistake. Everybody here knows everything. I know that from now on. So you started writing this during the Obama administration? I did. I started it then, yeah. Why McCarthy era Washington? Well, if you're going to write about it, I started writing it and it took place in the 1700s. And that's really tough to pull off. I don't know how many writers are here. So I tried many, many times, but I just couldn't credibly write for John Adams. And then I said it in the modern era, but Charlie, his character is he's a really good and decent person, but he's also kind of naive. And he's not even, it just wasn't believable in 2015, 2016. So then I said it in 1954, which actually brought a lot of things home for me, because then I could write about Washington and really plunge into the world as it was back then, as opposed to if I wrote it to the modern era, it would just be weird. And then also, the 1950s was such a curious time in American popular culture. It's idyllic and serene, but it wasn't, obviously, at all that way. First of all, it was a horribly racist and sexist period of this nation's history. But beyond that, it was also full of McCarthyism, the Red Scare, the atomic race. Segregation was about to, school segregation was about to be ruled unconstitutional. It was a time of real upheaval and menace beneath the serene surface. So it seemed like a good, it would fit well with the plot I wanted to do. And also, so if you're right about the 50s, you have to write about McCarthy, because he was, you know. He permeates the era. Yeah, he was the character. He's Joe McCarthy at the beginning of 1954 when the book takes place. He enters that year at the height of his popularity. He and his aides are talking about maybe even challenging Eisenhower and the Republican nomination for president in 1956. But he ends the year censured by the Senate and a disgrace. So it was just an interesting time. And the McCarthy parallels to our current history were there were there. And they say history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. And you can't read about the McCarthy era and not hear a lot of rhyming. And so I played a little bit of that up when I was writing the book in 2016 and 2017. But I didn't really have to, because the parallels are just there. I will confess, I knew who S.C. Koffover was. No, you do. You're a historian. But I did not know what the Hellfire Club was. That's a real thing. It's a real thing. Talk about the Hellfire Club and its history and how you use it in the book. So the Hellfire Club was an actual secret society in England in the 1700s. And it was on an estate outside of London. And the most powerful men in London, members of the royal family and politicians and business people, would, I should say, business men. But not business people. This was the 1700s. It was just men. And they would come. And they would have these mock, satanic rituals and orgies. And it was just complete debauchery. And it was a secret society where they all forged alliances and all, at the same time, had mutually assured destruction. They all knew dirt on the other. So it served all their interests on one level and also subjected them to blackmail on another. And obviously, these were people who had rivalries. And I first found out about it because Benjamin Franklin, when he was in London in the 1760s, I believe, visited it. If you know anything about Benjamin Franklin, I'm sure he had a good time. Makes some sense. So the conceit of the novel is, well, what if Benjamin Franklin was like, well, I like this. Let's bring it back to the colonies. And then it went on from there. You talked about the protagonist, Charlie Marder, who is a World War II hero, New York professor, writes a best-selling book. He's a historian. He's a historian. A young, tall, strapping historian. Thank you very much. Although he's 33. Sorry. A young historian. But he's sort of this Jack Armstrong 50s idealic hero in this very sinister world of Washington. How did you conceive this character? And his wife, Margaret, who's an incredibly interesting character, self-azoologist, as it happens. So I thought of Charlie as kind of a stand-in for the way I think of the United States back in 1954. He's just been through the war. He is a decent person. He believes in what America stands for. He believes in the founding fathers. He's a little naive about what's going on, but fundamentally a good person. Not really aware of racism. Not really aware about a lot of things going on. But a good man. Margaret is his wife. She's a zoologist. And they met at Columbia University when they were students. And she has career ambitions of her own, which is odd and a bit anachronistic, although not entirely, for the time. And I thought of her as kind of the principles that guide the country, whereas Charlie was kind of just the country itself. And that's kind of how I thought about them when I wrote about them. You've said in an interview recently, I have lived in Washington for several decades. And I have seen good people come here and try to do good works for the American people. And the system is designed to force them to compromise. Sometimes the compromises might be bigger and deeper. And I have seen some people and their principles chipped away and their souls sold off piece by piece. I'm wondering, and you were talking the context of Charlie Marder, your protagonist. Would Charlie Marder fare better in today's Washington or McCarthy Bureau Washington? Oh, God. It's so, you know, it's probably better for you or Doug or one of the professors here to answer that question than for me. But in terms of which era is swampier now or the 1950s? I mean, on its face, the 1950s was swampier because all of the transparency rules and laws that we know about today that require reporting of campaign contributions, so many of those were post-watering. But there's so much more money in politics today. So you didn't have to disclose it back then. But the bribe might be 500 bucks. And today, there's a whole legal bribe system, not to mention the illegal one that politicians still like to avail themselves of, in which it's tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. I don't know. That's a really good