Appearing on AM Joy with host Joy Reid, part of the team behind the documentary "Get Me Roger Stone" revealed that the former Nixon henchman found a in Donald Trump a possible presidential candidate with some of Richard Nixon's instincts that led him to cajole and goad Trump into running for political office.
On the Saturday morning MSNBC show, documentary creators Morgan Pehme, Dylan Bank and Daniel DiMauro told Reid that Stone, along with other political consultants, looked to Nixon as a model for a candidate and came up with Trump.
"Roger and a lot of the political consultants have a long history of taking things that have worked in the past and fitting them for the modern era," Banks explained. "What he saw in Donald Trump was to take all the things that worked with Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan and he saw Trump had the ability to turn it all into a great tweet and to modernize it."
"He saw his charisma and over the years helped teach him the methods to turn that charisma into the presidency," he added.
"What Paul Manafort says in the film is that even though it's a Trump presidency, it's influenced by Stone's philosophy," DiMauro contributed. "What we found in studying Roger Stone's career and relating it to Donald Trump is that Trump doesn't have an ideology so much as a political philosophy. And that philosophy is win at all costs and that correlates also to Nixon."
"Of course Roger Stone started with Richard Nixon at the age of 19 and was the youngest person called before the Watergate grand jury and now, he is involved in Russiagate" he noted.
Asked later why so many people behind Trump have sketchy overseas connections, DiMauro explained how political consulting changed after Nixon.
"I think that a lot of these political consultants at that particular time and lobbyists could make a lot of money," he explained. "The consulting class gained so much more power. A lot of people went to look overseas for work -- lobbying and consulting work. There was a very small pool in the 80's andBlack, Manafort and Stone's firm was a part of it. Representing brutal third world dictators to lobby in the U.S. for foreign aid to support their war against the more leftist communist regimes that were rising, say in Africa."
"Roger Stone has also done work in the Ukraine," he added. "[Former Trump aide] Michael Caputo has also done work in the Ukraine working for Boris Yeltsin. That is their new bread and butter," he concluded.
Watch the video below via MSNBC:
