#136 Cliff Sims - White House Myths, Doomsday Bunkers and Holding the Nuclear Football
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Cliff Sims, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure.

Pleasure to have you. It's quite 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 bad because I didn't bring anything good. Now I feel like when I leave, I've got to find something that goes on this wall. I've got a couple of things in mind. I'll take that White House Breitling emergency.

That would look 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, there's some really...

really cool pieces of history. Oh, 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, you know? Former Blackwater guys that got pardoned, you know? Yeah. Things like that, they go around the room and it's like, man, somebody, something meaningful to somebody's life here, 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. Are you familiar with that? Yeah, Operation Red Wings, yeah. Yeah. So the helos that crashed, my friend,

Best friend was friends with one of the rangers that secured the helo crash, and he was on the actual site where the fight happened, where the snipers were. And the ranger, his buddy gave him that a belt of ammunition, 60 ammunition, and said that was the only thing that was not burned up in the crash. Wow. And so he snapped off one round for every shot.

every U.S. service member that died, and that was like his most prized possession. Wow. And then he passed later on, and those came to me. Yeah.

That's amazing. Yeah, some heavy stuff in here, man. Yeah. But anyways, I'm really excited to dig into what you have to talk about. You got 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 interesting.

Really interesting. - Let's do it. - But if you don't mind, I'm gonna give you an introduction here. I've 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 are 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 were 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 U.S. House of Representatives to serve as

is a commissioner on the U.S.-China Economic 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 for Polaris National Security. What is Polaris National Security? - So it's a nonprofit policy organization focused on national security. It's 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 that'd be South America. Now you put me on the spot. South America, North America, Europe, Africa, Asia. Right on. Yeah.

Husband to wife, Megan, and your six-year-old son, Shep, who you adopted from Columbia in 2020. Congratulations. Thank you. Your new book, 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 and politics and has received endorsements from former DNI John Ratcliffe, Senator,

J.D. Vance, Donald Trump Jr., Tucker Carlson, and many others. And I find this fascinating. You've been sued by Trump. Ha ha ha!

And then he stopped the lawsuit and then asked you to come back, correct? That is true. Interesting. A true Trump world story. Only in Trump world would that happen. Yes, I've seen it all. He's got a lot of people gunning for him. 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...

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 for you that have to do with the national security and intelligence. - Okay. - So this is from Steven 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, Matt, it'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

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. They want 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 principle standpoint is identify that fact. I was in a U.S.-China commission hearing this past week,

debating with a witness over whether China wants to follow the rules or not. We're 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 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...

This is something more insidious than that from their end, their intentions. And so I think the first principle is being willing to say, call China what they are, and that is an adversary. Who was briefing you this, that China wants to follow the rules? Well, that was a think tank economist who focuses on trade policy who was saying that, yes. I mean, do they have any information to back that claim up at all? Or are they being paid to...

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 them an enemy.

Call them an enemy 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. LAUGHTER

Just being honest. A lot of members of the military and government workers are putting their money into 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 they 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. 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 comparisons to the Nazis, but it's analogous to like, would you have been wanting to be invested in German state-owned companies in the lead up to World War II? Would you have ever invested at the height of the Cold War in Russian companies or Soviet companies in the lead up to the

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 principle 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 kind of get ourselves out of that. But how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time? And we 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 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, our allies can't be in business with the Chinese the way that we are right now. Only over time by taking those little bites are we 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 stuff? Yeah, it's hard to do. It's really hard to do. And this is also placing a real expectation on a consumer to have, you know, you're a 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...

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. Do 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...

you know, people to take money out of their own pocket to pay a little bit more to buy American, I 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 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, uh,

One of those things has got to happen before I'm willing to do the other. - Yeah, that's a good point. 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 McKernie?

Uh, I have no idea. Me neither. Okay. I would love to know more about that. Fabric by Gerber Life is term life insurance that you can get done right here.

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- Performance may vary. Consult with your tax attorney or financial professional before making an investment decision. - But, well, Cliff, everybody gets a gift before we start the interview. - If this isn't what I think it is, I'm gonna be upset. - Hey, any guesses? - I want the gummies. - Oh, there you go, man. There you go. - My man. My son will very much appreciate that as I'm gonna treat him. A gummy bear fanatic. - Nice, nice. - So thank you for these. - You're welcome. Well, those are made in America.

So they might not be the healthiest thing, but you know, 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 they're, you know, 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 kind of that first

ring of top advisors around the Director of National Intelligence. And my focus was on a couple of 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 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

I didn't know how much communicating you can do when all you can say is I can neither confirm nor 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 onboarding. He's like, hey, do 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 neither confirm nor deny. We go downstairs, like 25 people on the communications team there.

I'm like, "Well, what are y'all, no disrespect to anyone here, but what's everybody here do?" You know? Yeah, you had a couple of speech writers over here. You had, you know, people that interface with the press over there. You had all the, I mean, dude, it was crazy. And really, first kind of insight to like, this ain't right. Like, we shouldn't have 25 people in here that are press and comms people in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. And so, you know, 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. - The Delta raid in Germany? - Whatever that 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 involved. 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 was

Do you know the phrase, where the phrase "I can neither 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've got to come up with a way how we're going to 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 hatch a plan. We're going to build a giant ship and the ship's going to open up in the bottom and a giant arm is going to 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 got to come up with a cover story for what we're going to do. So they contact Howard Hughes.

what billionaire, kind of eccentric billionaire, kind of 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. And 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 were able to get some of the ship, some of it was lost forever. So, you know, did we get good intelligence off of that? Some say yes, some say no, you know, but there's a lot of, you know, a lot went into that. Billions of 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, some through 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? They got the whole thing. The first time ever, the CIA said, we can neither confirm nor deny

the Glomar Explorer, the whole thing. That's where the phrase, "We can neither confirm nor deny," came from. - Man. - So to this day, if one of those requests would come in, somebody would say, "Just Glomar 'em, Glomar Explorer." In other words, just say you can neither confirm nor deny. - Man, so does that, does the majority of the time mean 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 neither 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 going to be? Is that you? It

It would be on most things, but if it rose to, I mean, it depends on how important of an issue it was. I mean, there are very often where Director of National Intelligence and I talked about the response to, especially operational things. If this is an operational issue,

topic, we would certainly talk through what do we do. And more often than not, you just don't even respond to those kind of things. But again, it created some very unique challenges from a communication standpoint that I'd never experienced before. I'll bet. So did you have insight into just about everything that's going on? Well, I would say not

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, I 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 gonna be very satisfying to anybody. - Oh man, come on. - Well, you know,

Everybody who's ever been at, you know, wondered what goes on in the White House or wondered what goes on at CIA or wondered, always wonders like, are these normal people there? Or are these like, you know, aren't you curious too about all these things? And the answer is, yeah. When we got there, the first thing I said is, all right, somebody wheel out the bodies. Like, I want to see, I want to see the alien bodies. I want to see, you know, and 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, I mean, go down the list of these kind of legendary, you know, call them conspiracy theories, call them whatever you want. Like we want to know. So when we got there, we wanted to know, you 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 U.S. government offers. I mean, these people that are in this office see, to your point, everything. I mean, they're preparing the president's daily brief every day. So they are seeing the most sensitive intelligence that the U.S. 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? Kicked everyone out of the room. Said, we're here to give the briefing to the director.

And so even the people who saw all the most sensitive stuff in the U.S. 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. That's pretty telling. I mean, that alone is very telling to me. Yeah.

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 company? Yellowhammer News. Yellowhammer News. So it sounds like, how did that start?

- So, Yellowhammer is a state bird of Alabama. I was based in Alabama. That's where the name came from. But, you know, I had worked on a campaign in 2010. It was the 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 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 tem of the Senate and all these different people. And I didn't know what I was gonna do next, but I figured I was gonna 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 the Sean Ryan show, but 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. They thought it was a joke candidacy, some people did 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 it was 2015.