question. Charlie is, I mean, one of the things I wanted to capture in this book, in addition to hopefully writing a fun yarn, was the idea of how it happens that somebody comes to Washington who is a good person and finds themselves, before they know it, neck deep in swamp water. And how is it that you go down there to do something good? And within three or four years, you're like caught up in something that is not good. And you see it happen all the time with politicians. And look, sometimes the compromises are just political compromises. And I'm not judging, I'll vote for your bill if you vote for mine, or we'll put this in the legislation so it can pass. That's just how the system was designed. But I'm talking about, nor, by the way, am I talking about, OK, in order to get reelected, I have to spend one third to one half of my time raising money, which is also an unfortunate part of today's politics. But that's also, that's the system. But in order to become part of the party machine, in order to get so much money that you chase off any challengers, so often people, politicians, enter into agreements with corporations, or big donors, or machine bosses, or whomever. And then the next thing you know, they're doing things that are illegal. And that's kind of what I wanted to capture. Would Charlie fare better than or now? I mean, he barely gets out of 1954, so I don't know. But yes, he survives. He lives at the end of the book. He doesn't die. But I don't know. I mean, I know a lot of really good politicians, really good people, rather, who are politicians who you can see that they're struggling with what they go through. So you've been around Washington for a long time. A couple of decades, as I mentioned in the quote I just read, do most of the politicians who go there, like Charlie, want to do good? I don't know. I honestly don't. I honestly don't know if it's most. I know that there are some. I mean, I could name a few that seem like decent people to me. But inevitably, if I do that tomorrow, they're all going to get arrested. But they might not be the endorsement they want. Exactly. Well, it's just bad luck at the moment. If I've learned anything in this business, it's watch out for predictions. But I don't know. I certainly think that there are a lot of good people that go into politics because they think they can do good and they can achieve good things. Definitely. Most, I don't know. I mean, there are a bunch that are sociopaths. I think it's pretty clear. I mean, like, well, I mean, isn't Farenholt from this state? I mean, what is that? I mean, I think that's unanimous. I'm not going out on a limb to picking out Macau. Didn't Governor Abbott call for him to step down? So I mean, I think there are a bunch that are sociopaths. And I think that there are a bunch that are in it for power. But I do think that there are a number of politicians who are in it because they are inspired to do good, whether it's because they are active with their church group and they thought maybe they could bring those values to Washington or live those values through public service or their veterans or community organizers or whatever. I mean, I think most people go to do good. I think a number of them go to do good things. I can't give you a number breakdown in terms of most. I really don't know. And I wonder these days. Let me go back to one who was not in it for good, McCarthy, who you draw out so well in the book. You write of him in the book. He's impossible to ignore. He's become this planet blocking the sun. And whatever points he makes that have validity are blotted out by his indecency and his lies and his predilection to smear. And then you write of President Eisenhower saying to Charlie Martyr of McCarthy, he is incapable of stopping, even when it's in his own interests, smearing and lying. It's what he does. One cannot appease the insatiable. So it begs the question here. And you all know the question. What? Let's face you way ahead of me. What are you talking about? How does Joseph McCarthy compare to Donald J. Trump? Well, I mean, there are obvious comparisons. There are obvious similarities. I actually think that President Trump owes much more to McCarthy's protege and President Trump's mentor, Roy Cohn. And that's, again, not invented. That's just real. I mean, if you pick up the art of the deal, and I'm sure this audience has a copy at home, he talks about Roy Cohn. He talks about Roy Cohn, what he learned from Roy Cohn, the importance of loyalty he learned from Roy Cohn. I think he probably also learned about media. And he learned about what the president calls, in the art of the deal, truthful, hyperbole that the rest of us would call lying. So I mean, I think there's, I can't think of a politics. Look, Bill Clinton told lies. Richard Nixon told lies. They all tell lies. Nixon and Clinton told bigger lies. But I can't think of an American politician that is as cavalier with the truth to this extent, unless you go back to McCarthy. I mean, everything he said was a lie. There were communists trying to infiltrate the government. But J. Edgar Hoover was nabbing them. McCarthy was just smearing people in the State Department. McCarthy smeared General Marshall, a hero of World War II and a hero of the post-war. So yeah, they have a lot in common in terms of just an utter and complete disregard for truth and smearing. But what they stand for is very different. I mean, Trumpism and McCarthyism and Donald Trump as a person and Joe McCarthy as a person are very different people. But the lying and the smearing and the indecency, I think, are very similar. And you alluded to this a moment ago. But McCarthy goes down ignominiously. In 1954, when your book ends, although you don't go into this in the book. I assume the reader knows what happens. This audience certainly knows. There are hints as to what McCarthy is about their experience. You get a good sense of what his fate is going to be. But he got censured, as you said, by the Senate for conduct, quote, contrary to senatorial traditions, unquote, after which his influence waned irrevocably and he was condemned to the ash heap of history. What do you think history will say about Donald Trump? I don't know