Thank you very much. It is a great privilege for me to be here with you at the historic Oxford Union where you are committed to debate and free speech, something which is lacking in the United States these days. I salute you and I am deeply gratified and grateful for your invitation. It has been my pleasure to have worked for four American presidents, to have been involved in ten presidential campaigns, one of them for a Libertarian party candidate; Governor Gary Johnson, the others for presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, my great friend and fellow patriot Senator Bob Dole, George Herbert Walker Bush of which I have some regret and of course Donald Trump. But I must say that the 2016 election was an election in which all of those things that I thought were absolutely necessary and true about American politics, about modern politics in the age of mass communication all proved not to be true or at least to be suspended at least for the time of this most recent election.

Donald Trump was successfully elected President without benefit of sophisticated professional polling, focus groups, message testing, or hundreds of millions of dollars of paid broadcast advertising. He was a candidate who operated solely and completely on the basis of his instincts, on the basis of his gut. He had no speech writers, he had no press secretary, and he had no one preparing talking points for him. He is very much his own man. There is no Carl Rove in Trumpland, there never has been and I suspect there never will be, certainly not Rodger Stone and most definitely not Steve Bannon.