-Hello. -Welcome back to the show, Katy.
-Thanks for having me back. -Uh, congratulations
on your book doing really well.
Uh, it is, honestly, one of the craziest stories.
You're-you're not lying when you say "front-row seat
to the craziest campaign in American history."
This is a book about your journey,
and it really is, like, a weird romantic story with no romance
involving yourself and now President Donald Trump.
That's the weirdest way anyone's ever described the book.
-I try my best. I try. -I've heard a lot of descriptions,
and that is, by far, the weirdest way.
It really is though. When I... when I read the story--
and I-I don't know if you felt it--
it almost felt like there was this strange connection
between yourself and Donald Trump.
Did you feel that during the campaign?
Well, listen, I was there from the very beginning.
Donald Trump-- I don't know if you guys remember this--
was not taken seriously when he announced his candidacy.
-Oh, we remember. We remember. -Uh, yeah.
Um, "Donald Trump is running for president.
It's gonna be so hilarious."
-Right. -Those were what the headlines were like.
People were calling him a carnival barker,
a-a sideshow, um, and the like.
And I was there almost from day one, from June 30 of 2015.
I was the only national news correspondent
that was following him full-time,
the only person really taking his campaign seriously.
So he would see me for-for months on end
-as the only familiar face in a crowd full of strangers. -Wow.
For months and months and months and months.
And he would call me out over and over and over again.
He would, uh, berate me from the stage
when he didn't like my reporting, which was often.
Um... he would, uh...
he would try to charm me behind the scenes.
Or if I did something that he liked
or if I said something that he liked, um,
one time, he kissed me on the cheek.
That-that story, I feel like you say now
and it's like, "He kissed me on the cheek."
But it wasn't, like, a welcome kiss on the cheek.
When-when you read the story in the book,
it really is a harrowing moment that, for me,
reminded me of the Access Hollywood tape. Right?
You see that tape where Donald Trump gets off the-the bus
after "pussy grab," and then he goes...
just before he gets off the bus, he goes,
"I'm gonna put in some Tic Tacs 'cause you never know
"if you're gonna kiss her. I just...
Sometimes I kiss the woman. I can't control it."
And you tell the story in a similar fashion,
-like he just kissed you out of nowhere. -Well,
this was many, many, many, many months before that.
This was November of 2015,
and I was on the Morning Joe set.
It was a remote show that we were doing from New Hampshire.
I was talking about Donald Trump's change in tone
from the debate the previous night.
He wasn't going after people that...
in the same way that he had been, um, the previous week.
Not the same amount of vitriol.
Um, and I get offstage
and I'm waiting for Trump and his, uh, team to arrive.
He walks in the side door, sees me immediately
and walks right up to me, puts his arms on my shoulders
and kisses me on the cheek.
If you kiss me on the cheek, Trevor, that's fine.
That's nice. We are... We're essentially colleagues.
And you're... I'm a guest on your show.
You're not covering me as a... as a journalist.
-I'm not running for president. -Right.
-You're telling me this now. -Um...
I wasted an opportunity, but okay.
-(laughter) -I didn't... I went in with the hug, but okay.
Now you tell me. Thanks, Katy.
-It's just... it's inappropriate in that setting. -Right.
It's not a social situation, it is not a...
I'm not a member of his family, I'm not a member...
I'm not his friend, I'm not somebody that he works with.
I'm covering a presidential campaign.
And I remember in that moment,
the first thing I felt was,
nobody is going to take me seriously
-if anybody sees that. -Wow.
Luckily, the cameras weren't rolling,
but a minute later, Donald Trump is on set with Joe and Mika
saying, "What happened to Katy?
She was so great, I just had to kiss her."
-Yeah, he bragged about it... -On national television.
Yeah, he bragged about it immediately afterwards,
and it feels like that was, in many ways, the story.
There was the story of Donald Trump on the campaign.
But what I genuinely loved about this book is
that you were taking us through the personal journey
of somebody who, in many ways, was having the same experience
-or similar one to Donald Trump. It was parallel. -Yeah.
Because you never covered politics before this, right?
Donald Trump was never in politics bef...
I would argue he might not even be now, right?
-(laughter) -And you were both on this journey together.
Do you think, in some ways, he related to you?
Was there, like, a connection between him and yourself
where he was like, "Oh, Katy, you and I--
-we're on this journey together?" -Well, we're both
political neophytes, we were both outsiders.
I was based in London.
I came back just to say hello to my bosses,
then got thrown on this campaign.
I didn't understand politics.
You could argue
that Donald Trump didn't really understand politics, either.
-Right. -Although, he did win, so maybe
he understood it better than any of us did.