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, you know, we're not allowed to say Christmas anymore. They want us to say happy holidays. And then, you know, 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, okay. So 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 a 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. And 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, ended up in the White House, and later ended up as deputy DNI. - I mean, how was it leaving your company? I mean, it started from nothing, blew 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 in life. Like money, who doesn't want money, right? Like I'd like to have more money. I'd like, you know, 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've started companies. I've worked in the White House. I've worked at D&I. All these things are like, wait, what? You did all of those things before you were 40? Yeah, because I want to do interesting things. So when the opportunity came for the president, 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 counsel said, okay, you got to sell your company. I said, oh, okay. And so, you know, that wasn't ideal because I had –

the people who were interested in buying the company knew 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, like it's hard for me. I mean, it still exists to 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 this story differently, or I would have, you know, whatever. And it's hard not to be like, man, that's my thing. So 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, "Yeah, I'll come serve my country in the West Wing of 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. 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 like what was, and there were others, like there were advanced staffers and there's others, certainly there's other people out there working on it. But in terms of what Trump would think of as like my campaign team, the people that he knows,

We're only talking a couple of dozen people here at that point. And so, you know, he gets full credit for the 2016 campaign because people ask me, what was the campaign? It was one guy and a microphone. That's what the campaign, and that's why they thought he was going to lose because, but Hillary has all these staffers and they're spending all this money on advertising and they're doing all these different things in the swing states. I mean, 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, 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 day,

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 his 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, it was 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 are kind of unique to a 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 it. Anytime Trump shot a video,

I was there with the White House Communications Office, the military guys, WACA, that shoot all those videos. You know, 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, you know, all that. And then I'd look at the remarks and, you know, say, well, he ain't gonna say that. Let's get rid of that. Let's do this other. You know, so I got to know him really well, and he had a comfort level, I think, that I was gonna 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. - Okay. - Was mainly. So the delineation there is I wasn't dealing much with the press.

I was dealing with, you know, 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? What is the messaging that we're going to use? And then the communications 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 kind of in charge of the initial message. But even that, Trump's in charge. Trump's his own communications director in a lot of ways. Yeah.

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. Okay. So you were on the campaign trail with him. You had mentioned it kind of started as a joke on your media outlet. People didn't take it seriously. When did...

When did you notice kind of a flip? I'm just curious. This is just personal curiosity. When did you notice a flip happen? That rally in Alabama was really an eye-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 that could get there. You had Mississippi and Louisiana down on the coast that could get there. You could have Alabama that could get there. It was 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 like go and have what the Washington Post described as a mix between a Lynyrd Skynyrd 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. 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 in 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, you know, we were, you know, all the economists said, well, you're gonna get cheap goods, but what they didn't talk about was you're also gonna have a crisis of the family across the Midwest of our country where young men, men no longer have a place to go to work

and find meaning and purpose in their lives. And it's gonna decimate their families economically. You're gonna 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 politicians starting in about 2010, and so I, you know, leading up to that point, so for five or six years had 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 in to readers from our, you know, critiquing our coverage shows,

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,

- Well, he obviously pisses a lot of people off, you know? But I'm genuinely curious. I mean, 'cause there's people that I have a lot of respect for, you know, that left that administration, you know? And I don't know what happened, but 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 within the military, but- - Very much.

And I don't know what it's like anymore, but, you know, since he left, but wow, like Marines, everybody wants, is dying to work for an individual of that caliber. And his, you know, reputation, it's 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, 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 he 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 at one point. So I've seen every side of it, and we can get into that, 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 found the characterization of 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 wild 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 funny.

That unusual, you know, you certainly wouldn't find it unusual. Anybody that's been in the military certainly wouldn't find anything that he did, you know, 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 free-wheeling 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 is 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 do you think? So what do I need to be talking about? What should we be doing? And then you'd go down, you know, oh, really? You think that? Well, tell me about that. Why do you think that about him? Okay, tell me, oh, 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 wanna engage with you on these things. So I found also 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? - So he does take constructive criticism. - Oh, he will definitely engage. No, he's gonna make the decision that he's gonna make, but he will engage with you on why do you think that and what you think.

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 Lighthizer, who was the U.S. 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. You know, 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 gonna 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

U.S. national security interest in Syria that merited keeping U.S. 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. Okay.

So, you know, General Mattis has subsequently said a lot of negative things about President Trump that I happen 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, I mean, thank you for clarifying that. Because that is, that is,

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... I'm just going to go off on a tangent here. Let's do it. Have you heard...

this is a little out there have you heard about this the the the trump prophecies stuff there's a book written about it about having people all right i'm going to leave it out then but um it's i just somebody just brung it across my radar the other day there's a couple of people that kind of called everything that's that's already happened and uh i was just curious if you knew about it 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, 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...

I say it's 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'll get an opportunity next year to make that happen. But one of the things that people are 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, kind of 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 kind of 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 the National Economic Council. That's it on the top floor of the White House. So in all of that, we're talking, you know, 20 principals in there. It's kind of the top level people in the West Wing, and then they have some support staff with them. Everybody else is next door in the Eisenhower Executive Office building. And so there are hundreds of people over there.

But it really shocks people when they walk in, especially if your only context is 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. Interesting. Very interesting. Well, let's get into kind of your experience within the White House. It doesn't sound like it was a great experience.

a great experience. And so, and I mean, 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, you know, to all these people that are trying to achieve power? Why do they want it? And so dive in.

So I will 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, in some ways an experience that I would not want to have again, and on the other 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 professionally.

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,

They're 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, the most famous entrepreneurs, all of those. 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 comport themselves in private meetings. I've seen how dictators comport 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 conduct themselves.

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, honestly, 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, it'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 of these things in life that you call life were made up by people that are no smarter than you.

And so it's terrifying 'cause 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 into 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 that when you realized, oh shit, nobody has the answer here? - I'm trying to think if there was just like a big dramatic one.

did it generally for the most part seem like people knew what they were doing or did you find that and i'm not saying they didn't know what they were doing i'm 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 like excellence and competence uh and and

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. Some of them went well, some of them didn't go as well. Negotiated all kinds of different things business-wise. Some of them went well, some of them didn't go well. He had a baseline skillset that he had applied to business and been successful in that. But suddenly he's confronted with

arguably the most intractable U.S. foreign policy problem of recent decades. Middle East peace places a total cluster. You know that better than most, you know? 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, et cetera, 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 gonna 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 this same problem set, along with the president, who also had, he had a business skillset 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...

I won't say they solved, but they started making real progress in ways we had never seen before with the Abraham Accords, this 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 had 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 if I thought here for a second that I could 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, is this 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 with

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 didn't

I don't recall any, now at the point that reelection 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 'cause it's gonna cost us something politically. Let's just wait till the second term to do it." 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 more

Braver maybe in their second term. Yep. Less fear of reelection. Well, you know one of the things that I'll say about about Trump that I think is rare among politicians is 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. And 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, both Republican and Democrat. And I know why. - 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 gonna be mass chaos in the Middle East. People are going to lose their minds. Any hope for peace and stability in this region is gonna 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. I promised I was going to do it, and we're doing it. So the conversation is over with. Start executing on doing it. So the president makes this decision, and he announces it. And after he announces it, I'm standing with him

in the outer oval, just outside the oval office, there's a little room where his assistants sit there. And he comes out because I'm getting ready to take him to the next meeting that we're gonna go into. And he looks up and there's a TV on the wall.

And every TV in the West Wing has four panels on it, split in four. It'll have Fox, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox Business. So you can see in one look what's the coverage, what's everybody focused on traditional media-wise. At a moment's notice, you can see that all day.

- They don't have the Sean Ryan show streaming in there? - They haven't got it streaming yet. You guys haven't gone 24/7 live yet. We need to get a 24/7 live stream of your life and we can get it put on the screens in the West Wing. We can make that happen. But he looks up on the screen and you can immediately see that every single panel is protests in the Middle East. There are people hanging him in effigy. There are people burning the American flag. There are people chanting, "Trump, Trump, you will see. "Palestine will be free."

He is watching this unfold, and it's the most visceral hatred toward a person that you can imagine. I'm watching a giant Trump head get lit on fire over there. I'm watching them stabbing Trump figure, things like that. The feeling that I had in that moment, I can only compare it to the same feeling that you might have if you see someone trip and fall on the sidewalk.

My inclination is to look away because I don't want them to be embarrassed that I saw them fall. You know, when people fall and then they look around and say, "Did anybody see that?" I would rather act like I didn't see it so that they don't feel embarrassed. Not that the president had done anything wrong, but I had this kind of embarrassed feeling of like, "Man, look what they're saying about the person standing right next to me." It's just such visceral hatred. And I will never forget Trump's reaction to seeing that though. He watches it for a minute.