because obviously Joe McCarthy was known for one thing, which was smearing people in the name of fighting communism. And Donald Trump, President Trump is doing a lot. I mean, there are a lot of things he is doing. So I don't know if he's going to go down in history as the man who denuclearized the Korean Peninsula. I don't know. I wish him the best. I hope he does. I don't know if he's going to go down in history as the man who he has so many things that he wants to achieve. Let's say that his, I don't think, if Trumpism is all these different things and McCarthyism is one thing, there are parts of Trumpism that I think are actually healthy. I think it is healthy for the United States to, United States political leaders and the public to rethink its approach to trade. I don't think there's anything wrong inherently with, you know, we have been negotiating our trade deals, the Democrats and the Republicans, thinking too much about corporate profits and not enough about having a thriving middle class in this country. I don't think it's necessarily wrong and I haven't seen him actually live up to his word in this but I don't think it's necessarily wrong for the president, for the public and the policymakers to rethink American intervention abroad because, you know, you hear about people on the left and the right who think that there's just one big party, the Democrats and Republicans are basically the same and obviously they're not. They're two very different parties but when it comes to trade and when it comes to foreign policy, there has been this kind of morphed in the middle, this big borg of just like one American policy and one American party. A fixed paradigm. Yeah, so I don't know. I mean, if after President Trump leaves office, there has been, there have been changes there. I don't know what people are going to think about him and maybe there will be achievements in that area. Now, that's policy. In terms of how he conducts himself on Twitter and in terms of the lying and the smearing and the racism and just the basic indecent behavior, just things that are not acceptable. I always get mad when I think about him insulting John McCain. I just get viscerally angry and obviously with that aid recently making a joke about McCain dying of brain cancer, how that person has a job and how the White House has not apologized is beyond me. So all of that that I start to look and sound like my dad when I think about it, I just start to frown. I think that history will judge politicians harshly who didn't stand up to it. You read about the 1950s and there are two people who stood out to me. One is Margaret J. Smith, Republican Senator from Maine who went to the Senate floor in 1950 and gave what was her declaration of conscience speech against McCarthy and McCarthyism in 1950. Now, just for context, Edward R. Murrow didn't take on Joe McCarthy until 1954. So that was incredibly brave and that was a Senator in her own party and she wasn't retiring because I know a lot of Senators find their courage when they're retiring. She stuck around for years and years and years after that in the U.S. Senate. So that she is who I think about when I think about that era and then I also think about Robert Taft. Robert Taft was a Senator from Ohio. I think either the son or the grandson of the president, maybe the grandson of President Taft and he ran for president against Ike in 52. He lost him in the primaries, went back to the Senate, became the Senate majority. I think the minority leader, he became the Senate majority leader after the Eisenhower landslide. Incredibly powerful man. I'm sure he thought that he was gonna run for president again someday and he tried to straddle the worlds of McCarthyism and knowing how awful and corrosive it was and he never took a stand against McCarthy and he never took a stand against McCarthyism. He thought, I guess he thought he could just wait it out and you don't get to write your own legacy. In 1953, he dropped dead and now he's known for not standing up to McCarthy. Right. And so that's what I think about when I think about how our future generation is gonna judge today's politicians, today's members of the media. How did you respond to the indecency? Not did you join the resistance, not did you vote this way, did you vote that way, but did you take a stand when this was said or when this was done? And I think that there are gonna be a lot of politicians who are gonna be disappointed when and if there's a heaven and they're looking down to see how their legacy looks and it doesn't look so good. You talked about Murrow who had a hand in McCarthy's demise, particularly at the end, but he was late. Yeah, he was late. And on his program, The Iconic, see it now on CBS, he did a famous monologue in which he said that we have to stand up for principle. That was at a time though when there were only three networks, there was ABC, CBS, and NBC. And they were all very cautious. Right, right. Very, very cautious. Very conservative, but you didn't have the fragmentation in media that you have today that landscapes changed significantly. The term fake news now really as a result of this fragmentation, to some degree, has become part of the vernacular. And 60% of Trump supporters believe Trump's claim that the media is the enemy of the people. Yeah. So... Is it up to 60? It's up to 60%. I thought it was 51%, which was upsetting enough. You're giving me bad news. Yeah, sorry. I don't like it. Fake news. But... That's what you do now. So as I was saying... If you don't like the news, you call it fake. As I was saying, 51% of Trump supporters he's good, he's really, he's that good. So the question is how do you combat that? How do you combat this notion? It's awful. That there is fake news out there. Well, there are a few things. One is, and I have to say this, and I mean this from the bottom of my heart, I think journalism is a noble profession. And I think a lot of journalists are really rising to the moment. But I also get really upset when reporters make sloppy mistakes. Or take positions that I think are debatable. It's debate, like for instance, there became last week, the New York Times wrote a story about whether or not the summit was