my argument in the book is playing political hard all trying to achieve the kinds of them -- amendments making the national government less dangerous to virginia's interest. now i know she will pull me off the stage so i want to say thank you for the opportunity to talk about henry. >> you can go sign them. [inaudible conversations]

>> you are watching booktv on c-span2 with top nonfiction books and authors every weekend, booktv, television for serious readers. >> breitbart news senior editor at large, take us to august 2015 and how you felt about that election. >> i was optimistic about trump's chances against hillary clinton, my co-author felt quite differently and he predicted in august 2015 that trump would not only when the republican nomination but the presidency and he did that on the basis of data that he was looking at particularly the large number of democrats in key counties and places like northeast ohio who are switching party registration from democrat to republican. one of the reasons they were doing that, they watched the first couple presidential debates and realize trump was speaking about issues many of

these democratic voters care about, trade and immigration, bernie sanders was talking about those issues which is why he did so well in the democratic primary but for many voters in the rustbelt and other swing counties across america, trump is where the action was was my co-author said this is where it is on election day a year from now. i was much more skeptical although i saw something happening, you can trace the dates trump seized control of the election to july 10, 2015, 31/2 weeks after he launched his campaign. for the first 31/2 weeks he was bumping along the bottom in the polls but on july 10th he met with families of members of the remembrance project, people who lost loved ones to illegal aliens, drunk driving or murder and trump showed empathy for those families, breitbart covered it, there is a great photograph of trump standing

with his arms folded listening to the family that within nine days, shot to number 6 in the polls straight to number one. he never relinquished that lead. it was showing conservative voters he would take up an issue that was important to them and showing voters in general that he sided with families and people who had been denied protection from the government, they had a right to expect or receive. that emotionally in terms of the polls is where he took over the election but i still thought hillary clinton had history on her side, first female nominee, hard for anybody to be but with a few months i came to the view that trump had a real chance because of the way he took on the media in a way no other republican candidate did. of the 19 how did the campaign work? >> guest: not at the beginning. i was harboring west coast campaigns for all the campaigns, tried to get breitbart people, ted cruz events, things like that. in the primary stage i was focused on the west coast,

traveling to events that happened there but i joined the campaign press corps around donald trump's campaign once the general election was underway, the debates and so forth and covered that homestretch and even then didn't expect them to win. when i started seeking the idea for this book my initial title was going to be something like the fall of trump tower or something. i did not see that he would have a great chance of winning, i put it at 20% or 30 presidential unit as a tragic exercise, larger than life american figure, this picture of individualism and achievement that almost had literary residence in american culture not just through tv's apprentice but his own book and cultural impact and falling short at the end. that is how i saw things happening. over the course of the next few weeks towards election day there were events and things i experienced that led me to

believe his chances were stronger but it was a surprise to me on election night when he won as it was to frank luntz who said at 6:00 in the evening that hillary clinton would be the next president of the united states which my co-author larry had a different perspective. he had sources of data that were proprietary and sources in various counties telling them what was going on, he was much more confident trump was going to win and predicted very closely the electoral votes by which trump would win. he had his fingers really on the data and he was confident in that data. i was steeped in the media looking at what trump was saying and what people were saying about trump. i never wrote him off, never thought he didn't belong at the top of the ticket i didn't have a chance but it was a surprise when he pulled it off but there were interesting things about his rapport with his voters that were early signs of their

devotion to him that they would march over broken glass barefoot to the polls to vote for donald trump. >> guest: >> host: on election day was it you or your co-author who went to see the grave of rabbi schneerson. >> guest: that was me. i went there, jared kushner had gone before and i had never been there. rabbi schneerson was -- he passed away 20 years ago. in his lifetime, he rescued postwar judaism and gave it a religious direction many people thought he would never have again after the holocaust. even with the establishment of the state of israel is relapse leaders assumed religious judaism was fading and if it existed it existed in small insular pockets. he reversed that. he promoted jewish ideas, jewish values, jewish practices as good in and of themselves not just as a tradition to preserve but as

