Writers Bloc Presents: John Dean | September 1, 2020

thank you for tuning in to today's program with john dean one of our most astute presidential scholars of our most complicated presidential era i'm andrea grossman founder of writer's block now in our 25th year i want to welcome john dean back to writer's block he has participated in so many great programs including barbara boxer michael moore and um i forgot i forgot uh anyway bob woodward uh so as you know john dean was white house counsel for richard nixon from 1970 to 1973 when he spoke truth to power testified before congress in what was electrifying testimony and helped to pull the curtain down on the nixon presidency he did the right thing and it couldn't have been easy if anyone can attest to the danger of presidential malfeasance it's john dean much has been written about donald trump and his evolution from flirting with the authoritarianism to all-out embrace in his new book authoritarian nightmare john dean does something different he looks at the trump base and studies what it is that some americans love about an authoritarian leader an authoritarian leader after all cannot exist without followers so what compels people to follow an authoritarian what personality traits do followers possess and what keeps them tied to their leader why does the base continue to believe lies coming from the top and specifically here in 2020 why is it that someone so corrupt would be so embraced authoritarian nightmare offers a lot of answers and prompts many more as well go to our website writer's block presents dot com to get a link to chevalier's books john has signed book plates which will be included in the books that you purchase we're 63 days out from the election you'll want to read this book if you enjoy writer's block and what we do please consider making a tax deductible contribution at writersblockpresents.com to keep these programs going i'm so delighted now to present john dean thank you andrea i'm going to share a screen immediately because i've got a little power point that i assembled for this occasion let me find it here we are i think that's got the full screen for you by way of preface i thought i'd start with a study that i was not privy to or party to but came out shortly before my book did and i knew one of the participants larry diamond who's at stanford it was a voter study group analysis over a three-year period of attitudes on authoritarianism in america and it's pretty startling stuff americans of course overwhelmingly love their democracy but that overwhelming love kind of mask some really troubling truths when you dig in as this study did for example one in three say a strong leader is a good way to run a country one in four say they would favor army rule in america this is as of june 2020 fewer than half americans would object to a president acting unilaterally with that should be without constitutional or congressional authority 41 percent say it's appropriate for a president to act unilaterally because quote a large majority of the american people believe he should act i don't know if this is a lack of civic education or indeed it is the kind of personalities that my collaborator and i were studying it may be a little of both but i think this preface tells us there is definitely a severe sympathy for authoritarianism in the in the population authoritarianism we could spend the whole session discussing it i i kind of thought that quickie is the oxford english dictionary on on wikipedia this describes it as the enforcement or advocacy of strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom i don't really deal with that aspect the political science aspect of it rather i deal with the personality aspect of it and authoritarianism in our terms is it's the relationship of followers to leaders stripped to its essentials authoritarianism happens when followers submit too much to their authoritarians in their lives now what's too much well that's obviously open to a lot of definitions and descriptions lying cheating and stealing may be too much for some to let their leaders get away with it others that doesn't trouble them ruling by undemocratic means and undermining democracy that doesn't trouble them so much either i discovered as i dug into this subject by way of the political science side i i would recommend anybody who's interested in this subject look at hannah arndt's the origins of totalitarianism there's some excellent books a quickie read on tyranny by timmy timothy snyder there's some others that i i looked at all these along the way but i decided that the more important aspect was to understand why these people believe as they do i did enjoy the dictator's handbook which is why bad behavior almost is always good politics my first dive into this subject was over a decade ago when i did a book called conservatives without conscience that book was actually prompted by my relationship with the late senator barry goldwater whose son and i have been lifetime friends we were roommates in prep school together and have remained close ever since in fact he introduced me to my wife uh which he never lets me forget he made a mistake in giving her up anyway the uh the senator was troubled uh by the fact that the religious right was taking over the conservative movement and he didn't understand it so we started on a project to try to dig out why that was happening he got ill the project got put on the shelf but some years later i pulled it down during the bush years and looked at it again and found the man who knew the most about this would later become my collaborator in this current project and he was very helpful bob altmeier he was a he at the time he was a professor of psychology at the