Haley Barbour - Former chairman, Republican National Committee HARDtalk

Welcome to HARDtalk with me, Stephen Sackur.

I'm in Washington DC to talk to a former chairman of the Republican

With every passing week the race for the Republican Party's

presidential nomination becomes more bizarre and increasingly bitter.

According to one Republican senator the fact that Donald Trump and

Ted Cruz are the two leading candidates is proof

What is happening to the Republicans?

Haley Barbour, welcome to HARDtalk. Thank you. You have spent all of

your addled life inside the Republican Party, can you remember

your party ever being in as big of a mess as it is in right now -- adult?

No wind I have been doing it since 1968, I read Oh! -- I dropped out of

college and worked for Richard Nixon and I have been involved in every

presidential campaign since then and I have never seen anything like

this. How did it happen? How did it get to a point where Donald Trump

who is the front-runner of the Republican Party is disapproved of

by 77% of the American people and to the most immediate challenge or, Ted

Cruz, has a disapproval rating of 60% -- challenger? Hillary Clinton

has a disapproval rating of the majority of Americans as well and it

is because most Americans are mad and many of them are scared. They

are mad on a bipartisan basis. If you look at polling, there is a

typical question of polling in the United States, asking whether the

country is going in the right direction or the wrong direction and

64% over the past few years have said it is going the wrong

direction. That is the average today. Only about 30% of Americans

are Republicans, so it is not just Republicans, it is independents and

Democrats and it is based on conditions in the country. This is

the weakest recovery since World War Two. The more you talk about the

alienation, the anger and the economic underperformance, the more

I am thinking, if after eight years of an incumbent Democrat, the

Republican Party must have their moment of golden opportunity, so how

come your two leading candidates, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz seem to be

so toxic to so many Americans? To quote Senator Lindsey Graham who I

am sure you know pretty well, he says, forgive my language here, he

says the party has gone bad ship crazy -- batshit. An old friend of

mine said he can't make heads or tails of this but it looks like

every time he turned on the television, all he saw were the

tales. That is many Americans are saying today -- that is what. Why is

that? Naughton the people who are advancing set themselves up as

outsiders and conservative media has become much more involved in the

campaigns and in political process. There has been a divide established,

conservatives tend to watch conservative news. Normally you

would think those conservative outlets would be attacking the

Democrats for bad performance but instead they are saying the

Republicans sold out, the Republicans surrendered. That is

exactly what they are saying. And may I say, you represent that party

establishment. You were a 2-term governor in Mississippi, you were

chair of the Republican national committee, if I may put it this way,

you are one of the big beasts of your party and it is precisely you

and your ilk that Donald Trump and Ted Cruz have the -- say have

betrayed the Republican Party. I don't take the blame for what

Congress does or doesn't do. In the 90s you ran the party for a while,

you were the chairman. That's right and we won the first Republican

majority in 40 years. But your point, many Republican governors are

very popular. Republicans in state governor have huge job approval. It

is Washington. And one of the reasons they have such low approval

appear is because the conservative media, much less than the liberal

media, doesn't say the Republican has passed 300 bills in the last

amount of time or that it takes 60 votes to get a bill to the floor of

the Senate and there are only 54 Republicans. There was a time when

conservative publications, of which there were few when I was starting

the business, would write, the Republicans are doing their dog Oh!

-- job, but they are being stopped in their tracks by Democrats. Today

it is that the Republicans are not trying hard enough. But they don't

have the votes. You worked for Ronald Reagan for a while and he

successfully reached out to the blue-collar, working-class

Americans. Many of them Democrats. And he wrought them into the

so-called Reagan coalition but ever since the Republican Party appears

to have failed to reach out to ordinary working and white Americans

as well as minorities -- brought. And the one thing Donald Trump

appears to be able to do is to tap into the white working-class.

Unquestionably, that has been something that he has done and it is

a positive for the party. It is positive but it is not dispositive

because while we are adding some people, and that is good, there are

many people who are very concerned about Donald Trump for various

reasons. He's 12 points behind Clinton, many think he cannot win

and something he may cost us the Senate but the other big thing is,

what will he do? He is not well-known to Republicans at the

grassroots level. Proposals are all over the lot. He's not like Ronald

Reagan. I will tell you something about Ronald Reagan, who I did work

for. He was hugely successful because he knew how to compromise

with the Democrats and get things done. That is why five out of seven

elections have been won following Ronald Reagan by Republicans.

Because they got things done. But that is the dealmaking compromise

based politics that people like Ted Cruz say is that the trail -- a

betrayal of everything that Republicans should stand for. But

those candidates... Virtually every other candidate wants to be like

Ronald Reagan. And bring forward his economic plan and the tax reform.

