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Fareed Zakaria GPS

How to Fight Terror, Lessons from Brussels; U.S. Politics Reacts to European Terror; Inside the Minds of Jihadis in America; Aired Historical Precedents in the Presidential Race; Previewing Tonight's "Race for the White House: Jackson Versus Adams". Aired 10- 11a ET

Aired April 03, 2016 - 10:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[10:00:00] FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN ANCHOR: This is GPS. The GLOBAL PUBLIC SQUARE. Welcome to all of you in the United States and around the world. I'm Fareed Zakaria coming to you live from New York.

We'll start today's show with the Brussels terror attacks. Do they showcase the strength of ISIS? Or the weakness of Europe? And what is the way to prevent the next bombing?

And other shows will tell you who's up and who's down in the 2016 races. But we are going to take a longer view. A much longer view. Is this race like 1968, 1944, maybe even further back? We have a great battle of history next.

And finally a book that has the potential to make your drink tastier and your life longer. I'll explain.

But first here's my take. The attacks in Brussels on the heels of those in Paris and San Bernardino have stokes an already white hard debate about Islamic terrorism in the United States. Many in the West including the two Republican presidential frontrunners, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, urge a campaign that targets Muslim communities more directly, searching for those who might be prone to religious extremism and thus terrorism.

But the recent bombings in Europe are being perpetrated by a new generation of terrorists who are upending our previous understanding of what motivates such people and how to find and stop them. To put it simply, today's terrorists are not religious extremists who became radicals but rather radicals who then became religious extremists.

The difference is crucial. Look at the two brothers who planned and executed the Brussels bombings, Ibrahim and Khalid el-Bakraoui. Born into a working class immigrant family from Morocco, they were not particularly religious and early on chose a life of crime. As the "New York Times" reported by their mid-20s, the two had participated in carjackings and armed robberies. Ibrahim was sentenced to nine years in prison for attempted murder. His brother, five years for armed robbery. And then, it seems, in prison or after, their path to jihad began. Their story is strikingly similar to those of many of the other

terrorists in Belgium and France. Few were devout Muslims. Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the ringleader of the Paris attacks, is said to have regularly used drugs and drank alcohol, as did many of his comrades-in-arms. In August 2014, the New Statesman reported on two British jihadists, both 22, who, before leaving Birmingham for Syria, bought copies of "Islam for Dummies" and "The Koran for Dummies."

Writing about young French jihadists, Olivier Roy, a French scholar of Islam, points out that almost none have a background in political activism, say, Palestine, fundamentalist Islam or social conservatism. "Their radicalization arises around the fantasy of heroism, violence, and death, not of Sharia and utopia," he writes.

The Islamic State is the ultimate gang, celebrating violence for its own sake.

These young men -- and some women -- are usually second-generation Europeans. In fact, Roy points out that often they are revolting against their more traditional, devout immigrant parents. They are unsure of their identity, rooted in neither the old country nor the new. They face discrimination and exclusion. And in this context, they choose a life of rebellion, crime and, then, the ultimate forbidden adventure, jihad.

Why are these findings so important? Well, they paint a picture of a new kind of terrorist, one who is less drawn into terrorism through religion but rather who has chosen the path of terror as the ultimate act of rebellion against the modern world -- and who then finds an ideology that can justify his desires. Radical Islam provides that off-the-shelf ideology, easily available through the Internet and social media. But it is the endpoint in the chain, not the start.

This still means that Muslims have to battle and eradicate the cancer in their midst that is radical Islam. But it does suggest that for Western law enforcement, bugging mosques, patrolling Muslim community centers and even fighting fundamentalist Muslims might be focusing attention in the wrong direction if the goal is to find terrorists.

[10:05:16] Those people might instead be in bars, drug alleys, unemployment lines and prisons, getting radicalized before they get Islamized.

For more, go to CNN.com/fareed and read my "Washington Post" column this week. And let's get started.

