Here we sit, on a sunny Upper East Side morning, after Donald Trump has really dominated in the New York primary.

The first thing I have to say is, I want to clear up some old business: What do you think of my hat now that you’re looking at it in person?

ROGER STONE: It’s not nearly as bad as I thought it was.

It’s actually more of a Fedora and less of a Jed Clampett-type hat, as I had incorrectly surmised.

GLENN THRUSH: I’m also shorter than Jed Clampett.

ROGER STONE: Much shorter.

GLENN THRUSH: Thank you, and more Semitic.

Well, thank you. I’m going to leave this on for the entire interview, just to …

ROGER STONE: Kind of a Matt Drudge thing. You’ve got the Matt Drudge thing going on.

GLENN THRUSH: No. I had the Matt Drudge — no, I think it’s kind of a suburban Jersey rabbi thing.

ROGER STONE: Maybe Matt Drudge has the Glenn Thrush thing going on.

GLENN THRUSH: Thank you. I like it that way.

And you are, for such an early hour, after a very long night, you are sartorially right where you ought to be.

ROGER STONE: Well, it was a great night. A few too many celebratory martinis, but I think you saw a new sophistication in the Trump campaign. I mean, his — even his travel schedule upstate was calibrated to go to the media markets, even small media markets like Watertown where you could impact three congressional districts through free media coverage, they really ran an excellent campaign, a very sophisticated campaign, with few resources other than Trump’s voice and some limited, you know, phone resources.

So the campaign, I think, is getting technologically more proficient. I think this is a reflection of the new hires.

You know, Trump, to his credit — and this was really his vision, not in any way mine — committed himself to an entirely communications-based strategy, something that veteran political strategists like me were skeptical about. What do you mean you’re going to run a campaign and spend almost nothing on paid television, or paid radio, or any paid advertising?

GLENN THRUSH: Tell me about those — actually, just to do this kind of chronologically, tell me about some of those early conversations, because it’s no secret, you’ve talked about this, that you did — you had a more conventional notion of how he ought to set up the campaign originally. Tell me a little about the early discussions in this.

ROGER STONE: Yeah, I mean, look, I think, without telling tales out of school, because I have a non-disclosure, but I mean, I think this actually reflects well on Donald, I envisioned a campaign that used the more traditional tools of polling and analytics and targeting and paid media, and a greater depth of organization. He envisioned a campaign that was all communications, based around the notion that he would go into these states, do these big speeches, the speeches would get wall-to-wall coverage from the networks, which it did. And then, on top of that, the enormous debate ratings. And then, on top of that, you know, as many television interviews as he could smash into one day.

So, and I’m sure you remember this, there was a period in which you couldn’t turn on the TV or the cable without getting Donald Trump.

GLENN THRUSH: Roger, that period was last Wednesday.

ROGER STONE: Well, but particularly, you know, prior to Iowa, prior to New Hampshire.

GLENN THRUSH: It was amazing.

ROGER STONE: And therefore, he believed that you could compete with paid media through the free media.

GLENN THRUSH: So, he felt — so, this was not particularly, I’m fascinated by the speeches. I think there’s not been — I think it’s a cultural phenomenon, and I’ve seen him evolve as a speaker.

Were you surprised by how the reaction to these speeches and the sort of — because they really are — you’ve never seen anything — to me, you know what they remind me of? Mort Sahl, in just, he’s got kind of a rolled-up newspaper, he’s got two or three talking points, and he goes on. Obviously, his topics are different.

Were you surprised by the reaction to the speeches?

ROGER STONE: Well, it’s — you know, it’s a little less blue than Mort Sahl’s work, but you know, no, I think what’s worked here is the fact that the whole thing is impromptu. In other words, he’s not — he’s not talking off of polling. He’s not talking off of focus groups. He’s not reading a script written by some 25-year-old speechwriter. I can just tell you, having worked with him for almost 40 years, he is entirely unscripted; he is unprogrammed; he is uncoached. It’s him. It’s like watching, you know, a man working without a net. So, it’s interesting, because you don’t know what he’s going to say.

GLENN THRUSH: Really?

ROGER STONE: And — you know, and he speaks colloquial English. He doesn’t talk like a politician.

GLENN THRUSH: Right.

ROGER STONE: He talks like you talk at the dinner table. So, people, I think, have found it refreshing and entertaining, which is above all the most important thing. I think it’s why it worked.

But the notion that you could combat — let’s take Florida — $40 million worth in negative television simply by going on Fox and Friends and responding, I rejected that idea, but in the end, he turns out to be right about it, and I turned out to be wrong.

GLENN THRUSH: So, in terms of, obviously, Corey Lewandowski was a campaign manager not a guy with a tremendous amount of experience, you think he was picked because of his lack of experience, essentially?

ROGER STONE: Well, he was the right campaign manager for that model because the model consisted of a well-run tour. You know, I mean, the logistics were very good. His rallies were — the backdrops were perfect.

GLENN THRUSH: Right.

ROGER STONE: The crowds were enormous. They collected all the data from the people attending in advance, because you couldn’t get in unless you went online and inputted your data to get your ticket, which is ingenious. So, they’re building databases of supporters, but it’s all logistics. Now, you’re just in a different phase of the campaign.

GLENN THRUSH: But Corey, it sounds to me like Corey was sort of, like, a tour manager, or a concert manager, and like, if you were going to kind of look at it in the Bill Graham kind of way, right?

ROGER STONE: Yeah. Yeah, I think — yeah, he is — he is a tour director, like John Ehrlichman did for Richard Nixon.

GLENN THRUSH: So, do you think — are there any other attributes about Corey that remind you of Ehrlichman?

ROGER STONE: No, he actually reminds me more of Bob Haldeman, but maybe that’s just the brush cut.

GLENN THRUSH: The haircut? Dan Pfeiffer gives him a run for the money on the brush cut.

How did you get along with Corey early on?

ROGER STONE: Actually, we got along fine. This idea that we clashed is really not true. We didn’t clash. I had a disagreement with Donald, but it’s his campaign, his name, his future, his brand. He really had a right to do it his way. And, to his credit, it has worked incredibly well. And he has spent, as you know, substantially less than all the other candidates. So, it’s not only that he got the most votes, but he did it spending the least [amount of] money.

GLENN THRUSH: Let me roll it back up to the stuff you were talking about his confidence, obviously, in being able to draw people into the debates, and you mentioned that he doesn’t do a ton of preparation on the speeches and all that stuff; this is totally him. So, what is it, in terms of a process? I’m just fascinated by this.

Do you sit, as somebody who is tasked — has been tasked from time to time with ‘managing’ this unmanageable force, right? You sort of sit around a room with him, hear what he has to say, sort of say, ‘This is good. This is maybe not so good.’ Just give me a sense without giving away the goods what it’s like.

ROGER STONE: Well, nobody manages Donald Trump. He manages …

GLENN THRUSH: Yeah.

ROGER STONE: … himself, and he is running his campaign. And generally speaking, historically, that hasn’t been a good idea, but the whole concept of doing this entirely differently than it’s ever been done before is his concept. So, he is his own strategist, and I’m a strategist. Well, every campaign can only have one strategist, and he is the strategist of his campaign.

Donald is a person who very quickly grasps broad concepts, but you can never put words in his mouth and you should never even try because, even when you introduce him to a concept, he’s going to put it in his own words. He’s going to grasp it his way and present it his way, which is less stilted and less formal and less political than perhaps we’re used to.

GLENN THRUSH: Does he communicate when you’re talking and you introduce a concept to him? Will he say, ‘I’m not going to say it like that. That’s bullsh--. I want to say it my own way.’ I mean, how does that kind of work?

