Goldberg: So you woke up angry. How soon after you actually wake up do you look at your Twitter feed?

Tapper: It’s on the way to the bathroom. I’ve made an improvement in that I now look at my e-mail first. But, so, that bothered me. I’m not worried about President Obama or President Bush’s feelings. But I know these Gold Star families. And I know that they remain—a lot of them—incredibly vulnerable, incredibly upset, and understandably so. So that just really bothered me. Within the course of an hour, the Scaramucci Post—which is, the whatever the heck it is, the web site or Twitter feed of the former White House communications director—is engaging in Holocaust denial. And then! Some nitwit on Twitter was comparing John McCain to Bowe Bergdahl, who just pleaded guilty to desertion. You know, President Obama loved John McCain and Bowe Bergdahl, and this is why I love Donald Trump—something like that. And Donald Trump Jr. liked it.

And I’m just like, I don’t want any of this to be happening. That’s my feeling about this. I would rather have woken up and none of that happened. It bothers me. It’s indecent. So I would prefer to not be so agitated. I would prefer this stuff to not be going on.

Goldberg: You’re maybe at your best when you’re a little bit peeved. But would you be better off if you just didn't pay attention to the passing noise of Twitter?

Tapper: I try not to pay attention to the stuff that’s against me. But the three things I just told you about have nothing to do with me.

Goldberg: One of them is so small. Some yutz on Twitter is comparing John McCain to Bowe Bergdahl.

Tapper: But Donald Trump Jr. liked it.

Goldberg: But that’s almost a reflex.

Tapper: But he knows better.

Goldberg: He’s not the president.

Tapper: No, but he’s the president’s son, and I know him a little bit, and he knows better, and it bothers me to see. And it bothered me when Democrats did this in 2008. It bothers me to see people denigrating John McCain’s military service. It bothers me. And when McCain was attacked by Trump—[Trump] said he wasn't a hero because he got captured. I found that horrendously offensive.

Goldberg: Was that the moment when you realized, Wait, something has gone awry in our society? That sort of thing should have killed the candidacy. But he actually became more popular with his base out of that.

Tapper: It’s so hard in retrospect to figure out which one was worse than the other.

Goldberg: The racism and misogyny and all the rest—let me say this as carefully as possible—those are things that could appeal to certain parts of his voting public. Some people who are racists voted for Donald Trump.

Tapper: Not everybody who voted for Donald Trump is racist. But plenty of racists voted for Donald Trump.

Goldberg: Veneration of veterans, specifically POWs, is known as patriotic conservative political behavior. And then Donald Trump flipped the whole thing on its head by attacking a POW for getting captured, which of course, when you think about it, is insane. This is the moment when the world went upside down.