gonna happen. And they said that a senior aides who said it was impossible, but the timing was impossible. And President Trump got on Twitter and said, this is fake news, this is invented, nobody ever said this, blah, blah, blah. This person is fictitious. And it turned out that the New York Times had based their comment on something said by senior administration official, at an official background briefing. And when you read the quote, what the aid actually said is something along the lines of, it was gonna be really, really difficult to pull it off, pull off the summit on June 12th because that's in like 10 minutes or something like that, blah, blah, blah. But they didn't say it was impossible. But then it became this whole debate about President Trump said this and the New York Times said that. And like ultimately, I kind of feel like the New York Times paraphrase wasn't necessarily fair. Or at least it wasn't as accurate as it could have been. The New York Times story yesterday about Trump's rally in Tennessee, they described an audience of 1,000 people and the fire marshal and the Trump Trump again this morning. Fake news was much bigger than that. The fire marshal said it was about 5,500 people. So about five times bigger than the New York Times and New York Times had to issue a correction. These are just, these are own goals. These are self-inflicted wounds. I don't mean to pick on the New York Times, they're just two of the most resonant in my head. I think it's an amazing newspaper and they do a lot of great work and it's impossible to publish a million facts a day and not have a couple of them wrong. But we just need to be really, really diligent and really, really careful because the most powerful man in the world is trying to undermine us and he's doing so at least according to what Leslie Stahl of 60 Minutes says he told her, I do it so that when you report negatively on me nobody will believe it. It's tactical. Yeah. That's why he's doing it. And we just have to be pure than pure and we just have to really make sure that our facts are right. And look, I don't always get my facts right and it's not possible. But I really wish, I had an editor, my first editor, my first job and full-time as a journalist was at Washington City Paper. My editor was David Carr who went on to become a media writer for the New York Times. And I remember every mistake I made at City Paper and I remember David Carr and how he dealt with it and it was not happy. It was not a pretty sight. And I just wish everybody had had David Carr as in their first job in journalism. The fake news phenomenon, calling us fake news is hideous. But it bothers me so much when journalists don't understand how fragile our credibility is and how low our standing is with the American people and how difficult it is to earn it back. So I don't mean to emphasize the New York Times or people who make mistakes and I just guarantee that tomorrow I'm gonna make some big mistake. But we really just need to rise to this moment and because it's hideous what he's doing. He has labeled anything he doesn't, he says, he said one time he described negative news as fake. He did a tweet where he said negative and they put in parentheses fake. That's what it is to him, negative equals fake. He one time tweeted something like all negative polls are fake. Like that's like a quote. I mean, so we know what it is to him and the problem is that there are a number of supporters of his who believe it and we can't help him undermine ourselves. We have to stand strong and make sure that we fact-checked everything. I wanna get back to this moment but let me ask you, why did you get into this business? No, I mean, you had other career aspirations out of college but you eventually gravitated toward journalism, why did you do journalism? I started writing freelance stories because it was, people were not writing the stories I wanted to read. There were things I wanted to know about and people weren't writing them so and I was kind of directionless. I was working in public relations. I had no idea and I started pitching stories to Washington Post or the Washington City Paper or others and I liked it. It just was fun and it's fun. You know, I got a rush from seeing my byline. I got a rush from people enjoying my work but I wrote a lot of different stuff. It wasn't political at first. It was, I did a lot of lifestyle stuff. I mean, you can find stuff on the internet. I did a story about when the Stairmaster was invented about, no, that's not even the premise. The women were complaining that there was a phenomenon called Stairmaster Butt where their butts were getting big from doing too much Stairmaster. This is in the Washington Post, so withhold your judgment. But I mean, I wrote anything. You know, when you're a young freelance you go write anything about any subject and then I liked it and then because I knew a lot about politics I kind of just gravitated towards politics. But I got into the business because people were not writing the stories that I wanted to read and I think now I am in it because people are not asking the questions that I want asked. You, I mentioned that Washington Post quote recently about you being a dogged defender of, you know, just a wonderful quote about how esteemed you are right now and you're, I think it's fair to say you were respected on both sides of the aisle for being a no-nonsense guy who asked tough questions but it's basically fair. Is there anything you've done relating to Trump that you regret? No. I mean, in retrospect, I think we all, everybody in the media, if we had known he was going to win, might cover things differently. Just in terms of policies and trying to get firmer commitments as to what his policies were on a number of subjects because that still remains rather hazy. But no, not really. I mean, he stopped doing interviews with me in June, 2016 because of the interview. I interviewed right before the California primary and the Trump University case was proceeding and there was a judge named Judge Curiel that was about to hear it and the president said to the Wall Street Journal the day before that Judge Curiel couldn't do a good job or be a fair judge because he