Clips, Sims, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to have you. So what a setup out here, man.
Oh, thank you. It's something else. We were doing a little tour around the room before I got in here, and I felt back because I didn't bring anything good. Now I feel like when I leave, I gotta find something that goes on this wall.
I got a couple of things in mind. I'll take that White House Brightling emergency. Don't know if I'll be able to... Real good in here.
Yeah, I don't know if I can come off that one. But yeah, I would love to have something, man. This is turning into a museum in here. It's amazing.
You know, it's some really, really cool pieces of history. There's a personal story behind all the things too. That's what I like about it. It's not just like, you know, that's a cool artifact.
It's like, well, there's a personal story behind that. Yeah. Some of the Blackwater guys that got pardoned, you know. Yeah.
Things like that that you go around the room and it's like, and somebody, something meaningful to somebody's life here and not just historically. Man, you know, the coolest, probably most important piece that I've got in here, I don't tell everybody this. Now we're talking about it on the show, but if you look at that flag up there, those rounds, you see those rounds. Yep.
So those rounds, my best friend was on the recovery op on the Red Wings operation. Yeah, yeah. The Operation Red Wings, yeah. So the Helos, the crashed.
My best friend was friends with one of the Rangers that secured the Helo crash and he was on the actual site with the fight happen where the sniper saw her. And the Ranger, his buddy gave him that, a belt of ammunition, 60 ammunition. And so that was the only thing that was not burned up in the crash. And so he snapped off, went around for every US service member that died and that was like his most prized possession.
Wow. And then he passed later on and those gave to me. Yeah. That's amazing.
Yeah, some heavy stuff in here, man. But, but anyways, I'm really excited to dig into what you have to talk about. You got two new book or one new book out. I think we'll talk a lot about both books and some of the stuff that you saw working in the White House, which I'm sure everybody's going to find really interesting.
So, but if you don't mind, I'm going to give you an introduction here and got quite the career. So bear with me, I'm horrible at reading out loud, especially on camera, but Cliff Sims, you served as deputy director of national intelligence for strategy and communications, helping to oversee the 18 agencies of the US intelligence community. In this role, you're awarded the Director's Exceptional Achievement Award in recognition of superior accomplishment and valuable service to the mission of the office of the Director of National Intelligence. You're previously special assistant to the president and director of the White House message strategy under President Trump.
You spearheaded communications for some of the administration's most notable accomplishments, including the successful passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and the Senate Confirmations of Numerous Cabinet Secretaries. You wrote a memoir of your time serving in the White House, which became an instant New York Times bestseller. In 2024, you were appointed by the Speaker of the US House of Representatives to serve as a commissioner on the US-China Economic and Scrut and Security Review Commission. You have founded, served as CEO and achieved successful exits in multiple companies in the private sector.
You've appeared on Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, CBS and ABC, and your opinions on national security, foreign policy and current events have been published in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Newsweek, the National Interest and Numerous Other Publications. You are a senior fellow in the America First Policy Institute Center for American Security and a board member of the Polaris for Polaris National Security. What is Polaris National Security? So it's a nonprofit policy organization focused on national security founded by some former Trump administration folks.
Interesting, interesting. You are a Christian and have participated in Christian mission work on five continents. What continents? So the South America, now you put me on the spot.
South America, North America, Europe, Africa, Asia. Right on. Husband of wife, Megan, and your six-year-old son, Shep, who you adopted from Columbia in 2020. Congratulations.
Your new book, The Darkness, The Darkness Has Not Overcome, Lessons on Faith in Politics from Inside the Halls of Power has been called the best book ever written in the genre of faith in politics and has received endorsements from former DNI John Radcliffe Senator, JD Vance, Donald Trump, Jr., Tucker Carlson, and many others. And I find this fascinating. You've been sued by Trump. And then he stopped the lawsuit and then asked you to come back.
Correct? That's true. Interesting. That's right.
That's true Trump-world story, only in Trump-world with that happening. Yes, I've seen it all. It's got a lot of people got in for them. But yeah, so we got a lot to dive into a couple things to knock out first.
I've got a Patreon subscription account. They're our top supporters. They've been here since the beginning. And they're the reason that I get to do this.
And you get to be here. So I give them an opportunity to ask a question each show. And we had some pretty good questions that for you that have to do with the National Security Intelligence. So this is from Stephen Casey.
What should we do in order to defang Chinese global strategy of dominance, asking for general core principles, and also some practical things, both nationally and individually? Yeah. That's a great question. It's the defining question of our time in a lot of ways.
I mean, one of the things that I realized in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and seeing all that intelligence coming in, and there's no question China wants to dominate the globe militarily, technologically, economically. They want to knock us off our perch. They want to set the rules of the road. And when everything done on their terms, and they'll do anything it takes to accomplish that.
So the first thing I think that we have to do from a principal standpoint is identify that fact. I was in a US China Commission hearing this past week debating with a witness over whether China wants to follow the rules or not. We were talking about trade rules. And she was trying to say that if China understands the rules, they want to follow the rules.
And I said, basically, ma'am, I'm trying to wrap my mind around how you could possibly come to that conclusion based off of their history. And I even cited a specific example of China, the Chinese stealing the technology of an American wind turbine company, standing up their own company and putting that company out of business to become the dominant market player. And this is extrapolated across a million different companies and industries. There are still people in this country in very senior positions who are not willing to say that China is not a friend of ours.