And then he looks at me and he goes, all right, what do we got next? Like, what's next on our schedule today? Didn't even acknowledge this hatred, unimaginable level of hatred happening for the whole world to see directed at him personally. And it rolled off his back like water off of a duck's back. And I realized in that moment that Trump

for all the things people can say about him, has a level of intestinal fortitude to do, if he thinks something is the right thing to do, and you may disagree with him thinking that that is the right thing to do, you may have a difference of opinion there, but if he thinks it's the right thing to do, he will endure any amount of criticism, hatred directed at him if he thinks it's the right thing.

And that's why I and a lot of others who worked in the White House would have crawled over broken glass for Trump. Because that's a level of moral courage that we were around politicians all day and these squishes who are just like, see which way the wind blows. Oh, people want me to go that way. I'm going to go that way. And Trump wasn't like that. And it was really a rare thing to see among politicians for sure. I mean, that had to be, was that an everyday occurrence for you to see?

I mean, things of that magnitude, maybe not. That's what they covered for four years, more than four years. I mean, it's what started probably a year out. I remember watching on the news people shoving eggs in women's faces because they were going to vote for him. Yeah. And it was just nasty. It was five years of this, at least. And it continues on today. But, you know, so none of that stuff doesn't affect him. Like Kathy Griffin, you know,

What did she do? Oh, yeah, when she held his head, severed head up, things like that. It doesn't affect him. I think it would surprise people because people, again, I think they have a little bit of a misconception of Trump because he's also someone who lets no slight go unanswered. He'll attack someone on Twitter for some seemingly down in the weeds, like, why are you...

raising that to the level of a response. So on one hand, he's like, we'll punch anybody who's confronting him. And on the other hand, is willing to endure the kind of criticism that I'm talking about. So it's a dichotomy a little bit there, but there's some parts of it I think are a sport for him.

The reason he would go after the host of Morning Joe or whomever on Twitter, it's the game. You can come after me, I'm going to come after you. Let's play the game. Let's go. Let's do it. But on these issues of national security and international importance and things that impacted people's lives, I think he had the courage to do the right thing. You had mentioned a couple of big names that had meetings recently.

in the White House that sounds like maybe you were previous to. - Yeah. - One of them being Jeff Bezos. Can you talk about those conversations? - Yeah, the Bezos one was kind of innocuous. It was like, he didn't spend a lot of time with Trump. He came in, I think it was for like one of the business councils that we had put together and he was one of the people on there and I'd met him and that kind of thing. The one that really stuck with me was the Elon Musk interactions though.

because we had a meeting in the cabinet room and the president was working on what to do on infrastructure, crumbling infrastructure all over the country. What am I gonna do? I'm gonna bring together all these people I knew from the private sector who can help bring up fresh eyes to this problem.

and come with interesting ideas. So he had a lot of his friends there who were big builders, who had done giant projects, built skyscrapers, all these things, like what are we gonna do about American infrastructure? And one of the people was Elon Musk. So we're going around the room and people are talking about the things you would expect with infrastructure. Ports, bridges, roads, airports, obviously important things. We get to Elon Musk and Elon wants to talk about a tunnel.

that would take people. All these people are in one room at the same time? Oh yeah, all in the cabinet room of the White House. Yeah, all around the giant table, the president sits in the middle. Fascinating. The back of his chair in the cabinet room, if you ever look at pictures, the back of the president's chair is about that much taller than every other chair in the room. So you can see which chair is the president's.

So the same meetings or same room where we'd have cabinet meetings, we would bring in private sector leaders and things like that. And the president would use it as like a giant conference room, just like he used to see on "The Apprentice" when the president's sitting at a, or Trump would sit at a table and people would kind of surround the table around him. He'd kind of go around the room. He would do the same thing with private sector leaders. And so we get to Elon and Elon says, "I think I can get people from New York City to Washington, DC in 29 minutes."

And we can do it via a tunnel, hyperloop system. He's kind of explaining this whole, the whole thing. And Trump kind of leans back in his chair and he goes, Elon, you know, this guy's talking about bridges. This guy's talking about tunnels. I mean, you're talking about bridges. He's talking about roads. And this guy comes, he says, I've got a tunnel. I'm going to bring a tunnel. You know, he starts doing this whole thing like a Trump riff on like, I can't believe you're bringing a tunnel in here. And Trump goes, you know what, Elon? That sounds great. Why don't you just do it? Let's just do it.

And it was just kind of a funny, awkward moment where everybody's like looking around the room, like, did the president just approve a tunnel from New York City to Washington, D.C.? Does he have the authority to approve a tunnel from New York to Washington, D.C.? I don't really know. But the thing that I always, that stuck with me about that with Elon Musk is the things that you are able to do in life are often directly proportionate to the amount of criticism and ridicule that you're willing to take for doing them.

And here's Elon Musk surrounded by some of the biggest business leaders in the world. And he comes with this really out of left field idea. And look, I don't know anything about the idea, like maybe it'll work, maybe it won't work, but he was willing to put himself out to the point that after the meeting, other business leaders were kind of poking fun privately amongst themselves about Elon coming in with this harebrained idea that he had. Well, you know what else was a harebrained idea?

Tesla, SpaceX, you know, go down the list of these things that Elon Musk has been able to bring to fruition. And I think there's a little Trump in that too. Going back to him being willing to endure all the criticism on all the decisions that he made. Like I find myself wanting to explain myself a lot.

when people misunderstand me or criticize some of the things that I have done or said publicly or whatever, because I wanna say, no, no, no, hear me out. Like, I have good intentions here. I'm trying to do the right thing. Let me tell you why I think that. And I think that that can become debilitating if you spend all your time wanting to be understood by people where if you're gonna truly do anything of any magnitude and significance,

you're gonna make enemies, you're gonna have critics. And if you spend all your time trying to, oh, no, no, no, please understand me, you're not gonna be able to keep a relentless focus on the mission, on the thing that you're trying to accomplish. And I think Elon has proven an ability to focus on the mission in the midst of people sniping at him left and right that I found really stuck with me after I left the White House. Seeing him not just endure that from the public, but even from

his peers, so to speak, of like these big business leaders in the cabinet room. - Interesting, very interesting. I just have some random stuff I want to ask you 'cause you've been involved in so much. I wanted to ask you about the football, the nuclear football. What can you tell us about it? - Yeah, so nuclear football, for people that don't know, if you ever see a picture of the president, chances are a few meters behind the president will be walking a military aide holding a briefcase, a leather briefcase,

And it was nicknamed the nuclear football because it's with him everywhere in case something happens. We need to launch a nuclear war. He can crack that thing open and get it going. So it's another one of those things I was very curious about when I got there, like, well, what's in the nuclear football? And actually, I was standing in the West Wing one day with the president's military aide, and I jokingly said, let me hold that thing for a minute.

And to my surprise, he let me. - Are you serious? - So for about five seconds, I held a 45-pound nuclear football at my side. And so I've experienced what it feels like to hold the nuclear football.

But before anybody freaks out that I, for five seconds, had the fate of the world in my hands, a lot of what's inside the nuclear football remains classified. But what I can say is there isn't a giant red button in there that you just crack it open and like, boom, and we go to nuclear war. The purpose, first and foremost, is to verify the president's identity. So everywhere the president goes, he carries with him a little laminated card called the biscuit.

And on the biscuit, there are codes that are his verification codes for his identity. So in the event where there was an emergency where the nuclear football gets cracked open, the first thing that happens is communications are opened up to the National Military Command Center and the president verifies his identity with the codes that are on the biscuit. Then from there, I have heard it described in media as...

a Waffle House menu of pre-planned nuclear strike options. So you can imagine, you know, a bunch of different options of pre-planned nuclear strike options. The scariest thing that I've learned about it all is

one researcher estimated that there may only be a six to seven minute window in which the president would have to make a decision about what to do if someone were to have launched a nuclear strike on the United States. And the scariest of all potential nuclear strikes is what we call a bolt out of the blue strike, which is...

there hasn't been anything kind of leading up to this moment at all. There haven't been rising tensions that led to this moment. This is just a out of nowhere, somebody with nuclear weapons just launches out of the clear blue sky one day and we're suddenly confronted with there's a nuclear missile flying toward the United States right now. So in a bolt out of the blue scenario, this is where the researchers say there may only be a six or seven minute window where the president has to decide the future of the world.