Let's dig more into the lessons from the Brussels bombings with today's terrific panel, John Miller is the New York Police Department's deputy commissioner for Intelligence and Counterterrorism. He's previously held top positions at the FBI and the Office of the Director National Intelligence.

Phil Mudd is a CNN counterterrorism analyst. After a long career in counterterrorism at both the CIA and the FBI. And Seth Jones is director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the Rand Corporation. He has previously held positions with the U.S. Specials Operations Command.

John, let me start with you. You said recently that the interesting thing about the Brussels attacks was you were witnesses ISIS going from inspiring terrorism -- San Bernardino -- to enabling it, in some cases that the NYPD caught, and now it appears in Brussels to actually directing it.

Do you have a sense that you're going to see more of this kind of ISIS directed terrorism that is sending out actual teams from Syria and Iraq?

JOHN MILLER, DEPUTY COMMISSIONER FOR INTELLIGENCE AND COUNTERTERRORISM, NYPD: I have no doubt we're going to see more directive operations through western Europe. Excuse me. If you look at -- if you get a sense of the network there and you come out from Mr. Abaaoud who ran the first the -- the Bataclan Theater Paris attacks from earlier this year, you see a sprawling network there and that's what you can see. There must be parts that are unseen.

So I think we're going to see that continue. The challenge is going to be as we're already seeing attacks that are inspired here, San Bernardino, enabled here, in cases we have in New York, we have the advantage of it. It would be harder to have directed attacks here because those people have to make it over. But it would not be impossible.

ZAKARIA: Phil, one of the things I'm struck by is people look at what has happened in Paris and in Belgium and they get very worried about the strength of ISIS. But I wonder, does it really show you the weakness of Europe, that is, you know, Brussels had six police departments that were not communicating with one another? European governments still jealously sovereignty on issues like intelligence? You know, they don't share information about problematic -- how much of it is that a problem? And did you have to deal with that one when you were at the CIA?

PHIL MUDD, CNN COUNTERTERRORISM ANALYST: Look, I think you got a couple of problems here. One is the adversary has the advantage of numbers that I didn't witness when I was at the FBI. We might have three, five, eight major cases going at once. 5,000 people in Europe potentially have trained in Syria. That's a remarkable problem. That said, the Europeans themselves hasn't had a problem I don't think they can't overcome.

If you want to combat this kind of threat that involves tactical sharing of information about your citizen, real time e-mail, phone, travel and the first question can't be, can I share information on my citizen with the neighboring state, it has to be soon as my target moves I've got to hand it over. The second thing is a bureaucratic --

ZAKARIA: And they don't do that.

MUDD: They don't do that. There's a simple reason why. If a citizen hasn't done something wrong you're potentially impeding his rights by telling a neighboring government, hey, this guy might be dirty, we're just not sure. The other problem we have is a bureaucratic reality. Until you sit together, virtual sharing in my experience is a form of bureaucrat, I hate to say it doesn't work. You have got to sit in the same place to feel the same reality of the threat. That combination of information sharing and sitting in the same place. Those are two things I don't think will happen in Europe.

ZAKARIA: Seth, we wrote a piece last November which has turned out to be incredibly fresh. Even prophetic. You said ISIS is losing ground. It is losing ground in territory, it is losing resources and you will therefore see an uptick of terrorism in Europe. Why did you make that prediction?

SETH JONES, DIRECTOR, INTERNATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENSE POLICY CENTER, RAND CORPORATION: Well, since 1945 we have almost 200 groups -- I call them insurgent groups -- that control ground. ISIS certainly does this in Iraq and Syria. They do it in other countries like Libya. But we see when groups like that that control ground and they use that -- they use their security resources to control the territory that they have. And they start to lose that ground. They'll often use those resources elsewhere. They'll lash out at governments that are evolved in conducting attacks in them.