university of manitoba in winnipeg he is an american born in saint louis but he has had pretty free reign he said up at manitoba to do all the research he wanted to do and he has specialized in studying and exploring authoritarianism when trump arrived on the scene we both were scratching our heads as to why so few mainstream journalists were writing anything in depth about trump's authoritarianism there was one piece that would appear during the primaries was done by amanda taub for vox it was called the rise of american authoritarianism and she described in the subtitle or the editors did a niche group of political scientists may have uncovered what's driving donald trump's ascent what they found has implications that go well beyond 2016. that was an understatement but what she had discovered was a sort of an offshoot of the main body of science on this that's based on a four-question uh analysis of people's disposition towards or against authoritarianism based on child rearing as bob altmire told me repeatedly and we actually ended up putting an index or excuse me an appendix in the book to explain how incomplete this analysis really is and how little it really tells you about authoritarianism but yet a number of journalists did pick this story up and go with it so there was some hint during the campaign that we indeed had a an authoritarian his opponents in the primary certainly uh thought that they called trump a demagogue right out of the box uh lindsey graham cruz called him a demagogue even stephen hawkings called him a demagogue it kind of came no question when the new york times did a study of the first 95 000 words trump had used on the during the campaign they called in uh rhetorics specialists they had political scientists psychologists and they concluded that he was indeed a a full-blown uh demagogue and then after the the d word became very common in the times another paper it was a little slower getting to the a word authoritarianism after as the as the campaign proceeded and and and nothing was happening i was having ongoing conversations with bob altmire up in at manitoba and we were both sort of trying to figure out what we could do to get the mainstream to look at this body of science that had really started with the aftermath of world war ii when scientists up at berkeley began examining could it happen in the united states what had happened in italy and germany where they had so easily fallen swayed to a dictator that was the the beginning of the of the study of the authoritarian personality i got bob to join me in writing a column and then doing an interview in july of 19 excuse me of 2017. sort of the last piece we did on authoritarianism uh and he he was predicting that trump would actually win the election i didn't think there were enough uh authoritarians in existence to do so as it turns out uh he wins by a fluke is what we explain in our book so to pick this up and and tell you what the body of science involves uh there are three types of personalities that have emerged there are the leaders there are the followers and there is a unique type of personality that has traits of both the leader and the follower and they're some of the most troublesome personalities let's look at each quickly the social dominance orientation scale is pretty clear uh it typically is involves men it looks for dominating personalities and brings out in questionnaires and and examinations and in some instances we have to rely because people aren't going to sit down and take personality tests but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck and does it all the time like a duck it's probably a duck so we have drawn that conclusion in some instances but anyway the social dominating dominators have dominating uh personalities uh they excuse me i was going to give an overview first of all three there are the authoritarian followers which are determined based on what's called the right-wing authoritarian scale then there are the double highs then they show traits of both leaders and followers which is sort of oxymoronic but it it is a a definite type personality so you have these three personalities let's look at uh each of them briefly as i was saying the social dominators are dominating personalities richard nixon is our last authoritarian president we've had about four authoritarian presidents if you use the definition of social dominance that's used by social science andrew jackson would qualify woodrow wilson would qualify richard nixon qualifies and donald trump is a poster boy but anyway the dominating personality the they believe in inequality it is the only way they want life to proceed either in when they are in control or any group they're a part of typically is rattled with inequality and they're desirous of personality personal power and finally they are amoral those four criteria will give you a social dominator we also have tests of them things in the book referred to as the madman test in the con man test and they show other interesting traits with the social dominators they're intimidating and bullying they're faintly hedonistic they're vengeful they're pitiless they're exploitive they're manipulative they're dishonest they'll cheat to win they're highly prejudiced racist sexist homophobic they're mean-spirited militant nationalistic sounds like somebody uh we might know so here again are the four criteria of the social dominators jackson wilson nixon trump so this is not a new phenomenon that's what i just went through these people are really uh however somewhat fools on a soapbox as demagogues until they get followers and not all of them do some of them do and the followers have been the focus of most of the social science study in fact when i