positive forces for change in the world that were not just restricted to jews but values judaism promotes would help humanity as a whole and inspired thousands of people to become missionaries to other jewish communities all around the world. in the course of that project, he became very widely respected, not just in new york where he lived but throughout the country for his advice, political leaders and political insights not just on american politics but israeli politics and global affairs and politicians would seek his advice. there that is correspondence with ronald reagan and things like that, bipartisan, impact on both parties and leaders of both parties, i decided to check it out on election day, made no secret that i was a trump supported my right for a

conservative website. it was an interesting experience, a lowell in the day and i took that time because usually when people are voting there is not much news. i talk about it a little bit in the book but the tradition is to write a note to leave at the gravesite. the jockey who won the triple crown left a note the next day. i left my notes on the side of the grave area and intended to folded up and the breeze came through and listed it up. it is kind of interesting. it got lost in queens, i was stuck in queens which made me nervous about missing deadlines but amazing to see the world donald trump came from the this is who he is, he grew up in

queens and made it in manhattan and has achieved the ultimate mission he and his family imagines, an interesting way to spend the afternoon on election day. when i got to the victory party, 7:30 at night, people looked dejected. this was at the hilton. the donors were gathered and the inner circle at trump tower for a while, the party felt very diminished, very quiet. explanations for why trump was going to lose, not looking good, exit polls were terrible. then we were looking at the screen, and been there for the trump campaign in pensacola and my wife did her navy training in

pennsylvania so i know the area well. when i asked a woman at the rally the same question i ask everywhere is why are you here, what through you to donald trump? why are you here? she said i'm not an idiot. that was her answer. that is how automatically a vote was. i said how do we know which way florida is going to go? a short while later those counties started to come in, the state flipped into the trump column and everybody felt trump was going to win. i didn't think he was automatically going to win, in my pre-election calculations, to pick off a blue state, not going to win by using the tried and tested republican strategy of winning the conservative states and competing in swing states, there are three swing states. i knew he would have to steal one state from the blue column.

this has been a republican idea for quite a while, sarah palin one to do it in 2008. this has been an idea out there but trump wanted to do it. the day before the election i ran into frank luntz on the outskirts of a rally in north carolina, in nevada, new hampshire, ohio and florida, ohio, florida, saw his chances were 50/50, new hampshire 50/50, the early vote for democrats were coming in and it was massive. winning one of the blue states, he looked at me, like i had fallen off the moon, which one? he couldn't imagine. the next day he won three of the blue states, pennsylvania, michigan and wisconsin. that is the one no pollsters saw. my co-author who was running his

own election model said his team predicted trump's victory everywhere except wisconsin. they did not think wisconsin, and you can pop champagne corks. it took three or four hours for networks to call it. in the media gallery people looked crestfallen, they did their job and we were left at the end, the breitbart crew watching this and realizing donald trump would be the next president of the united states. we covered this covered the conservative argument, in the middle of a fight because breitbart was one of the more supportive conservative outlets of trump's candidacy and what happened hit us, this remarkable moment in history. i right about that drama in the

last few weeks in the book. >> host: did the party start to fill up once florida came in? >> guest: yes. many people started streaming in at 9:30 that night and it was pandemonium for a long time. looking down on the floor, it was a mosh pit from midnight until 3:00 in the morning. there was some blueing when john podesta said they would count more votes. people started blueing and one network called pennsylvania so anyway what was interesting to people is not so much the election night dramatics, where were you when this happened? some of the conversations i had with voters, the people in those crowds, people who liked trump, i first had a sense trump would win the nomination in las vegas, went to an event in the primary

in 2016, no other candidate does, the conventional wisdom among politicians, you want to keep an audience waiting, you know you are not a celebrity in your own right, trump is but very few politicians are. they created mystique around themselves, not accessible to everybody, and i was told by some campaign consultants but one thing more seasoned candidates do is they arrive on time 15 or 20 minutes on stage, trump didn't do that at this event in las vegas, he came out on time and did that throughout the campaign, almost always on time and the message that sent people in the audience who have waited and camped out by the door, their time is worth something to him and there's an immediate intimacy between the candidate and audience which

politicians don't want, and there is a little bit of a difference, donald trump came off the pedestal and would stand for an hour and speak extemporaneously about what was on his mind. the media started bank attention to what he was saying, they were saying this man is crazy, rambles, no coherence, wasn't crazy, a conversation among friends, about current events and it was an ordinary conversation and people appreciated his confidence, sharing his inner reflections the way he does on twitter, the new york times, some of the interviews he gives, let on about what he is thinking about things, but we have not had a present as accessible and letting people know what his policies are going to be in foreign policy, in the trump