[10:10:04] We've seen it most recently with al-Shabaab in Somalia that has lost over 50 percent of the territory it controlled a few years ago. And it's the violence levels have gone up 300 percent in the last two years. As it's lost the ground, it's lashed out to the Kenyans, it's lashed out to the Somali government. We're likely seeing that with ISIS now as it's lost about 40 percent of the territory it once controlled in Iraq.

I suspect it will continue to lash out as well against the Europeans, tried to last out against the Americans. And we're seeing groups do it for a whole range of reasons.

ZAKARIA: How do you protect a city like New York in a scenario where you're likely to see an uptick of this kind of violence?

MILLER: It's a three-tiered approach if you break it down. The first tier is intelligence. If you look at the plots that were being planned here last June, what you saw was good intelligence cooperation between the FBI, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, foreign partners overseas, the NYPD, we're able to identify that small network, map it out, put it under surveillance, gather evidence and disrupt it. So that's job one. Prevent it.

Job two is having a robust response in case it happens, which his as we learned from "Charlie Hebdo" and the kosher supermarket the year before, or more recently with the other Paris attacks, time on target matters . You cannot have -- and Fareed, you're one of the experts on this. You cannot have a Mumbai situation where they take over large buildings and hold them for a period of three days. You need a police department that is equipped to respond immediately -- immediate action, rapid deployment, effective tactics, and to put that down while the killing is just beginning.

ZAKARIA: And you beefed up after "Charlie Hebdo" so that you could deal with multiple -- attacks in multiple places in the city. Right? MILLER: Well, we went to Paris, we went to Sydney, we went to

Tunisia. We studied the attacks in detail and we asked the authorities to teach us what they learned and we took their lessons and we put them into effect here. We went from having 500 people trained in special weapons and tactics to 1800 in the course of those months. With the support of the commissioner and the mayor we were able to hire 1400 more police officers and 500 of those went to the counterterrorism effort.

ZAKARIA: Fascinating stuff.

We will be right back with more about all this. We're going to talk about Trump, Cruz and the politics of terror when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:17:07] ZAKARIA: And we are back with John Miller with the NYPD, Phil Mudd, formerly of the FBI and CIA, and Seth Jones of Rand.

So the most recent politics of terrorism is Donald Trump who in an interview said we don't need NATO. I don't understand why people care if it were to crumble.

Seth Jones, you've spent a lot of time in Afghanistan. People forget what's going on in Afghanistan is not an American struggle against what first al Qaeda then the Taliban, but a NATO mission.

JONES: Right. Sure. It's a NATO mission and when it comes to targeting terrorist in Afghanistan and actually neighboring Pakistan as well it's required sharing of intelligence across NATO countries, not just the "Five Eyes," the British, the Australians, New Zealand, Canada and the U.S. but a wider swath. Also help in targeting. So we've had European airplanes target Taliban, al Qaeda and more recently Islamic State terrorists in Afghanistan.

So U.S. simply does not have the resources to do it on its own and this is where countries with some capabilities to do it and with intelligence to share, it becomes absolutely crucial. We've seen it in other theaters including Libya as well. So NATO has been very helpful for the U.S. in countering terrorist organizations.

ZAKARIA: John, you spoke out when Ted Cruz made his proposal to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods. You and your boss, Bill Bratton, in effect saying don't ask the police to do things like this that are counterproductive, might even be unlawful. Did you get any pushback on that? Did you --

MILLER: Not a single bit, Fareed. And I mean, even the construct of what he was saying which is the federal government should authorize local police departments to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods against radicalization, first of all, the depth of that is less than an inch. It wouldn't work. Second of all, it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of American neighborhoods, but also American policing. The federal government does not direct local police departments.

ZAKARIA: Right.

MILLER: To invade local neighborhoods.

ZAKARIA: What happens to state's rights.

MILLER: And it's funny, from Ted Cruz, you know, a state's rights guy. But the subtext or the code word there is not patrol and secure. The code word was to intimidate. And that's just not the way it works in America.