was writing back in uh 26 and and seven actually researching it in 2005 uh the social domination orientation had only recently been released and shown so it's a little over a decade that social scientists have really been looking at the social dominators because most of the focus has been on the followers that's where we have the most science as a result of hitler and mussolini and the crowds and people they attracted of their own free will as i say a group went up to berkeley and started to try to analyze these people and put out their first work in 51 on the authoritarian personality the this study was controversial and actually it had a life of about a decade but it was based largely on a lot of freudian psychology and had its own weaknesses but the the personality was believed to be there so other social scientists picked it up not using freudian psychology or any sort of economic approach to it but rather just testing personalities and developing personality tests found that there were these people called right-wing authoritarians this wasn't a label used to find conservatives although conservatives certainly do score high on it it was a reference tells me who was responsible for the initial uh label on the on the scale that he was thinking in the old english term of right writ and in other words correct with authority was the image he had and he said it was a mistake to to use this label had he to redo it he would have picked another one because there are al there also can be left-wing authoritarians in fact he used the right-wing authoritarian scale in russia and found that those who were loyal to the communist party were actually right-wing authoritarians while we would see them as left and this was true in some socialist countries as well where it's been used so it's a little bit confusing politically if you look at it that way uh this is just for my review to tell you what what these people do they are uh submissive to authority and then they are aggressive excuse me there's i couldn't find a good picture of submissive to authority and i just fell it just struck me as totally submissive they are aggressive on behalf of authority this is not unsurprising when you have demagogues and authority figures trump has pushed this pretty far with his willingness to take care of legal bills of people who get overly aggressive on his behalf and there also if you look at them closely very conventional they are they're the people who do not stand out in a crowd typically additional testing shows them reveals them to be highly religious they have moderate to little education they trust untrustworthy authorities they're prejudiced particularly against homosexuals women and followers of religions other than their own they are mean-spirited they're narrow-minded they're intolerant they're bullying they're zealous they're dogmatic they're uncritical of their chosen authority they're hypo excuse me they're hypocritical they're inconsistent and contradictory in fact we we explain in the book at some length their ability to hold inconsistent thoughts and how they are able to compartmentalize uh information they don't want as well as that they do want they have virtually no skills in critical thinking it's really quite remarkable some of these people when they are uh some of these follow-up tests are given to them they are highly self-righteous they're moralistic they're strict disciplinarians they're severely punitive they demand loyally and return it they have little self-awareness so while those traits have appeared in consistently and reappeared in test after test they don't define and describe every single person some may have some traits and not others but by and large if you find a prototypical right-wing authoritarian he will or she will have all those traits to test this science that had been in existence with the right-wing authoritarians for almost about five almost five decades of science but it had been done with relatively small samples some of it in canada some of it in university towns around the united states some had been done in state legislatures throughout the united states but they were as i say relatively small samples so while these were recognizable traits in the trump base that we found we took some risk because we were also planning to test this on a national basis with a poll i happen to know the man who's founded and runs the monmouth university polling institute which is one of the better polling institutes they both in the last uh couple several presidential elections uh pat murray has been the public face of monmouth which has done a remarkably good job on their polling and is one of the few that nat silver gives a gold star to i think he has five in his uh site where he collates uh multiple polls particularly for the approval ratings and he has always said that monmouth is is one of the best in the business anyway in working with them we first did a sample in new jersey where they're based and uh that was about 900 people we did that sample to to refine a what was in really a personality uh survey where they would take personality uh scales and tests and see where they fell politically uh based on those tests and we after trying telephone in person all methods monmouth came up with a very good platform to do an online uh survey we then moved to a uh two-phased national test and was done in late november and early october from drawing from about 225 000 people we got down to what turned out to be 990 former voters and prospective voters people who planned to vote in this coming election and we skewed a little bit towards the republican end because we wanted to make sure we had a good analysis of trump's base that was a eureka moment moment for bob