hundreds of anti-government demonstrators protests spread to the western city of care much a day after hundreds rallied in iran's a second largest city of mashad the protesters condemned the government's economic policies chanting slogans against the high cost of living and demanding the release of political prisoners south africa's top court has ruled the country's parliament failed to hold president jacob zuma to account in a scandal over multimillion dollar upgrades to his private home last year the court concluded that zuma violated the constitution when he benefited in appropriately from state funding for home former football superstar george wayout has officially been declared liberia's president elect after winning tuesday's runoff with more than sixty percent of the vote his opponent a joseph buckeye conceded the feast on friday saying he wanted to avoid bloodshed whereas when marks the first democratic transfer of power in the west african

nation in seventy three years. and those are the headlines stay with us i'm going to have more news for you in half an hour coming up next though it's up front thanks for watching. his has been a year of couldn't travel see him crises of breaking rules and telling lies so how do you cover how do you hold to account a president as unique as donald trump and from special.

promoting us near nazis retreating british neo fascists peddling conspiracy theories and brazen lies defending alleged child sex abuse and threatening a nuclear war with north korea there has never been a president of the united states quite like donald trump so how do you cover president trump and how is he survived his first year in office against all odds in this up from special i'm joined from chicago by gwenda blair a longtime trump biographer from milwaukee by charles sykes a former conservative radio talk show host and author of how the right lost its mind and here in the studio by jane coast and senior politics reporter at vox and daniel dale washington bureau chief for the toronto star who famously keeps a running tally of all trump's lies done neal that is a task i do not envy i thank you all for joining me on outfront daniel as a political journalist in your view what makes this moment to this era we're living through so unique what makes trump and covering trump so different to any president

or national leader that's come before him in your view well let's start with the dishonesty he's averaging three fast claims per day that's a pace we haven't seen we haven't seen a president attack the media like this we haven't seen the president this unpredictable i think from a journalist perspective what's so strange what's so unique an amazing is that the news cycle has already started off and by six am it doesn't stop until midnight and there is no rhyme or reason to it there is no schedule to it the news cycle is driven by this president's erratic. impulsive behavior it's just it's just so different and you say you know the three lies a day and obviously when you say to a trump supporter of some of those you look he's a serial fabricator he tells lies on this record level their argument is all politicians lie why focus on trump well my counterargument is that not all politicians lie like this you talk to any historian of the american presidency and they will tell you you know our presidents have been dishonest on occasion some

more frequently than others but we have not seen their pace and triviality many of these lies pointlessly loaded everything so we see bill clinton lie under pressure trying to fend off scandal we saw barack obama be at least somewhat dishonest in selling his big health care policy we see trump lie about the size of crowds you know it was raining during the normal you know that was the first one on my list so from the very first day of his presidency he was saying nonsensically needlessly wrong stuff as a biographer of donald trump someone who's covered him and his family for decades you have perhaps a unique insight into what might make him tick has he always been like this should we should the media have been as surprised as shocked as we've been his outbursts his behavior or was this always going to be the case. well in a word no nobody should have been surprised in the one nine hundred ninety s. when he began to have a series of corporate bankruptcy he had made himself too big to foreclose on and i

think what's happened during the campaign and now in the white house is through the miracle of twitter he has made himself too big to fact check so those three lies a day which you would think would sink anybody. he made himself too big to fact check and here's a crazy question for you as a biographer and someone who's been what she would a distant the big picture over many years when you see the u.s. media the white house press corps on a day to day basis what are they getting wrong in their approach to covering this unique president i think there needs to be kind of simon it's a tough thing to do but simultaneously. the press corps has to respond to those tweets has to respond because that's what's driving attention you can't ignore them but at the same time keeping everybody's eye on the ball of what else is happening while the distraction of the tweets are going on what is happening across all the