And it's very, very scary. People do not have an appreciation today the way that I think they did at the height of the Cold War, which even precedes us, really, of the danger of nuclear war and just how quickly we could lose everything, everything that we know of as life.

for the few people that would survive a major nuclear exchange would not be a life worth living. The living would envy the dead in that scenario. Yeah. And it's very, very scary. And I don't think we have an appreciation for how close, how real that possibility is that that could happen. People can't even fathom, you know, we have it pretty good here. Yeah. I mean, it's just...

It's so far out of the realm. I mean, yeah, I would think that there would be just about every possible scenario that a think tank could think of

is in that with predetermined decisions. - Yep, yep, 'cause you wanna try to, for all of these things, you wanna try to plan in a non-emotional state so that when you're met with a crisis, you can fall back on the great preparation planning work and make a good decision in the middle of a crisis. The thing that I don't envy any president

is how do you make a good decision in that window of time with those stakes? Literally, humanity hangs in the balance in some ways. And you're trying to decide, first of all, you're trying to take in the information of, well, what's the strike coming toward us look like? Is it a nuclear missile or is it...

200 nuclear missiles. And then, okay, what's the response to that that's going to keep us from ending the planet, but also protecting American national security in some way? I mean, it's just an impossible decision-making matrix that you're confronted with. It's just, I mean, it's unimaginable. And some of the things that stuck with me the most from my time working in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence

were the planning for those, for different scenarios. One day when I was at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, we got to go inside one of these so-called doomsday bunkers.

And the government has places around the country. What happens inside of them still remains highly classified. Some of the locations themselves remain classified. But it's basically if there was a crisis scenario in which the government had to be reconstituted outside of Washington, D.C., these are the places that you would go. And so I was taken to one of those places that was hundreds and hundreds of feet underground.

When we got there, a giant metal blast door opened in the side of a mountain and we kind of go inside and we're down into these tunnels that take us into basically an underground city.

that had everything from like a made-to-order grill where you could order hot dogs and hamburgers and pizza and stuff in there to living quarters and office space and computer space. I saw where my computer would be in that, you know, a scenario like that. And some of it was kind of like off of the movies where you see, you know, a room where they're monitoring a bunch of different televisions, things that are going on all over the country kind of happening.

a watch center there, conference room space where we went in and we kind of talked through some of these different things of what happens if this, in this scenario, what happens in that scenario, just to be prepared for what they call COG, continuity of government, C-O-G, or COOP, C-O-O-P, continuity of operations.

And so the government spends a great deal of time planning for these scenarios so that if we're ever confronted with them, we could have a competent response to them. And in some ways, I found myself

very surprised about the quality of preparation that we have. And in other scenarios, I found myself terrified that were that to actually happen, things are going to descend into chaos and we're probably not ready for those things. So it was an eye-opening experience to say the least. It was kind of like doomsday prepping on the highest possible level. Wow. What's the entrance look like, if you don't mind me asking? If you can...

Does it blend in with the environment? I'm talking about going back up a couple hundred feet. Yeah, so you... Or is it a little thing out in the woods? I mean, what is it? There are... The one that we went to, if you had satellite imagery, you would be able to see that it's a facility. Okay. There's a helicopter landing pad there. There's some space up there. But you couldn't even get to it.

- Gotcha. - We did not fly into it, we drove into it, but by the time that you've driven there, you're so far off of any beaten path, you would never get to the point that you could even see what the entrance looked like outside of satellite imagery. But there are a couple of these that are not classified that I would encourage people to look at. It's really fascinating stuff. You can look up Raven Rock, you could look up Mount Weather.

There are a couple of them that come to mind for me. - Where's Raven Rock? - Raven Rock is in Pennsylvania. Mount Weather is in the Blue Ridge Mountains. - Okay. - So you can go look at these things. They're fascinating. Anybody that's interested in this kind of stuff, you can go down a million rabbit holes with them and conspiracy theories and all kinds of stuff. - Are they all over the country? Are they all within a couple minutes flight time of DC? - Yeah, there are places that are in different places.

parts of the country for sure, but the ones that would be used to kind of relocate the U.S. government are at least close enough where you're far enough out from, you know, if a disaster had happened in Washington, D.C., that you're kind of away from it, but close enough that you could have a chance of getting there. Who would have access to that? Would it be just the president and his

who he picks, security advisors, intelligence people. - There are plans for that too, who are the people that get to go, I say get to go, I mean, it's a terrible scenario if you're having to go. If you do end up going, it's the people that you would expect. A lot of the senior national security folks would be there with support staff. There's also staff that is there 24/7.

- Congress, Senate? - Some leadership, for sure. There are evacuation plans for them to be a part of those, definitely, because you not only need to reconstitute the executive branch, you need to maintain the legislative branch as well and the judicial branch as well. So there are evacuation plans for every branch of government that are fully fleshed out.

But this is one of those things when we first got to the White House that even Trump was interested in. And there's a way that Trump,

I'm not going to say exactly how because I'm actually not sure how sensitive this is, so I'll just kind of stay away from it. There's a way that you can tell who is going to evacuate in different scenarios. And Trump realized, he noticed this thing and asked what it was and found out that it was evacuation protocol under these kind of scenarios. Who's going here? Who's going there? Who's not? Yeah.

And so at that point, I was just, I was a communications aide in the White House. I wasn't at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. I wasn't one who would be evacuated.

And so for the rest of the day, Trump would point out who in the meetings would get to go if something bad happened. And he would be like, Cliff's not going to be there, guys. So make your peace with him now. Make sure to say bye to Cliff before we leave today because if something happens, he's not going to be there. So you got to kick out of that. I'm curious to know how important the power grid was.

when it comes to national security? Very much. I think this is one of the areas where we're more vulnerable than people would realize. Industrial cybersecurity in general is an area where we've got a lot of vulnerabilities around the country. Our infrastructure does. And

I'm actually getting ready in about a month to chair a hearing on China's preparation for crisis scenarios or potential war and things like that. When is this? That'll be in mid-June. Where's this? In DC. The US-China Commission is hosting it. So it'll be in Congress in one of their hearing rooms there.

And one of the things that we're kind of learning about is what is China doing to prepare for things like this and where are their vulnerabilities? And then how are we preparing and where are our vulnerabilities in this regard? And this is one of the things where

cyber espionage or cyber attacks or cyber warfare. These are things that have existed in theory for a long time. They've also existed even when they're happening below the threshold of war in kind of a gray zone.

for a long time. And the question is, what's gonna happen in the event of some conflict? What role is cyber war going to play in that? And the first time we've really been able to see this in some ways is what's happened in Ukraine with the Russians, 'cause the Russians have pretty robust cyber capabilities.

And we've seen them have some successes there. We've seen them not be as successful and maybe not done some things that we thought they might have done. But in the United States, one of the areas where there is a lot of focus, but I think needs to be more focus in, what are we doing to harden our infrastructure? What are we doing to our power grid to ensure that we're not vulnerable in the event of

you know war or an attack uh of some point from a cyber perspective uh that we're not extremely vulnerable because right now i think we're more vulnerable there than we would like to admit yeah i've interviewed i'm really into the the the china threat and the in the power grid and i've interviewed a handful of people on the subject and it's it sounds like we're extremely vulnerable right now very vulnerable like

it's a good possibility it could happen. Would you agree with that? I would agree with that in the event of conflict, that that would be a good possibility. What are their vulnerabilities? What would we do if they shut our power off? Well, in some ways, I'm not going to talk about it. And in other ways, I don't know. Okay. And these are the kind of eventualities that are

People are planning for these things, but the thing that's difficult is how civilization as a whole is so dependent on electricity at this point, how quickly it would affect our food supply, people's ability to get access to food and clean water and all of these different kind of necessities of life and how quickly we could devolve into chaos here domestically

of kind of what's going on externally, who's attacking us. So I think you're spot on. This is an area of extreme concern and vulnerability that we need to do a lot more on. What about the water supply? Same stuff? Yeah. Anything that's an industrial control system at this point, uh,

There are people, really smart people, who are devoting their lives to this problem, but it needs a lot more focus on the government side. Gotcha, gotcha. Well, Cliff, let's take a break. When I come back, I would like to...