They are an adversary of ours. Now, does that mean we want to go to war with China? No. But we got to be honest about this is not just a friendly competition among rivals and peers.
This is something more insidious than that from their intentions. And so I think the first principal is being willing to say, call China what they are and that is an adversary. Who is briefing you this? The China wants to follow the rules.
Well, that was a think tank economist who focuses on trade policy who is saying that. Yes. I mean, do they have any information to back that claim up at all? Or are they being painted?
So her explanation was that I had basically spent all of my time looking at national security and not economic security. And she made a delineation between the two things and said that because I'd been looking at national security information, I did not understand that China economically wants to follow the rules, even if they color outside the lines in the national security side of things. I mean, it was just like this very tortured explanation from her end. Wow.
Yeah. So call him an enemy. That is number one. And secondly, I think we've also got to be willing to call out people in our own country who are undermining American national security interests to further their own economic means.
There's a lot of money to be made in China. There has been over the last couple of decades. And we think about things like, let's take Sequoia Capital, for instance, one of the largest venture capital firms in America, legendary venture capital firm. They taught the Chinese how to do venture capital.
And they set up Sequoia China over there. Now, because the political dynamic has gotten a little hot over the last couple of years, they broke off Sequoia China. Now, where it's a separate thing instead of inside of the same company. But you have to understand that Americans built the Chinese economy.
Up until only about three years ago, military men and women in this country who put money into their retirement, the Thrift Savings Plan. You probably got a Thrift Savings Plan. I was too dumb to sign up for that. Just being honest.
A lot of members of the military and government workers are putting their money on the Thrift Savings Plan. Up until just a few years ago, the Thrift Savings Plan was investing in Chinese state-owned companies. I was ahead of my time. All right.
So you knew not to sign up before it was cool not to sign up for it. So I had to pass a law to basically say, we shouldn't be doing this. That's just one example. And certainly members of the military didn't do anything wrong.
And the people that are managing those investments on their behalf. But we've got to be willing to say, to Wall Street, to Silicon Valley, we've got to call these people out and say, it's wrong what you are doing. And I'm very hesitant ever to draw a comparison to the Nazis. But it's analogous to, would you have been wanted to be invested in German state-owned companies in the lead up to World War II?
Would you have ever invested to the height of the Cold War in Soviet companies and the lead up to the Cold War in the middle of the Cold War? I mean, there's some real parallels here. And so being willing, but that's not popular to do that, especially for politicians, because those same people that are making a bunch of money off of that, are the people that are donating the most money to campaigns in this country. So being willing to take very difficult political stands is another thing that I think is very, very important.
And I could go on about this all day. But the other thing that we have to understand is from a principal standpoint. We didn't get here overnight, and we're not going to get out of it overnight. The difference between the Chinese threat that we're facing today and what happened with the Soviet Union during the Cold War is that our economies were not intertwined the way that ours are with China.
And the Soviet Union was not in the global economy, the way that the Chinese have put themselves into the global economy. Again, we caused this. We brought China in the World Trade Organization. We normalized trade relations with them.
We propped up their economy. We invested millions, billions, trillions of dollars into their economy over there. This happened over the course of decades. So we've got to do this over the course of decades to get ourselves out of that.
But how do you eat an elephant one bite of a time? And we've got to start taking bites every single day. Little bite here, little bite there, shoring up our supply chains, building our industrial base back, rebuilding our military, all of these different things we've got to be doing at home while being willing to decouple from China and build consensus around the world that we cannot be in business with the Chinese. The countries around the world are allies.
Can't be in business with the Chinese the way that we are right now, only over time by taking those little bites or we're going to get to the point that we can truly confront that threat. What about just buying American? Or maybe not even just American, because it's hard to do now. What if you just don't buy made in China?
Yeah, it's hard to do stuff. It's really hard to do. And this is also placing a real expectation on a consumer to have your regular person out there and you're making 50 grand a year. And you're trying to put food on the table and trying to like what car are you going to buy?
What American car are you going to buy? What, you know the TV sets that you have in your house, any electronic device that you have. You have an iPhone, all of those are made in China. At this point, I mean go down the list of these things.
It would be a real expectation for people to take money out of their own pocket to pay a little bit more to buy American. 100% think that's a worthy cause to pursue, to build national consensus around these things. My only problem with that is I'm going to look at the person who's making $35,000 a year in the eye and say you should sacrifice and do this while I'm allowing somebody in Wall Street and Silicon Valley to make billions of dollars investing in China. One of those things has got to happen before I'm willing to do the other.
Yeah, that's a good point. Thank you. Thank you for clarifying that. And I have no idea what this is.
I've never looked into this, but I find it interesting. This is from an anonymous person on Patreon, but do you know anything about a Delta Raid on a CIA server farm in Germany referenced by General McCurney? I have no idea. Me neither.
Okay. I love it. I love that. But when you run a business, you track every dollar and your bank shouldn't make that harder or hold you back.
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More information on APY rates. My pay slot, me, and trailworks, go to chime.com slash disclosures. But Cliff, everybody gets a gift before we start the interview. This isn't what I think it is.
Don't be upset. Hey, any guesses? I want the gummies. Oh, there you go, man.
There you go. My son will very much appreciate that. A gummy bear fanatic. Nice.
Thank you for these. You're welcome. Well, those are made in America. So it might not be the healthiest thing, but they taste good.