world, what we do with isis or russia. that is the personal view for strategic reasons. in terms of how he feels about things he's very direct about that and they created a rapport between him and the audience. when i left that night, no other candidate does that. trump withdrew 4000, 5000 people, marco rubio had a rally two blocks away and had 200. marco rubio on paper is a better candidate, more political experience, policies lined up perfectly with the conservative movement, republican party, very good on television, he was latino and could appeal to a new section of the electorate republicans were struggling to reach. he checked all the boxes. trump had a connection to people and wasn't just celebrity but something he knew how to do. a charismatic persona, when you

look at obama rallies, and a cult of personality, elevated him above them. trump had a different appeal, he was the man who came down from trump tower on the escalator, giving up a lot of that prestige, look how his brands have suffered, how his personal life has been opened up and turned upside down and his business is under investigation. he has exposed himself in all these ways and a young woman on the campaign trail at a rally in michigan was one of the more interesting rallies north of detroit and one of the few events that started to link because we had trouble getting there with the traffic around detroit. a very long route, got there late. absolutely packed, this was a young audience, people in their

late teens, early 20s, why she like donald trump, she said he loves us. i said to her how do you know he loves you? because he doesn't have to do this is that was the same sentiment i saw at the beginning of the campaign when i went to a trump event, people had an appreciation for the way he was giving his time, arriving on time, giving up his lucrative, comfortable life in the fray of american politics. it is not such a great sacrifice to live at 1600 pennsylvania avenue, get driven everywhere, net worth has probably risen, president obama is worth as much as mitt romney, the since people had with this, he was sacrificing himself, the next step up on a set of political

stairs the way it was for hillary clinton and other candidates. that remains his connection to his voting base. he remains loyal to them and what is remarkable in the first eight months, daily ups and downs, the setbacks in congress, voters are with him, not that they have a slavish cultish adherence to trump as a possibility. it was an interesting paul, and a trump administration, republicans love it but one thing both sides agree on, what he was going to do, they didn't like that he was doing what he said he was going to do and

republicans loved it. that was the one common area of agreement in the polls at that time and that is largely still true, in congress, and prepared for the trump presidency, hasn't gotten all his ducks in a row. the leaders of congress didn't expect trump to win. some prepared for trump to win. mitch mcconnell deserves a lot of credit for the way he handled merrick garland in 2016 and he held the line in the same way the trump was going to win and he did, made a big bet. washington wasn't prepared. he is dealing with bureaucracy and administration with portions that are not in secret rebellion against the administration. a massive challenge but so far

doing okay -- >> host: did you read fear and loathing in las vegas? >> no i didn't but there is an element in it, it is not as crazy or as adventurous. i talked about some of the sidetrips on the campaign trail and one of the interesting ones to harvard, flew to new hampshire to boston, joined family and friends for the jewish sabbath and took that afternoon on saturday to walk across campus where i studied, a quiet trump supporter on campus, there were a few of them in the harvard faculty, we had a long discussion about trump, what he

meant and the perilous state of american politics in american political discourse and the thing that worried us both at the time was whether trump won or lost america was going to be divided and it remains divided, bitterly divided and donald trump is not even because of the campaign, goes back earlier, some start in the obama administration and some starts before that but i remember almost with fondness when i was in college in the 1990s the complaint among political commentators with the parties were too close to each other in american politics had become consensus debate. there was no real disagreement or issues that divided people. that began to crack with the impeachment and bill clinton refusing to resign and the recount, looking back a little ways to see where these divisions began but the obama presidency was divisive and that obama unlike bill clinton didn't react to setbacks by coming

toward the middle. when he had a political setback he would move further in the direction he intended to go. for conservatives and republicans and many independents that was frightening. they decided they needed someone to fight back, in terms of the style of his campaign and here we are, this agent of change in the white house in the way obama wasn't. obama was focused on changing the foundation of society, talks about the fundamental changing of the transportation, obama was fixated on changing what he saw as a society marred by the original sin of slavery and trump doesn't feel that way about america's found in, he is trying to change america's government. in a way that resonates deeply with the american electorate which doesn't want to revisit its first principles or under liberty, doesn't want to apologize for american presence in the world but causes problems in washington because government is set on working a certain way and trump wanted to work