I would like to talk about your book. I think it would be best to start with the lawsuit and then talk about why you were getting sued by Trump and then why he redacted it, and then we'll get into the weeds. Let's do it. Perfect. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. I want you to think of a time where you don't think you could be your full self.

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When I first started podcasting, opening an online store is something I knew I needed to do, but I had zero clue on where to start. Tried all these different platforms, and then I found Shopify. Shopify made the entire setup process fast and easy, prompting me to do everything like set up products, create blogs, and connect my social media. Because of Shopify, my online business runs more smoothly than ever.

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Upgrade your business and get the same checkout we use with Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash Sean. That's all lowercase. Again, go to shopify.com slash Sean to upgrade your selling today. That's shopify.com slash Sean. All right, Cliff, we're back from the break and we're getting ready to dive into kind of why you wrote the books and, and, and,

But first, I think it's important to talk about why he got sued by Trump and then why he redacted that and invited you back on. So there's a funny story when my wife and I left D.C., we were moving back to Alabama, and we were buying a house. And the mortgage guy calls and he says, "Hey."

We're doing our due diligence on the mortgage here. And one of the things we had to search was, is there any pending litigation going on? And I noticed here that it says that you're engaged and you're involved in a lawsuit right now. And now my mind is like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I am. And he said, well, it says here that it's Donald John Trump and Trump.

Is that the President of the United States that you're involved in a lawsuit with? And I was like, oh, yeah, but it's no big deal. It's going to be fine. Don't worry about it. It's just a misunderstanding. Yeah, it's just going to be good. It's going to be good. And long story short, they didn't give us a mortgage. They couldn't do it. They couldn't do it because of pending litigation. So that was kind of like, ah, man. But yes, I did get sued by the President of the United States. It was...

not the most fun experience of my life, but basically I had left the White House and I decided to write a memoir of my time there. And a lot of it has been like, a lot of it was because of the things we've been talking about in this interview, like misconceptions about what it was really like, what Trump is really like, you know, and I really wanted to give what I was calling the first honest insider's account.

Because you had books that fit into a few different categories. You had haters. People were going to leave and just say, oh, Trump's the worst thing that ever happened. And it's, oh, it's so bad. And then next thing you know, they got themselves a CNN or MSNBC contract. And you get what's going on there. Then you had people that were on the opposite end of that spectrum who really didn't talk about anything meaningful because they didn't want to

even be the slightest bit critical or say, we could have done this better. They're just totally sycophantic and you're not getting an honest look at things there, no matter who it is. And then the third was journalists, most of whom are dishonest, but even the honest ones are subservient to their sources. They're not actually in the room. They have to have somebody tell them what happened in that room. And so it's always a secondhand account.

And so what I wanted to do was give a firsthand account, this honest look of what the first year and a half of the Trump administration, what the White House was all about. And my intention was not to attack Trump. And in fact, my view was if people know what it's really like in there, they're actually gonna have a more favorable view of the president when they get the real inside scoop on it than they do from what they're getting through the filter of the media. But one of the variables was,

the staff in the White House was not a cohesive unit. And part of that came from when the president wins, number one, at the time, he's not a D.C. person. He doesn't know anybody in D.C. All he knows is, well, I've got this campaign team who's been with me, and now I've got the RNC, kind of more establishment Republicans, the kind of D.C. people,

I only have a handful of people on my campaign team. It's not that many people. I'm going to have to staff a full government. I need to bring these people in and we're going to try to build a government with these kind of different factions, so to speak. And what happened very quickly was, um,

instead of coming together and uniting and being able to kind of work together, there was these factions that broke off that were all kind of self-serving. And you had a dynamic where the establishment folks come in and they're trying the best they can to get rid of the campaign people who they look down on because a lot of them were like me.

I never worked in the government before. I never worked in the White House before. I was an entrepreneur. I was doing things in the private sector. I was from some other part of the country. And I went because I believed in Trump and like, let's go try to accomplish something here. But I didn't know how to govern. I had never governed before. And they want you to think governing is some kind of superpower that only the chosen few in DC know how to do this, Sean. You wouldn't know if you came to DC, you wouldn't know what to do because you're not one of the chosen ones. You know, it's very...

egotistical condescending point of view that these people have toward people who've been successful in the private sector and never done it before. So it's just like, it was just nonstop fighting. And so the book was titled Team of Vipers. And it was a playoff of Lincoln's Team of Rivals. And so he famously had this team of rivals. He brought different people together and they were his cabinet and they worked together. And this team didn't gel in that way. It was

constant fighting. And so one of the themes of the book were those dynamics and how they were kind of working. And so when the book comes out,

the president immediately has the false impression that I'm attacking him, that I'm gonna be one of the ones who has now left and is now gonna stab him in the back and say all of these terrible things about him. And so he sued me when the book came out and basically in violation of a non-disclosure agreement that we had signed on the campaign

And so I countersued him because I had to. I didn't want to sue the guy, but they had countersued him on First Amendment grounds and saying that, you know, as a government employee, as long as I don't disclose classified information, you know, I'm not bound by, you know, an NDA, basically the sign in the private sector that apply to my assignment government service. That was the gist of it. Pretty soon, the president sees me on TV, sees things being written about the book, sees the things I'm saying and realizes that I'm not

I'm not even at the time when we're in the middle of a lawsuit, you know, I'm still very good friends with Don Jr. at the time has become one of my best friends. You know, Jared and Ivanka were my friends. Like everybody kind of understood what was going on. The president had been given a false impression of the book by some of the people inside of the White House that I criticized.

they were my former colleagues, and they used that opportunity to try to get back at me by spinning him up to come after me. So he realizes that I'm not. We kind of make peace there after a brief legal dispute, and he asked me to come back. Was that a phone call?

I don't want to get into the, yes, we did talk. I won't talk about the details of it, but we had a very good and very funny conversation and put all that to rest pretty quickly. And he asked me to come back to do a couple of things. One, to run speech writing for the Republican National Convention in 2020, and I did that, and then to come back as Deputy DNI.

So it's a full circle kind of I've been in, I've been out, and I've been back. I've done it all at this point. So that's the story of the lawsuit. - What is it that you wanted to convey in that book?

what it's really like. I wanted to just tell the truth about like, you see, this is the most talked about story in the world. Everybody wants to know what it's really like in there. Well, here's what it's actually like in the room with Donald Trump. Here's what it's actually like to work with his staff. Here are some moments that have been covered throughout our time in the White House that were covered wrong. And I'll tell you what really happened. I mean, I'll tell you one of the things that was like a huge revelation to me, and maybe it shouldn't have been,

When I started being in rooms that reporters were writing about, that journalists were talking about, I realized how wrong so much of what they're saying about what happened in those rooms was. I mean, I'd see these things about like something that happened in some meeting. I'm like, I was in that meeting and that's not even remotely what it like, what happened.

And maybe this shouldn't be a revelation because I've always felt like there's kind of a pervasive liberal bias in the media, but I didn't have a full appreciation for it. And it's hard to have a full appreciation for it until they're writing about things you actually saw firsthand. And you're like, that's just total BS. Is there anything specific that sticks out into your head? So there's one that I wrote about in my book called

that made me, and this is maybe a small thing, but it illustrates the broader point. Who's the most famous American journalist, perhaps, of all time? Bob Woodward. Woodward and Bernstein. Watergate. They're the ones who broke the stories of all the things that were happening in Watergate during the Nixon administration. Well, Bob Woodward wrote two or three books about the Trump era. And there's a scene in one of his books

where he talks about, it's during the campaign when Steve Bannon first joined the Trump campaign. And there's this scene where Steve walks into the 14th floor of Trump Tower into the war room, and there's nobody there except for one person. His name's Andy Sarabian. He was the war room director. And Steve's like, where is everybody? And Andy says, you know, oh, well, they're,

This is everybody there. We don't really have a team. Basically, it's like this whole scenario of dialogue that happens. And Steve dramatically says, I want everybody back in here from this moment until the day the election happens. It's this dramatic scene of we're going to rally the troops and we're going to have everybody in this room. We're going to be a whole thing. It's a really dynamic story, except for the fact that it never happened.