ROGER STONE: No, no. You don’t know how it comes out until he says it. So, for example, like most Americans, I don’t think he’s read the 9/11 Commission Report page for page and, therefore, I don’t know how aware of the fact that the [George W.] Bush administration had multiple warnings about 9/11 that they did nothing about. I’m not sure how much of that he knew. He never read the report and, frankly, that was not the angle the media played up.

GLENN THRUSH: Right.

ROGER STONE: And I also don’t know if he was aware of the fact that 29 pages of the report are still redacted on the orders of George W. Bush, and that Sen. Bob Graham, from my home state, and a number of members of the House who have read that material have publicly said that it pertains to the Saudi royal family’s financing of the attacks.

GLENN THRUSH: Sen. Gil — I mean, this has become a mainstream push. Sen. Gillibrand, the junior senator in New York, who I sat down with last week, has also been pushing for the release of the redacted pages.

ROGER STONE: Finally.

GLENN THRUSH: Yeah.

ROGER STONE: Yeah, but it is —

GLENN THRUSH: Is he a big reader, in general?

ROGER STONE: He’s certainly a newspaper reader. You know, I mean, he’s a good old-fashioned print reader. He’s not a guy who surfs the net.

GLENN THRUSH: Right.

ROGER STONE: I think he likes his — you know, he likes his reading in paper and ink.

GLENN THRUSH: And he likes tabloids.

ROGER STONE: He loves tabloids.

GLENN THRUSH: What is — obviously, he likes the Post, but …

ROGER STONE: Yeah, he’s probably not too fond of the (New York) Daily News, but, you know, if he were here, he would say, ‘Look, I get — I always got better-looking girls than [Daily News owner] Mort Zuckerman, that’s the real problem, and Mort is very, very short, as you know,’ and Donald is very tall.

GLENN THRUSH: I worked for Mort Zuckerman for a while, and I will attest to the fact — I can’t talk about any of the other stuff, dude, but I will say that he is, in fact, short.

ROGER STONE: Well, I’ve had it up to here with Mort. That’s a visual joke.

GLENN THRUSH: Let the listeners know that Roger Stone just put a hand to his chest around, I will say, nipple height, but we will stop with that.

So, in terms - OK, in terms of the tabloid stuff, one of the things that I find really fascinating about Trump — and like, people who are not from New York — I’m a former Daily News person and a former Newsday guy — if you do not understand tabloid culture in the ’80s and ’90s in New York, you do not understand Donald Trump, I think.

ROGER STONE: Well, tabloid journalism is just shorthand journalism, and that’s the way Trump communicates. He communicates shorthand. In other words, he gets right to the point. There’s not a lot of frill in the way he speaks. He is very blunt and to the point, and that’s the tabloid style.

GLENN THRUSH: So, you’ve known him, you said, for roughly four decades, right?

ROGER STONE: Yes, I met him in 1979 when I came to New York to organize the campaign here for Gov. Ronald Reagan in his — what was really his third bid for the presidency, but he would — his biography would lead you to believe it was only his second bid for the presidency. He did run in 1968. He ran hard in a coalition with Nelson Rockefeller to try to block Nixon’s nomination on the first ballot. He spent about $10 million. He traveled between …

GLENN THRUSH: Which was an immense, immense, amount of money back then.

ROGER STONE: And he visited 26 states in the run-up to the convention. They had a trailer. The governor himself was hot-boxing delegates one-on-one in a trailer off the floor, trying to break the unit rule in Florida and Mississippi. Yet, if you go to his official biography, they have airbrushed his 1968 candidacy totally out of history. And when Bob Novak said to him on the eve of his 1980 announcement — really, ’79 — he said, ‘Well, Governor, I guess the third time’s the charm,’ he looked at him and said, ‘What are you talking about? This is only my second time.’

GLENN THRUSH: Well, you know, as we know, Reagan occasionally had some selective memory, right?

In terms of the — what was your first impression of Trump when you met him? Do you remember the first meeting? Tell me a little bit about it.

ROGER STONE: Yeah, he was — you know, he’s very charismatic. He fills the room in a way that Reagan did. I mean, he’s got size — I don’t mean physical size.

GLENN THRUSH: But he does have physical size. He’s a big guy.

ROGER STONE: He does have physical size, but it’s beyond that. There is a star quality right off the bat. He seems larger than life. You know, he seems greater than any mortal human. It’s just — you know, he’s a star. Right off the bat, he’s a star. And I’ve often thought that his celebrity status was the greatest asset he brought to this, and that celebrity status was enhanced enormously by 15 seasons of ‘The Apprentice.’

I understand that elites look at that and say, ‘Oh, it’s reality TV.’ But to voters, there’s no line between the news and reality TV. It’s all TV. It’s all television.

So, think about it. If you see Trump in ‘The Apprentice,’ he’s in the high-backed chair. He’s perfectly lit. He’s perfectly made up. He’s perfectly coifed. He’s perfectly dressed. And he’s decisive. He’s tough. He’s making decisions. He looks and acts like what you think a president should be.

GLENN THRUSH: Right.

ROGER STONE: So, I think that has really enhanced his public imagery [sic] in a way that people don’t recognize.

GLENN THRUSH: Let me pivot on you a little bit. Your favorite president, and you know, we can’t see it on your back, is Richard Nixon. Richard Nixon was arguably perhaps one of the most prepared presidential candidates in history.

ROGER STONE: Yes.

GLENN THRUSH: He was — you could argue that particularly in Ike’s second term, Richard Nixon was running a substantial amount of the country’s foreign policy, and his capacity to really understand data and really juggle complex issues, both internationally and domestically, were really sort of unparalleled. It’s kind of lost in the shuffle on Nixon, right?

Trump is not that guy, Roger, you know that. So, when you sort of talk about that simplification for reality television that you see in Trump, is playing — is being able to project these attributes of the presidency good enough? Do you think he needs to embrace a more serious notion of studying up a la Nixon to be president?

ROGER STONE: I just think it’s a different model. Trump is … not a politician, but he’s a political figure in the Reagan mold. Ted Cruz wants to be Reagan, but unfortunately for him, he’s Nixon. Shifty-eyed, too clever by half, slightly sleazy. I mean, look, yes, I am an admirer of Nixon. I would not say he’s my favorite president, ironically.

GLENN THRUSH: Really?

ROGER STONE: No, I’d have to say Dwight Eisenhower is my favorite president.

GLENN THRUSH: But you didn’t put — it should be noted: You did not put Nixon on the front. You put him on the back.

ROGER STONE: Well, here’s the point, though: The point of my Nixon tattoo is actually completely nonpolitical. The lesson of Nixon is just one of resilience …

GLENN THRUSH: Right.

ROGER STONE: … that in life, when things don’t go your way, when you have setbacks, when you suffer defeats, when you’re dejected and you think you’re done, that, you know, it’s not that you get knocked down, it’s whether you get up — whether you get back up, and Nixon’s story is one of the comeback. It’s one of resilience.

GLENN THRUSH: You know who you sound — you know who you sound exactly like when you say — when you use this terminology?

ROGER STONE: Who’s that?

GLENN THRUSH: Hillary Rodham Clinton. That’s her argument.

ROGER STONE: Yeah, I’ve heard her use it. I think she’s cribbing it from somebody else, but it is — that’s the thing about Nixon: It’s the persistence.

GLENN THRUSH: An amazingly resilient figure.

But it sounds to me like there’s a personal predicate for that. Was there any instance in your own life where you had to call on that kind of resiliency?

ROGER STONE: I’ve had my own difficulties, as everybody has, but it’s an inspiration. So, you know, every morning when things don’t go your way, that’s kind of why I got the tat. It’s like a daily reminder that you have an obligation when you get knocked down to get back up and get in the game.

GLENN THRUSH: OK. I’m going to keep pushing on this point. I don’t want to piss you off, but was there any event or any general thing that was going on in your life …

ROGER STONE: I had a very serious illness that was debilitating for a couple of years where I literally couldn’t walk up a flight of stairs or get out of bed, where I was really completely incapacitated, and it was really depressing because my mind was working fine, but my body was not cooperating, and I overcame it. So, it is —there is the lesson there.

GLENN THRUSH: Well, I’m glad to hear that. I don’t think you’re the only person who’s had issues like that.

So, in terms of Trump and preparing for the presidency — now, granted — well, the other thing about Reagan is he had James Baker. He had this entire coterie of enormously accomplished people around him, and he had the experience of having governed in California.

You, getting back to your initial judgments in the campaign about how light Trump was flying, I mean, do you think now — and you clearly played a role — and I’ll ask you in more detail about that later, but, like, do you think we’ve reached the point where he needs to start assembling the kind of serious team that Reagan had around him?

ROGER STONE: Well, I think he’s already doing that. I mean, clearly, Paul Manafort’s charge is to set up a serious policy shop in Washington to spearhead a congressional outreach operation. I think there’s going to be a very substantial outreach to conservative intellectuals in the non-neocon camp for some of this policy formulation.

Actually, I find the way that Trump assimilates and uses information to be very similar to Reagan. Nobody gave Reagan his notecards. Reagan made up his own notecards. Nobody hands Donald Trump his notes for a speech. He writes out his own notes. And, if you notice, when he goes to the podium, he takes a piece of paper out of his pocket and puts it down on the podium, big Sharpie.

GLENN THRUSH: Right.

ROGER STONE: Where he’s label — where he’s written, you know, a list, I imagine, of key words that he can look at to make sure that he makes all of his points. So, it’s actually very similar to the way Reagan assimilated and used information.

GLENN THRUSH: But one of the roles that you’re playing is to sort of — to be a catalyst — almost like Podesta played with Obama early on, where he was sort of the ambassador to establishing something that looked like an infrastructure. Obama had it. But, like, do you see that as your role as being a catalyst to kind of get this thing gelled and serious?

ROGER STONE: You know, look, I have no formal nor informal role in the campaign, by my own choice, despite what some reported without checking with me.

GLENN THRUSH: On the super PAC stuff or …

ROGER STONE: Washington Post. I was not fired, I quit, and I quit because the campaign can only have one strategist and he’s entitled to call that shot. It’s his campaign, and we left on what I think are excellent terms. I think I’ve been a very effective surrogate for him out there on the circuit, explaining why I think he ought to be president and why I think he has what it takes to do the job and trying to, you know, issue some defense under the withering attack of the establishment Republicans.

By turning to Paul Manafort, who’s a former partner of mine, a very skilled guy —

GLENN THRUSH: Along with Mr. Black, right?

ROGER STONE: Yes.

Who’s also a very skilled and capable guy.

GLENN THRUSH: Right, right.

ROGER STONE: You know, when Black, Manafort & Stone disbanded or, in essence, after we sold it to Young & Rubicam after 10 years of business…

GLENN THRUSH: And we are talking — just for the listeners, we’re talking about the firm that you established in Washington …

ROGER STONE: Right. It was a well-known lobbying consulting firm. I kind of went non-establishment. My partner, Charlie Black, who comes out of the staff of Jesse Helms, Young Americans for Freedom—Jesse Helms and Ronald Reagan, he goes establishment, goes on to work for the Bushes, for Romney, and so on. And Paul Manafort goes international. He basically withdraws from domestic politics and is doing stuff offshore.

So, by going to Manafort, I think that Donald has made an excellent selection in terms of somebody with the breadth of experience to understand what needs to be done to upgrade the campaign for a general election.

GLENN THRUSH: What catalyzed that? What made him realize that it was time for him to move to somebody like Manafort?

ROGER STONE: This would be speculation on my part, but I think the shorter answer — the short answer is the delegate theft in Louisiana, the loss in Wisconsin. Those two factors, I think, cut against what was a conventional wisdom that permeated the campaign, that once Donald ran the table in the early primaries that the opposition to him would collapse. This — I think the night of the South Carolina primary, he actually says, ‘This will all be over in March and we won’t even have a convention.’ What he meant, I think, was we won’t have a convention fight.

GLENN THRUSH: Right, right.

ROGER STONE: And I think that’s what they believed. I never believed that because I never believed that the …

GLENN THRUSH: Well, I remember talking to you pre-Wisconsin and you were very clear about you thought Wisconsin was going to be a watershed.

ROGER STONE: Yes.

GLENN THRUSH: … in terms of, talk about that. You realized he did not have an infrastructure in a state where you needed one, right?

ROGER STONE: Yeah. Wisconsin was probably the worst state for him in the lineup in the sense that the Walker/Ryan machine had proved its efficiency not only in two elections, but in two recalls, the recall of — the failed recall of Walker and the failed recall of the Republican majority in the state Senate. So, these guys have a well-oiled machine.

I also have done a — I read a terrific study by Richard Charnin, who is a mathematician, a liberal Democrat, an eccentric but brilliant guy, who concludes on the basis of the exit polls and the actual vote on a precinct-by-precinct basis that the swing cannot be that wide without widespread voter fraud. It’s just mathematically impossible.

So, I suspect that the system there — he’s been making this case through several cycles in Wisconsin, focusing only on that state …

GLENN THRUSH: That there’s voter fraud.

ROGER STONE: That there’s extensive voter fraud, which I presume is executed through the electronic machines.

GLENN THRUSH: In terms of your — geez, you know, I wrote a ton — you just reminded me. Like, 20 years ago, I wrote a ton about the move from mechanical here in New York — we had problems yesterday here with the primary —mechanical to electronic. The one thing about the mechanical machines is, you can’t really rig them.

ROGER STONE: Yeah, I’d like to go back to them. The fact that we’re still using in some states machines with no paper trail at all really …

GLENN THRUSH: That is — I think that’s absolutely nuts.

ROGER STONE: … should be a requirement.

GLENN THRUSH: In terms of your personal politics, because I don’t think anyone really talks to you about this: How would you kind of describe your personal politics? I think of you as almost like a — I mean, not a centrist Republican, but you’re very much of a northeastern Republican.

ROGER STONE: Well no, actually, what I think I am is a libertarian. I am a fiscal and economic conservative. I’m a non-interventionist. I’m not an isolationist. I recognize that there are bad people in the world who don’t, you know, wish us well, but I also don’t know why we should be rushing off to war in a lot of places where we can’t identify our national interests. I opposed the Iraq War about the same time that Donald did. I saw it from the beginning as an error. We were going to go out and punish Saddam Hussein for his involvement in 9/11 — except for he was never involved in 9/11. It was Karl Rove’s sleight of hand that, because John Kerry’s a moron, they got away with.

So, and on domestic issues, I’m a flaming progressive. I’m for gay marriage and I’ve always been. I am for the legalization of marijuana which probably, unfortunately, brings taxation with it, but that’s not such a bad idea. So, I would …

GLENN THRUSH: And you’re pro-choice.

ROGER STONE: I’m pro-choice.

GLENN THRUSH: How did you feel when he made his remarks about punishment and abortion? I mean, have you communicated with him about that?