ZAKARIA: Do -- you know, he pointed to the New York -- the NYPD mission that was described as eavesdropping on communities and mosques as being the one he meant. What do you think of that program?

MILLER: So that program is not what it was described to be. The demographics unit which according to many people who have misread it was the entire intelligence program of the NYPD. It started as 14 people.

[10:20:03] By the time -- by the time I got to the NYPD it had dwindled down to two, and that's because it's worked, which is something we did in the FBI, Phil, which was to map the demographics of the domain. It was to understand what our neighborhoods were if you had a tip that came in on a Friday saying three suicide bombers from -- pick a country, Bangladesh -- arrived last week and they're going to strike in Times Square. You didn't want to then start to look for what kind of the neighborhood would they go to blend in. Where would we go to find our sources and contacts?

You would want to pull that out, and say, all right, let's understand where we begin to look. That's what that unit did. Its job was mostly done because of all the adverse publicity. It was basically radioactive. The NYPD intelligence bureau is made up of 700 -- more than 700 people. Transferring those two detectives did not break the model and the fact that Ted Cruz and the sound bite-makers don't understand that is not surprising.

ZAKARIA: So we just got a minute but I want to ask you, you've talked before about how we shouldn't overreact on the basis of fear. I look at Trump and Cruz's proposals. They're not real proposals. They're just trying to push some emotional buttons. Does that have a real consequence in policy? Do you worry that -- you know, if there's another big attack, we're going to, you know, shred the Constitution?

MUDD: Sure. Because the responsibility of politicians when you're in an intelligence service is not only to lead the service, it's to tell the country how to respond. If you look at violent crimes in this country, a miniscule part of that is terrorism. It's opioids that are cheap, it's gang activity, it's drugs coming out for Latin America.

I think politicians in this environment have the responsibility actually to cool it off. We do not have a significant terror problem in the United States. The facts don't show that.

ZAKARIA: Well, stay with us. When we come back, we will take you inside the mind of American jihadists. What makes them tick. These gentleman have spent time listening to those tapes and they will tell you when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:25:59] ZAKARIA: And we are back with John Miller, Phil Mudd and Seth Jones.

Phil, when you were at the FBI you supervised the interrogation of a particular group of American jihadists. Now we all know the story, American Muslims are more assimilated.

MUDD: Yes.

ZAKARIA: Less prone to this kind of pockets of radicalization. But you did find one place in Minnesota where you had these Somalis who showed some of those tendencies. What did you --what did you learn about why these people get radicalized?

MUDD: It was the only time I saw comparison in America between what we have here and what you see in major European cities such as Brussels -- Birmingham, for example, that is an expatriate community, first, second generation after the Somali civil war in the early 1990s, comes over, lives in a closed society. Not a great economic opportunity, in some cases a lot of single mother homes and a lot of those kids, partly through an interconnectivity saw what was happening back home and got radicalized. So we have a spread-out demographic in terms of immigrants here. In that case we didn't. And I think it hurt us and it hurt the community.

ZAKARIA: John, when you -- you know, again, you've reviewed all these tapes of these radicalized jihadists. What stands out as -- you know, people look at the San Bernardino shooting and they say what made this happen? Now when you ask that of any shooter, that's a random element, this is one person who almost by definition is somewhat deranged. But is there a pattern?

MILLER: You know, with the inspired, I mean, and the people who are just watching the ISIL videos on the Internet what we see is a lot of loners, a lot of losers, a lot of people whose lives aren't going anywhere. So they latch on to something. With the enabled, which is the ones who are actually communicating directly with ISIS over social media channels that are closed, we see a couple of notches up. You see people who are in search of a purpose, in search of even adventure, as Phil will tell you sometimes, and better educated. And then the directed, I think, you know, we've seen in Paris, we've seen people who are -- have become ideological adherence including the things they don't understand. So it's a mix.