So, well, Cliff, I'd like to start with just what exactly could you give us some insight on what deputy director of national intelligence for strategy and communications is? Yeah, so in the office of the director of national intelligence, there's a pretty small front office that are the closest advisors to the director of national intelligence. And there are some of them have titles like chief of staff or deputy chief of staff and others are deputy directors or assistant directors, that kind of thing. And so I was in that first ring of top advisors around the director of national intelligence.
And my focus was on a couple things. Number one, interfacing with the White House. I had worked in the White House previously, so I knew all the senior staff there very well. All the folks on the National Security Council very well.
And so I've interfaced a lot with our counterparts in the White House on things that we were dealing with. And then from a communications perspective, I have to admit that before I got there, I didn't know how much communicating you can do when all you can say is I can either confirm or deny. Right? And so, but I'll be honest, we were stunned when we walked in the door, the first day we get there, and the person's kind of on-boarding, so I hate you want to go and meet the communications team.
And I'm like, well, how many of them could there possibly be here because again, all they can say is we can either confirm or deny. We go downstairs like 25 people on the communications team there. I'm like, well, what do y'all, no disrespect to anyone here, what's everybody here do? You had a couple of speech writers over here.
You had people that interfaced with the press over there. You had all that. I mean, dude, it was crazy. And really, it first kind of insight to like, this ain't right.
We shouldn't have 25 people in here that are pressing comms people in the office of the director of national intelligence. And so in the event that there was a press issue that we were dealing with, I would be the one that would have to try to navigate that. And it's a whole new comms challenge because often you are talking about, I've gotten phone calls from major journalistic outfits that somehow found out about something that we may or may not have been involved in. It's a Delta Raid in Germany.
Whatever that was. It was something like, I would get very similar inquiries from reporters and then having to navigate those things because sometimes there's still serious national security implications, but also lives could be at stake. So is this something that we need to try to talk, if a news outlet is going to publish that, do we need to try to keep them from publishing that and make the case to them of why there could be lives at stake for them to publish this? In other cases, I just had to say ignore it or no comment because it was something that we perhaps were involved in that I just couldn't talk about or sometimes we actually weren't involved in whatever the thing was, but I couldn't say that we weren't because that would expose maybe who was, but you know, so it's a lot of different things you have to navigate from a communications perspective.
My favorite story about intelligence community communications. Do you know the phrase, where the phrase, I can either confirm nor deny came from? I don't. So way back in the Cold War, we find out that the Soviets have lost a sub in the Pacific Ocean.
They don't know where it is, but we do. So we gotta come up with the way how we're gonna get this submarine and we also have to do it in such a way that the Soviets don't know what we're doing. So some of your former colleagues in the CIA, how to plan. We're gonna build a giant ship and the ship's gonna open up in the bottom and a giant arm is gonna come out of the bottom of the ship, go down to the bottom of the ocean and pull this submarine up.
But obviously that would be quite an operation. So we can't let the Soviets know what we're doing. So we gotta cover up with a cover story for what we're gonna do. So they contact Howard Hughes, what billionaire, kind of eccentric billionaire, how the Elon Musk of his day in some ways.
And they say to Mr. Hughes, we want you to be the cover story for this and we want you to say that you are mining some kind of rare mineral off of the ocean floor. Because you're such an eccentric billionaire, people will buy this. Howard Hughes says, sounds good to me, have at it.
So they build this ship, the Glomar Explorer, they go out, they find the submarine, bottom of the ship opens up, arm goes down, they pull the submarine up, breaks in half, about halfway up when they're pulling it. So they're able to get some of the ship, some of it was lost forever. So did we get good intelligence off of that? Some say yes, some say no, but there's a lot of, you know, a lot went into that.
Billions and dollars built this ship, the whole deal. And people thought, well, whether we got good intelligence out of it or not, no one will ever even know that this happened. Until one day, I believe it was the LA Times. Something a weird series of events finds out what happened and they contact CIA and they say, did you guys build this ship with an arm to get a Soviet submarine and use Howard Hughes as the cover story, the whole thing?
The first time ever, CIA said, we can either confirm nor deny the Glomar Explorer, was it, you know, the whole thing, that's where the phrase we can either confirm nor deny came from. Man. So to this day, if one of those requests would come in, somebody would say, just Glomar, in other words, just say you can either confirm nor deny. Man, so does that, this is the majority of the time being yes.
I will say sincerely, sometimes it's yes, sometimes it's no. I mean, genuinely, and there's a lot of reasons why you would, even if the answer is no, that you would still need to say I can either confirm nor deny. But yes, it's genuinely not a tell one way or the other. Who makes that determination on what the response is gonna be, is that you?
It would be on most things, but if it rose, I mean, it depends on how important of an issue it was. I mean, they're very often where Director of National Intelligence and I talk about the response to, especially operational things. If this is an operational topic, we would certainly talk through what we do. And more often than not, you just don't even respond to those.
But it's again, it created some very unique challenges from a communication standpoint that I've never experienced before. I'll bet. So, I mean, so did you have insight into just about everything that's going on? Well, I would say not nobody really does.
Nobody really does, just because the scale of it is so vast and I didn't need to know everything. But certainly most of the things that were flowing into the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that would have been in the room for. All right, what's going on with the UFO stuff? So I actually talk about that a little bit in my new book.
Really? But it's not going to be very satisfying. Oh man, come on. Well, everybody who's ever wondered what goes on in the White House or wonder what goes on at CIA or what it is, always wonders like, are these normal people there?