ROGER STONE: Not directly. But you know, look, I think it is not going to be a driving issue in this campaign. I think the Clinton campaign will try to make it a driving issue, but I don’t think it’s going to work, not with a sour economy and the kind of problems that we have around the world and the devastating impact of the international trade packs that the Clintons gave us. I just don’t think you can go through life and say, ‘Well, I was for NAFTA then, but I’m not for NAFTA now. I thought the crime bill was a good idea then but the crime bill’s not a good idea now.’

The only place Hillary Clinton wants to feed poor black people is in a prison cafeteria.

GLENN THRUSH: But the one thing — let’s talk about Trump’s politics a little bit. Do you think he’s actually — do you think he’s more aligned with you than not, because not the noninterventionist stuff — by the way, early on, I think was a real hallmark on the foreign policy stuff. He hasn’t talked as much about that since. The Bush stuff, obviously, he hammered like a drum in South Carolina, but he’s been much more — I guess he’s been a little more ambiguous on the social stuff. He’s kind of played around with the social conservatives. Do you suspect in your heart of hearts, having known him for 40 years, that he’s actually pretty close to you?

ROGER STONE: Well, I mean, look, he’s a New Yorker. He’s lived up — he’s lived in a pretty cosmopolitan society. I do think that the birth of his youngest child really profoundly changed his views on abortion. I think that’s entirely genuine. You go back and you look someplace where he was talking about this, he said, ’You know, I had a friend, and this friend and his wife had a baby late in his life,’ and it was really — you know, all of his other children were born much earlier and he really appreciates that child. That child is really special, and that child changed his entire outlook on abortion. And then, it occurred to me, he’s talking about himself, but it’s a little too personal, I think.

GLENN THRUSH: How so?

ROGER STONE: Because he and his wife had Baron, their youngest child when Donald was in his 60s. I think it’s changed his view.

GLENN THRUSH: Really?

ROGER STONE: Yes. You know, this is just speculation. He’s never said that to me, but I think that story is apocryphal.

GLENN THRUSH: Is he a — that’s really interesting. The book on him is that he is a very guarded person with his personal life. He does not talk about it. I think there is the perception that he is not reflective. I suspect that’s not true privately. Have you seen an aspect of him that is more reflective than what the public sees?

ROGER STONE: Well, first of all, when you’re a billionaire and when you have the kind of profile he and his family have, you can imagine the number of death threats. You can imagine the number of kidnapping possibilities. So, I think, in a way, this accounts for the fact that he tries to keep as much of his life private as possible.

GLENN THRUSH: And that looms large — those threats really do loom large in his consciousness, right?

ROGER STONE: You know, I’m sure the Secret Service and his personal security detail are dealing with it every day. He’s a very controversial and polarizing figure, but he — I think that he’s reflective. He’s, you know, people don’t recognize that he is — he’s very funny. I mean, he’s really fun to hang out with. He’s — there’s nothing stilted or formal. He would much rather have the cheeseburger than the chateaubriand. I mean, he’s a guy of great middle-class tastes and …

GLENN THRUSH: Well, it is interesting that, like, people talk about his mansion in Queens. He never — they didn’t move out of Queens. They could have gone to Sands Point. They could have gone to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Long Island. It’s 10 miles away from where he grew up. They stayed in Queens, the Trumps.

ROGER STONE: So, when you go to Mar-a-Lago where they have — where the food is just extraordinary, I mean, it’s gourmet cuisine, Donald will always recommend the meatloaf. And, by the way, it’s outstanding. I always order it.

GLENN THRUSH: OK. But let’s talk a little about some — you mentioned the death threats. Were you personally comfortable — some of these rallies — I’ve been to a couple of them. I was at one in Lowell, Massachusetts, in particular. Are you personally comfortable with the way that he talks about the protesters and all that stuff, or do you think he needs to chill this stuff out?

ROGER STONE: I think that there is a concerted effort on the left, financed by — largely by George Soros and others — orchestrated — I think dreamed up by David Brock, orchestrated by Move On and Black Lives Matter, to incite violence so that it can be blamed on Trump. I would suggest that you just don’t step in that trap. This is going to be the greatest challenge in Cleveland.

I lived through the ’68 campaign. I worked for Nixon. I saw what the violence in Chicago did to Hubert Humphries’ prospects. Any violence in Cleveland would be counterproductive to Trump’s general election prospects. And I have no question that — for example, we are organizing a rally in March. We’ve applied for a permit. We are in touch with law enforcement to talk about how they want us to do it, where they want us to do it, how security will be provided, and so on.

The MoveOn folks and the Black Lives Matter, they don’t operate that way. So, they’ll just show up where they’re going to show up and they’re there for the purposes of violence.

I think it’s laughable that they’re wearing Bernie Sanders T-shirts and that it’s being blamed on Bernie. Blaming Bernie Sanders for the violence at Trump’s rallies is like blaming the communists for the Reichstag fire. I mean, it’s a false flag. These aren’t Bernie Sanders supporters.

GLENN THRUSH: But I will point out, you did make a pretty provocative comment, and just tell me if it was bull---t or real, when you talked about sort of, ‘If they contest the convention, giving people the names of the hotels.’ Would you really have done that?

ROGER STONE: I most — we did it in 1976. All you need to do is listen to the very next sentence right after they take this out of context…

GLENN THRUSH: Yes.

ROGER STONE: … when I say we have a right to dialogue with these delegates. We need to take them a voluntary pledge. Now, I’m speaking specifically of the Trump delegates who are really not Trump supporters.

So, let’s take Texas, the best example.

GLENN THRUSH: Yup.

ROGER STONE: Cruz has 60 delegates. We have 40 delegates. Not a single one of those 40 people will really be a Trump supporter, not one.

GLENN THRUSH: Right, right.

ROGER STONE: So, let’s go to them and say, ‘Sign — you’re a Trump delegate. Sign this voluntary pledge that says you’ll stick with him for every ballot.’ And when they won’t sign, give the name of that person to CNN. Let them interview that person and say, ‘Why do the votes of people in Texas not matter?’

GLENN THRUSH: I remember a movie where, “Either your signature will be on this contract or your brains will be on this contract.”

ROGER STONE: Yeah, no, I — no place did I advocate going and physically beating on delegates. That is a cheap shot when you take an hour interview and you take one line out of context. But even more troubling to me is the fact that CNN allows Ted Cruz to attack me by name on three occasions with Anderson Cooper, who’s always been very professional and very nice to me, somebody that I have enormous respect for, and not give me an opportunity to respond.

GLENN THRUSH: And we are, of course, talking about the — you’ve been banned from CNN for saying some things.

ROGER STONE: Who knows why I’m banned. They’ve never …

GLENN THRUSH: No one’s told you.

ROGER STONE: They’ve never informed me.

You know, I think it is enormously irresponsible of Anderson Cooper’s producer, Kari Pricher, not to respond to me when I say, ‘Hey, if you’re going to let Ted Cruz attack me by name’ — and it was pretty vicious. He called me a ‘ratf—ker’ — then, you ought to give me a chance to respond; to not do so is journalistically unethical.

GLENN THRUSH: By the way, I had totally forgotten about that.

ROGER STONE: It’s journalistically unethical.

GLENN THRUSH: No, I mean …

ROGER STONE: Look, either you’re a news organization or you’re an opinion organization. CNN is exposing themselves as not being a news organization.

GLENN THRUSH: Let me give you an opportunity to respond right now. Roger, are you, in fact, a ratfucker?

ROGER STONE: Actually, I’ve seen some of the women that Ted Cruz is accused of hanging with. I think he’s the one fucking rats.

GLENN THRUSH: All right. We cannot--that is gone. Was it--let me--can I ask you that question again and don’t fucking say that?