ZAKARIA: You said to me once, Phil, there was -- it reminded you of gangs, the way that people would join for the thrill, for the adventure. There was a sense of my life has no purpose and --

MUDD: That's right. I think people confuse what's happening now with religious extremism. I think of it more as a cult. A closed environment typically of young people who are impressionable. And there's one individual who usually is the force multiplier, who comes in and says, this idea is appropriate, nobody else in the group really understands the idea. They pretend they do so. I don't think of this often as religious extremism. I think of it more, as I said, as a cult.

MILLER: But, Fareed, it comes with a package. And if you have to boil it down to three things, the promise of all these groups just like gangs, and Phil will validate this, is valor, you'll be brave, you'll be a hero. Belonging, you'll be a part of something bigger than yourself. Empowerment, what you will do will matter. And when you have none of those things in your daily life, this is a powerful elixir.

ZAKARIA: Seth, do you get a sense of when you go out there, you know, Afghanistan, places like that, you see a similar pattern?

JONES: Yes, I think so. I mean, I think what belonging to a terrorist group means in many of these places is belonging to an organization that makes you feel like you're doing something worthwhile. You're part of an important social network. I mean, a lot of these people that do this -- I'm just going back from Turkey, a lot of people that Turks are identifying right now that are involved in the ISIS attacks we've seen in Istanbul and Ankara are individuals that feel like they now belong to an organization so they feel valor both in his life but also in the next life if they -- if they commit an attack. So I think we see similar trends across Europe and across the globe.

ZAKARIA: Thank you, gentlemen. Fascinating, fascinating discussion.

Next on GPS, the 2016 presidential campaign. It might seem unprecedented. But in some ways it feels like we've been here before.

[10:30:02] I have a great panel of historians and writers to talk about history and the 2016 presidential race.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

XXX ways, it feels like we've been here before.

ZAKARIA: I have a great panel of historians and writers to talk about history and the 2016 presidential race.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ZAKARIA: Turn on any news channel or talk show and the topic of the day is, of course, the presidential race. But I want to step away for a second from the talk of who's up and who's down, who won or lost. Instead, we're going to put this election season, so far, at least, in its place in the historical pantheon, to talk about the historical precedents or lack thereof for what we are seeing, the anger, the success of the political outsiders, the nationalism, the attacks on foreigners, the divisiveness.

I've asked some of my favorite writers and historians here today to give us a historical lens through which to view this election. David Remnick is the editor of The New Yorker. Nell Irvin Painter is a history professor emerita at Princeton University. E.J. Dionne is a columnist for The Washington Post. Geoffrey Kabaservice is a historian and author.

They're all authors and we'll tell you about their great books at the bottom of the screen because it would take too long otherwise.

(LAUGHTER)

David Remnick, every president, in a sense -- in some sense -- sows the seeds of the campaign to replace him. So when you look back at history, how do you think people will write about Obama?

You wrote a biography of his, but, going even further up, if someone were to write it 20 years from now, what would they say about Obama that produced this campaign?

DAVID REMNICK, "THE NEW YORKER": Well, there are a lot of issues that have transpired over the last eight years that could figure into a more comprehensive answer. But the theme of the book that I wrote was -- it wasn't so much a biography; it was a book about race and Obama. And here we are almost eight years later, and I think the sources of what you could call "Obama derangement syndrome" are largely about race.

And look -- look at how Donald Trump -- I get -- it's like a drinking game. I get, you know, the first drink for mentioning Trump first.

(LAUGHTER)

What has propelled Donald Trump's political career? I mean, he's been around New York's ego-scape for -- for decades as a -- as a semi- comical figure. But in an economic sense and in a political sense, what propelled him to the fore is his support of the "birther" meme. That's it -- and his challenging a sitting president's legitimacy by challenging the notion of where he was born, knowing full well it was nonsense.

ZAKARIA: Geoffrey, you're a Republican, a moderate Republican. You've always pined for the moderate Republicans. Do you buy that it's -- that Obama's race is at the center of the reaction you're seeing in the Republican Party?

