John Heilemann: Trump will Pay at the Ballot Box

The Best People with Nicolle Wallace

Nicolle Wallace interviews veteran political journalist John Heilemann about the intersection of politics, media, and emerging technology. Th

Key takeaways

• John Heilemann points out that Donald Trump has been a 'loser' in every midterm and off-year election since his 2016 victory.
• The pair discusses how the 'Game Change' project was pitched to HBO as a movie before the book was even completed.

Main topics

• Donald Trump's electoral record
• The production of 'Game Change'

Notable quotes

Trump has been a loser for the Republican Party.

Conclusion

The episode offers a sobering look at how technological advancement an

Transcript preview

Speaker 7 (0:00) Money. The Speaker 5 (0:00) economic fallout from the war. Is it temporary? Power. Is this White House for sale? Speaker 7 (0:05) Politics. Speaker 5 (0:05) What is your message to the country right now? Speaker 7 (0:08) Money Power Politics with Stephanie Ruhle, weekdays at 9 a.m. Eastern on MSNOW. And find more on the MSNOW app. Speaker 8 (0:15) Have you looked at Trump's win-loss record in his 10 years? You know, got elected in 2016. Every time there's been a midterm election, off-year elections, Trump has been a loser. He's been a loser for the Republican Party. That's how we do accountability. We have a legal system that should meet, when people break laws, should meet out that kind of accountability. But in the political system, the way that you pay for doing crazy, stupid, self-destructive, country-destructive things, you pay at the ballot box. Speaker 4 (0:48) Hi there, everyone. This week's guest is so familiar to you that he's going to get a brand new introduction, partly so that I can brag about my pal. John Heilman is one of the best and most astute political journalists in our country. He's my wingman in covering a moment in the Trump story where the bottom calls about every 48 hours and says, come get me before I go lower. He's spent hours interviewing Trump. He's spent decades interviewing voters and elected officials, campaign operatives, leaders in media, tech, entertainment, and diplomacy. His Rolodex spans the entire globe. But for all his cool accomplishments and interests and hip, creative friends, he never forgets the constellation of political nerds and campaign hacks and flacks he's covered for decades and befriended over the years. There is no one who has been a more present or enthusiastic booster of my career, especially as I leapt from campaign spokes gal to cable news rookie. He put me in a co-anchor chair at the very beginning of my career. We share a love of and for our dogs, and he is the indispensable voice on Deadline White House. So this is the best people, and this is one of my best friends and my most favorite people, the host of the podcast InPolitic. and chief political columnist for Puck, John Helms here. Speaker 8 (2:10) I feel like Cuba Gooding at the end of Jerry Maguire when he's sitting there with Roy Firestone, he's like, I'm not going to cry, Roy. I'm not going to cry. Speaker 4 (2:17) See, I thought you were going to say in the movie where he's like, Tom Cruise walks out and Cuba Gooding's like, oh, I thought we were just finally starting to communicate. I thought we were just finally starting to communicate, totally. Speaker 8 (2:26) No, that's a very generous introduction. And, you know, the glib way of doing the, when you say, thank you for that. Kind introduction. You read it just like I wrote it. But I was a little too emotional to be that clever. But Speaker 4 (2:41) I feel like people, I mean, you can turn on the show any day that you're there and there's always like the layer of your, you know. Fearless Commentary, which in and of itself puts you in a category of your own. I think a lot of people are afraid of what they'll find in their Twitter feed. But a lot of people don't know our origin story. And you were one of the first people to let me sit next to you and help anchor a show. I Speaker 8 (3:06) don't know if you remember this. I haven't seen it in a while, but we were doing With All Due Respect at Bloomberg. And when someone was on the road and we'd had the empty chair, we were always looking for... people. And you were one of the first people that we had come in and co-host the show. You'd never hosted a show before at that point. Were you on The View at that point at all? I don't think I had done The View yet, but Speaker 4 (3:29) it might've been like that season. Like, I think that might've been the year, but I think the first thing I did was fill in for you or Mark. Speaker 8 (3:36) Yeah. And you were great. And so we kept having you back because you were really just a natural at it. But there is a one, there's one episode of that show where I... completely lost it and like in the cold open of the show it was like we had all these corny jokes that started the show