ROGER STONE: Okay.

GLENN THRUSH: Okay. So, I’m going to ask you right now, Roger, are you in fact, a “ratfucker”?

ROGER STONE: No, actually that was a term —

GLENN THRUSH: Segretti, right?

ROGER STONE: Yes, who was an amateur. In other words …

GLENN THRUSH: UCLA? He was part of the UCLA …

ROGER STONE: Ordering 20 pizzas and sending them to the Democratic Headquarters —

GLENN THRUSH: And it was Donald Segretti.

ROGER STONE: Right.

GLENN THRUSH: We were talking about a young —because people —

ROGER STONE: I …

GLENN THRUSH: Not everybody knows all this stuff.

ROGER STONE: Right.

GLENN THRUSH: He was a young Nixon aide implicated in the periphery of Watergate, who did all kinds of silly, dirty tricks. Yeah.

ROGER STONE: Right, which — none of which produced or changed a single vote.

GLENN THRUSH: Right.

ROGER STONE: So, what was the point? Harassment? That’s ratf--king. That comes out of the USC -

GLENN THRUSH: USC.

ROGER STONE: Fraternity parlance. I didn’t go to USC.

So, yeah, when I was 19 years old, and this is —you can find this in the Senate Watergate hearings — I was sent to New Hampshire to make a contribution to Pete McCloskey in the name of the Young Socialist Alliance. I brought this enormous pickle jar of quarters and pennies and dimes, and then I was supposed to get a receipt, which I brought back and gave my superior. Now, I guess theoretically the idea was they were going to give the receipt to The Manchester Union Leader and that was going to generate a story.

GLENN THRUSH: Right.

ROGER STONE: The story never ran, so the whole thing had no impact at all. I ultimately got a subpoena to come talk about it before the Senate Watergate Committee. I was 19 years old. I also had a brief interview with the Watergate special prosecutors. I didn’t know at the time that they were meeting repeatedly ex parte with John Sirica …

GLENN THRUSH: Right.

ROGER STONE: … for which he should have been disbarred. He should have been impeached. And now we know that there were extensive improper conversations between the prosecutors and the judge without informing the attorneys for the Watergate burglars.

But putting that aside, 30 years later, I’m in the Strand Book Store, and there’s a book by this guy Bruce Oudes which is a compilation of memos to and from Nixon from his aides. And I’m flipping through it and there’s a memo from Pat Buchanan to Bob Haldeman that says, “What we need to do is to send some young guy to New Hampshire.”

GLENN THRUSH: No kidding.

ROGER STONE: ‘to give a contribution.’

GLENN THRUSH: And that was the first time you’d seen it?

ROGER STONE: Yeah, I had no idea this was …

GLENN THRUSH: That is amazing.

ROGER STONE: Buchanan’s brainchild.

GLENN THRUSH: Also amazing that I could possibly run into you in the Strand.

ROGER STONE: I love the Strand.

GLENN THRUSH: It’s the best bookstore in the world.

ROGER STONE: I could spend a whole Saturday afternoon in the Strand.

GLENN THRUSH: Absolutely, and I have, from time to time.

But look, this is part of — this is — you know, when people know Roger Stone, this is part of what — come on, you were attracted to this kind of stuff. You never really went over the line, as far as I’ve ever read, but you do dig this kind of end of the business, right? What is it that attracted you as a kid to that kind of — a little bit of the bare knuckles, bad boy stuff?

ROGER STONE: Well, look, it’s very simple. I was first attracted to politics by Barry Goldwater. So, I was living in northern Westchester but right on the Connecticut border. So, the nearest city to us was actually Norwalk, Connecticut, where I was born, an industrial — you know, a small industrial city.

GLENN THRUSH: What did your dad do, real quick?

ROGER STONE: He was a well digger.

GLENN THRUSH: No kidding.

ROGER STONE: Yes. He never went to college, didn’t graduate from high school. Worked with his hands.

GLENN THRUSH: Was he …?

ROGER STONE: Very hard work.

GLENN THRUSH: What generation — and he was a …

ROGER STONE: He’s second generation.

GLENN THRUSH: And you said he’s Hungarian.

ROGER STONE: Yeah, Hungarian.

GLENN THRUSH: So, he was second generation. Your mom — I read somewhere your mom was a reporter.

ROGER STONE: She was a newspaper reporter. She is a Sicilian, Italian-American. If you see — if you’ve watched any of ‘The Sopranos’ and you remember Tony’s mother …

GLENN THRUSH: Yes.

ROGER STONE: That’s my mother.

GLENN THRUSH: That’s great. I’m sorry.

ROGER STONE: Even looks like her.

GLENN THRUSH: I totally interrupted you on this. So …

ROGER STONE: So, I was attracted to the candidacy of Goldwater when the woman who lived next door to us who was very active in the Federation of Women’s Republicans gave me the book, Conscience of a Conservative. Until that time, my aspiration was to become an actor. I wanted to be an actor.

GLENN THRUSH: Interesting.

ROGER STONE: And then, I realized that politics is just show business for ugly people. So, it was — you know …

GLENN THRUSH: They say that about journalism, too.

ROGER STONE: It has many of the same attributes, though.

GLENN THRUSH: Right.

ROGER STONE: So, and I was an all-out for Goldwater. I mean, I was an absolute fanatic. I …

GLENN THRUSH: Just, again, your similarities with Hillary Clinton are chilling to me. No, I …

ROGER STONE: Except I don’t yell when I talk.

GLENN THRUSH: No, we got to get back to the acting thing. Who was your favorite actor? What was your paradigm? What did you foresee yourself being?

ROGER STONE: I wanted to be Gary Cooper. Come on …

GLENN THRUSH: Gary Cooper?

ROGER STONE: Gary Cooper is the greatest actor of all time.

GLENN THRUSH: You like — really?

ROGER STONE: Yeah, I like that whole strong Southern …

GLENN THRUSH: The whole …

ROGER STONE: Yeah.

GLENN THRUSH: Who else do you like, other than Gary Cooper?

ROGER STONE: I think Brando — the early Brando stuff is really great.

GLENN THRUSH: I see you much more Brando than Cooper, I’m sorry to say.

ROGER STONE: Well, I like to dress more like Cooper, but so — so, I was all in for Goldwater. You know, I had a bumper sticker on my bicycle, and I went to the Republican Headquarters every day after school and licked envelopes. And, of course, I had no sense of his prospects.

GLENN THRUSH: Right.

ROGER STONE: So, I really thought that he would win and that Lyndon Johnson, this guy is — even then, I realized how corrupt he was. I couldn’t believe that anybody would elect this guy. Remember the Bobby Baker scandal …

GLENN THRUSH: Of course.

ROGER STONE: … was following him around. And after Goldwater’s defeat, which I found crushing, I started looking into the 1960 campaign, which I knew nothing about.

GLENN THRUSH: And what happened in Chicago with the Kennedys and all that stuff?

ROGER STONE: Well, just — look, Bobby Kennedy ordering hundreds of thousands of pieces of anti-Catholic literature — putting Hubert Humphries’ disclaimer on it and distributing it in West Virginia. That ain’t bean bag. You know, Bobby was a tough, mean son of a b---h, and they used hardball tactics.

Nixon, who was kind of considered a gut puncher was shocked at how the Kennedy people put him away through what he considered to be a series of dirty tricks.

GLENN THRUSH: So, you were looking across the battle line and seeing Bobby Kennedy and saying, ‘We need to do that.’