governmental agencies what are the great shifts that are going on in various departments all the things that are going on on capitol hill both things at once that's a tough act jane you're a politics reporter done you're based in washington d.c. a lot of american ordinary american voters who don't like donald trump which is a majority of the country if you believe the polls they would say look the media has played a massive role in letting trump get to where he is survive in office because as hostile as they may sound as as many exposes the new york times the washington post may do ultimately they're still playing the old game we're trying to play a completely different game i would say so i mean keep in mind that this is we have a president who is in a home alone too if there's anything he knows he knows the media and he knows kind of the fact that you know if you give the media something to talk about the media will talk about it there's a whole litany of things that donald trump has said he'd do or promise to do or said he would definitely do on his first day of office it just haven't happened and

because there is always just this constant push tweet after tweet after tweet it kind of gets lost in there and so i think that something that's really important for the media to do is like ok you know we need to be anchored in something that is not donald trump's twitter feed you need to talk about kind of the deeper stories lots of things are getting done right out of his twitter feed is not as great getting things done exactly like and so a lot of things are happening some things are getting but it's really important to focus on something besides his twitter feed or because besides what he's telling you charlie sides and i want to ask you about your you're a well known conservative former radio host out of the republican which is before i get to the your all sort of a book called how the right. lost its mind but when you listen to what jane was saying and when you hear what psychologists have written about this idea of talk about cognitive load that we don't have the mental capacity to keep up with so much controversy and crisis because we're digesting the last big story we're processing

and there's another big story we just it's too much news too much control to see how do you cope with that in your everyday life. well that's exactly right in a lot of ways donald trump has broken the model of journalism because he does lie so so often and look donald trump is donald trump and we should have known very clearly that this man is a serial liar he's a con man he's been engaged in malta poll fraud so he is who we is the shocking thing that's going on in american politics right now is what he is doing to americans that the effect on the culture which has become more and more accepting of the untruth of the lies and by the way it's worse than just lying and there's a real disconnect from reality this is this is a president united states who spends a lot of time deep in of the fever swamps of conspiracy theories but if you if you shift the focus back to his fellow republicans my fellow conservatives americans that's what's really shocking there in difference to this they're willing to this

was not just their indifferent it's not just indifference they put up i think you called yourself the reddest of meat for his base is it not a problem it's not just the media as i put it that seems to be enabling trump he has a very loyal base and the wider republican body movement even senior republicans who maybe not privately founds of his but publicly are enabling him how do you push back against them well you try to push back against that except i think that that this this last year you know has seen the degree to which the willingness of republicans to capitulate to all of this and so would donald trump wise he's not just lying about one thing or another you know this is really an attack on truth itself on credibility it itself and. you know there is a method to his madness when he attacks the media one of the things he's doing is to deal with any independent source of information that might criticise him immunized him self against any of the bad stories that are coming this is a fundamental challenge to american journalism i'm not sure they figured out how to

cope with that and what do you think about this idea that it's a deliberate strategy on his part to distract the media to deal is just to minds the media that he's a monster manipulator the media because that's one school of thought another school of thought is just he's a he's a guy who's demented unstable can't control himself egomaniac just tweets without thinking which is is it both or is it one or the other what do you think having studied him for so many years the salesman he's been selling himself his whole career he's an opportunist he's a remarkable opportunist possibly the best in history certainly one of the top ten you know if he has to perform he has to keep everybody's eyes on him and you do that by doing the unexpected he's been doing that his whole career certainly been doing that ever since he started campaigning for the white house in the white house the whole idea is to keep you constant so in your view and that means he's in charge so you know very hard sort of sounds like you're describing a strategic genius to demented egomania who can't control his tongue. genius

i leave that to the ages but somebody who's very shrewd about how interested inthe works ok well let me bring in dunn your your canadian journalist in washington d.c. covering american voters for foreign publication as an outsider what do you think american journalists could be doing should be doing to meet the challenge that go under and charlie about well first and foremost i think there's still insufficient fact checking being done think about what happens during a presidential debate almost every outlet from regional papers to the new york times deploys a team of fact checkers to call out all the false statements of both candidates and then the next day and the day after and then when one of them gets elected all that all that goes away and fact checking what about the argument we have so many studies these days that actually fact checking doesn't work or doesn't get through to people that's not going to people just ignore it i push back you know as a you know sort of amateur self-appointed fact checker i get asked a lot you know do facts still matter does truth still matter and i argue that it