was Mexican. Judge Curiel is, of course, from Indiana. And so I challenged President Trump, I thought nicely, but persistently about, you know, if you're saying somebody can't do a job because of their race, is that not the definition of racism? And that was the last time I got an interview with President Trump. So it's hard for me to look back and say, well, I should have been tougher because I was, I mean, there weren't a lot of people that were interviewing him that all of a sudden weren't allowed to interview him anymore. Right, right. Has CNN changed its operation in any way to adapt to the Trump era? Oh yeah. Well, first of all, I mean, I think there's an acknowledgement by leadership of CNN and I wish that Fox and MSNBC would acknowledge this as well but that in 2015, especially CNN ran too many Trump rallies, start to finish unedited, gavel to gavel, no editorial comment, no fact checking and didn't do the same for other candidates. I mean, I think Jeff Zooker has acknowledged that he regrets that and I wish that MSNBC and Fox would acknowledge that too. So there's less of that. And I think the fact checking apparatus is much stronger and much more forceful and I think that the way that journalists talk, at least on CNN, the way that journalists talk about lies and statements that are not true is much more clear cut than it used to be. But I mean, there are other changes that we've had to make. I mean, there's more security at CNN because of death threats and the president saying that your organization is the enemy of the American people results in lots of unpleasant people having lots of unpleasant thoughts. I mean, it's a chant at Trump rallies, CNN sucks. It's not, I mean, they mean the media sucks but CNN represents. You were the poster boys for fake news. And girls, yeah. Right, and I think you are the central figure there and I don't mean that in a negative way but I suppose, I mean, the truth of the matter is that it's so silly. Right. It's just so juvenile. You know, I mean, it's not like the way an adult would have a conversation with somebody and say I really thought that story was unfair and let me explain to you why. It's just, you're a poop. I mean, it's just, what? Do you take it, is it hard not to take it personally? Or is it easy because it's so ludicrous? I think it, I don't take it personally at all. The stuff that offends me is the stuff like making fun of a journalist who has a disability is obscene. It's obscene. And, you know, that's, you know, a ban on all Muslims entering the United States. I mean, these, I don't have room to get worried about the stuff that offends me personally. There are like millions of other Americans I'm far more offended on their behalf than when it comes to me. It's, you should not go into, if there are any journalism students here, you should not go into journalism if you don't have at least something of a thick skin because it is not an easy business but it bothers me because he is undermining the concept of empirical fact. That is troubling. Not attacking me or attacking CNN or whatever, but the idea of that facts don't exist or they are what I want them to be or they are what I feel them to be. You know, Barack Obama couldn't get these three hostages out of North Korea, so I'm gonna get them out. Two of them were taken hostage when you were president. How was Obama gonna get them out when he was president if they hadn't been captured yet? And yet, you know, there's no shame. You know, Kellyanne Conway came on the show when I challenged her on that and just, and I said, you know, the president tells so many lies and she said, the president does a lot of things. Right, which is true. I can't dispute that on factual grounds. But I mean, like, look, that tweet is still up. It's still up. It's a lie. It's just a blatant falsehood and there's no embarrassment about it. You know, I mess up an ampersand in a tweet and I'm like under my bed for like a week and there's just no shame. They don't care. It's quite something to behold. I talked about the fragmentation of the media world before. And given the breadth of the landscape, who do you consider your competitors? Oh, everybody. I mean, everybody's, I mean, the media landscape is vast and there's great journalism being done. I mean, on one level, you know, I have a Sunday show. So Chuck Todd and George Stephanopoulos and Chris Wallace and Margaret Brennan are my competitors on Sunday. And then I have a show at four o'clock. So, you know, I'm competing directly with Nicole Wallace and Neil Cavuto. Right. And then, you know, more broadly, there is just a world of TV anchors and we're all trying to do the best show we can and we're all trying to get the interviews we can get. So there's a lot of competition, but the truth of the matter is I have never felt a more collegial time in journalism than now because there's so much animosity towards journalists that, you know, none of us want what has happened to very, you know, when the president, Chuck Todd's a friend of mine and when the president goes after Chuck Todd, I have to stop myself from like tweeting a defense of Chuck Todd. My wife's like, he doesn't need your defense, stop. But your comrades-in-arms. Yeah. You feel a certain... Yes. I mean, I'm competing with him. Right. And I want to beat him and I want to get the guests and I don't want him to get them and, you know, all that, but I want him to thrive and I want him to succeed and the animus is so strong that it outweighs the spirit of competition quite often. But there, I mean, we all have, I mean, look, the New York Times is breaking a million stories a day, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the LA Times. I mean, there's a lot of great journals on being done right now. You did this country a great service by going down to Parkland, Florida after the shootings and moderating what ended up being a very constructive, very illuminating conversation after the shootings at Stoneman Douglas High School. What was it like to be in that room that night? You know, I'm thanking you for saying that, but I have to tell you, like, conservatives hated that town hall so much. And it was, I remember as a journalist flying into Dender