ROGER STONE: I was saying, ‘That’s what we need to do to win.’ And if we had been more — if we had been more combative …

GLENN THRUSH: That’s …

ROGER STONE: I mean, Nixon walked into a buzz saw. The Kennedys took this guy apart.

Just to be clear, they wiretapped his hotel room at The Shore in Washington before the second debate. They were wiretapping him through the entire campaign. So, you know, I realized …

GLENN THRUSH: So, your paradigm — that’s so interesting. So, like, your political motivation is Goldwater. Your tactical motivation is Bobby Kennedy.

ROGER STONE: Robert Kennedy. I have an enormous poster of Robert Kennedy over my desk in the office. He was a scrappy, tough SOB who got the job done.

GLENN THRUSH: Well, to give another plug to Evan Thomas, Evan Thomas wrote a great RFK biography, and he wrote that terrific Ike book a couple years ago.

ROGER STONE: But more importantly, he’s written a terrific book on Richard Nixon.

GLENN THRUSH: A terrific — what is the best Nixon book? I like the Ambrose one, myself.

ROGER STONE: I like Ambrose. Herb Resnick wrote a great one, but I have to come back to Evan Thomas’ book, because it’s perfectly balanced. In other words, it’s not a love letter to Nixon, but it also doesn’t — and Doug Schoen, by the way, has a new book that also, I think, is in the same vein, which is, they’re both more objective.

There’s plenty of books about Nixon’s flaws; he had many. He made huge mistakes and huge miscalculations because he — among other things, he was an introvert in an extrovert’s business. But I think Thomas really hits the correct balance of — and he understands the dark side and the light side.

You’d also have to put Bill Safire’s “Before the Fall” in there, too, is another great book.

GLENN THRUSH: The other thing …

ROGER STONE: And then, I have to recommend my own book, “Nixon’s Secrets.”

GLENN THRUSH: Well, we’ll cut that out. I’m kidding.

You know who Evan Thomas’ grandfather was, don’t you?

ROGER STONE: Yeah, he was — he was a socialist.

GLENN THRUSH: Norman Thomas.

ROGER STONE: Yes.

GLENN THRUSH: The socialist candidate for president.

ROGER STONE: Yes, well, the acorn hasn’t fallen that far from the tree.

GLENN THRUSH: Literally, the ACORN.

So, in terms of the — getting back to sort of Trump, I also find it interesting, I hadn’t realized you had that sort of — did you actually act in plays in high school and stuff?

ROGER STONE: Oh, yeah.

GLENN THRUSH: What was your biggest role?

ROGER STONE: I wrote a play on the Civil War, and in two acts, I played both Gen. Lee and Abraham Lincoln. But since I was both the producer and the playwright, I was entitled to do the casting.

GLENN THRUSH: To me, that is your entire career in a nutshell.

ROGER STONE: Yeah …

GLENN THRUSH: So, how do you get — so, is Trump, you know, Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee in one person?

ROGER STONE: No, no. Trump is Trump. I mean, he’s an entirely unique, self-styled individual.

GLENN THRUSH: Does he ever piss you off? You have a very strong personality. You clearly have a strategic imperative. Are there times where you’re sitting across from the guy and you’re like, ‘Shut up and listen to what I have to tell you’?

ROGER STONE: No, because you can’t deal with him on that basis. It’s just not — you know, when you know somebody that long, you get an understanding about how to affect their thinking without being — you know, without being insulting or overstepping a line. Remember that he’s not [been] a political figure until recently.

GLENN THRUSH: Right.

ROGER STONE: So, the dynamics of your whole relationship are different. He — conversations with him are light, they’re not heavy. He’s very engaging. He’s very funny. He’s — like, he’s fun to be with. He’s fun to work for. It’s an adventure.

GLENN THRUSH: So, how do you get him on your brain wave? How do you persuade Donald Trump, which I presume you’ve had to do from time to time? It seems he’s moving in your direction now. What is the technique of sort of getting Trump around to your way of thinking?

ROGER STONE: Nobody puts words in Donald’s mouth. He is his own conceptualizer. All you can do is present information and let him either assimilate it or not. When you write something for him, keep it short and staccato. He’s not going to read a 40-page white paper on the economy; zero chance of that. It’s just too boring. Don’t blame him; I don’t like it either. So keep it simple and direct because that’s the way he communicates.

GLENN THRUSH: So, as president, he’s got to do the daily briefing and stuff. You know, they present the — I did an interview in the Oval Office with Obama, and sitting on his desk was the daily briefing. It is a compendious document in a binder. So, the way — and when you read, like, Cannon’s book on Reagan, a lot of the way that Reagan was briefed was orally. People would come.

ROGER STONE: Yes.

GLENN THRUSH: In the office. You foresee that being the way.

ROGER STONE: Yeah, I actually think their management styles were very, very simple. Reagan was a big-picture guy. Trump is a big-picture guy. Don’t — you know, you don’t need to know the name of every subsect of Islamic terrorists … to understand the dangers of Islamic terrorism. You do need to have people who work for you who know those names. You need to see the big picture.

GLENN THRUSH: But doesn’t he need to, just in terms — I know you’re not in the ‘musing publicly about his weaknesses’ business, but if you were to sort of counsel some change for him to make — and, you know, a man of his age who’s done what he has done is set in the ways, particularly when he’s been successful. Do you think there is an adjustment he can make, you know, incorporating obviously the fact that he is his own man?

ROGER STONE: I think he’s already making it, just by dint of this experience. I mean, he’s — I think he’s having the time of his life, first of all.

GLENN THRUSH: Really?

ROGER STONE: Oh yeah, he’s loving this. He loves it.

GLENN THRUSH: You think so?

ROGER STONE: Absolutely. First of all, he’s working harder than I have ever seen him work. He’s worked very hard for this. People keep asking me, ‘Does he want to be president?’ Well, he definitely wants to win. He’s a very competitive person. That’s been the story of his whole life.

GLENN THRUSH: Right.

ROGER STONE: And I think he has improved immeasurably as a candidate from the beginning, but juxtapose that, for example, with Jeb Bush, who looked like a guy who was hating every minute of it, who looked like, ‘I don’t want to be here. Just give this to me. It’s mine. You know, this is mine by birthright.’ He looked like a guy going through the motions. There was even one point at which he barked out, ‘I have better things to do.’

GLENN THRUSH: Right.

ROGER STONE: So …

GLENN THRUSH: Well, Trump said that initially, that — like, ‘I don’t have to — I’ve got all this other stuff.’ Didn’t he sort of, in his …

ROGER STONE: Yeah, but I think it was a different thing what he was saying. What he was--

GLENN THRUSH: And people weren’t hearing it that way.

ROGER STONE: What he was saying was, ‘I don’t need this to be successful. I’m already successful.’

GLENN THRUSH: Right.

ROGER STONE: ‘I don’t need to be president to be someone. I’m already someone. And therefore, I’m going to give this a shot, and if it doesn’t work out, OK, I’ll just go back to having the greatest life in the world.’ I mean, he has the greatest life in the world. I mean, he’s got a plane nicer than Air Force One. He’s got a palatial home in Palm Beach. He’s got an incredible apartment in New York. He’s got a great family. You know, he’s got a great lifestyle, and instead, he’s schlepping around in Wisconsin campaigning, you know, very hard to win. He’s very competitive.

GLENN THRUSH: But you said — I just want to — and then, I’ll move up the road a bit in just a couple more questions.

You said he very much wants to win, and that was your answer when people ask you constantly whether or not he wants to be president. Do you think he wants to be president? Do you think he wants to win the presidency or he actually wants to be president?