does you know look at the polling for example we've seen this year on trump's health care plan and his tax cut plan in both of those cases the approval rating for those policies has been under twenty percent and so despite trump calling things the best ever fantastic wonderful is going to put money in your pockets going to save health care people aren't buying it and so i think we have many sort of glimmers of hope that show us that that truth is not lost that people still do care and it's not pointless to bring them facts so i'll not know the truth stilnox is doing to a lot of quote unquote journalists in the united states today especially in the trump supporting part of the blogosphere and online journalism the bright bots the info wars it's not about truth it's about conspiracy theory it's about politics and chip it's about pushing any nonsense as long as it supports your guy well i think something that happened with the conservatism that begins this idea that you were going to create a parallel media structure that was parallel to the new york times washington post

but it was a conservative media structure and it would be. one where you know you have your weekly standards international reviews but then you also have your breitbart syrian for wars but then i think you also get to a sense that you know paul ryan you know in my opinion he's not a supporter of the speaker of the house of representatives he's not supporting trump because he wants to like hang out with him he's supporting trump because he really wants tax cuts it wasn't ever really about you know this privatising of truth justice and the american way it was getting a republican in the white house it was you know we just have to do that and then you know kind of using the trump as a thoroughfare ok everything that they want done let me ask you this you know we're seeing the rehabilitation of george w. bush on some parts of the center left and people are going to even bush was better than truman and they said well bush invaded iraq and killed hundreds of thousands of people which isn't done yet what do you say to the up criticism of kind of mainstream journalism making trump out to be somehow different to previous presidents well i think you can fairly make the argument that george w.

bush or any number of other presidents had to have done worse things than donald trump has done in this first year in office there been you know wars there's japanese internment you know the american presidents of both parties have done terrible things but i think i still think in fundamental ways in terms of his respect for political norms his regard for for truth and accuracy his knowledge of policy and lack of knowledge really this man is different so i don't think in all ways he is objectively worse than every other president but i don't think we've seen anyone like him charlie let me get this how does the quote unquote mainstream media of such a thing exists anymore how does it get through. the trouble how do you get through to people who just say oh that's fake news that's an incredibly important question and nobody's really figured it out right now because one of the things that they think that you know has happened in american politics in american media has been

the creation of the alternative. reality silos and you know i think some of the investigative work of the washington post the new york times is as good as anything that we've seen in a generation and yet for a lot of voters it does not penetrate because donald trump and in trump world has successfully discredited you know much of their journalism but also they get their information from these web sites from the breitbart network from fox news you know from the from the from the drudge report at some point i have to say this it's going to have to be conservative media trusted conservative media that's going to have to stand up and say to other conservative voters look this is not true we don't want to go this way you know these are the facts so far unfortunately we are not seeing that happen big but i don't know that there's anything that the new york times can do that's going to convince some voter in alabama who gets their news from breitbart dot com that something is is falls let me let me let me put this to

you there's another aspect to what makes him unique compared to even george w. bush of the previous presidents which is his position on race his position on minorities we have seen him do everything from retreat british new fascists to defend the u.s. neo nazis a very fine people. nationalists. when you have a president the united states who is doing these things on a near daily basis again how do you respond to that is there a danger that even unwittingly we will just normalize that kind of rhetoric and behavior well i think that the g.o.p. very much had two separate messages and has for decades the republican party you know they had one talking about policy and tax cuts and talking about you know what we should do about health care having these very good conversations went to each other which would hopefully with their base right which isn't popular to their base and then they had you know there is a republican strategist named lee atwater who basically said that you can run essentially on demonizing african-americans and you can do it effectively and you