Or aren't you curious too about all these things? The answer is yeah, when we got there, the first thing I said is, all right, somebody will out the bodies. Like I want to say the alien bodies, I want to say I'm joking about it, but like sincerely want to know what's what with this? I mean, how can you not be curious?
How can you not be curious about the JFK files? How can you not be curious about? Go down the list of these kind of legendary, column conspiracy theories, column, whatever you want, like we want to know. So when we got there, we wanted to know, they call it the UAP program, unmanned aerial or unidentified aerial phenomenon or whatever they call them now, the euphemism for UFOs.
So the people who brief on these programs come to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Now to be in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, you have to have the highest security clearance that the US government offers. I mean, these people that are in this office see to your point everything. And they're preparing the president's daily brief every day.
So they are seeing the most sensitive intelligence that the US government has. Well, when we got there, you know, naturally, kind of the senior team wants to be in the room to hear, let's get the briefing too, let's get the briefing with the director. And they kicked everyone out of the room. Are you serious?
Like everyone out of the room said, well, we're here to give the briefing to the director. And so even the people who saw all the most sensitive stuff in the US government, that's how sensitive they were about being willing to brief that. And that's about all I can say about it. So it is legitimately the top, top, top level.
They are very, very sensitive about who has access to those programs for sure. Wow. Yeah. That's pretty telling.
I mean, that alone is very telling to me. Interesting. Interesting. Well, let's move on.
How did you, I mean, you came from, you had a media company. What was the name of the media? Yellow Hammer News. Yellow Hammer News.
So it sounds like, how did that start? So Yellow Hammer State, Berta Valabama, I was based in Alabama, that's where the name came from. But I had worked on a campaign in 2010. First thing I ever did in politics.
It was a big year in Alabama because people don't realize this. Now, like Republicans had not been in control of the Alabama politically in 136 years since Reconstruction. Up until 2010, Republicans took over. And so it was the first thing I'd ever done in politics was manage a campaign during that election cycle.
And coming out of that election cycle, I had gotten to know everybody who came into power. I knew the governor and the Speaker of the House and the pro-sim of the Senate and all of the different people. And I didn't know what I was going to do next. But I figured I was going to keep kind of doing political consulting.
And so I started a blog that was basically the inside story of what's going on in Alabama politics. And my thought was, if I can show that I know what's going on, maybe people will hire me to be a consultant for them. And what actually happened was the thing exploded and just blew up into a full blown news outlet. And we had millions of readers and a statewide radio network.
And I hosted a daily radio show. It was not nearly as good as Sean Ryan's show. But it'd be that as it may. I had one.
And that's what I was doing. And in 2015, one of the guests on my radio program was an upstart political candidate for president that people didn't really think had a chance. His name was Donald Trump. I thought it was a joke.
Candidates see some people dead at the time. And he was coming to do a big rally in Alabama. And this rally is now kind of legendary now as the moment where people realize this is real, because like 100,000 people showed up or something just like completely nuts in a stadium in South Alabama. But Trump called into the radio show to promote that he was coming to the state.
It was the first time that I talked to Donald Trump. And I was 2015. I had a good interview. It actually went viral because it was the middle of the summer.
And out of nowhere, Trump started riffing on Christmas. Saying that we're not allowed to say Christmas anymore. They wanted to say happy holidays. And then when I get in there, we're going to bring Christmas back.
I can't remember what month it was like June at that time. But I was like, OK, the interview went viral. And about a year later, Senator Jeff Sessions, who became Trump's attorney general, I had known him very well because I covered him as an Alabama politician. He called me and said, they're trying to fill out the team up there in the Camp Trump campaign.
And I really think you should consider taking the leave of absence and go and work on the campaign. And if he doesn't win, you go back to running your company. But if he does, who knows where it could lead? Wow.
So I thought I was going to have maybe a few month experience up there working in Trump Tower for the president. And it really changed the trajectory of my life, to say the least. So that's how I ended up in Trump World and up in the White House and later ended up as Deputy Dina. I mean, how was it leaving your company?
I mean, it started from nothing. Yeah. Blue up, millions. I mean, radio shows, TV shows, did you say?
Radio News Network, like a syndicated network, the online media hub, the whole deal. Yeah, it wasn't hard. And really, the reason was I'm all about experiences. Money, who doesn't want money, right?
I like to have more money. I was like, sure. But really, I want to have a life that I look back on. And it's like, man, that was interesting.
It went a lot of different directions. I've been the lead singer of a band. I played college basketball. I started companies.
I worked at the White House. I worked at DNI. I worked at DNI. Before you were 40?
Yeah, because I want to do interesting things. When the opportunity came for the present, it's like, do you want to come work in the White House? Yeah, I want to work in the White House. And then the White House council said, okay, you've got to sell your company.
I said, oh. Okay. And so that was an ideal because I had the people who wanted to be interested in buying the company new. I had to sell it by January 20th on inauguration, or I wasn't going into the White House.
So I had a short fuse there to sell it. So that wasn't fun. And certainly anything that's your baby. It's hard for me.
It still exists for this day. And there are times when I read things on there and it's like, I wouldn't have done that. Or I would have covered the story differently. And it's hard not to be like, man, that's my thing.
I still have a lot of affection for it, and it was a season of my life that I loved. But it's not hard to tell the president of the United States, y'all come serve my country in the West Wing or the White House, where the only office between my office and the Oval Office is the Roosevelt Room. Yeah, I'll do that. So yeah, it was a no-brainer.