ROGER STONE: I think he wants to be president, but, more precisely, I think he wants to achieve something as president. It’s not about just holding the job. I mean, compare that to George H.W. Bush. Here’s a guy who ran for vice president six times, which nobody runs for vice president, as early as 1968, then again in 1972, then again in 1974, when there was a vacancy, then again in 1976, and then finally achieves it in 1980.

He didn’t have any idea what he wanted to do with the presidency; he just wanted it because he was a technocrat. He had no ideology. He could run as a Goldwater-ite for the Senate in 1964, where George Bush favored getting us out of the United Nations and taking fluoride out of our water. Then, he could run as a country club Republican for the House in 1966, pro-choice, pro-Planned Parenthood. He believed in nothing. He was just a technocrat, and he always wanted to be president, he was ambitious to be president, but he didn’t want to be president to achieve any one big thing. Compare that to Reagan, or Trump. Reagan wanted to be president to destroy Communism.

GLENN THRUSH: What does Trump want now? Trump wants to …

ROGER STONE: To secure America, to bring the country to back to where it was —

GLENN THRUSH: OK, but what the hell does that actually mean?

ROGER STONE: Build a wall, secure our borders as our first solution to our immigration problems, revitalize our economy.

GLENN THRUSH: But I was struck by …

ROGER STONE: … by putting forward a tax code that is dynamic and pro-growth, which the current one is not.

GLENN THRUSH: OK. Let’s talk about the wall for two seconds, and then we’ll talk about funner stuff, because I’m sick of talking about the wall.

One thing that struck me is the head of the Border Patrol Union endorsed Trump.

ROGER STONE: Yes.

GLENN THRUSH: … and said at the same time, “We love the general idea, but we don’t need the wall for the entire expanse. We need it in some of the …” Is the wall thing a little bit bulls--t?

ROGER STONE: No, the wall is a symbol. The wall is — again, it’s shorthand. It’s — what’s the word? It’s imagery that’s designed to explain the idea that he would seal the border.

GLENN THRUSH: So, it’s an idea rather than necessarily a particular …

ROGER STONE: Well, except you’re talking about a guy who’s an accomplished builder. So, if he becomes president, let me assure you, you’re going to get a wall.

GLENN THRUSH: For the whole damn expanse.

ROGER STONE: Whatever has to be done to solve the problem. I think it has become a powerful symbol of Trump’s resolve to seal our borders.

GLENN THRUSH: OK. One of the things that really fascinates me is — and you mentioned the Gary Cooper thing. So, I’m thinking “High Noon” now, right? If I’m looking at that street at — you know, at the end of “High Noon”, two guys walking down the street, you’re on one end of it; David Brock is on the other end.

ROGER STONE: Yes.

GLENN THRUSH: Do you know him at all? What do you think of him?

ROGER STONE: You know, we were friendly back in the days before he went to the dark side. I guess at some point, he made the calculation that he couldn’t make any money as a conservative and he could make a lot of money as a liberal. It is — it’s kind of absurd that you collect this little group of sycophants who are literally like a cult: “The Clintons have done nothing wrong. They’ve never, in their entire lives, done anything wrong. It’s all

bulls--t. It’s all part of a right wing” — you know — “a vast conspiracy.”

My political heroes have all made mistakes. It’s just human nature. The Clintons have made enormous mistakes, I would argue, as I have in a best-selling book, that they’ve committed numerous crimes. But David Brock and his little band of cultists can’t seem to see that.

GLENN THRUSH: Don’t you think, to some extent, it’s brand — in the same that it’s an exaggeration, that it’s a branding tool, and they’re in combat just like you are? And so, they’re going to — when you’re in combat, you do things a certain way. I mean, do you respect the guy? Do you think he’s dangerous to your guy?

ROGER STONE: Put it this way: What we have on Hillary Clinton is far more damaging than anything they ave on Donald Trump. So, you want to go down this road — the suppression of information against the Clintons in the ‘80s was much easier in the pre-Internet days. It’s not going to work that way.

And I already see that CNN, when Steve Milesburg [phonetic] or Kurt Shlichter or any number of commentators want to talk about Hillary’s abuse of women, their response is to pull the plug. That’s not going to work, because after Citizens’ United, if you don’t see it on CNN, you’ll see it on commercials in between the breaks. You can’t suppress information anymore.

And the sheer number of women who will come forward who have been sexually assaulted by Bill and then threatened by Hillary, bullied by Hillary, intimidated by Hillary, it’s an enormous number. It’s kind of like Bill Cosby: They can’t all be lying.

So, I understand that there will be an attempt to discredit them. I understand the attacks on me, the attacks on my personal life, but I’m not running for president. So, let the voters evaluate the information on their own. It’s not about me, and it’s not about David Brock, for that matter.

GLENN THRUSH: How much of this, though, is about getting in the opponent’s head, because we talk about Segretti, we talk about Kennedy. The Kennedys — has anyone mind-f--ked another politician better than the Kennedys did to Nixon? How much of what you do — have done over the years is about getting into the other guy’s — or the other woman’s — head?

ROGER STONE: I, look, I think I’m in Ted Cruz’s head right now. He’s got his paid shills, Glenn Beck and Mark Levin, attacking me viciously. So, I have to assume that Ted Cruz is laying awake at night worrying about what I’m doing next. And you know what, Glenn? He needs to be worried.

GLENN THRUSH: Do you want to do that with the — well, I guess I have to ask you, then: Did you have anything — you’ve been asked this and you’ve answered it — did you have anything to do with The National Enquirer story, personally?

ROGER STONE: I didn’t promote the story. I didn’t plant the story, which is what he claims without an iota of proof. In fact, I’m quoted in the story. So, I ask you: If I were going to plant a story as a dirty trick, why would I leave a big old thumbprint there? My quote is, “If this is true, it would be particularly damaging to him because of his base as the evangelical Christian candidate.”

GLENN THRUSH: Right.

ROGER STONE: But I think every reporter in the business knows that this story was being actively shopped prior to The National Enquirer breaking it in the way that they did.

Now, it is true that the journalistic standards for The National Enquirer are different, but they have beat The Washington Post to the punch on some major stories and there’s just no way around that.

GLENN THRUSH: Do you think …

ROGER STONE: Media is media, and you can’t …

GLENN THRUSH: “Media is media.” I think that is a pretty damn good way to describe the …

ROGER STONE: Well, here’s something that I found out …

GLENN THRUSH: Yeah.

ROGER STONE: … The vote of a billionaire is exactly equal to the vote of a cab driver.

GLENN THRUSH: No ...

ROGER STONE: So, when you say, “Oh, that’s The National Enquirer, yeah, they sell 6 million of those a week. Those people vote, too.

GLENN THRUSH: Do you think you will have the same success getting into Hillary and Bill Clinton’s heads?

ROGER STONE: Some reporters would indicate that perhaps some are already there. So, you know, I’m just going to do my own thing.

GLENN THRUSH: But is that a goal, frankly?

ROGER STONE: I think involuntary resettlement is part of the strategy of any campaign to psych out the opposition. You know, there’s no question that Karl Rove got into John Kerry’s head.

GLENN THRUSH: Are the Clintons particularly vulnerable to this kind of thing?

ROGER STONE: I think they’re more vulnerable than most because they have more crimes to hide.

GLENN THRUSH: So, let’s do our dismount, talking about Trump, again. You talk about the woman stuff, and you got very passionate about it. He met with Megyn Kelly, recently. His numbers, Roger, at a general election, now are — you know, you’re coming out of the woods. The delegate stuff, you know, you’ve got this convention fight. Yes, you can focus on that; yes, you can deal with Ted Cruz. But you’re looking at some numbers in the general election — and you’re a student of history — that no Republican candidate has ever seen before in terms of these negatives: (a)What does he have to do to reverse that? And (b)Can this guy really get elected president?

