- When I first became aware that Donald Trump
was actually running for president,
my thought was, this can't possibly be happening.
- Basically for 25 years Donald Trump had been flirting
with the idea of running for president.
It was basically a way for him to get a bunch of attention.
- The combination of a clearly undisciplined candidate
like Donald Trump and a handful of incompetent,
republicans are seemingly competent republicans,
suggested a repeat of the cycle we saw on 2012.
- You know, a lot of news outlets
had already put their best reports on Jeb Bush,
he was supposed to be the front runner at the, sort of,
presumed Republican nominee at, you know, a year out.
- I guess I really didn't take it as seriously as
I could have or should have.
- It's hard to actually think that this person,
who's a showman, is going to launch
this credible campaign for president.
- Yeah, so, early 2014 I arranged to interview Donald Trump
on his plane, so I spent two days with Trump
down at his kind of beach side compound in Palm Beach,
interviewing him, getting to know him.
The piece that I wrote, kind of, called him out
for 25 years of pretending to run for president,
just to kind of get attention.
I predicted quite confidently
that he never would actually run for president.
- Yeah, so when Trump announced he was running for president
he came down with his wife on this escalator in Trump Tower.
- Coming down the escalator,
I think that few of us will forget that image.
- With the escalator, I think,
the mood was sort of, jolly about it.
I mean, I think that goes for a lot of newsrooms.
- I was actually up in New Hampshire
covering a Jeb Bush campaign rally.
And I remember just sitting in this like town hall
in New Hampshire like watching the tweets come in
about Trump's announcement
and I remember, I think I tweeted something like,
I feel like I'm being punk'd.
- When I first saw a Trump event in person,
I think that's when it all sort of came together.
It was just that kind of political event
I'd never seen before.
- When I was in a cab ride back to my hotel
and I was on the phone with my editor,
kind of giving my read out of what had happened
and kind of talking about insider political analysis
and I remember all of a sudden the cab driver
just like, was obviously eavesdropping on me.
The cab driver barked something like,
"Trump is winning cause he understands real Americans".
I remember just getting out of the cab
and being like, okay, this is probably happening.
- When he went after John McCain
for having being captured as a prisoner of war
and there was all this condemnation
that came from the Republican Party.
For him to be able to say what he said,
which was actually in many ways,
a criticism of all prisoners of war,
and to not have it affect his support whatsoever,
that was that moment where I thought,
this isn't just your average Kennedy.
- I would say that my own feeling about this really turned
around the time of the Paris attacks.
And Trump's ability to capitalize from the Paris attacks
and kind of open up a new front,
policy front which is the ban on Muslims
into the United States, his vote share like went up.
So I kinda had two conclusions.
First, the Republican base is really eating
whatever Trump is cooking with regards to
bigotry and nativism.
And second, I don't think the Republican Party
institutionally is equipped to deal with it.
And if it's not equipped to deal with it,
then I'm not sure how they're going to stop it.
- The thing that I realized is that
I underestimated Trump because I thought
that all he wanted was attention.
And what I think he really wanted was respect.
And that's more deeply rooted than I ever realized.
It goes all the way back to when he was kind of
this outsider kid in Queens, who wanted to live in Manhattan
and be accepted as a true Manhattan elite.
And he's kind of had this outsider status anxiety
his entire life and I think that I didn't realize
how deeply he felt that and how that would fuel him
to do something so kind of outlandish
as actually run for president.