You mention these things, the tweets, the attacks on other people. Have there been any times throughout the election where you couldn’t get behind something he said?

Oh, once a week. Oh, totally. I mean, I still 100 percent support him, but yes, I am frequently denouncing the TV. Now it seems funny to me and I think it is part of his charm. And sometimes I think it is strategic, and I didn’t realize it at the time.

What about throughout this election?

When he went after Jeb Bush claiming that Bush’s brother lied us into the Iraq war. Look, you can oppose the Iraq war—I was an enthusiastic supporter, but I don’t think I would want to do it again now. I mean look at what happened. . . . In any event, when he said that during the [South Carolina] debate that Bush lied us into war, that was one of the times that I wanted to shoot my TV, but then, three days later, I realized that he did the Trumpian walk back as if he had never said it. He will always slightly modify what it is that he is apologizing for, and he never explicitly says, “No, what I said was wrong.” Suddenly he is just defending something else—which I totally love—a very smooth technique. But for the next week, every TV show, every radio show, it was all Trump versus Jeb, Trump versus Jeb, Trump versus Jeb. Well, South Carolina was supposed to be Ted Cruz’s fire wall. That was the big evangelical state, but you would have not known that Ted Cruz was running for president.

Speaking of walking back comments, a couple of weeks ago there was his “softening” on immigration. Obviously, you took to Twitter and were one of the loudest voices during that period. Can you talk to me about what you think that was about and what your reaction was?

At first I thought that this is not going to help him. He is not going to win one more vote, but he is going to demoralize his base. But I think that it had a few purposes. The main one was that by hinting at the softening he tricked every cable-news network into carrying his speech live. That speech was built up like the Super Bowl. That was all anyone was talking about for a week before. And I have noticed that the networks have not been showing his speeches live. . . . He has been giving fantastic, unbelievably amazing speeches, but the media aren’t showing his speeches, they are just saying, “Oh, it was dark, it was awful, you don’t want to see it. Trust us, listen to us, we will be the interpreters, no peeking, no going on the Internet.” So he tricked the networks into showing this magnificent speech live.

What is it about immigration that you think is the big problem?

Well, if you were going to use one word, I’d say “culture.” But I mean, part of our culture is that we are fair to the weakest and most vulnerable among us. American wages, I know everybody is doing great in New York City—they keep having Janet Yellen pump money into Wall Street—but we are headed toward becoming Brazil, where you have this very tiny elite—probably the readers of Vanity Fair, so they may not be on my side on this, but I think some of them will be; I think some of them see the benefits of having a huge, prosperous middle class in America. That’s what always set us apart, that we had an enormous, prosperous middle class. You go to Europe and they have their very wealthy elites, and then everybody else is, you know, a couple of steps above a peasant, basically.

“Most of the people who hate me haven‘t read me. I highly recommend reading me.”

I always thought that’s where the ugly American expression came from. Usually when we meet Europeans, well, we are only meeting the upper crust. When they meet Americans, no, all Americans used to travel to Europe—not so much in the past decade, because the middle class is just atrophying, and the working class, they are about two generations away from having begging babies. We’ve totally hollowed out manufacturing. In the 1980s, as I described in the books, there used to be about 20 million manufacturing jobs in America. The population has gone up astronomically. Now, we have close to 10 million manufacturing jobs. There are no jobs out there, and the rest of my party, their idea of Republicanism is to offer a tax cut? What does a tax cut do if you don’t have a job?