It's very complicated. It's a long story, but the short version is I was in South Bend, Indiana, as a young person when the renewal movement began at Notre Dame University, the renewal movement within the Catholic Church and I was a Protestant and I was there. And there was a great demand for information in the Catholic world and in the Protestant world about what happened, what it waas. What does this mean? And so out of that demand, I ended up writing a book, and so I started writing.

my audience was the world. The book is entitled inside Trump's White House, and it's, uh it's interviews with the president and Jared Kushner and Ivanka and Eric Trump and Laura and Donald Trump Jr and Tiffany and, uh, all their closest friends. And my desire was to capture their voices as primary sources for history. And so that's what the books all about. It's their story. I'm asking them all the questions that you might want to ask. Everything I could think of, I asked, and that became the basis of the book.

book called All the President's Children, and it told the story of the Children of the American Presidents. And so it was a New York Times bestseller, and from that book I became recognized as an authority on presidential Children. Not because I'm so smart, but because nobody else had written about all the president's Children and I had and had interviewed, like 19 of the Children of the American presidents, which was quite a coup and quite a story in itself. So I had written the book All the President's Children. So when Donald Trump became president immediately, there were stories, uh, by the news media saying that this was unprecedented. It was illegal. It had never happened before. Uh, and I got a call from the BBC in London and they said, We want you because I had written a book All the President's Children. We want you to be on our morning show. It's our flagship show. It's people in London when they wake up for breakfast. This is what they see on TV, and it's very important show, but you'd have to come into the studio in the middle of the night. Washington D C. Time I lived outside of Washington, D. C. So I thought, Oh, I don't know if I want to do that but I finally agreed. So they send a car out for me in the middle of the night and drove me into downtown Washington, D. C. Which took an hour, and I did an interview and they asked, uh, isn't it illegal for the president to appoint? And I said, No, it's not illegal. Ivanka Trump will be the 18th son or daughter of an American president toe work in the White House for her father. It's not unprecedented, and it's not illegal, as you're seeing reported. But hasn't there been a law passed since John Kennedy appointed his brother that you can't appoint relatives? Yes, there was a law passed, but they found ways around it. They don't take a salary. They put their child on the RNC payroll. The Republican National Committee, if they're Republican or the DNC payroll Democrat National Committee. If they're Democrat, they give them an office chip. Carter worked for his father, Jimmy Carter. Susan Ford was on the photographic team at the White House and worked for her father, Gerald Ford. It's happened all through history. They said yes, but no woman has a Ivanka. Trump's a woman and they've never had a woman. I said, Oh yes, Anna Roosevelt was the daughter of FDR, and she practically ran the White House her last, his last year in office. In fact, she planned the Yalta conference. She decided who would go. It would be on the manifest and the whole conference from top to bottom. So Ivanka is not the only one. But why, they said, Why would the president want to appoint his own Children? I said, because the president very quickly learns that the most important quality and a staffer is not competence. It's loyalty, and child will be loyal to the parent, and chiefs of staff will come and go. But Ivanka will always be daughter. You can't be fired as daughter. She will always have a seat at the table for Thanksgiving dinner, and that continuity becomes very important in that loyalty becomes very important. So the car drove me back home. I got in my pajamas, went back to sleep, and I thought, Boy, I wasted my time. I did the show in London, England, but nobody's watching But I was wrong. Ivanka Trump was watching and she sent me an email and said, I saw you on television. Thanks. And that began a correspondence. And finally I met with her on several occasions and I said, You know, Ivanka, in 300 years they'll still be writing books about the Trump family and whether those books are good or bad. Whether they're portrayed like the Borgias are the meta cheese as an evil, rich, powerful family, or whether they're celebrated like the Rockefellers or the Kennedys. It all depends on primary sources. It's not what secondhand sources and thirdhand sources say. It's not what the New York Times thinks. It's what the president himself says and what you say, What Jared says. It's what the primary sources say that will be the basis upon which history will write their books and someone needs to write an official history of the Trump White House and capture those voices. And I would like to write that book, and she had tears in her eyes. She said, I'm going down to my father right now. I'm going to give him this memo and she called back the following Friday and said Congratulations. You can write your book. Eso It took another year to get all the permission because the White House is quite elaborate myth and the conflicting political agendas. But finally I got the okay, and that's how the book was written.