Andy Sarabian's one of my best friends. Seeing this, I'm like, did this happen, Sarabian? He's like, dude, nothing even remotely like that ever, ever happened. And Bob Woodward never called Andy Sarabian to ask him if this story ever happened. I don't know where he got this story. There's only two people in the room, Steve Bannon and Andy Sarabian. And one of the two people in the room, he never even talked to to find out if this story

story even happened. I don't know if he talked to Steve Bannon or not. I'm just saying at least one of the people in the middle of this story, he never even called to ask about this scene. And yet it's a prominent scene in one of his big bestselling books. This is the most famous American journalist in history.

And that's how little he cared about getting the story right. Now imagine, you know, the Bible says, if you're faithful in small things, be faithful in big things. If you're not faithful in small things, you won't be faithful in big things.

If Bob Woodward couldn't care enough to get that story right, what makes you think that he would get any story of any meaning and substance right? The answer to that is he doesn't give a crap about the truth. What he really cares about is what's gonna move books and what's gonna get clicks and what's gonna drive conversation. And the incentives in the media right now are so perverse.

that they are not leading to outcomes that produce truth, that get us closer to truth and understanding, which is why the podcast format has blown up because it gives you an opportunity to really dig in and like have a conversation with somebody and try to find common ground or try to find truth

that the current media environment is not conducive to. So I saw that extrapolated across name and issue and topic, especially with Trump,

because he's such a divisive figure. So the media had a strange relationship with Trump because on one hand they needed him to prop up their business. He drove interest. People were clicking on things and watching things and now, and then he's gone, those numbers go way down, but they also hate his guts because he doesn't just like roll over and take, he'll punch them back in the mouth twice as hard as they punched him. And so it's a really difficult dynamic there, but none of it leads to getting closer to the truth, that's for sure.

It sounds like some of the things that were going on in the White House didn't really align with your values as an individual. What were some of those things? One of the things I talked about in my first book was most people who write a book are the heroes of their own story. And I'm not the hero in my book.

Because it was not a book that was like, oh, I saw things that I didn't agree with and I was standing athwart history yelling stop, you know, and I was so brave. What I learned about myself was I was much more susceptible to the attraction of power than I otherwise would have ever known because I never had power.

I grew up with nothing. In a working class family, I didn't know, I'd never met anybody who worked in the government, much less somebody in the White House. I'd never met anybody who had money. What do people do if they have money? I don't know. I've never met anybody who has money. I've never met a business owner. I've never met an entrepreneur. I've never met a politician. I've never met anybody who

So you only know the universe that you've been exposed to. So if you've lived your whole life and you never had any power, so to speak, of, how are you gonna respond when that ultimate test comes? Because power is the ultimate test. Somebody wrote about Lincoln's legacy. He said, any man can endure hard times. You wanna know what a man's really made of, give him power. And so what I learned in the White House was,

I was much more susceptible to the allure of power than I thought. And what does that look like? Well, in the White House, there's an org chart, just like any other organization. The chief of staff, you know, president, chief of staff, everything kind of flows down from there. In the Trump White House, that org chart existed, but the real org chart was Donald Trump in the middle, and anyone that he knows is a spoke off of him. He's like the hub of activity.

And most of us would do anything that it took to be and remain one of those spokes. And I was the same way. If I saw an opportunity to stab my colleague in the back because they were encroaching on my lane a little bit, I'd do it if that's what it took to make sure to get them out so that I'm going to maintain my proximity, my access, those kinds of things.

So it's not that I was witness to things that were oh so horrible that I couldn't believe were happening. It was that my own character was being revealed in these situations that I'd never been confronted with before.

So I wrestle with that a lot in my book. One of the great things about working in the Trump administration as a Christian is I was never asked to do anything that violated my sincerely held beliefs. And a lot of the policy things that we were advancing were things that I had been hoping would happen for years and years. And the president rescinded the Mexico City policy, which funds abortions overseas with US taxpayer money.

He told the Department of Justice that we're no longer gonna go after the nonprofit status of faith-based nonprofits that speak into political issues, which had been a threat that many churches and faith-based organizations were worried about for years and years. Right now at the State Department, whether you like it or not, your pronouns will be in your email signature, whether you like it or not, automatically.

In the Trump administration, something like that would never happen. A lot of the power of these DEI offices that exist now and imposing all this woke ideology on government workers and bullying them into submission because they're scared to speak up about it, things like that never would have happened in the Trump administration. There's a, my favorite monument in Washington, D.C. is the Jefferson Memorial.

Jefferson's my favorite founder. He's the most fascinating, interesting person, I think, from that era to read. And there's a quote inside the dome of the Jefferson Memorial. "I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility "against any tyranny over the minds of man." "I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility "against any tyranny over the minds of man." What that means is

Any government censorship, oppression, or attempt to subjugate someone's freedom of thought, expression, religion, sincerely held beliefs of any kind is tyranny. And then any true patriot will stand up to that. And right now, the government that we have in place is trying to impose a tyranny of the mind on millions of Americans, and including the government workers who work in this government,

who don't want to abide by things like calling a man a woman that is not a woman. And they are being forced to decide, am I just going to

go along to get along because I've got a family to feed. And these are tough choices. I'm not casting blame on the people who do just put their head down and don't have the means to fight those kind of things, that they're just a career government employee in there making ends meet every month, and they got to decide whether they're going to take a stand on stuff like this or not. In the Trump administration, things like that would never happen. The president would never have allowed people to be

tyrannized in that way. And yet he's the one that they try to say is an authoritarian wannabe. Yeah, yeah. It's the mental gymnastics we're seeing people perform today that's something. How long did it take for you to be in the White House before you started seeing your character shift? I don't know, but it's really one of those things where I, in retrospect,

more than in the moment that I am able to look back and say, I lost something there. So in the moment, I mean, one of the things I've found in life is very few people think they're a bad person or think they're doing a bad thing. Most people rationalize the decisions they make, even the bad decisions,

with something. And so I had a million rationalizations for why I would stab a colleague in the back to maintain access. I'm giving him better advice. They're trying to give him the wrong advice. I'm trying to do the right thing for the president. I'm trying to do the right thing for the country. And in reality, in retrospect, a lot of times I was trying to do the right thing for me and maintain my position. You're trying to justify all of your decisions that you maybe weren't

particularly happy with. Yeah, definitely. I think everybody does that. Yeah, that's right. Very rarely does anybody in life say, you know what, I'm a bad person and I'm going to do a bad thing right now. Most people rationalize even the bad decisions that they make. Yeah, yeah. So there wasn't any one particular thing that kind of made you, I mean, when did you

What was it? What was it? Even looking back in retrospect, what was it? What made you look back and go, man, I'm not really happy with how my character changed. I'm not really happy with the influence and what it kind of... Yeah. Well, one of the main things that happens when people... I think there's a lot of good about people from outside of D.C. coming to D.C., people in the private sector, fresh blood in the government. The flip side of that is...

you don't know how your character is gonna respond to these things. And so you leave your support system, wherever you're from, for me, my church small group, people that couldn't care less that I worked for the president of the United States, the people that my son goes and plays with their kids and they know all the things about me, good, bad, and otherwise. And suddenly I'm in DC and I don't have that anymore.

And so I think part of it was losing those people that were around me who would say, "Hey, what are you doing?" Or like, "Hey, I think you are looking at this wrong." Or, "I think you've lost yourself a little bit in this thing." Like, who's gonna be that person, certainly in a city like Washington, D.C., to say something like that? You and I were talking off camera a little bit. There are cities around the country that represent certain kind of mortal sins, if you will.

You've got Las Vegas for sex. You've got LA for fame and notoriety. You've got New York City for money and greed. And you've got Washington, D.C. for power.

It attracts a certain type of person who wants to go to Washington, D.C. 'cause the only thing going there is power. So it attracts the people that are susceptible to that attraction already, and then it gives them, like a junkie, the drug that they are already addicted to before they even know they want it that bad. Like, oh, you came here to get a little power, to be a part of this? We'll give you a little bit. Oh, you like that? You want a little bit more? Let's keep going.