ROGER STONE: The answer is yes. Actually, his numbers are pretty much akin to Reagan’s; they’re maybe slightly worse, but he’s not running against Joan of Arc, and I’ll wager right now that her unfavorable ratings will be higher on Election Day than his because she has greater vulnerabilities. Trump is really who he appears to be. Hillary is not who she appears to be on television. She is a vicious, greedy, foul-mouthed, short-tempered …

GLENN THRUSH: Don’t!

ROGER STONE: Yes. And that will show. It’s actually beginning to show.

GLENN THRUSH: But wait, hold on a second.

ROGER STONE: The Trump you see is the real Trump.

GLENN THRUSH: OK. But the Trump you see is going to get 8 percent of the Hispanic vote. And you — listen, you know, I understand where you’re coming from on this, but you read that 2012 after action report that the RNC did. They weren’t wrong about the numbers on Hispanics. How can this — come on.

ROGER STONE: Mitt Romney never made an aspirational argument to Hispanics. He was a country club stiff who seemed to have a different haircut every time he did a debate. He was — there was nothing attractive to those voters for him.

GLENN THRUSH: But you’re as — but you’re good at this. Did Trump have to antagonize Latinos? Could he have accomplished in a narrower way the stuff on the wall stuff without being quite so over the top with …

ROGER STONE: I think that obviously he has some challenges going into the general election. I think they’re all soluble. He’s going to have to convince women that he — first of all, he has treated women much better in the marketplace than his opponent has. He has some very, I think, powerful surrogates in his daughter and some of the executives of his company who can speak about how he has treated women. It is certainly a challenge, but I think everything there is entirely fixable.

You can’t look at polling this early out and say, ‘Well, this is how it’s going to end.’ Those numbers are going to change dramatically. It’s what a campaign is about.

GLENN THRUSH: Well, I do dis —

ROGER STONE: And they have to change dramatically for him to win.

GLENN THRUSH: Yeah. I mean, like, what would you — if you were sort of looking at — a if you were, like — and you do advise him. You are not — by the way, you are not disallowed from communicating with him in your role at the super PAC, you just can’t talk with him about fundraising, right? That’s the —

ROGER STONE: Well, we can’t talk to him about fundraising or communications. But the super PAC I’m involved with is specifically spending its money documenting voter irregularities in Oklahoma, Kansas, Utah, Wisconsin, so that the Trump campaign — or a Trump supporter — will have the option of challenging the seating of those delegates in the Credentials Committee.

GLENN THRUSH: So, you have a wide — so, I guess what you’re saying is that you have a wider latitude in what you can discuss with him than perhaps somebody like Cruz.

ROGER STONE: I have gotten a written legal opinion on this, to be very clear. I can’t discuss the communications strategy of the super PAC and the communications strategy — the paid communications strategy of his campaign.

GLENN THRUSH: Got you.

ROGER STONE: But we don’t talk about those things.

GLENN THRUSH: Do you still work for the Trump Organization?

ROGER STONE: I do not.

GLENN THRUSH: You don’t? So, in terms of the stuff going forward, in the terms of the way that this is going to play out, you’re talking again about, kind of, him having to make the adjustments, these are the challenges. What would you advise him to concretely do to sort of clean up some of these issues?

ROGER STONE: He’s going to have to better articulate himself on issues that are of concern to women. He is going to have to define a pro-growth, more aspirational message for African-American voters, for Hispanic voters, where I actually think he can make inroads.

There’s a huge differentiation between people who are here as legal immigrants and people here who are illegal immigrants, and virtually no poll of Hispanics ever breaks down into those cells. So, yeah, there’s work to be done there, but I don’t think any of it is impossible.

GLENN THRUSH: One last question. It’s been a blast, by the way. I could do this for another hour and just talk to you about Nixon. Who do you think — who would you recommend, just kind of looking at the field right now, as a running mate for him?

ROGER STONE: Well, I think he — I do think — aand he’s already said this, that he would be better off with somebody who is — who has some experience in government, who could then function as an implementer of his policies.

He’s an outsider. He would be the first outsider president really since Reagan. You can argue that Reagan was an insider because he has two terms as governor, but I reject that. He comes to politics and government from acting and being a union president, which is an important factor.

So, you probably want a running mate who could facilitate your program and get it done, help get it done.

GLENN THRUSH: Give me some names, damn it.

ROGER STONE: Well, if I give you any names, then I’m going to hear from some …

GLENN THRUSH: Give me one. Just give me one.

ROGER STONE: Well, you could certainly take — you could take John Kasich. You could take Marco Rubio. Either one of them would be serviceable as running mates. They both come from battleground states that are important.

GLENN THRUSH: You would have rebrand — maybe “Medium Marco,” as opposed to “Little Marco.”

ROGER STONE: You know what? We both know that Lyndon Johnson authorized the break-in at John Kennedy’s doctor’s office here in New York to secure his medical files and then, only days later, his chief operative, John Connolly, has a press conference to announce that John Kennedy’s far too sick, may not even live through a first term.

GLENN THRUSH: I love it.

ROGER STONE: And these guys got on the ticket together, which is why Bobby Baker, secretary of the Senate, Lyndon Johnson’s right-hand man, says on the day that John Kennedy is inaugurated, he says, “Jack Kennedy will die a violent death and he will not fill out his term.”

GLENN THRUSH: Actually, I liked — one last question, and it’s really raised by the Marco thing. You know, Trump has said a lot of nasty things about people, and do you think he will have a challenge getting quote/unquote — because to govern, you do have to have sort of mainstream people in your orbit — do you think he will have trouble hiring the best people because he’s Trump?

ROGER STONE: Actually, I think he sees a distinction between business and politics. I also think he will see a distinction between politics and government.

Government is serious business. You’re really — you’re spending serious public money. I think that he will be a much more serious president. He is the master of public relations. He’s the master of branding. He understands the new cycle like no one else, but this …

GLENN THRUSH: But that’s raises an interesting …

ROGER STONE: This is show business to him.

GLENN THRUSH: But that raises a really interesting question, and that is — I just asked you about the vice president — which, by the way, has become a much more powerful institution over the past, people haven’t realized. The vice presidency, which used to be a joke, is now a really functional part of the whole damn thing.

So, chief of staff is probably just as important as a vice president for this guy. Who — so, Roger Stone is his ambassador to sort of — not mainstream politics, but sort of conventional politics, right? Who will be this guy’s ambassador to governance? Who is the person — who’s his James Baker? Do you see someone out there who you, Roger Stone, would like to install in the middle of this thing to ensure that this guy can really run the country?

ROGER STONE: I wouldn’t even presume to tell him who he would — who he should choose. He’ll choose somebody he …

GLENN THRUSH: Presume to tell me.

ROGER STONE: Well, if I do, I’ll be telling the world. No, I don’t have a brilliant idea in this regard.

GLENN THRUSH: OK.

ROGER STONE: He’s very much his own man. He’s going to make those choices himself, and he is more than capable of thinking outside the box. So, I actually think he is going — he will be a great president because he is committed to large goals and he sees the big picture, and he has executive experience. He is a guy who has built a multibillion-dollar international business with thousands of employees. So, he’s a guy who’s actually run something complex. That’s far better training to become president than, say, in being a U.S. senator, who runs nothing.

GLENN THRUSH: Well, listen, thanks for taking the time. And next time you come, I would appreciate if you brought some meatloaf with you.

ROGER STONE: All right, done.