That had to be surreal. I mean, what was it about you that you think caught Trump's attention? Well, at that point, especially, people really don't understand how small the team was. There were, I think at the end of the campaign, there were five Hillary Clinton staffers for every one Trump staffer.
And before that, it was even, the disparity was even greater. I mean, the Clintons had this giant juggernaut of an operation. And really, the Trump campaign was split into two groups. You had a small group of four or five people who were on the plane with him going around the country.
And then you had a group of us, probably 25 of us, in a war room on the 14th floor of Trump Tower, that, and that was kind of it. I mean, people talk about what was, and there were other little advanced staffers, and there's other people out there working on it. But in terms of what Trump would think of as my campaign team, the people that he knows, we're only talking a couple of dozen people here at that point. And so he gets full credit for the 2016 campaign, because people ask me, what was the campaign?
It was one guy on a microphone. That's what the campaign, and that's why they thought he was going to lose, because Hillary has all these staffers, and they're spending all this money on advertising, and they're doing all these different things. And meanwhile, it's Trump going around the country, speaking to tens of thousands of people every day. And even on the last 48 hours of the campaign, I won't get this exactly right.
I think he did 10 rallies in the last 48 hours. Wow. Like back to back to back to, like, do a rally, get on the plane. Do a rally, get on the plane.
Do a rally, get on the plane. Up till like midnight on election, the night before the election, he's like in North Carolina or something doing a rally at one o'clock in the morning. It's like a seventh rally of the day or something like that. He was just relentless, taking his message directly to the American people.
So how did I catch his attention? I think one is a small team. And then the second thing is, one of my roles on the campaign was anytime that the president would shoot a video message. I was his guy there with him shooting the video message.
And Trump is a TV guy, right? That's his background. So he really is particular about, I want to be lit this way. I want to be shot from this angle, the way that the remarks are written or kind of unique to the Trumpian way of doing things.
He likes the background to be a certain way. All of these different, like, very nuanced things that are his likes. I got to know those things. And I was there with him for a lot of those things.
So that's how I got to know him personally during that time period. And so when I came into the White House, I was still doing that anytime from Trump's shot a video. I was there with the White House Communications Office, the military guys, Waka, that shoot all those videos. It was me and all the military guys shooting those things.
Because I knew his likes and dislikes. And here's how we need to set up the teleprompter. And here's how we need to set up the lighting. And here's how we need to look at the remarks and say, well, he ain't going to say that.
Let's get rid of that. Let's do this. So I got to know him really well and he had a comfort level. I think that I was going to make sure to take care of him, that he was going to be presented in the way that he wanted to be presented.
So that's how I got to know him. Very interesting. So before you went into intelligence, you were in charge of all communications? So not all communications, but I was in charge of messaging.
OK. So the delineation there is I wasn't dealing much with the press directly. I was dealing with working with the speech writing team, building, for instance, for the tax, big tax cut that Trump passed, helped develop. How are we going to talk about this?
OK. What is the messaging that we're going to use? And then the communication and press teams would push that out in different ways and we'd come up with different ways to get the message out. So I was in charge of the initial message.
But even that, Trump's in charge. Trump's on communications director in a lot of ways. I think we've all figured that out. So basically, you're part of the think tank and strategy before any messaging goes out.
That's right. OK. You mentioned it kind of started as a joke on your media outlet. People didn't take it seriously.
When did you notice kind of a flip? I'm just curious. This is just personal curiosity. What did you notice a flip happened?
That rally in Alabama was really an opening moment for a lot of people. And I would include myself in that. It was held in Mobile, Alabama, which was strategically really smart because you had the Florida Panhandle. They could get there.
You had Mississippi and Louisiana down on the coast. They could get there. You could have Alabama. They could get there.
It's kind of this like cross section of a lot of the hardcore Trump base that we know it to be now. It gave them all an opportunity to just go and have what the Washington Post described as a mix between a Leonard Skinner concert in Talladega. Like they all just came together and were like, this is our guy. And when that many people show up to something, people just spent their time to come and stand out in the heat for hours to hear what this guy has to say.
That's not a joke anymore. That there's something real underpinning that. And of course, in retrospect, I think we understand more that Trump had put his finger on an issue set that was completely unappreciated in American politics. You had the immigration message.
You had the trade message of how China and other countries have hollowed out America's industrial base. And these towns across the Rust Belt that no longer exist anymore because we have allowed other countries to do all our manufacturing for us. And not only, we were, all the economists said, well, that's you're going to get cheap goods. But what they didn't talk about was you're also going to have a crisis of the family across the Midwest of our country where young men no longer have a place to go to work and find meaning and purpose in their lives.
And it's going to decimate their families economically. You're going to see a rise of opioids that we're even seeing today, the drug issues in those communities, all of these things that have happened subsequently. Trump intuitively understood that even as a billionaire in his tower in Manhattan. And I wonder how.
And I can really only think of like he was a builder. So he's around builders all the time. He was around people that work with their hands all the time and interacted with these people and heard their problems and their concerns and the things that they were scared about. And even if they didn't affect him in some way, because he's a billionaire, he understood the importance of those issues.
So the immigration issue, the trade issue, the tough on China issue, all of these things now that we kind of identify with Trump, we take for granted now because he talks about them all the time, but no one was talking about these things. And certainly no Republican was talking about these things. So I even growing up as like a conservative and being around political politicians starting about 2010. And so I'd leading up to that point.