That's the thing that I didn't have any exposure to. And so for me, it was power. And I never would have said, first of all, who am I to even have, like, what power did I even have? I'm a White House communications aide or I'm the deputy DNI or whatever. The president's the one with the power, but it's the proximity to that that is intoxicating.

Everything you do plays out on TV screens around the country and around the world. Every single person you talk to wants to know what's it like? What's he like? What's he doing there? And it feeds that ego nonstop. It's constant. So if you don't have anybody around you anymore who doesn't give a crap about that,

It's just constantly being reinforced to the point that you just even forget that that's not what things are all about. You didn't have anybody to ground you. Well, you know. Nobody does over there, sounds like. Yeah, I mean, my wife, I didn't change the way that I spoke to my wife. Coming home, my wife wasn't like, what's wrong with you? Why are you treating me differently? So it was kind of like siloed in a way. It's professional ambition or personal.

In some ways, it's even things that the world doesn't say is bad. So if you're an alcoholic, that's bad. If you're a drug addict, that's bad. Oh, you run around cheating on your wife, that's bad. But if you're really ambitious and you're trying to fight your way up the ladder, you're trying to build a company or you're trying to do something remarkable,

Who says that's bad? Nobody stops you and says, "Don't climb so high." They say, "Wow, how'd you get there? Keep going." Like, "Man, wow, that's amazing. Wow, you made it." And it's not that ambition is bad or that wanting to achieve things or wanting to do things of significance is bad, but there has to be a check on that. And the check,

in my life is my relationship with God. So the thing that a relationship with God does for you is it is an ever-present reminder that you are not the most powerful, you are not the most important, there is a higher authority than you are, and it forces you to be subservient to something other than yourself. Everything in this life that most people go through their day doing is an attempt to get for themselves more comfort, more money,

more power, more fame, more and more for me, build myself up. And everything about the Christian faith says, I'm not great, he's great. I'm not important, he's important. And so if you're in a daily, if you have a daily, if you have a relationship with God and you are reminded of those things daily, it helps you keep

these other things in check. Your ambition's in the proper place. The importance you put on your work is in the proper place. That's what I was missing, and I would justify it any number of ways. I don't have time to be in the Bible today.

I've got 46 briefings that I got to get ready for. The president of the United States is depending on me to come in here and be able to talk with authority about these issues. I don't have time for that right now, but thankfully I did that some other time. You know, I've got that filed away somewhere and, you know, and I wouldn't necessarily make a conscious decision so often like that, but over time, that's what your actions say. That's where I kind of lost my

myself in it, I think. Are these, why did you leave? So I left the White House initially because, you know, I had helped

been a part of orchestrating other people getting pushed out of there who were my rivals. And the day came when one of my rivals helped orchestrate getting me pushed out of there. So when John Kelly became the chief of staff at the White House, we butted heads pretty strongly. He tried to get me to leave previously. He tried to make me the assistant secretary of an agency. And I declined because I said I didn't come to DC to work for the government. I came to work for the president.

And then I helped run the confirmation for Mike Pompeo to be Secretary of State. And through that process, Pompeo asked me if I would come be his senior advisor at the State Department. And so I thought, you know what, here's a good kind of off ramp. I'll go have a new experience at State, being senior advisor to the Secretary of State.

And so I resigned from the White House to go and take that job. And then John Kelly, as White House Chief of Staff, blocked me being able to go ultimately to the State Department. And that's how I ended up out of government before coming back later. So in retrospect, do you think that was a good thing? Best thing that could have happened. Best thing that could have happened for several reasons. One, it's like going cold turkey if you're a drug addict and you just got...

One day I was walking into the West Wing and the next day I wasn't and there wasn't no going back to it. It like broke that. So that was really helpful, healthy. The other thing is getting blocked from going to take this like amazing dream job at the State Department was that the book that I wrote that made me wrestle with a lot of these things never would have happened.

the lawsuit with the president never would have happened, which ended up being a great thing for me to have experienced that for several reasons. Number one, the president attacked me on Twitter in the middle of all of that. And when he tweeted about me, I was actually sitting in a live CNN interview. And the interviewer said, "The president has just tweeted about you. Would you like for us to read it live on the air?"

- Oh man. - And the president, you know, he attacked me, whatever. And the interviewer said, "How would you like to respond to that?" - What was the tweet? - Cliff Simms, I'm not gonna get it exactly right, but this is the gist of it. Cliff Simms, who I hardly knew, wrote a book with made up stories in fiction. He acts like he was an insider, but he was nothing but a gopher. You know, he was a nobody, you know, that kind of thing.

Which in retrospect, shout out to the president for, like, I know when his heart's really in wanting to get after somebody and he didn't, I can tell he did it, but he didn't like give it his all. It could have been much nastier. He could have been much more hardcore about it. But the interviewer asked me, what do you, how do you want to respond to that? And in the moment I said, um,

My identity is not wrapped up in being a Trump staffer or in anything that the president or anyone says that I am. My identity is found in Jesus Christ and who he says that I am, and he says that I'm his. I meant it, it was the right answer, but in retrospect, I don't think that that was an accurate reflection of where I was at in my life at that point because it hurt me a lot more than I was willing to admit

publicly because my career mattered so much to me. And getting attacked by the President of the United States in that way bruised my ego much more substantially than I would have admitted. And the reason that was such an important experience is

God created work. The first thing that we see God doing in Genesis 1 is creating, creating the whole world. And it is part of his plan for our lives that we would reflect his character by being many creators ourselves. And so work is an important thing. But it also says in the Bible that do anything as if you were doing it unto God, not for man.

And so when I left the White House, I had realized I had found my purpose in that job. And I thought that defined me. And what I was able to realize is no matter what you're doing, if you do it unto God,

you can find purpose in that. I mean, I remember thinking like, especially even after I left, I mean, the last day, the day that Joe Biden was inaugurated president, I was standing in the lobby of the CIA and inauguration day is basically a government holiday. It may be a government holiday. Like nobody's there, near empty halls,

And I'm walking around in there because I'd never really taken a lot of time to like really soak it all in. And I'm like looking at the memorial wall and I'm looking at the Book of Honor with the names of the people who've, you know, given their lives in service to their country there and the CIA seal in the hallway there. And I'm walking all the way through. I'm looking at the CIA museum. I'm like going through stuff I've never had a reason to look at while I'm there just to kind of soak it all in because I thought that the day that I walk out these doors that I'm, it's never gonna be, nothing I do will ever be this great.

cool, this important, this great again. And that was ego talking, but it's also not true because if you are truly doing anything that you're doing in life as unto God and not for men, it doesn't matter if you're working at the White House or at a coffee house. You can find meaning in that work because your work becomes an overflow of worship.

And it changed my perspective on work, which is why I genuinely think that was the best thing that could have possibly happened to me being attacked by the president of the United States in that way and losing the things that I had allowed to define me in my job because otherwise, what would have ever broken that mentality in me? And so a big part of the book that I've written now is talking about wrestling with that in a way so that other people understand

can have the same perspective that it took me going through that to gain for myself. Interesting. So it sounds like your first book became a New York Times bestseller damn near overnight. And you went on all kinds of interviews. I mean, what was it specifically about that book that just...

made it take off like that? - It was about Trump. It was a Trump insider writing about Trump. So it's the biggest story in the world and all the people wanted to hear about it and all the news outlets want to cover it. And you know, it's really, really hilarious now reading the Amazon reviews of that book because it's two camps of people

It's liberals angry because they thought the book was going to eviscerate Trump. And so they bought it and then they read it and they're like, he didn't go and didn't- Like, where is it? Yeah, they couldn't find it. And then it's conservatives who didn't read the book, but understandably thought that it was going to be an attack on Trump, attacking me for turning my back on Trump.

And the interspersed in there is some people who actually did read the book who were like, "Actually, it's a great book, whatever." So it's really kind of funny. But man, I never would have imagined I would be doing The Late Show with Stephen Colbert or going on The View with the ladies of The View, but there I was. - How was The View, to be honest? - It was interesting. It was interesting. I normally on interviews, I don't like to meet the hosts beforehand.

because this is probably unfair, but I saw Jake Tapper one time at CNN interviewing the deputy campaign manager for Trump.