GEOFFREY KABASERVICE, HISTORIAN & AUTHOR: I think it probably has something to do with it, but I wouldn't say it's the primary driver.

I think that what's driving Trump is really an eruption of populist sentiment, which we've seen at various points in American history, and specifically what's going on right now are the difficulties that a large segment of working-class white America is experiencing.

If you look at the data, the wages for blue-collar workers have been flat, in real terms, since 1970, whereas they doubled between 1940 and 1970. These are very difficult times. People are looking for answers; they're angry, and Donald Trump is one expression of this populism. ZAKARIA: So Paul Krugman was on this program, and he said, "I find

that every time somebody says something incredibly racist on the campaign trail, people say, 'Look, there go -- there goes another economically anxious voter.'"

(LAUGHTER)

Which -- which do you think it is?

NEIL IRVIN PAINTER, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY: Or they say 'I'm not a racist.'"

ZAKARIA: But which -- so do you think -- I mean, historically, is this another outburst of racism, or -- there is something to this economic argument, though?

PAINTER: There is something to the economic argument, but there's a whole lot more. And I am struck by how difficult it's been for moderate Republicans, conservatives, to see what's right in front of their eyes, and that is this outburst since Obama became president.

I mean, the first words out of their mouths was "He's only going to be a one-term president."

It's like, "This is our game." And I would like to talk about possible parallels in terms of the campaign. One is 1948, where, when Truman embraced black civil rights, all hell broke loose, and there was actually a separate party. The States' Rights Democrats -- we know them as the "Dixiecrats" -- they ran their own campaign. They ran Strom Thurmond. They got a few electoral votes in the Deep South. They did not win. Truman miraculously got another term.

But there -- it was very clear that the response was against black civil rights.

ZAKARIA: In your book -- you know, what I got out of your book was that there really are two almost separate revolutions that are taking place within the Republican Party. Tell me if you would agree. The first is the one you outline very nicely, which is that the Republican Party has been promising to repeal the New Deal, the Great Society, for 50 years, and never done it. And so there is this anger boiling up, which, in a sense, Ted Cruz represents.

But there's another one which Trump represents, right?

E.J. DIONNE, "THE WASHINGTON POST": Right, and the -- the first sense of the book is the history of contemporary American conservatism is a story of disappointment and betrayal. And that has to do with the sense of promises made and not kept. And they've had to make these promises to win support from their base. They don't keep them. Trump is getting a little bit of that vote.

But the other piece is that white working-class voters have been a linchpin of the Republican coalition for a long time. You can take it back perhaps to Nixon in '72, or certainly Reagan in 1980. And they have almost nothing to show for it materially. Indeed, their living standards have gone down, which is why, by the way, I think we can, sort of, see elements of both race and class in this -- these developments, at the same time.

In Trump, it's odd that a class war in the Republican Party is being led by a billionaire, or at least a man who claims to be a billionaire.

(LAUGHTER)

But that is what is happening because Trump's support is disproportionately from this constituency.

REMNICK: Isn't it just a switch in tone? You've had a party that has been using the racial dog-whistle since the -- at least the Southern strategy moment of the Nixon campaign.

PAINTER: Yeah. Yeah.

REMNICK: George H.W. Bush, however admired by Barack Obama in foreign affairs, employed Lee Atwater to use racist means in his political campaigns.

PAINTER: Lee Atwater...

(CROSSTALK)

REMNICK: Ronald Reagan, who is practically deified by not only the Republican Party but across the political spectrum, opens a campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and talks about the -- the greatness of states' rights, which is another kind of dogma.

So now you have a different kind of demagogue. He doesn't use the dog- whistle; he uses the claxon, the bullhorn.

(LAUGHTER)

PAINTER: The bullhorn, yeah.

REMNICK: And he's talented.