differently, trump comes from the real estate world, business world where things are built, things are done directly, generally, done under budget. washington doesn't work that way and there is a clash of style. the things that worried us in the sidetrip i took on the campaign trail remains worrying to me now. i wonder why we come down as far down the road as we have. one of the interesting comments on my book came from someone who read it and told me the thing he liked about my book as someone from the outside was my personal account of being on the campaign trail and following trump, trump seemed normal to him because he is not seen as normal in the media, he is seen as dictatorial or fascist or whatever they applied to him or as a figure nobody can figure out. when you are close to what is

going on and see the day today and place it in the context of other people, the geography and changing of the seasons, whatever it is, you understand there is an element of it that is normal. we have just become used to a different way of doing politics and that is why people are frustrated with politics, trump is trying to change that and some of those changes are ambitious and challenging, sometimes radical. as a figure he is not outside the bounds of the american political experience. there is a lot familiar about being a people immersed which people don't want to do. if you don't want to go to a trump rally would do that or get inside trump's mind and talk about policy the way he does you might read the book because that is the part of the book i focus on, describing the world travel with trump. larry schweikert, this part of the book is focused on historical context of trump so he put in context how the trump

campaign, although different from anything anyone experienced in our lifetimes is not totally unprecedented. they campaign for these ideas, given the history, he gives you the data that further explains why trump won and how trump won. he is still collecting the same data. he says the shift from democrat to republican in voter registration has continued since the 2016 election, the momentum is still on the republican side even though you watch the news might think it is the opposite but the electorate is following trump on the issues and democrats are not talking about issues, they are talking about trump. that is good at solidifying their base to bring donations but not good at broadening the democratic party electorate and that is why democrats are still struggling to figure out their strategy in the midterm in 2018, almost paralyzed by this resistance movement they encouraged but is so radical that democratic party leaders

are having trouble raining it in. trump is talking about issues people care about, trade, national security, healthcare and that is why the electorate trends in that direction. we will see how much longer that lasts but if he can start delivering on more these things particularly on the legislative side you will see that trend accelerate. >> host: in "how trump won" you talk about your experiences on the campaign trail. what is it like to be on the campaign trail? what was the reaction you got from other parties being part of breitbart? >> guest: when i joined i knew i wasn't going to make many friends. i was surprised i did make friends but i knew not to try to be too jovial with people because either they wouldn't want that relationship with a breitbart reporter or i wouldn't lose i had to keep focused on what people were not focusing on. the interesting thing to me was

how few journalists took an interest in the crowds. there was a kind of condescension, fear, irritation. not every reporter is not all the time but i found many reporters put you in a cage at these big events and i would jump the fence. secret service was there but i didn't care, i was going to talk to people. that was made a news story, talking to people at these rallies. it struck me there wasn't that much curiosity about trump supporters. the media had an idea baked in what trump supporters were. i'm generalizing, not everybody was like that but it was fun. there were friendships made across ideological boundaries, some very left-wing supporters i got on well with because we talked about baseball, i wore my cubs fan hat everywhere. it was fun to be on the trail. many reporters didn't like trump but most of them would agree,

some quite open about it that it was better to be covering trump and hillary clinton because hillary clinton did very few events and there wasn't much access to the candidate and not much change from day today, the speeches were scripted, crowds -- it was all set pieces of politics that you are used to. trump was different, never knew what was going to happen which protesters would show up, there were four five events today, it was exhausting but it was exciting. he did tire out journalists a third of his age, talking journalists in their early 20s struggling to keep up with this presidential candidate on the doorstep of 70 and he had this amazing energy, that is one of the reasons he won. the sunday before election day he was in 7 states, in states close together, new england or something like that across the country. he has more energy. hillary clinton relied on her

surrogates a lot more. not sure her health problems wade into this but the clinton campaign felt their bases were covered if they sent barack obama here and joe biden. hillary would do one event today, that didn't connect to voters. the fact the trump was working so hard and could speak off-the-cuff about where he had been and where he was and where he was going next created a kind of immediate intimacy with people in each place he went to. and it was fun at times to socialize with people. world series games and things like that, there were funny things that happened, tens moments, strict rules about what goes on on the press plane, i