can do it for years. and you know he talked about you know there was something called the southern strategy which nixon used which is basically going to southern voters and saying you know if you vote for this person he'll basically let black people into your house essentially and so what i think you're seeing is this resuscitation of this southern strategy but it's being used that on steroids it's being used in this brand new way because for a lot of these voters they believed we were told you know african-americans are victims and then donald trump is telling them no no you're the victim and that's all you know this is all i want to get i get the relation between trump and the voters and what i selling them what i'm also interested in what does what does everyone else do what of all of us do who are watching this spectacle and say oh we are we in danger of unwittingly even normal as if we just get busted down by the repetition of awful stuff and i think that you know i think there is an idea that i think some people had that trump would change or that could be influenced and i

think you know trump in some ways it's a lost cause like i you know me writing about african-americans and their interest their dealings with this kind of trump government is not going to change trump's mind trump is seventy one years old that's just not going to so we don't know what it's going to change when it was in trouble and there's a big debate i mentioned charlie about how do you change trump voters' minds from conservatives but to double your representative of a liberal canadian mainstream publication but you've been around the united states of america during the campaign and during this president you've interviewed trump voters what is your reaction to them and what is their reaction to you that's one of the most interesting bizarre things that i learned is that someone can be very sweet and then tell me that muslims should be all interned in a camp in new mexico and so these are very regular people in many ways who have come to hold non-factual or bigoted views in many cases in some cases they had more cogent reasons for supporting trump i don't know if you or i would agree with those

reasons leading to voting for this man. they would say things like hillary clinton is beholden to big financial interests trump is is is you know he's wealthy on his own and if you then say to them hold on he just filled the government with goldman sachs but because you know what do they say that well i haven't had many of those conversations after after the election but we've seen from the polls that for the most part his base has stuck with him and i think to some extent what's happened after his election has resolved this sort of academic debate we had during the election about whether the source of his support was was race or racism based or whether it was you know economic self-interest people feeling like they were left behind by by trade deals but as i thought it was just as racial resentment yesterday i think what we've you know we still can't say for sure but what we what we've seen since the election with the tax bill is that trump is not for the most part pursuing a course of economic populism he's pursuing a very traditional conservative course of tax cuts of benefiting the wealthy deregulation to the benefit of corporations what he has delivered on though is the

race element of his agenda so he has going after muslims see how it has gone after hispanics he has defended neo nazis and he's retained his support so that's something so i mean charlie charlie you've been very honest both on the show and in your book about the role that conservatives have to play in pushing back the role that conservatives played in creating some of this phenomenon and distrust of the media would you also acknowledge the role that conservatives and people on your side of the spectrum the talk radio sphere played in creating some of this grievance culture that when the point of this racial resentment that dunn was talking about yet there's no there's no question about it i mean that this didn't come out of didn't come out of nowhere you know i want to make two points about this because you know you used the word that i think is very important which is normalize how we have normalized all of this and i don't want you to think back to you know a year ago two thousand and sixteen do you remember at one point and by the way paul ryan the speaker is a personal friend of mine i've known him his entire career and the last year at one point when donald trump was attacking

a mexican american judge paul ryan said there was a text you know. case of racism when donald trump called for a ban on muslims entering this country paul ryan held a press conference saying that you know this was a good you know of fun fundamentally no not not a conservative idea fast forward to today where you have the president engaging in these are not racial dog whistles anymore these are fog horns right now you know reach weeding the you know the the neo fascist anti muslim bigoted videos you know out of out of out of great britain paul ryan and the rest of the republican party is absolutely silent so this is the normalisation right now you know it's the second half of two thousand and seventeen you're so you're basically seeing them shrug their shoulders oh trump is trump and their silence is one of the most dramatic developments that we've seen here and by the way you know when we talk about playing the race card understand that it's not just african-americans you know how central to the trump appeal his attack on muslims on mexicans on the

chinese all of these groups all of these others who are to blame for all of the problems and i think that's one of the darker aspects of american and all that it's how many americans have been willing to buy into that and i mean i have to also same question to the very begin to show there's nothing new here is that when it comes to trying to go off to minorities this is not something you developed as a republican presidential candidate or the president states he has a long history of going off to african-americans and other minority groups absolutely does when it when he first emerged into the into the public fear into the spotlight in the mid seventy's when he was when he was still in real estate the first thing that he did to really get some kind of attention was when the department of justice charge that the trump organization was discriminating in its rental policies towards african-americans and his father had previously encountered such a charge and had sort of quietly made it go away in new york city when the trump or