So for five or six years, I've been involved in politics and really kind of paying attention. No one talked about those things. So when I started getting calls to my radio show and getting emails into readers are critiquing our coverage, I started realizing, man, there's something much more powerful here from an issue standpoint, certainly the personality is larger than life. But from an issue standpoint, there was something there that he hit on that it just took me and others, I think, some time to really understand.
Interesting. Interesting. What's it like? I mean, what was it like working for him?
It's, it's, he obviously pisses a lot of people off. You know? But I'm genuinely curious. I mean, because there's people that I have a lot of respect for, you know, that they left that administration, you know?
Yeah. And I don't know what happened. But let's, let's one, for example, General Mattis, you know, to see a guy with that reputation. I don't know if you're familiar with his reputation with the military, but the, and I don't know what it's like anymore, but you know, since he left, but wow, like Marines, everybody once is dying to work for an individual of that caliber and his, you know, reputation.
I mean, everybody knows about that guy. And so to see somebody like that leave that administration, it just leaves me with a lot of questions. Yeah. Well, so we can, we can kind of two questions there.
One is what's it like to work for Trump? The second is we can talk about the Mattis one specifically, because I've spent a decent amount of time with him while I was there. And kind of I think understand some of the backstory of that. I personally don't have a single negative thing to say about having worked for Trump.
And I've been sued by the guy. Yeah. You know? So I've seen every side, I've seen every side of it.
And we can get into that, you know, kind of what happened there. But in terms of actually working for him, it is different. It's unlike anything I've ever experienced. And I can see how it wouldn't be for everyone.
But personally, I've found the characterization as Trump as someone who's just like, you know, he's just the you're fired guy. And it's just like flying off the handle and yelling at people and going, you know, wow, all the time to not be my personal experience. He never yelled at me in a way that wasn't any different than like, you know, that I found that unusual. You know, you certainly wouldn't find it on you.
Anybody in the military certainly wouldn't find anything that you did unusual. Me as a college basketball player, my basketball coach probably yelled at me 10 times worse than Trump ever yelled at me for anything. So I found that kind of mischaracterization. I found that to not be what he's like.
The thing I think that people struggle with, and I could see where somebody, especially from a military background, might struggle with, is how freewheeling it is. It's not regimented. It's not very orderly. There's some kind of controlled chaos that goes on that I have come to the conclusion as a part of his creative process.
He didn't like to have a lot of structured time during the day because he wants to have time to he talks all day to a million different people. He is constantly on the phone getting feedback from a million different inputs. Some of them kind of frontline type people. Some of them the names you've heard of type people who are in leadership and everyone in between.
If you walked in there today, he would ask you, Sean, what are we thinking? What are we thinking right now? What are we hearing out there? What are we talking about?
What should we be doing? And then you go down to, oh, really? You think that? Well, tell me about that.
Why do you think about him? Okay, tell me. You're interested in General Mattis. You know Mattis, or you know his reputation.
Let's talk about Mattis. Why do you think that about Mattis? Let me tell you my experience with Mattis. He would like want to engage with you on these things.
So I found also that the idea that Trump does not like feedback or for people to push back on him to be entirely false. In fact, I found quite the opposite. If you were willing to say to him, I don't think that's the way we should go, Mr. President.
He would be interested to know, why do you think that? Like he does take constructive construction. Oh, he will definitely engage. No, he's going to make the decision that he's going to make.
But he will engage with you on why do you think that? And what would lead you to that conclusion? Because I'm in a totally different place. So he's willing to be persuaded on things.
And in fact, I think one of the unique things that he did in his White House that was very constructive was most White houses are ideological conformists. And I don't even mean that derogatively in a way because if you saw a candidate that you wanted to support so much that you were willing to go spend all your time trying to get them elected and then you end up in the White House with them, chances are you agree with them on pretty much everything. In the Trump White House, just look at the trade issue. You had Gary Cohn was the chief economic advisor.
He is probably best described as like a free trade Democrat. You had Peter Navarro, who was the kind of top trade advisor and Robert Leicheiser, who was the US trade representative. These are much more, they might derogatively be called protectionists, but certainly more inclined to use tariffs as a tool in economic statecraft. They're totally different from Gary Cohn, ideologically.
Those were the people in the Oval Office arguing about trade all day. And so you have a diversity of opinions that you're not going to get in most White houses. Now, where it breaks down is when the president makes a decision, if one of those two sides lost the argument, they have to be willing to subordinate their views to the president's decision and execute on his vision. And I do think there were breakdowns at times in the Trump White House where people were not willing to subordinate their own views to the president's views, which gets me directly to the John Mattis question.
General Mattis resignation came at a time when President Trump was trying to get us out of Syria. And he felt strongly that we need to get out of Syria. And General Mattis felt strongly that we had a US national security interest in Syria that merited keeping US troops there, continuing to engage there in a way that President Trump did not feel inclined to do. And essentially what General Mattis did was say, I can no longer, in good conscience, based on my sincerely held beliefs, execute on the president's wishes because I disagree with him on this policy.
Now, I actually respect that because the dishonorable thing to do was what so many others did, which was I disagree with the president, but I know better than him. And so I'm going to slow roll his wishes. I'm not going to execute on his wishes. I'm not going to do what the duly elected president of the United States has decided to do.
That's more nefarious in my mind. So, you know, General Mattis has subsequently said a lot of negative things about President Trump that I happened to disagree with. But on that particular reasoning for resigning, I understand why he did, even if I would disagree with him on that, and I think he did the right thing by leaving rather than not executing on the president's agenda. Interesting.