in 1999 after Columbine. And, you know, you can feel grief, right? You must, you go into a house where people are mourning, you can feel it. And when it's a whole city or a whole county mourning and shock on edge, it's something almost tangible in the room. And I didn't know how that was gonna go. The way that went down was, I know the congressman from that represents that county, Congressman Ted Deutsch. He was actually my counselor in training at camp. I mean, I didn't keep in touch with him, but, you know, that would be kind of weird. But years later, when we got elected to Congress, and I'm like, oh my God, we were in camp together. And so I knew him, and he called me, the, I guess the shooting with, I think the shooting was on a Tuesday or Wednesday, or Wednesday, maybe. And he called me the Friday. He called me two days later and said, you know, there are people down here who want to have a town hall. They want CNN to do a town hall. What do you think? And it became, you know, and it, there was, that community was obviously a very political and engaged community, obviously a very progressive community, and they wanted to speak truth to power. And they wanted to vent, and they wanted to get things off their chest, and they wanted to come together as a community. So we put it together really quickly, and we put it together in this big arena, because normally a CNN town hall is like 100, 150 people. We put it together with the school, with Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School, and the school had the position, and I'm, you know, I totally get it. We're not turning anybody away. So this needs to be in a big arena. We're not doing 150 people. Anybody who wants to come. And it's a school, I think, of 3,000. So we add it in the local hockey arena. And we worked really hard on it, and we tried to make sure that anybody who lost a family member got to ask a question. Anybody who was wounded got to ask a question. We tried to get a diversity of topics, so it wasn't just only about guns. So there were other topics in school security, mental health, the response of the sheriffs, which we know now and didn't know then, could have been much stronger. And it was very intense, and I thought it was gonna be a much more sad event, and it ended up being a much more mad event. People were angry. And so a lot of conservatives were upset about it, and that's fine, that comes with the job. Marco Rubio, to his credit, showed up. Now, to be completely candid, I don't know what you guys know about Florida politics, but Broward County is not Rubio country. It's a very liberal part of Florida. And so Marco Rubio, showing up two weeks before, would have been razed in that room. But he knew what he was getting into, and I admire that he went there. Governor Scott did not go, and President Trump did not go, and the Republican leaders of the State Senate and the State House didn't go, even though they were all invited. So Rubio was the only Republican official there, and people were angry. And I took some heat for not stopping, I mean, I tried to calm the room a few times, but I took some heat for not stopping students or parents when they went after Dana Lesh from the NRA, or Marco Rubio, or anyone else. But the truth is, I wasn't going to say to some dad who just lost his 14-year-old daughter, you need to have a little bit more respect for the Senate. I mean, he just lost his daughter, you know? If you don't like it, turn it off. What I admired was your restraint. You held back and you let people talk. I thought that was the whole point of it. Letting them talk, letting them vent. It was, we all fancy ourselves as speaking truth to power, people in journalism, but that was the most pure example of speaking truth to power that I've ever seen. 15, 16-year-old kids grieving moms, grieving dads, just unfettered, only a week into their grief, telling politicians how upset they were and how furious they were about what had happened and how come they hadn't done more to try to prevent it from happening to them, to their kids. I'd never seen anything like it. And it was raw and it was uncomfortable, but I don't think I'd change one thing. Did you get a sense of the movement that would grow out of it? No, not really, not until the March. And, you know, they're impressive kids. They're politically active and savvy, but they're kids still. And they obviously had an effect when it came to the law in Florida, a law was passed in Florida that changed how things are done, not in any major way, but the law for purchasing a semi-automatic weapon was raised from 18 to 21. And there were other changes having to do with school security. But, you know, I see them on Twitter and they're still very optimistic and I'm not about to correct them. Will their movement lead to meaningful gun control reform? I don't know. I don't know. Because you saw a very different response in Santa Fe. And a lot of the country, I don't need to tell you, a lot of the country feels the way that a lot of people in Santa Fe do, which is the problem is that's a bad kid or there isn't enough God in our school or whatever. I mean, I was surprised that there wasn't more of a call for a law to require adults to lock up their weapons because the Lieutenant Governor, Dan Patrick, said something along those lines about right after the shooting about how people need to lock up their guns. But then I had him on my Sunday show and he wasn't willing to require it as a law. There's a law that if there's a law that you can get sued if you don't do it and your kid gets a gun and then whatever, there's a law that if you're a concealed carry holder and you try to stop something and somebody else gets, you can get sued. So that exists, but not the thing about locking up your guns to begin with. So, you know, I don't think so. But I don't know that your moderation of that conversation is a good example of you getting a sense of the people and journalists, particularly those in Washington don't often get that opportunity. How do you stay in touch with the American people? Well, I read a lot and I travel a lot and I read a lot of people on Twitter who are different from me and I stay in touch with a lot of friends who