They were all passed when we had big Democrat majorities in house and

Ronald Reagan knew how to get done. The biggest anger in our party

today, the biggest contention is not over policy but over tactics. That

is what Ted Cruz has complained about. Remember he led the shutdown

of the government in 2013 which cost us the Virginia's governors race. We

would have won but it came right in the aftermath of the government

shutdown. Republicans don't like to shop the government down because

there are all kind of Republicans who understand that the government

has some functions that are necessary. This is what Ted Cruz

says about you. He says, the big businesses and lobbyists to get in

bed with career politicians do nothing but grow government and who

is left off that list? At the American taxpayer. You are the

archetypal politician turned lobbyist and Ted Cruz and his like

have had enough of you. Actually Stephen, I was a lobbyist turned

politician, just so you can get the chronology right. You made a lot of

money by lobbying and you have had a long political career as well but

the point is, you're kind of politics is not the kind of politics

that fires up the Republican base today. What the Republican base

wants is a performance toward success and they haven't got it from

this administration. They don't want a guy which represents the

Washington political machine and that is you. Donald Trump and Ted

Cruz are outsiders and you are the insiders. And insiders have had

their day it seems. Ted Cruz is anything but an outsider. Donald

Trump is also anything but. He talks about how he has given money to

politicians constantly and I think all of that is made up. He says he's

contributed to the Republican Governors Association but they have

never ask for anything. I have not seen that side of Donald Trump but

let's not act like he has not been a part of the way Everman works in New

Jersey or New York or Washington, DC -- government. If he wins the

nomination, will be back in and support him and work for him?

Whoever the Republicans nominate I will support. If it is Donald Trump,

no matter who it is, I will support them. Really? Absolutely. Any one of

our candidates would be better than Obama having a third term under the

auspices of Hillary Clinton. Even if you agree with Senator Lindsey

Graham who says that Donald Trump is a race baiting xenophobic bigot who

would be an absolute disaster for our party and would destroy

conservativism as we know it and we would get wiped out. You would still

support that? Let me make a point. I don't agree with Lindsey Graham on

all of that. I don't want you to misinterpret my answer. You support

building a wall to Mexico in making Mexicans pay for it and banning all

Muslims coming into the country? That isn't what you said Lindsey

Graham said. What he said was... I don't agree with Lindsey Graham on

that. He said Donald Trump with a race baiting xenophobic bigot and he

is of course alluding to the policies which include building a

wall with Mexico and making the Mexicans pay for it. And we know how

he described the Mexicans are coming to the United States. He also said

he was going to ban Muslims from travelling to the United States of

America. That is what Lindsey Graham was alluding to. Do you support

those policies? I am for immigration reform but because I think we need

to get back to the legal immigration and put a stop to illegal

immigration and I think most Republicans agree with me on that.

They don't go out and yell about building a wall or whatever. But we

have to secure the border. We also have to have a good legal

immigration system. But I want to go back to the question you asked me

which triggered all of this. Why would I support Donald Trump?

Because life is a series of choices and get the choice is Donald Trump

or Hillary Clinton, I will go for Donald Trump. Let's talk about other

things he has said. He has said he is sick of America bankrolling and

supporting Nato. He says it would be OK for Japan and South Korea to get

their own nuclear weapons and maybe even Saudi Arabia as well. He is

talking about fundamentally changing America's position in the world. I

don't know whether you agree with those positions but if you don't,

you are still saying he would support him because he is better

than Hillary Clinton? As you say, who would you rather elect, a

Republican or a Democratic nominee? It is not like some countries in the

world where they have multiparty systems. One of the two of them is

going to win and of the two, I think the country is in better hands, is

safer, will make more progress if the Republican nominee wins over

this is Clinton. Are you aware of how Donald Trump is seen around the

rest of the world? I want to quote you a quote from Martin Woolford was

respected economist for the Financial Times. He says the US is

the greatest Republic syndrome, The Bastion democracy and the guarantor

of liberal world order. It would be a global disaster if Donald Trump

were to become president. That is the way many people around the world

feel about what we are watching right now in this country. After

watching the last eight years and what has happened to America's

standing in the world, they should be worried that the standard is

going to keep going in the wrong direction because it has sure been

going the wrong direction the last eight years. I think a lot of what

Donald Trump is saying is hyperbole and I remembered his book how he

talked about how that can get you a long way but at the end of the day

you have to be able to close the deal with substance. A lot of the

hyperbole I think is way off the mark. But I will support him or

whoever wins our nomination against a third term for Obama and failed

policies. You have made that pretty clear so let's get to the detail of

how this is going to unfold over the next few months. Nobody knows the

Republican Party and its processes better than you do and we are

looking at a convention in Cleveland in July where it may well be, given

the way the vote count is going, that Donald Trump has not crossed

the threshold and got those 1237 delegates signed up and pledged that

he needs to get the nomination on the first vote. If he is not there,

it will go to a second vote when many of those delegates become so

called unbound, no longer tied to the guy they promised they would

vote for in the first round. Can you see a scenario where Donald Trump

has won the popular vote around the nation in the Republican primaries

by two or 3 million votes and yet is deprived of the nomination?

I worked for Ronald Reagan and in 19 semi six 1 million more votes and

Gerald Ford in the primaries but Gerald Ford got the majority and he

was a nominee for president and Ronald Reagan never whined or

complained, and he never threatened to start riots. He knew what the

rules when Andy play by the rules. The rules is that it takes the

majority of the delegates to win the nomination. Period. Not the most.