ZAKARIA: All right. We have got to take a break. We will be right back. I will ask David Remnick, who has reported from Russia for years, is Trump America's Putin?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ZAKARIA: And we are back with David Remnick, Nell Irvin Painter, E.J. Dionne and Geoffrey Kabaservice.

Let me ask, David, when you look at Trump and you look at the world of Europe, the former Soviet Union that you know, what are the echoes?

REMNICK: Well, you know, someone once invented a phrase called "illiberal democracy."

(LAUGHTER) And you have to take into account, again, there's a complex of factors here. It's not just the political talent of Trump or his timing or the self-betrayal of the Republican Party or the demographic or economic factors. There's also a worldwide trend here, that you begin to talk about, that -- where you have a distrust of democratic norms, an anxiety about immigrants. The browning of the United States is not limited to the United States. This is going on throughout Europe. It's happening because of Middle East immigration into Europe.

So you've seen the rise of autocrats and xenophobes, not only in smaller countries, like Hungary, for example, which is a distinctly anti-Semitic and racist regime, but in a power as enormous as Russia, which has become distinctly autocratic, a kind of culture war against gay men and women, the isolation of foreigners, of people who are not purely Russian.

So I think you have to see it in -- in broader terms. You see it in France with the National Front, with the UKIP in Great Britain.

Again, these are not perfect analogies, and it's a mystery to me how self-aware and historically self-aware somebody like Donald Trump is. But the other -- and the other factor is pure demagogic talent. Ted Cruz is not going to win, it seems to me, because he lacks the talent of attraction. People can't stand him. The votes he is getting are people that are fearful, it seems to me, of Trump.

DIONNE: What the fascinating thing is about Trump -- and this is the last thing I think he or his supporters would think -- is he does represent a peculiar Europeanization of American politics. Because, if he represents anything, it is an ideology that looks like the National Front in France, that looks like some of these right-wing parties in Scandinavia, or UKIP in Great Britain, because, you know -- and, obviously, it has an American tone; it has American elements, and Trump is...

(CROSSTALK)

DIONNE: ... uniquely Trump. But it has this -- this same kind of feel, which is ultimately partly why I don't think it will be successful in the long run.

ZAKARIA: What -- what does the Republican Party look like ideologically, going forward?

KABASERVICE: I mean, most political parties in American history have been coalitions of interests. The Republican Party has remade itself, really since the Reagan years, as an ideological party. But ideological parties are no more stable than coalitions of interest. And there are many different kinds of ideology that jostle against each other in the Republican Party. And Trumpian populism is one other kind.

And I think the real fear on the part of people who run the Republican Party is there's going to be a break-up within the ranks. And -- and this is the thing that worries people, that people are going to stand up against Trump, that they'll walk out of the convention if they don't get their way, and that the Republican Party is going to go through what it went through after '64 when Republicans lost all the way down the ticket.

ZAKARIA: Nell, what do you make of Bernie Sanders?

What do you make of him historically? What do you -- what can we learn from history?

PAINTER: We can learn a lot from history. And I recently posted on my Facebook page simply "1972." In 1972 I was a young firebrand, too, and I just loved McGovern. And McGovern got one state.

DIONNE: Massachusetts, my dear home state.

PAINTER: I was in Massachusetts at the time and I voted. We stayed up, and it was wonderful. It was, oh, it's going to change the world; it's going to change the United States -- one state. So that's one thing I take away.

I couldn't agree more with what Barry -- Bernie Sanders has to say about some of the -- what ills our country.

ZAKARIA: So you like him and support him; you just think the rest of America wouldn't, and so you...

PAINTER: No, no, there's more.

There's always more.

(LAUGHTER)

There's more. Looking back at '72 and realizing that, for one thing, what I like is not necessarily what masses of Americans are going to like, but also, now, how are we going to get from what I agree with in very large terms into getting things done in our political system?

And I think one of the weaknesses, sadly, of Hillary Clinton, is that she has been in it. She has had -- she has not been the president.

