Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a special series of discussions about US politics and the Trump presidency, or as we journalists call it, the gift that keeps on giving.

I'm Freddie Gray. I'm deputy editor-in-spectator. And today I'm going to be talking to Tucker Carlson, who is a Fox News anchor and founder and editor-in-chief of the Daily Caller website.

You're probably not going to like this, but I'm going to start by talking about the Michael Wolfe book.

You're probably sick of it.

But I think, it seems to me that the, I don't think Trump has necessarily been affected negatively by this book so far.

But the thing that surprised me is how quickly Steve Bannon has collapsed as a public figure. Have you been surprised by that?

I think that was a long time coming. Yeah. I think, I don't think I know that Trump was highly annoyed for a long time about the implication that

he banon got him elected it brought out his competitive instincts yeah he doesn't

like to share credit and you know it could debate how much credit he should share you know it's

entirely subjective conversation but um i know that the president resented you know the magazine

covers with bannon calling him trump's brain or things like that drove trump crazy yes and i think

bannon is a you know, is a difficult guy to get

along with in the first place. I think it's interesting that, I mean, both his friends and his

enemies think that Bannon has this dark genius. But in the last couple of days, you've seen

people coming out and saying he's not actually as smart as people think he is. I've never

thought he was particularly smart. Really? Ever. No, and I dealt with him extensively because he ran, you know, a website not so different from the one that I ran.

Yes.

And we had a lot of overlap and staff.

He hired a lot of my reporters, and we were running a for-profit company and he he wasn't he had kind of endless

funding from various donors and so um he just had a much higher budget than i had and so he

outbid me on a lot of different people and so i dealt with him a lot and i i never was impressed by him

not for one fact i thought he was profoundly unimpressive, but so is a lot of the country, and

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