altmire because the the poll came back and the studies came back and the survey came back excuse me and confirmed a lifetime of work for him in in the strongest terms more than he could have thought but maybe the most telling feature of the poll was the fact that trump has assembled a coalition of maybe the most prejudiced americans it is a base of the biased the the prejudice just uh stands out in this poll the racism the homophobia uh and these are people who are they're they're obviously not identified by name so they're anonymous in taking this but they're telling it the the way and the these were all cross-checked by their their answers the way it the way they felt and the the trump base is first of all highly biased uh highly prejudiced but also deeply authoritarian they are a combination of social dominators not as many of those but it's still a very high number and right wing authoritarian followers now i said there was a third type of personality and that's where people score high as both social dominators and right wing authoritarians the reason that's rare is because the dominator is saying and taking the right-wing authoritarian scale is that he's submissive too uh which seems as i say oxymoronic but the reason they do that is because when they take that right-wing authoritarian scale to see what kind of follower they are they're thinking of other people following them these people come up with some really nasty additional personality traits i go into those in the book i actually put a little table of them together because they're pretty unattractive what was stunning about the poll uh the monmouth survey if you will is how many uh double highs appeared in the republican party it seems they've all gone there to roost that's not a healthy sign so uh the book is designed to not be sensational but it i am one who appreciates all these sensational books that are coming out and i can now explain why people why his followers are not going to react to any of this the lesson for the election is while a few of these people are unhappy when they're told their natures most of them are not the social dominators they're proud to be prejudiced they're proud to be racist uh they're the people who are driving these vans down van nuys boulevard uh and have the trump flags or the people who were in the the cavalcades in portland uh they're the people who are causing problems in in kenosha uh and they're they're gonna keep doing it but they're also uh they're joined by the double highs who will provoke them on and back them up so we to defeat these people in the election one of the reasons we did this book is where anybody who's trying to persuade the trump people that 35 to 40 percent who are always approve everything he does they're not going to be persuadable they're going to stay right where they are and the only remedy is a tsunami election where indeed they get the picture that their disrespect for democracy their belief in this man who uh is a norm-busting democracy weakening character uh just won't be tolerated they'll get that message they understand that but they're not gonna be they're not persuadable so we're wasting our time if we go there so with that i think we'll open this up for questions i'll bring andrea back in by going out of the share screen and she can come back on and said she's accumulated a few i have accumulated a few on the it's a silent audience isn't it very quiet audience yeah that's so unusual for right as i kind of like it well i miss i miss you know a lot of the um the really active engaged audience that writer's block has true is you know having done so many of them yeah yeah um so my first question um is this uh is the right-wing authoritarian trait something that is found universally among all different nations and continents is it essentially a genetic trait yes uh it's not known if if it's nature or nurture that creates these personalities uh altmeier who has dealt with this for a lifetime and a full career thinks it probably is more nurture than nature but there's a disposition that the parenting influences and results in these personalities emerging but yes they are found throughout the world and well you showed these you know these photos that are so uh familiar to us you know the the um korea photos the the uh hitler and mussolini photos i mean i would i i would worry that it's more uh that it's less nurture than nature actually don't you think uh as i say they don't science doesn't have a definitive answer and i can only tell you what my expert uh altmeier felt that in fact we didn't know mary trump obviously was writing the book she was writing in the first few chapters of the book we sort of lay out the background of donald trump such as it can be gathered he has talked he doesn't like to talk about his youth he doesn't really want to look back he tries to suppress it but yet in with working with some of his biographers uh tony schwartz the first and and and a few others he he's revealed a little bit of himself and we found that material the best digging into his background however was done once he won the election the washington post put a team of investigative reporters and they really went back up into queens and and all of his former childhood friends and what have you and prepared a very good book uh about him and his his is growing up the most dominant thing that we found and report in our book is exactly what mary trump reports as a family member and it's the tremendous influence of his father of fred trump on his son donald and how he was the chosen one uh for his son for his bias father and how he's never taken responsibility any time in his life and how he was able she didn't look at him developing the traits that an