have very different political opinions than I do. That's not so, everybody has. I don't really have huge political opinions. I'm more like, people passionate on the left or the right, like I'm like, wow, that's nice that you think that strongly, but like, there are a lot of people on Facebook posting leftward and rightward and I'm just like, wow, so all of them are different from me because I'm not out there with political views on much of anything. But I do keep in touch with a lot of Trump supporters that are soldiers that I met when I wrote my last book about Afghanistan and I'm friends with hundreds of troops and their families from that experience. I interviewed more than 200 people for that book and a lot of them are very conservative and a lot of them are Trump supporters and a lot of them aren't. A lot of troops are not Trump supporters too. So I don't, I mean, how do I stay in touch? I mean, the short answer is probably I don't as much as I should or as much as I could but I am aware that I come to the world with a certain viewpoint based on being who I am, raised how I was in Philadelphia and going to where I went to college and all that. So I'm constantly seeking out how other people might look at the same situation. And so it was not a surprise to me for example that Santa Fe dealt with the shooting much differently than Parkland. Right, right. But so that's, and Santa Fe is actually what I'm much more used to. And Parkland's the aberration. Yeah, yeah. Most communities deal with school shootings the way that Santa Fe does. In a very personal way about the loss and there isn't a cry for activism. Earlier today, you retweeted a Donald Trump tweet and your tweet read happy sixth anniversary to this tweet and the retweet from Donald Trump read, and I'm paraphrasing a little bit, Barack Obama's major failing as president was not uniting the American people. Hey, bro, six years ago today. Six years ago. If you're on Twitter, there's a great Twitter feed called Trump Hop and it just tweets out things that he tweeted in the past. And I follow it and it's a never-ending source of amusement. Because sometimes you'll just get a whole bunch from 2011 or 2010 and it's just like, come to my new golf course, it's just like selling a product of some sort. And sometimes he'll be talking about Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson. It's just like, he had this obsession with why they broke up. It was very odd. Really, he tweeted about it like 30 times. In which he was telling him to move along because she had cheated on him, right? Yeah, I guess. Anyway, I asked President Trump. But can any, but some of them are very poignant politically because he'll be faulting Obama for something that is like now on his watch. Barack Obama did not unite the country, I mean, but it's hard to argue that there's a huge effort being made today. Sure. Which is, I guess my question, can anybody in today's divided America unite us? And we're not meant to be. We're not meant to be united. It's kind of a silly criticism. The best that an American president can do is try to heal the nation in times of division and try to bring people together. There's never gonna be a united States of America. But what I think President Trump does, and he's not the first and he won't be the last, is he tries to divide us often. A good example of this is the controversy over NFL players kneeling during the National Anthem to protest police brutality and inequality. I totally understand, and this comes from filing a lot of gold star moms on Facebook, I really truly understand why people are offended by it. They think this is the two minutes in this week where I can think about my son and I feel like the country is also maybe possibly thinking about my son, my fallen son, or daughter, or husband. And to have people, even though it's not what they're, even though that's not what they're protesting, to have people pick that moment to stage a protest is deeply offensive to them. I really do understand it. And I also do understand why an African-American, especially a player in this day and age with the gift of knowledge that we all have because of cell phone cameras, and now we all see what everybody in the African-American community and Latino community has been complaining about for decades that people like you and me just didn't see ever why they feel compelled to do something, even if it's just this one little thing. And if there were a dialogue and a discussion about this, that is something that maybe could be at least helpful. And fruitful, just even if people disagree, you're not gonna convince everybody to join one side or the other. There's no winning in this argument. These are too deeply held beliefs. And by the way, they're both right. They're both right because it has to do with how they feel and their feelings are valid. But what President Trump does is pick a side and demonize the other. The politics of division. Right, it's not new to America. George W. Bush did it with same-sex marriage and plenty of other politicians going down the line and both parties have done it. But that to me is what I was thinking about when I tweeted that tweet, that retweet from 2012 or whatever because I just think he really, I mean, Barack Obama did not unite the country and he did a lot of things that a lot of people found divisive and I'm not gonna take issue with that but I don't think he picked on scams the way President Trump does. He wants to get his base out. I understand it's a political strategy but is it good for the country that he's leading? I don't think it is. So you started your journalism career during the Clinton administration. You've seen the Clinton administration, the George W. Bush administration, the Barack Obama administration, the Trump administration. This is, well, I'm gonna ask you, is the Trump Washington the new normal? Is Trump's America the new normal? Or will we go back to an America that's more familiar to us? You know, I don't know. I mean, there are a lot of people who found, a lot of people on the right who were, and I think it was more policy oriented than it was in terms of the national character and the national dialogue but there are a lot of