ZAKARIA: But isn't that a strength, that she can get stuff done?

PAINTER: I would have thought.

REMNICK: But she's complicit in everything that...

PAINTER: That is -- that is how it is...

REMNICK: ... Sanders is arguing, particularly about money.

PAINTER: Yes...

(CROSSTALK)

ZAKARIA: Were you surprised by Sanders?

REMNICK: I'm surprised by everything this time... (LAUGHTER)

... everything.

PAINTER: Can I say a couple of things? And this is personal, that I have noted over the course of this campaign that something new is happening. And that is that smart talking heads are now -- who are not black -- are now seeing the side of American politics that I have known for many, many, many years, and acknowledging it as part of our -- our politics.

ZAKARIA: You mean the racial...

PAINTER: And that is the xenophobia and the racism. It's not just -- Republicans are not just conservatives. So in this sense I feel more American, or I feel more at one with thoughtful Americans who are not black.

ZAKARIA: David Remnick, Nell Irvin Painter, E.J. Dionne, Geoffrey Kabaservice, thank you so much.

If you're interested in all of this, you will be fascinated by CNN's "RACE FOR THE WHITE HOUSE." Take a look at this clip where an Andrew Jackson faces John Quincy Adams for the first time after losing a presidential race to him.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: Andrew Jackson has just lost the election he thought was his. He now approaches its victor, John Quincy Adams.

DANIEL FELLER, PROFESSOR, UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE: Adams looked uncomfortable. He thought that there might be an explosion of temper from Jackson.

STEVE INSKEEP, AUTHOR: But he could be very controlled when it fit his motivations. You don't want to seem like a sore loser. But behind the scenes, his advisers were already thinking about the next election four years away and how to position Andrew Jackson to crush this man.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: See just how Jackson secured his position as president on "Race For the White House," tonight at 9 p.m.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ZAKARIA: The IMF recently approved China's yuan as one of the world's reserve currencies. It brings me to my question of the week. Other than China's, how many currencies have been granted world reserve currency status, two, three, four or five?

Stay tuned and we'll tell you the correct answer.

This week's book of the week is "Midnight at the Pera Palace: The Birth of Modern Istanbul" by Charles King. This is a terrific story of the slow collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of modern Istanbul. It's a story of politics, war, fashion, sex, all set against the backdrop of one of the world's great cities.

And now for the last look, which is, sort of, another book recommendation. It's called "the drinkable book."

At first glance, it looks like an average book with information about sanitation. But let's just say you wouldn't want to buy the Kindle version of this book. You see the pages themselves are water filters containing silver nanoparticles that kill bacteria. To use, simply tear out a filter, place it into a plastic filter box and poor contaminated water through it. The result, according to the book's developers, is safe, clean drinking water, something the World Health Organization says 663 million people around the world still do not have access to.

In fact, waterborne illnesses kill nearly 1,000 children every single day, according to UNICEF. The drinkable book is relatively inexpensive to produce and the pages are reusable. A page can filter 26 gallons of water, so an entire book can provide a person with clean water for up to four years.

Until recently, a small number of books have been made in the kitchen of a church. But the book's inventor, Dr. Teri Dankovich, and her company, are scaling up production and hope to distribute the book to communities around the would. During a recent test trip to Honduras, they say the drinking water showed 100 percent inactivation of the E.coli bacteria after using the filter pages.

They hope to include cartoons and pictograms, as well as to teach those who cannot read in the languages available about water safety.

Steven King once wrote, "Books are a uniquely portable magic." Well, this book certainly is.

The correct answer to the "GPS" question of the week is C, 4. The yuan will join the U.S. dollar, of course, the euro, the Japanese yen and the British pound in the basket of special drawing-right currencies when its new status goes into effect October of this year. The IMF said this was a, quote, "important milestone in the integration of the Chinese economy into the global financial system."

Thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week. I will see you next week.