Yeah, thank you for clarifying that. Because that is something that I've always wondered about, you know, seeing so many individuals leave. Is it because he doesn't take constructive criticism? And so that's good to know.
I appreciate that. Thank you. If you're just going to go off on a tangent here. If you heard, this is a little out there.
If you heard about the Trump prophecies stuff, there's a book written about it about how I'm going to leave it out then. But just somebody just brought me to cross my radar the other day. There's a couple of people that kind of called everything that's already happened. And I was just curious to be doing that.
I haven't. But let's talk about, so you're in the White House now. And it sounds like from what you were saying when you first showed up, the intelligence in your intelligence role, there was a lot of fat to be trimmed. How much fat in the White House needs to be trimmed?
Well, in the White House, it's actually not a large organization. They're much more constrained because the White House has a finite budget for personnel that they cannot go over. And the way that you subsidize that, so to speak, is you'll have agencies detail people to the White House. So I actually found that in the White House itself, there's not a lot of fat to be trimmed.
Now the government, my God, the amount of fat there is to trim is just like beyond imagination. There's no question about that. But the actual White House itself, it's a pretty small group. And in the West Wing itself, have you been in the West Wing before?
I've never been in the White House. All right, so we're going to make that happen. Hopefully we get an opportunity to make sure that that happened. But one of the things that people struck by the first time that they walk in, and I certainly was, was how small it is.
I'll take you around the White House real quick. The main floor of the White House, where the... Well, let's just go. We'll go to the basement of the White House, ground floor of the White House.
White House situation room, White House mess, some bathrooms, a couple of small offices on the side over here. That's it. Main floor of the West Wing. You've got press briefing room, Oval Office, President's private study, President's private dining room.
You've got, in our White House, you had Steve Bannon. When we first got there, a couple of offices right there, and White House Chief of Staff, Vice President, National Security Advisor, Press Secretary, and a couple of comms offices. That's it. That's it.
That's it on the main floor of the West Wing. Top floor of the West Wing, you've got offices on each corner of it. You had the Senior Advisor for Policy and Head of the Domestic Policy Council. You had Deputy Chief of Staff, Head of Legislative Affairs.
You had Senior Advisor, Deputy National Security Advisor, Ivanka, and the Head of National Economic Council. That's it on the top floor of the White House. So in all of that, we're talking 20 principles in there. Kind of the top level people in the West Wing, and then they have some support staff with them.
Everybody else's next door in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, and so there are hundreds of people over there. But it really shocks people in the West Wing, especially if you're only in context as you've watched the West Wing TV show, which is kind of what got me into politics to begin with, was like binge-watching the West Wing and wondering what must happen behind those white walls and curtain windows. And the real life, West Wing is so small that you wouldn't be able to shoot a TV show in there because the halls are so cramped. You wouldn't be able to fit people in a camera.
And like the Walk and Talk scenes, they do wouldn't work in the real West Wing. No real West Wing. Yeah. Interesting.
Very interesting. Let's get into kind of your experience within the White House. It doesn't sound like it was a great experience. And so, and people like me are fascinated to know how it works in there.
Is it as corrupt as we all think it is? Is it as secretive as we all think it is? I mean, what's the driver to all these people that are trying to achieve power? Why do they want it?
And so dive in. So I would say my experience in the White House was one of the most amazing experiences of my life, one of the most frustrating and exasperating experiences of my life. So I would say that I would not want to have again. And on another hand, an experience that I would love to go back tomorrow and let's dive right back into it.
So it's like every extreme that you can imagine, both good and bad, I feel like I experienced in there professionally. And then also in terms of what it does to you from a character standpoint, what it reveals about you as a person. I learned a lot of stuff about myself that I don't think I would have otherwise had a reason to learn. On the good end of that spectrum, there are just things that you see in there that where else in the world are you going to see?
Some of the things that they're experiencing, some of the things that you experience. If you think about it, anybody who comes in to meet with the president is at the top of their field. So it's a king, it's a prime minister, it's a president, it's a CEO of the largest companies in the world, most famous entrepreneurs. So you're seeing how do these people operate?
How do they run meetings? How do they conduct themselves? What questions do they ask? What's their demeanor?
I mean, everything. I've seen how kings can port themselves in private meetings. I've seen how dictators can port themselves in private meetings. I've seen how democratically elected presidents and prime ministers conduct themselves.
And I've seen how Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos conduct themselves and everybody in between. And the extraordinary thing about that is you, I remember a meeting that we were having in the cabinet room of the White House. And the meeting was, I can't even remember the topic, but it's the type of people that I'm talking about. It's people at the tippy top of their field.
And there was a moment where I realized that no one here knows what to do right now. No one knows what decision to make. There's not an obvious decision. Here's a tough decision.
And no one here in the moment knows what to do. And I found this to be a simultaneously terrifying and liberating realization because Steve Jobs was right when he said that all these things in life that you call life were made up by people that are no smarter than you. And so it's terrifying because you're like, holy crap, I thought there were rooms where people knew what they were doing, knew how to tackle these big challenges. But it's also liberating because it's like, well, if they can figure it out, then maybe I can figure it out too.
And so that's how you can combat this imposter syndrome. So the first day I walked in the West Wing, it was like, who am I to be sitting in this office? Who am I to be standing in the Oval Office and tell the President of the United States anything about anything? And I think that's something we all struggle with in different ways.