had a disagreement about one of my stories, reporting on the press reaction, didn't quote anybody but it was evident what the reaction was and told i shouldn't do that and it was back and forth. media narratives are set, there will be cooperation out of necessity. there is a shared worldview, an idea coalesces in the press about the meaning of something trump had said. and other people agreeing with it as an argumentative person saying i will disagree with that but when surrounded by for your pb -- 50 people more senior than

you, doing this for longer, hard to say i disagree with the rest of you, when you go toward a deadline, you don't have energy and that argument but interesting to see inside what the press is doing, the public benefit and journalist could benefit because there is a herd mentality that is developed in the press corps and it would behoove journalists to think themselves out of it, looking at events and understanding events that don't fall into this established pattern. most in the media sees itself as the opposition party. steve van and called them that but they see themselves as the opposition party, that is a mistake. that is a mistake. any press corps is going to have a combative relationship with the president because the administration wants to get things done and the media want to report on what they are doing wrong or not doing but the media has taken a partisan stance that has undermined its ability to

reach its audience and ironically make that partisan effort to reach its fulfillment. if you want to convince people to come to your point view but undermine trust in your ability will is the people you're trying to bring with you. there is room for media reform or journalists to think about how they report on presidential campaigns when they hear ideas they don't like. breitbart is a conservative website but when we cover liberal politicians or liberal events it is usually just to present them as they are. our audience does not need to be told what is good or bad in what a politician says. straight delivery is most effective. i went to cover hillary clinton last august speaking about the alt right, an attack on breitbart news which she lumped with the alt right giving a speech to this audience. it was interesting to report what she said. the reactions of the crowd. nobody in the crowd knew what the alt right was.

her campaign chose to show trump as an extremist and so forth. to report what she was saying was very effective in showing our audience what they need to know about the facts, and how out of touch she and her campaign were with what was really going on in the campaign, it wasn't some fringe movement but a populist moment where trump was connecting to millions of people who didn't get their opinions from twitter or website or blogs with people experiencing what trump was talking about in everyday lives that no politician had acknowledged. there is a lot to be learned from way the press coverage to 2016, we are still seeing journalists trapped in the same mode. we got along well with those people who wanted to be friendly, people from left-wing outfits. it is a question of temperament, individual people, you find

conservative journalists, try to get along with everybody, not possible all the time. there is a next book to be written about lessons for the media and this presidency. >> host: joel pollak, how did you get to breitbart, what is your background? >> guest: very interesting. how far back do you want to go? i was very liberal in college and shortly thereafter. i was part of the college democrats but they were too centrist for my state. i was in the radical wing of the democratic party. i would have been bernie sanders. i grew up in the suburbs of chicago, went to public school and jewish religious school but harvard college and began to change my mind halfway through college. i still thought of myself on the left but there were things that began to bother me. the most important thing that bothered me was the hostility, i went to left-wing lectures and ask questions and was often told

my question was based on an incorrect assumption. if you had a question it was because you didn't understand something. i went to conservative events - challenging questions as a liberal student and never got that reaction. i would get an explanation, respond even though students didn't agree with me i would never be shouted down or any like that. the open-mindedness of conservatism on campus attracted me a little bit, but really it was my time in south africa, spent seven years from college and law school in south africa working as a freelance journalist and speechwriter and opened my eyes because i saw many of the left-wing policies i had believed in being implemented and i saw they were destructive and achieve the opposite of what they set out to accomplish. i thought of myself as a democrat when i came back after six months in the country and law school and i became a republican, became active in republican colleges, volunteered on the mccain campaign 2008, i

had this confrontation with barney frank when he came to give a lecture that went viral when youto was relatively young and got a call from republicans back home in illinois who said we need someone to run in this district, would you consider doing it? i said okay. i ran for congress in a blue district on the conservative platform and we lost badly but the campaign was very successful. we had this conservative campaign that raised $700,000. student loans and the whole deal, it was the excitement of having a conservative candidate to vote for the brought volunteers and donors from across the country and we ran a tough energetic campaign and i