people who found Barack Obama's America upsetting because they thought it represented big government and if not socialism, more people on the federal dole, et cetera. And the truth of the matter is that every president makes an imprint into this country and makes an imprint on this country and it's very difficult to go back. The country just keeps going in its own direction. Is there gonna be a course correction when it comes to lies? I don't know. Maybe. I don't know. Remember, this is the American experiment. It's not done. Right. It's a work in progress. We don't know how it ends. I mean, you could, they're interviewing a different person at a different time. You could make an argument about how damaging President Obama was to the, just the notion of what Americans expect their government to pay for. And how that actually means more long-term damage to the United States than anything else because of the amount of money we pay to pay the interest on the debt, not to mention the debt. I don't know. They all put their imprint on it one way or another and I could, you talk about I came down during the Clinton years. I mean, there's a lot of stuff that happened during that presidency that I think had a very negative impact on the national character. I mean, people are very quick to criticize conservative evangelicals turning a blind eye to Donald Trump's behavior. But I remember when people made those same criticisms about feminists turning a blind eye to Bill Clinton's behavior. Do we change irrevocably as a result of those developments? It's hard to say because it really has to do with the Parkland generation and it has to do with those kids and how they think about things because certain things just change and they don't change back. I mean, you and I are old enough to remember when the concept of same-sex marriage being legal in Texas would be insane. Right, sure. Not to pick on Texas, Alabama. But is that better? I mean, I'm just much better. We're in Texas, I think. So things change. I mean, certain opinions about humanity evolve. I don't know where this nation's gonna be on abortion in 50 years. It seems like according to some polls, as a nation, we're getting more conservative on that issue. So I don't know. Let me shift gears, but stay on the same subject of works and progress. You mentioned to the audience, and I don't think you're spoiling anything, that you're a protagonist, Charlie Marder. Charlie lives. Lives? Charlie lives. In a very memorable last scene. By the way, and if you are, just to give a little plug for the book, if you are a history buff, which I suspect you are if you're here, I mean, a lot of history buffs have liked the book because there's a lot of history in it and a lot of just what it was like to live in 1954 and actual events that took place that you might not have known about, like in March 1954 when Puerto Rican terrorists burst into the House of Representatives and shot it up and shot five members of Congress. And different little things like that, that's not little at the time, but different things like that appear throughout the book. I mean, let me just, to that point, very few works of fiction have end notes that cite sources. I have end notes in my book. Jake has a very comprehensive section in which he cites his sources and I would, as a history buff, commend the book to you. Yeah, I thought that people would want to know what was real and what was not real because to me, the craziest stuff in the book is the stuff that's real. That, I mean, yeah, I have this conspiracy theories and all that, but like Joe McCarthy, when he drank, which was often, would eat a stick of butter. He would eat a stick of butter. And I put that in the book. I read that in a Jack Anderson biography of McCarthy that I read that was written in 1952. I'm like, if I don't put that in the end notes, people are gonna think I made that up. I need to put that in there. And I will say the last words of the book come after the end notes and they are, that being said, this is a work of fiction. Right. So, will Charlie Martyr come back? Are you thinking about a sequel to the Hellfire Club? I am thinking about it. There's this great story I heard about that takes place in 1962 that's real. That it struck me, this would be an incredible thing to have a plot of a book around, although it's not particularly, it's not a cliffhanger in any way, but it might be fun to have it around, which is in 1962, John F. Kennedy, President Kennedy was about to go out to Los Angeles. And Frank Sinatra, who had helped him get elected and considered him a good friend, was desperate to have John F. Kennedy and President Kennedy stay at the Sinatra compound in Los Angeles, desperate. And he started building extra buildings and this is where the press file will be in this book. And Attorney General Robert Kennedy thought about it, looked into it, turned out there are some things in Sinatra's background that weren't so hot. Maybe you've heard about them. He was friends with some people. And ultimately, John F. Kennedy, President Kennedy stayed at the house of the number one Republican celebrity in Los Angeles, Bing Crosby, and it drove Sinatra crazy. And I just thought that was such a great story. It drove a permanent wedge in their relationship. Oh, Peter Lofford, who was the member of the Rat Pack, who was also married to a Kennedy, one of John F. Kennedy's sister, Peter Lofford was after this happened, because Lofford was the ambassador between the two camps, was after that was banned from Sinatra movies. He was written out of every oceans movie. Like it was a huge deal back then. Anyway, I just thought that was a... It would be like George Clooney dropping Don Cheadle or something, you know? Yeah, you're out. Right, you're out, right? So that structurally is something that might be fun to write about, but I don't know yet. I mean, it was a lot of work to do this one, and so we'll have to see. Well, again, the book is on sale outside. If you haven't already picked it up, I recommend it highly. Jake, I want to thank you so much for being here. I want to thank you for what you do, particularly now in the Trump era. Thank you. Thank you very much. Before the conversation.