That ended imposter syndrome for me, not because I'm smart, not because I'm any better than anybody else, but because I've seen the people that I thought had it all figured out and realized that they didn't, that just like me, they wake up every day and are trying to figure it out too. What was, all right, what was one of the big decisions that you were a part of when you realized, oh shit, nobody has the answer here. I'm trying to think of, there's just like a big dramatic one. Did it generally, for the most part, seem like people knew what they were doing?
Or did you, did you find that? And I'm not saying they didn't know what they were doing. I'm just saying, did it seem like you were at the beginning around people that always had the right answers? No, but I would say there's a delineation between excellence and competence and being, and just not knowing the answer in that moment and needing to work through some things and incompetence.
I found myself around a lot of excellence and competence, people that have risen, have a proven track record over their careers of doing remarkable things, thrust into situations where they're trying to figure a problem set out that they've never had to face before. Let's use Jared Kushner as an example. Jared Kushner had never negotiated Middle East peace on behalf of the president of the United States before. He negotiated real estate deals.
Someone went well, someone didn't go as well, negotiated all kinds of different things business-wise. Someone went well, someone didn't go well. He had a baseline skill set that he had applied to business and been successful in that. But suddenly he's confronted with arguably the most intractable US foreign policy problem of recent decades.
Middle East peace, a place is a total cluster. You know that better than most. And so suddenly he's having to figure out, okay, how do I navigate the dynamic between the Israelis and the Palestinians? How do I navigate the dynamic between the Israelis and countries in the region who are more stable, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, etc., with other countries in the region that are far less stable, Syria and Iraq.
Go around the globe there. How do I balance those interests? How do I delineate between what some of these people say publicly and what they really think privately about the Palestinians, for instance. For decades everyone assumed that any breakout of peace in the Middle East was going to be predicated on the Palestinian, getting a Palestinian state.
And so every issue started with, if we don't deal with the Israeli-Palestinian issue first, we can't get any other things to happen in the region. Jared looked at the same problem set, along with the president, who also had a business skill set that he was approaching these things with. And they kind of said, you know what, I wonder if we flip this on its head. If we can get some normalization agreements between Israel and other Arab states, that it would actually lead to momentum that might one day lead to a solution to this Israeli-Palestinian problem.
And so they didn't, I almost say they solved, but they started making real progress in ways we had never seen before with the Abraham Accords, the series of normalization agreements with Arab states around the Middle East and Israel as kind of the starting point for peace and prosperity in the region. So that's an example of when we got there, none of us knew what to do with Middle East peace. I mean, my gosh, what a giant problem to solve. And over time sat there and worked through those things and immersed ourselves in those issues and took the same skill set that it made us successful in the private sector and implied them with fresh eyes to these tough problems that had caused so much, been such a challenge for other administrations.
So there are a million examples of that that I thought here for a second that I'd come up with, but that's one that reshaped the global order in a lot of ways. How many of these decisions are you guys going through a day? Well, that's the magnitude of this is something of that magnitude, or are we going to stay in or get out of the Paris Climate Accords? Are we going to renegotiate the trade deal with Mexico and Canada?
These kind of giant things, those are few and far between only a handful of those, at least the conclusion of them will happen in the course of an administration, but you're confronted constantly throughout every single day with the little decisions on any number of those issues that are trying to take you down a certain path. How many of these big decisions get pushed to the second term because of re-election? I don't recall any, at the point that re-election was happening, I was at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and so I wasn't in the White House on some of these more political issues, I was just dealing with the national security stuff more. But I never heard anyone say, hey, we could get a win for the country here, but let's just wait a second, because it's going to cost us something politically, let's just wait until the second term.
I never heard anyone do anything like that. Okay, I'm just curious how it works. We only hear so much and you see a lot of things get punted, or you hear a lot of talk about how presidents would be a lot braver, maybe? In the second term, less fear of re-election.
One of the things that I'll say about Trump, that I think is rare among politicians, there are different kinds of courage. There's the kinds of courage that you have shown on the battlefield. Your brothers in arms have shown on the battlefield physical courage manifests itself in different ways. And then there's moral courage, which you've also shown in the things you've been able to tackle in this country and the things you're willing to talk about, that a lot of others aren't willing to talk about.
And the question with any president is, any politician is, what kind of moral courage do you have? Because you're inevitably going to be confronted with a decision that's going to cost you something, this is really the heart of the question you're getting at, is are you willing to do something that's going to cost you something if it's the right thing to do? One of the early decisions that we had to make in the White House was, are we going to move the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem?
Every president since Ronald Reagan had promised to do it. We're going to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. We're going to acknowledge the fact that Jerusalem is the eternal capital of Israel.
We're going to move our embassy there as a show of support for the Israelis and for that fact. And every single president prior to Trump reversed course and didn't do it. It was Republican and Democrat. And I know why.
Because I saw the same thing. I was confronted with the same briefing that all of those other presidents got. You make this decision and it's going to be mass chaos in the Middle East. People are going to lose their minds.
Any hope for peace and stability in this region is going to be gone by you doing that. And every president was confronted with this conundrum. Do I do what I said I was going to do? Do I do this thing that's the right thing to do?
Or do I allow myself to be convinced that it's actually, I shouldn't do that because it's going to cost lives or it's going to infect our interest in some other way. Trump was confronted with the same briefing. And at some point he said, hold on just a second. I think everyone here is confused about there being a debate over whether we're going to do this.