authoritarian personality develops altmeyer added that that was our angle on it but she certainly cooperates and we certainly corroborate her on the fact of the dominant influence of the father on donald trump um so do authoritarian leaders have a real ideology or are they just power man a few you know i just based on my own reading i know some had come in with ideologies that they want to impose donald trump obviously had no ideology he was a he was a blank slate he didn't even believe he would run win the election he was on a branding exercise it's stunning he has no plans for his second term he was asked by peter baker of the new york times recently he was asked by sean hannity even before that what were his plans for the second term he has none he cannot articulate any to hannity he said well experience is what counts and went off on a rift on experience he didn't even get that far with peter baker so this is a man with no no ideology and that's somewhat typical of authoritarians they are their ideology is their personality and their own desire to uh be in charge and whatever it takes is going to be what drives their uh their actions they're surprisingly intuitive uh there is no evidence whatsoever that donald trump has any idea about this body of science on the type of personality he is appealing to and his own personality but intuitively these people know how to read a crowd now how to read their feelings we found in researching the book that some of the things like the wall he'd actually floated versions of those as early as 2000 where he just stumbled into it in a in a speech he was giving in in new hampshire at a he was a guest speaker at a republican event and the only real serious applause line he got was when he said well if what they should do is build a fence along the mexican border that sent his crowd wild well that was some he collected that and that's the way most of his his feelings have gathered that's why he likes the rallies because they give him instant feedback to his thinking where he floats things and tests them uh so that's that's handicapping him right now to sort of pre-test his thinking does it matter what he says his base still seems to cheer at everything he says so does i mean i can't imagine that that he would say anything that that his base you know uh disapproves of i mean well they they're not as i as i mentioned in my in my powerpoint they they have zero critical thinking skills not all of them some of them are obviously i know some trump voters who are highly critical of trump they they wanted to vote for trump uh at least last time because they wanted his tax plans uh that he that he would let the republicans they've been cooking around in the on capitol hill for quite a while uh and they were pretty convinced that trump as president they would be adopted so they're all happy and uh they didn't need the tax breaks but they wanted them and i don't some of them i talked to are not so happy with trump now but these are not either authoritarians or social dominators uh they're just greedy people right right um here's an interesting question with biden uh making a statement over the weekend about condemning violence on both sides he uses similar rhetoric that trump used in charlottesville um do you but you know in terms of their there are good people on both sides and you know and uh biden said you know that there has to that there are the violence on both sides needs to stop the question is that um do you believe that equating fascists with protesters who are fighting against this very fascism uh is dangerous and doesn't this actually um i'm sorry uh deal with so doesn't this thinking actually normalize authoritarian tactics well you know i've stayed away from the word fascism it's it's uh it's a word that has been abused and misused and it's not not terribly clear and stick pretty much with authoritarianism which is clear while there are different types of authoritarianism in governmental context in in governing context uh in the personality sense it's pretty we all recognize an authoritarian personality it didn't take long to to put that label on trump so it's not hard to recognize people who uh that behavior is acceptable to and needless to say people to whom a an authoritarian personality is acceptable uh it is not a large step to be accepting uh that kind of governing but anyway i so i i stay away from the the uh uh the pejorative terms as best i can in in discussing this but i i i don't i didn't hear biden's remark that on uh both sides on violence were uh at fault that is true of course violence should be acceptable unacceptable for either sides i'm i'm in a couple chains of uh idea exchanging groups and there's been a lot of talk recently about the violence and sort of a justification on both sides of their side and as somebody else who was in the chain came in and said later late today is that any of us who are saying that violence is acceptable are certainly uh on the wrong track it is it is unacceptable on all fronts there is no justification or rationalization for it and i thought biden was pretty clear when when he came out uh yesterday and made his statement about trump's whole attitude towards violence and fanning the flames that it was unequivocally wrong he said he would if president he would prosecute violence that was contrary to the law that he would find no justification for it and didn't try to make excuses for it in the statement i heard um okay uh let's see um what about q and on and other neo-nazi groups uh will they gain traction as authoritarian leadership becomes more accepted here if trump is re-elected you can be sure those people are going to surface and be much more important in the dialogue if he is defeated