and i lost it completely and i i just couldn't stop laughing and your reaction was it was like when characters break out snl and you were really trying to hold it together because you were also at that point still kind of like i'm just kind of new i'm kind Speaker 7 (4:03) of auditioning for Speaker 8 (4:04) tv here like what do i do like my coast is like literally Like out of control, like, you know, you used to get when you're like eight years old when you couldn't stop laughing. You thought it was because you ate too much blueberry pie or something. They clipped that and turned it into a gif way back when. I was looking for it the other day just because it's so funny watching you look at me going like, oh my God, he's completely losing his mind. I Speaker 4 (4:23) think we were often on Morning Joe together. Yes. Which I felt like had no rules, right? Like we could laugh and Joe would say something and we would all start laughing or Joe and Mika would do, you know, I mean, they ran the table, but we were all kind of allowed to laugh. But I remember. it felt different when I was, you know, Speaker 8 (4:39) sitting. Right, sitting in the co-anchor chair. But you know, the funny thing is that if you think about that period, it's like, we just spent a lot of time on TV together. And like people now, we were saying before we started, I was like, people now will often say to me, like, you guys have such a sibling vibe. And I'm kind of like, yeah, I mean, like, I feel like Nicole's like my, I'm adopted, adopted child. I have no idea about my genetic inheritance. I could be your half brother. Who knows? Who knows? But it's partly just the result of spending a lot of time in different settings, like in that Morning Joe setting, in that With All Due Respect setting. And then, of course, you know, the whole thing started around Game Change, which, I mean, I knew you as a... Bush operative, but really got to know you in the process of putting Odu in the book. Speaker 4 (5:24) Well, you covered us, which is totally different. Yes. And Speaker 8 (5:27) I Speaker 4 (5:27) think like to be on TV with someone, you see how they talk on TV. Your coverage of that campaign was, you know, something that people study for a reason. Speaker 8 (5:35) I mean, it's been, you know, the nicest thing, the nicest thing in the world is, you know, Maggie, who's, and Jonathan Swan, I've been a president of Maggie for a long time. Yeah. And given the success of regime change and how well it's doing, we have... you know, we experienced that with GameChanger also, but to hear Maggie kind of, she will say to me at various times, she's like, when we were doing this, I was thinking of this thing you guys did in GameChanger, or that was the standard we were shooting for. And that was like, we knew, you know, how hard it is to get those things. And so it's a, it's a, that's a, you do some things in your career that you enjoy and that you're proud of and that have a half-life of, not exactly fish wrap, but. they fade pretty quick right and then other things just go on and on and on and like people like you know the circus and game changer are the things where people you know years go by i still you know people come up and say nice things so it's it's gratifying but Speaker 4 (6:26) people don't remember about game change because you guys you wrote the book and then you guys are in the movie movie comes out but game change is the Palin story is part of it and it's titillating, but like the whole book is like that. Speaker 8 (6:40) It's crazy because, I don't know if you know this whole story, right? We went and pitched Game Change as a movie before there was a book. And because we knew- We had this notion that the campaign had been super cinematic and that we were going to write the book in a very cinematic way. And we thought it would be cool if we could- get a screenwriter to embed with us while we did the book so that the movie, because the problem with movies based on books is that they all come out so many years later, right? So we had this kind of theory of that. Everyone we talked to in Hollywood, we talked to like everybody, they were all kind of like, you know, come back to us when there's a book. Speaker 6 (7:13) And Speaker 8 (7:14) Richard Plepler, to his great credit, we walked into Richard Plepler, a guy who formerly ran HBO, and walked in with like three scenes. They weren't even chapters. It was an Edward scene, a Clinton scene, an Obama scene. And said, you know, he sat there, he read them and he was like, okay, we're doing the movie. Speaker 4 (7:32) Amazing. Speaker 8 (7:33) And then they wrote the check. And then we had this screenwriter who was semi-embedded with us. He knocked the script out quickly. And those guys were great because there was a, what was great about them that you will appreciate was for strategic reasons, they were like, we're going to stick to the book because the book had been