. going to zation was charged with this in one thousand nine hundred seventy three . donald now he was in charge of the he did not back down instead he the next day held a press conference counter sued the government for one hundred million dollars and that was the first the first public appearance of him really on a large scale and it had to do with a discrimination in his random policy but here's my question i will wrap up on this question let me ask you all this question you talk about him fighting for himself and he clearly loves himself and he's a man who loves to win remember doing the companies that will get to you get tired of winning will win so much he's not winning at the moment politically in any way is his approval ratings are lower than any other modern president at this stage in their presidency how do you think failure comes across to donald trump how does he feels about coming across as a failure and how those are going to affect us in twenty eight in the second year of his presidency. so hesitant to try to jump in this man's head i think you feel

sad about failing i think he feels angry but i think one fascinating thing about him is that you know often people don't hold those failures against him they say well he's trying his best it's congress is the media it's democrats so i think we can overblow the extent to which people are still with him we have to remember that he's very unpopular that many people are against him but for that core you know no matter how much fairly he does he's not a failure that's for the core but for the mountain itself and what's driving him i think he does not see himself as someone who can fail that's almost in a uniquely american idea to believe that you know even when you fail you are still a success he himself is a success other people around him have failed to describe themselves this year is that you know he's done more than any president ever yet he's going to any president ever but i think a lot of his voters you know they see trump as a blank slate upon which they have projected themselves and so when we criticize

trump a lot of his voters here they're talking about me. you know when you criticize term for lying you're saying what i support a liar would i do this and so i think that it's very important for the media to really separate you know there is trump and then there is trump's voters and i think that we need to talk about those two entities in two different ways well let me leave the same question about how do you separate out voters who you know very well from. the question is what will it take to break off trump from his supporters and we don't know yet we honestly don't know as long as the economy is humming along as long as he's making the right enemy as long as the able to beat up on the media i think one of the mistakes sometimes we make about politics is thinking the politics is about issues about it's about accomplishments but i don't increasingly in america politics is about identity it's about attitude it's about tribal loyalty and i think that donald trump you know despite his erratic personality disorders understands that and last last word to you as

a person who populism best on this panel as a person i've got to ask you a question when i see a lot of us media coverage always trying to wait for the pivot they're always trying to wait for the trump moderating moment we have are going to see a neutral going to absolutely not i think. you got to remember this guy's comfort zone is chaos and that gives him in a way ironically a leg up because almost everybody else is looking for calm looking for some return to something approaching normal and that makes that that leaves in the last guy standing the strongest guy in the room that's the role he once so he's going to keep riling things up he's never going to be presidential if presidential means calm no way lucky the rest of us will have to leave it we've run out of time thank you all so much for joining me to discuss this store newest of thorny issues shows

up front will be back in the new year. on counting the cost of flying taxis megadeals and banishment shakeups will look at the flight plan for global aviation in two thousand and eighteen after roberts over the year in the middle east plus what arms sales book telling us about the state of the world's economy. counting the cost of this time on al-jazeera.

zero. every. twenty seventeen has been full of stories that have changed the global political landscape and al-jazeera has been there to cover them all. joining us as we look back at some of our most memorable interviews of the year in a special edition of talk to al-jazeera at this time. i'm barbara starr in london these are the top stories on al-jazeera israeli tanks and their craft have fired on targets in gaza in retaliation to rockets being fired into israel the israeli army says its aerial defense system intercepted two rockets

launched from the gaza strip it caused panic among civilians on the ground and is.