and it's overwhelming and there's a tsunami election they're going to be driven back under the rock where they belong and that's what we have to hope happens yeah and and what happens to the congressional leaders senators and you know congress people uh republicans who have spoken out against uh trump like mitt romney for example and you know and the others who have uh you know who have towed the line and um let him be the pied piper uh what happens to them if uh biden wins well if biden wins i think that they will be in it's going to depend a lot on on the size of the win if it's a if it's a squeaker i think we're going to have a lot of trouble uh that biden wins by i one of the things that came up as we report in the book in our monmouth survey was roughly 25 percent of the trump supporters will tolerate him not leaving if he wants to say it's rigged and fight it there are certainly legal limits on what he can do but that doesn't mean he can't cause a lot of havoc i think he is fairly desperate at this point while i don't think biden would authorize i don't know the answer to this i shouldn't say it but if if past is prologue biden isn't going to authorize a criminal inquiry into donald trump obama and biden did not authorize a criminal investigation into the war crimes of bush and cheney and they were certainly conspicuous that's where i came up with the title worse than watergate because i didn't think richard nixon on his darkest day would authorize what they authorized in waterboarding and other war crimes but anyway i i don't know what biden would do uh and is but i do know that trump is in a lot of trouble uh cyrus vance is not going to be uh reluctant to prosecute him he once did a deal for his children that has cost him politically and he hasn't forgotten that so i think trump's in a lot of trouble politically if he's not in the white house he's exposed maybe he moved to florida because he thinks that governor desantis won't extradite him to new york if he gets prosecuted so if he gets reelected um how do we effectively fight uh this progression of authoritarianism over the next four years the uh it's gonna you know the what-ifs are difficult because if we knew what the composition of the congress was but it's pretty pretty certain the house is going to remain democratic there is a possibility the a good possibility that the senate is going to become democratic as well it won't be an overwhelming filibuster defeating majority though so the first issue that's come up is whether or not if the democrats control the senate they will abolish the filibuster so they can get something done some moderates are saying they don't want that to happen and that if that's going to happen they don't want the democrats to control well this is just craziness so anyway there's a lot of tough issues that have to be faced if the if the democrats do win control there's certainly not enough votes to impeach in the senate uh that takes 67 votes uh there's that they're just not enough seats in play that that's going to happen uh where they would have that check on trump if he were somehow to squeak through and be there and but yet lose the congress generally um let's look at fox news for a second um they've created an entire you know an entirely effective propaganda machine and so how can the civilized world break through that bubble in order to connect with fox viewers i don't watch a lot of fox news i occasionally just for counter programming to see what they're doing will turn them on uh and sometimes i'm actually surprised that they have some less than outrageous programming on there is there is no easy way to solve that problem other than more information that counter programs them and tells the truth and points out what they're doing these aren't stupid people i have not read brian stelter's book yet but apparently he pierced the uh the veil if you will and found a lot of these people at fox news believe that trump is a joke and he's dangerous and so they actually have not lost their uh intelligence and they're just so interested in making the money they're making that that's blinding them to go ahead and keep doing what they're doing there's is the always the possibility they might become responsible um you're you showed a few examples of authoritarian presidents including richard nixon whom you knew well um but i thought he was more just corrupt rather than authoritarian can you describe the differences between you know between nixon's authoritarianism and trump's nixon was an authoritarian behind closed doors donald trump is a an authoritarian in the rose garden nixon was not a demagogue he did not go out and rant and rave like donald trump will do so there nixon was a if we didn't have the tapes we wouldn't know the extent of nixon's authoritarianism uh he was not a particularly dominating father with his daughters uh he was not a particularly dominating [Music] that's you it's me that was my brother who knows you're you know you're here today i'm sorry that's all right he was not a particularly dominating father he was not a particularly dominating man as a manager so the ranting and the domination you hear is a clenched teeth telling haldeman his chief of staff or ehrlichman or kissinger his top aides what he wants done how he wants it done the ruthlessness with which he's prepared to do it how he is very knowledgeable about how the government works unlike a donald trump who has not even a good newspaper knowledge of how the government works uh nixon knew he'd been in the house he'd been in the senate he'd been vice president for eight years he understood the processes and how to pull the levers that's something that trump is only now figuring out and i don't think i