bulletproof and like no one had found anything, even though it was a lot of exciting. titillating, controversial stuff in the book, no one had knocked anything down. You know, people had yelled at us, but no one had knocked anything down factually. Palin had yelled at us a lot in public, but no one had challenged any of the facts in the book. And so their attitude throughout the writing of the thing was something that I think a lot of authors don't get, which is Danny was just constantly on the phone with us and was constantly like wanting us to read drafts and just to kind of make sure that the thing would stand up. And they weren't doing it to be solicitous to us. They were doing it because it was a way to kind of criticism proof the movie. Again, it played out. Palin attacked the movie. A bunch of people attacked the movie, but nobody attacked the facts in the movie. Unfair. I'm, you know, not that dumb. You know, basically. Julianne Moore didn't make her look dumb at all. Well, I agree. There's also Speaker 4 (8:39) a read where, like, she really humanized her, made her more sympathetic. Right. Speaker 8 (8:43) Wouldn't she say that? I still, to this day, if you go back and watch that movie, I would say, if you're not Sarah Palin, you look at that and think. This is a very sympathetic portrait of Palin, also damning, but sympathetic at the same time. Speaker 4 (8:54) It'll forever be one of the weirdest things to be played in the movie. And I never met Sarah Paulson while she was playing me. I met her at the premiere. Yeah, yeah. She's so great. She's amazing. And we met at the premiere and we became friends afterward. And I met Julianne Moore. And I mean... What shouldn't be revelatory, right, is that she was not just one thing. Like, she almost, in reality, is a greater caricature than the portrait that you wrote and that Julianne Moore played. Speaker 5 (9:23) You just gave up. It wasn't my fault. I wasn't properly prepped. Speaker 6 (9:29) You weren't properly prepped because you wouldn't listen to us. You never listened. Speaker 8 (9:34) My fundamental thing about Sarah Palin always was obviously unqualified to be vice president, let alone president of the United States. And this Speaker 4 (9:41) is in a pre-Trump era. I don't even know what that means now. Well, Speaker 8 (9:44) right. By the conventional metrics. By pre Speaker 4 (9:47) -Trump measurements, she was unqualified. Now she'd be freaking, you know. Speaker 8 (9:51) She'd be like Marco Rubio. She'd be running like six different departments and considered the philosopher queen of the Trump administration. But she was thrust into a thing. a role, a position that she was wildly unready for. That is not her fault. And in some way, you could say, well, she could have said no. But when the nominee of your party comes to you and says, I need you to be on my ticket, it's the only way we can win. It's hard to say no to that. It's the same reason why it's hard for someone like Chris Lick to say no to being head of CNN. Speaker 4 (10:19) You Speaker 8 (10:20) say, I can do this. You think I can do this? I will do this. But she was in an incredible... Incredibly difficult spot. And the responsibility for that goes to John McCain, not to her. Speaker 4 (10:29) I have always said about her, she didn't pick herself. Speaker 8 (10:32) And she didn't lobby for this. It wasn't like Sarah Palin was out there among, there were a lot of people lobbying for her to be on John McCain's ticket. Sarah Palin was lobbying to be on John McCain's ticket. She was kind of floating around, you know, this more or less unknown governor from Alaska who your old friends Rick Davis and Steve Schmidt found by searching the internet. Hey, look Speaker 4 (10:49) at Speaker 8 (10:49) her. She pops on camera. Speaker 4 (10:51) Correct. Okay, so the other one you talked about was the circus. I miss the circus. Speaker 8 (10:56) Yes. Do you miss the circus? We miss the circus so much. So much. Partly because... I've written three books. I've done daily columns. I've done weekly columns. I've done monthly columns. I've done long-form magazine work. I've done a daily television show. Nothing I've ever done was harder and more fulfilling and satisfying than doing that show because it was like no one had ever done anything like it before. And so the concept of trying to make a mini documentary about the news of the week that wasn't just newsreel highlights, but that was... Shot in the field, and we'd start shooting on Monday, and we'd stop shooting on Saturday, and on Sunday night on premium cable, there would be a 30-minute, you know, fully produced, like, it's not polished in the way that a doc that you've worked on for two years is polished, but that show looked good. And I say, I had nothing to do with how good it looked. It looked great. And we had two different kinds of viewers for the show. People who didn't really pay much attention to political