met andrew breitbart, he called me a candidate journalist because i was doing my own opposition research. when i went to the rnc and what you have? no one has run against her, we don't have anything and never tried because it is such a liberal district, never put the resources into it so i ran the opposition research campaign and we uncovered things that didn't just tell a story about my opponent but what was going on in the democratic party because she was deeply connected to obama and the political operation around obama, particularly -- janet czajkowski and her husband and kramer had trained obama's activist and a community organizer and in a way the mastermind behind the policies obama implemented in the first year or two of his presidency. those links had never been explored or uncovered so i broke a lot of stories and started writing the time it was

biggovernment.com, we developed a friendship and after the election after i lost i pitched the idea to him of coming out to work in la doing legal work. company started with one employee in andrew breitbart's basement was now half a dozen employees and was growing, becoming a national media story or national media organization. i moved out there and for the first six months, still have in-house counsel responsibilities but as the company started to expand andrew made me editor in chief and i was editor in chief or two years including the period he died suddenly and we had to hold the company together, reboot the news organization and start bringing stories. we had a blog site the first few years of the website and that was good in terms of giving a voice to conservative journalists but wasn't going to compete with mainstream media,

replacing the front of the breaking news path and andrew's vision was to get breaking news, 24 hour news and move into other media so we have radio on serious xm, breitbart news daily and breitbart weekend show on channel 125 so it has been amazing to see the company grow, 100 employees and come in relatively young to be part of the success. i think andrew would be proud of it and fascinated by what is going on today but wouldn't have anticipated a lot of it. trump was a candidate anticipated by breitbart even though he wasn't a conservative the way breitbart was conservative. here we are at freedom fest, breitbart tended toward the libertarian side in many ways and trump has some liberal tendencies when it comes to social issues but some of his policies are not libertarian,

people talk about that. andrew understood that trump knew how the media worked and could overcome the media and he said in 2012 because of the way trump beats the media trump is going to be your candidate one day if you don't watch out. he was saying he's not a conservative away these other people are conservative but he will be the candidate you get because he knows how to fight. andrew's early feelings about that were fulfilled. the reason many republicans voted for trump even though they didn't like him is he's a fighter and he fights back against people republicans feel i their opponents, less democrats and liberals and more media. andrew believed and i believe given a level playing field, the media allows both sides equal time and equal respect and equal coverage, conservatives will win most of the debates. a lot of the energy of media is devoted to marginalizing

conservatives, marginalizing republicans so we don't have the same chance to have our point of view. it is not the fairness doctrine where everyone is forced to have equal access. the remedy is to expose bias where it exists. that is something we have done a lot at breitbart and more since the election. we have been fighting against a lot of the coverage because we think trump is a president we can hold accountable, he is accountable to his voters, but he should be accountable based on policies and principles, not based on media's often contrived crises and double standards. they try to catch him on things, as if they were asleep or eight years and woke up to the importance of an independent press. you don't get to complain about trump not giving a press conference when you wanted him to if you followed obama all around the golf course for eight

years. that is my path to breitbart. i like the company's posture, the fighting conservative, the fighting kind of political attitude. i don't necessarily march in lockstep with everyone else, we have lots of opinions on the site about different issues, same with trump. i was critical of the things he said during the campaign, but the obligation we have to our readers is to hold him accountable according to the promises he made to people and that is the world andrew breitbart wanted to create, he said democracy will happen in his words when the mainstream media filter is no longer there to prevent it from happening. we see that democracy as the trust, don't want to call it a transaction, the trust that

underlies an agreement between the voters in the president. the president offers certain things to voters, they vote for him and expected to be delivered and that is what makes democracy function. he is not accountable to the white house press corps, he is accountable to the american people, particularly to those who voted for him. that is the world breitbart created and it is exciting to be part of it, the book was really exciting to write, it was a labor of love, didn't take long because it was written on adrenaline, didn't mean much sleep, just coffee. ..

television for serious readers. here is our prime time line-up. at 7:00 p.m. eastern hillary clinton gives personal account of the 2016 presidential campaign and election. then at 8:30 historian looks at the global ramifications of the cold war. on book tv's afterwords at 10:00 p.m. eastern, new york time magazine susan reflects on travels abroad and reports on the world view of america's power and influence and at 11:00 p.m. paul professor talk about intellectuals that supported dictators. that all happens tonight on c-span2 book tv