think his staff is worried about what he might do if he knew more than he knows that they don't educate him anonymous has not yet stepped forward but he or she is still there watching and i suspect others are because they realize that he is a loose cannon and and dangerous so um what can the what can the average voter do besides vote to stop this move is there anything i mean you said we're not going to convince any of his base of that 36 or 40 percent whatever that percentage was to change their minds but what you know is there anything else that yes there's certainly there certainly is and and we we talk about it in the book and we appeal to all the young people we know i appealed i i am confident my granddaughters who are all of voting age will all vote and that they will talk to their friends about voting and it's really the the in our analysis uh and i was doing cnn yesterday and and uh the head of the naa was on just before i was on and he was talking about their analysis of the vote and it's just right where where uh bob altmire and i came out is it's the youth vote that is could really make the difference they tend not to vote uh they're lazy they don't think it accounts or help and yet they don't like trump uh once until over generally speaking and they could they could make this a tsunami election where he and uh his enablers are all washed out of the system if you will and so i am i'm doing my best to get the word to young people uh as to how important this is to get commitments from them and we all know young people and i think that's where adults can spend a lot of time with young people who are not particularly savvy or interested by giving them a little chat that this is important and they've got to do it this time i have to say i have to say something about about that i in 2008 when obama ran it was i thought the campaign was sort of run by kids it was wonderful to see yeah so we can't we can't cast aspersions on young people because they got obama you know they turned that they did i'm just talking statistically generally they don't vote okay not that they haven't voted and maybe maybe our senator uh and would potential vice president will stimulate young people uh she certainly is charismatic and and hopefully that will be one of her assignments is to go out and stimulate the the younger people to vote right right um one last question do you have uh do you have any interesting intel on roger stone i you know i've i've only met roger stone once when he showed up at a book fair in texas where i had a book and he asked and stood up he'd gotten himself positioned in line to pull what he thought was a dirty trick uh to ask me some outrageous question at the at the top of the line and then he snuck off and i had the mic so i said roger come back to the microphone this i'm told is on c-span somewhere and i made him take the answer and i explained to the audience of texas that this is a man who thinks that lyndon johnson's responsible for jack kennedy's assassination amongst other theories so i i fully and was managed to embarrass roger which was the reverse of what he had in mind and that's the one dealing i've had with him um i you know it i think that with some voters trump's going to pay the price for what he did with stone stone who had professed his innocence has recently withdrawn any efforts to fight his law his his appeal and so in essence has admitted his guilt that he did lie and got away with it um i think i think also there's a high probability that if a biden administration is in place and the democrats control the senate and the house that he's going to be called back before congress there's going to be further investigations democrats are not going to let this go if if benghazi was really just a tragedy that the republicans stretched into years of investigation the trump administration is worth a decade of investigations will um trump get on that helicopter from you know from the white house lawn and wave farewell if he loses i don't think so i think i think michael cohen is right when he said that trump is not going to willingly leave what's interesting is that without getting into we could do a whole program on this in fact i'm reading a book on it on will he go right now which is interesting uh there are legal restraints on what he can and can't do he can fight it to a degree what he's got to do is corrupt an awful lot of governors to overturn the election results and send electors who are contrary to the wish of the state now that's going to be kamikaze actions by those governors but that's the way he could only way he could overturn the election if it's not resolved by uh by january 8th i guess it is certainly by january 20th but maybe it's as early as the eighth but the 20th for sure uh at the inauguration time nancy pelosi becomes president and that's fine with me let her i think she'd be excellent until they it out what a that's a a good note to to end this terrific program uh this book is is so worth reading it is you i raced through it i really just loved it so i loved it and i i hated it but i loved it so um thank you very much and uh you know we so appreciate your being here and i look forward to seeing you again at writer's block soon well it's nice being back thank you thank you all bye-bye bye and go to chevaliers because they have signed book plates everybody yes they do right i think about 100 plus of them yeah yeah bye bye bye bye thank you you

Channel: Writers Bloc Presents

Views: 1,907

Rating: 4.8644066 out of 5

Keywords: Trump, John Dean, Bob Altemeyer, Authoritarian Nightmare, book, author, writers bloc, livestream

Id: oLHR4XTwHa8

Length: 53min 30sec (3210 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 01 2020