With all due respect, it has very little to do with Chrissy. Once you

see... Well he calls it dirty and discussing politics when people try

to persuade delegates to cross eyed and vote for someone who they were

pledged to in the first place. It is not look like democracy because it

looks like rye bread because they can free food and accommodation,

they get goody bags and all sorts of things come into play. Just remember

that delegates who were elected by state law, state structure are bound

to vote for a candidate. They are required by the rules to vote for

that candidate. In the first round. It depends on the state party.

Florida is three rounds and most of them are one round. The rules

suggest that if it comes to a third or fourth round vote it will get

very dirty. Donald Trump is said if he doesn't get the nomination with

the biggest number of votes he has spoken about riots and it is going

to be bad, real bad. How worried are you about the chaos that could

engulf your party? First of all, I think Donald Trump, or at least his

team knows that that hurts him in winning people support. That does

not help. To try to threaten and break the law. In the way that he

has been treated in some of these events to be saying that after the

way he has been treated, to me, is all the more unusual. Let me just

say. In our party we have a variety of systems for electing delegates

because we are the party that believes in the 10th Amendment state

authority that the states get to make their rules and the National

Party and enforce the state 's rules. I can understand if I was

sitting in some way in the UK today, watching the Republican or

Democratic nomination for president, I would think that this is the

craziest and wildest thing. Remember, it has been four years

since either party that has had a conviction that might go to a second

ballot. It has been 60 years since we went to a second ballot. Nobody

has done this. I've been doing this for 48 years and no one has seen a

second ballot. We're probably going to see this this time around. I want

to pin down with a fee you personally it would be a bigger

problem for the party to go into the general election with Donald Trump

or Ted Cruz? We haven't spoken a lot about Ted Cruz but there is no more

unpopular Republican Senate at his own peers in the Republican Party

then Ted Cruz. It is like picking your poison and which one would you

pick? The big issue is that Ted Cruz is also behind Hillary Clinton in

the poll. Party leaders whether they are the Washington establishment and

I understand that who you don't like it who you vote for. You were the

Washington establishment. The establishment is very slim. Is being

a while since you made your money in Yahoo! City. You obviously care

about your party and you thought about Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. Can

you imagine a scenario where a third candidate, and you can visit, comes

into the arena at the convention and actually gets the nomination? Things

should happen before. .Com could get to 1237. If he does not it becomes

three hard to him to stay up as high as he was. I think it probably goes

down on the second ballot because they have not had a strong ground

game and they have not worked hard about who got elected the delegates.

Ted Cruz finishes second on the bow at and I think he might rise. But I

don't think he will get to 1237. Could be the guy who finishes third

or fourth or could be someone who has not run a full? Paul Ryan... I

think he has made it very clear that he is not a candidate. Every one of

those scenarios is at that scenario the Republican. Number one has 70%

disapproval monthly American people. Number two is just not as

well-known and has very high negatives for people who know him

best. Number three, the guy who finishes third or fourth. Number

four. What you are telling me is that your party is doomed. No, I'm

not telling you that. We're not going to have a bump. The likelihood

is that we will have a dip. But I remember 1976 when Ford was behind

33 points and a week of the convention was over. A lot of Ronald

Reagan supporters said they will not vote for him because their feelings

were hurt. By up most of them were back helping Ford because they did

not want Jimmy Carter. And let me tell you that Jimmy Carter was a

walk in the park compared to Hillary Clinton in the eyes of Republican

supporters. Thank goodness our convention is in July and will take

so few weeks first to get over it when people start coming home.

Gerald Ford lost by two points. Down 33 with a disastrous convention and

lost by two points. I have not forgotten that and there is a lesson

there. If you give me one name who is going to be the public and

presidential nominee, who would be? I want a name. I respect you too

much to lie to you. We've dug away the process and it is got to be,

located and it is going to be ugly between now and July but surely

there is a much bigger problem with all the mess of a presidential

campaign. And that is this, increasingly your party looks

completely out of touch with the way America is today. One fact that a

majority of kids under the age of five years old in America today I'm

nonwhite, but you look at the Republican Party and who they really

speak to and for and it seems to be mostly male, mostly white, most

rural and that certainly looks to be that way. That is the way Democrats

picture at. Republicans think results determine election. Do

Republicans it to work harder like Chris Christie did and get 51% of

the Hispanic vote or Mitt Romney the year before had got 27? Definitely.

You have to get your hands steady and do some things and is not all

red rec and hyperbole. Or Ronald Reagan who was a great Conservative

and flew on bold colours. He would be spinning in his grave if he saw

what was happening in your party today. He really would because one

of the things he would never do it he would never disrespect people he

disagreed with. He understood that there are people who vote for me

every time with me who disagree with me on staff, so you have to remind

yourself that the person who disagrees with you 20% time is not

80% a traitor. Purity is the enemy of the victory. We're going to end

it here. Becky very much for being on HARDtalk -- thank you. Thank you

Stephen. If you were lucky enough to have

spring sunshine yesterday, you probably got some spring warmth

as well. In fact, it was beautiful -

warmest day of the year