Um, and I felt like that helped me,
because I could assess his support in a genuine way
without all the, uh, you know, the baggage
of being a Washington insider.
And I mean that in a good way.
People in Washington know their stuff.
-Right, right, right. -They're great reporters.
They understand the dynamics of Washington.
They did not understand Trump because he broke all the rules.
So I-I came into it, you know,
not knowing any of the political terminology.
Neither did Donald Trump.
And it allowed me to, I think, honestly see why
he was resonating and try to convey that.
I kept telling people...
I was like that bad Simpsons meme--
"Old Man Yells at Cloud"--
-(laughter) ...every morning in our editorial meeting,
because I would get on the phone, and I would say,
"Guys, I know that the Access Hollywood tape is a big deal."
-Yes. -"I know it's especially a big deal in Washington,
"it's a big deal in New York,
"but people on the campaign trail do not care.
"They don't hear it. They're not... They don't care.
"They don't care about Russia.
"They don't care about the controversy.
"They like him, and they're not listening
to any of the reporting that we're doing on him."
It's interesting that you say, people don't hear it,
because they were hearing it,
but they weren't almost feeling it.
They weren't listening to it. The....
The-There's a... there's a stat that you have in the book
that was really eye-opening to me,
and talking about the evening broadcast,
like, you know, the national news,
and how Donald Trump got way more coverage
than Hillary Clinton, but only 32 minutes was about policy.
-Yes. -I think in previous election years,
it was something like 114 minutes
and then, like, 200 minutes on policy.
Whereas with Donald Trump, it was only 32 minutes.
Do you think... that journalists
could have done a better job of keeping it on policy,
or was Trump the first person who was willing to risk
scandalizing the entire election,
you know, and getting it away from that conversation?
Donald Trump had no policy.
There wasn't policy to cover with him.
-It was very limited. -Right.
I mean, he had a Muslim ban proposal,
but it didn't... and he had a tax plan,
this pseudo-tax plan, but he didn't really get into policy
on the campaign trail.
And whenever he did, he would immediately bury it
with another controversy or getting into some sort
of personal fight with Ted Cruz or Hillary Clinton
or Marco Rubio or Ben Carson or the pope
-or the podium in the... in the Oval Office. -(laughter)
I mean, it just, the list goes on and on.
So would I have liked to have covered more policy?
Absolutely. But he was making it really difficult to do so.
I wanted to talk and put Donald Trump supporters on TV
every night on NBC Nightly News,
but the man just kept saying things
that we could not ignore.
He's fighting with the family of a Gold Star...
-Right. -a Gold Star family. You can't ignore that.
He's calling on Russia to hack into Hillary Clinton's e-mail.
You can't ignore that.
It was one after the other after the other.
Um, looking back, though, and really, you know, analyzing
how we covered this campaign,
I think it's a discussion that we have to have
to figure out how in the world we're gonna cover 2020,
especially if Donald Trump is the Republican candidate.
Before I let you go, you did say in the book
that you would like to cover him running for president again,
which he's already started somehow.
But... looking at what you learned from the first campaign,
is there something that you would do differently,
is there something where, as Katy, you would go,
"Okay, that's a mistake I made," or, "That's a trick that he used
that I can now work on using against him"?
How would you cover Donald Trump, a man
-who still has no policies? -Well, I'm not somebody
who's trying to do anything against him; that's not my job.
I'm not out there to convince any of you how to vote.
If I were, I would hope that you
just wouldn't trust anything I said.
Um... our job as...
and my job as a reporter is to just contextualize the person
and to fact-check them when they need to be,
and to dive in to not only their support but their policy.
I... If I do cover him again, if he does run again--
these are all very big ifs--
um, I would like to make sure from the outset,
we cut through the noise,
we don't get distracted by every little tweet,
we don't... we're not...
uh... we don't fall into that trap
where it's just Donald Trump, um, trying to...
I guess go on the attack as opposed to trying to suss out
-exactly what he will do in his second term. -Right.
Then, again, I mean, I think the way we covered 2016
really did show how he would behave as president.
It's not somebody who cares much about, um, policy.
He doesn't get into healthcare whenever he, um...
is trying to talk about it.
He knows the... the very broad strokes.
He just wants to get something done.
And I think that was very apparent on the campaign trail.
This book is one of the most insightful.
It's... an amazing journey that you took
on the road with Donald Trump.
The most romantic unromantic book I've ever ready.
Thank you so much for being on the show again.
-I really appreciate it. -Thanks, Trevor.
-(cheering, applause) -Katy anchors MSNBC Live
weekdays at 2:00 p.m.
Unbelievable is available now.
Katy Tur, everybody.