And prior to the interview, cameras aren't rolling. He's like buddy-buddy with the guy. You know, oh man, we ought to get our kids together and get them to play. And man, it's great to see you. And man, you guys are doing great, man. Looking like Trump's doing really well. He's gonna, you know, whatever. Like has this buddy-buddy conversation. And the second that the lights came on, he said, how can you as a father allow your daughters to be in the same room as Donald Trump?

you know, stuff, something to that effect. It was just like jarring. And I'm like, two seconds ago, you were this guy's buddy. And now you're like, so it made me not want to interact with people before the interviews because I was like, are they softening me up here? And then just try to give me the okie doke once I get on there. So at The View, I'm like sequestered in a,

you know, backstage, back there waiting for them. I don't want to meet anybody and I'm just kind of in the room. So they finally bring me out. And it was funny because, I mean, I got cheered, I got booed, I got everything in between that you could possibly imagine on that show. But I really, I think I got the audience early on in the interview because I was talking about the book and I said, you know, I would compare myself to Eminem in 8 Mile.

when he gives the big battle rap at the end, where he basically says every terrible thing about himself. And the other person doesn't know what to say because now he's already said all these bad things about himself. How could he like attack him in this rap battle? And that's basically what this book is. It's like, I'll tell you everything good, bad, and ugly about me and everything else that happened there. And so it kind of softened up the audience and we had a good time.

And the interview was mostly uneventful. I mean, I remember one of the questions being something to the effect of, you know, we get all these former Trump people that come on here and they want to go on an apology tour for working for Trump. And why should we take your apology? And I said, I'm not here to apologize. I'm proud that I worked for the president. I'm proud to work for the White House and American people. And I'm proud that the president that I served was Donald Trump. And they're just like befuddled by the whole thing. Like, I can't make...

There's like the cognitive dissonance inside of their own head. It's just like, I can't make sense. Don't worry, I don't need your forgiveness. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, exactly. Thank you so much for bestowing your forgiveness upon me, but I'm good. But you know, the thing that I remember more than the on-camera stuff was after the interview was over with, we go backstage and Joy Behar pulls me off to the side. My wife was there with me.

And she's probably the most, I mean, they're all really anti-Trump on there for sure, but I mean, she's like vehemently, you know, very leftist anti-Trump. And she said to me, "What's a nice young man like you doing working for a guy like Donald Trump?" And in the moment, I kind of played it off as, "Oh, well, I'm probably not as nice as you think I am." And, you know, we just kind of like laughed it off, but that kind of like stuck with me after I left.

Because the real question that she's getting at, I think is important for everyone to think about. How can you love someone with whom you disagree? Or how can you support someone even when you disagree with some of their actions, some of the things that they do? And the answer to that question is really a lot more simple than I had really thought about prior to that, which is it's easy.

I've been doing the same thing with myself my entire life. Paul writes about in the New Testament, the thing that I want to do, I can't do. And yet the thing that I don't want to do, I keep doing. And I'm going around and around. He's like wrestling with, you know, I can't bring myself to do the right thing. But for all of us, how much grace have we extended ourselves and all the things that we've screwed up in the past? And yet you can't find it within yourself to extend that grace to anybody else?

People ask me about Donald Trump all the time. He did this, that, or the other that I disagree with. And how could you work for the guy when he did this, that, or the other? And even the things that I disagree with, it's easy. I extend to him the same grace that I've extended to myself so many times that I can't even count it. And thank God that Jesus Christ extended that grace to me because I definitely didn't deserve it from him. So that whole experience, I try to reflect in this new book,

because I think there were so many faith lessons to take away from working for Trump, but also interacting with members of the media. I mean, I've seen it all. I went on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and I mean, that's another one where I definitely didn't want to meet before we went out there because I'm like putting my battle armor on, like we're going to go out here and it's going to be like on. Stephen Colbert in the commercial break right before I went out to go on the show,

comes up to me backstage and shakes my hand and says, thank you for being willing to come on my show. And so I want you to know, if the audience boos you or heckles you, I will stop the show, stop the cameras and say, we're not gonna treat our guests that way. You can disagree with them, but you're not gonna mistreat our guests. And I just want you to know if that happens, that I'm gonna have your back when we go up there.

I don't agree with Stephen Colbert on anything politically. And we joked and had it out on different things and, you know, whatever, and it was totally fine. But I think that's such a rare thing, especially in people in the media today. The first time I went on Good Morning America, it's the first interview I did for my book, and George Stephanopoulos is going to interview me. And I'm sitting there waiting at the table for him to come over in the commercial break.

and he's walking over and I'm sitting there and they start counting down, the camera's gonna come on in five, four, three, two, and at two, the production assistant walks over and pulls the pad in my chair out from under me so that I'll like,

sit down and look shorter than George Stephanopoulos on TV just to screw with me right before the interview starts. And the first thing Stephanopoulos does is ask some trumped up story about like, we hear you actually got fired from the White House instead of, you know, it's just like a picture into, you talk about people's character in the media. I've seen all from the good surprises like the Stephen Colbert who treated me well to, you know,

the Good Morning America folks who tried to screw with me when I got on there. So I've seen it all. Was Stephen Colbert, was that a rarity? What? That approach? Oh, yeah. They're going to back their guests? Oh, yeah. So, so few. So few. I mean, really unheard of, honestly. I mean, I never had, especially, you know, in what's anticipated to be an adversarial interview, just doesn't really exist. And frankly, even some of the conservatives that I know and

It reminds me of when I was growing up, I was the lead singer of a band for a while and got to meet a lot of famous musicians and Christian musicians especially. And I met this one band and I won't call them out on here, there's no reason to do that, but that I had really idolized, probably too strong of a word, but like somebody I really looked up to is like, man, they made it and they're like real Christian guys and they're like doing this.

And I meet the guy and he's like a raging alcoholic who's bragging about how many women he's slept with that weren't his wife since he's been with her. And it's like jarring. It's kind of like when you meet your heroes and it's not what you think it's gonna be. It's like a jarring thing. And meeting a lot of people in political media, I'm kind of jaded by it now, I guess, and like nothing surprises me. But certainly at first, when you see these people that you like looked up to, it's like, man, they're out there just trying to like

fight the good fight, so to speak, every day, and you meet them and they're not what you think. There's a lot of those, and that's why the good guys stand out. Tucker Carlson, great example. People can say what they want about Tucker Carlson. I've spent a ton of time with Tucker off air, offline, talking, texting, at his house in Maine, the whole thing,

And I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt, whether you agree with Tucker Carlson or not, he's a good person. He's a good man. And he's trying to live a good life. He's trying to do the right thing. He's trying to tell the truth. He's trying to search for the truth. He doesn't think he has a monopoly on the truth. He's curious. I've seen the way he treats his wife. He treats her well. See the way he treats his dogs. He treats his dogs well. I've seen the way he treats his employees. He takes care of them.

and respects them. Most people that talk for a living have a very difficult time not being the center of attention at all times. And Tucker's just not like that. And it's an anomaly though. I'm telling you, it is an anomaly. And I'll tell the folks, Sean Ryan off camera, great guy. Not a jerk. All right. Hadn't let the fame get to him yet. He's still a good guy. Yeah. How long was it before you

wrote your next book? - So this one, see the first one came out in early 2019 and this one has just come out now in summer of 24, so about five years between the two books.

And this one includes, you know, more from the White House experience, but also I had not yet gone to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in the first book. So this one includes a lot of stories from inside, you know, ODNI and CIA and the intelligence community as well. What was your, I mean, you had, had you had much experience within the intelligence world before? No, no, none. What was it about you that got you?

So I helped run the confirmation for Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe and helped get him through the Senate. That was one of the things I did when I was in the White House was kind of a specialty of mine was kind of helping run these confirmation battles in the Senate. So I did that for him and got really close to him in that process. And so he gave me the opportunity to come in in that role. Well, I'm curious to know what your first impression of the intelligence agencies were. I mean, you have

Coming in as a civilian, how old were you? 37? So you've got a lot of assumptions on what it would be like, what it looks like, what the culture is. How did those play out when you actually saw it for yourself? Were you impressed? Were you disappointed? Was it completely different? Some of both. Some of both. I mean, our technical capabilities boggle the mind.

the ways that we can acquire information boggles the mind. Any corner of the globe, from human intelligence to SIGINT, the signal side of things and intercepting phone calls and other things, to what the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency can do and satellites. I mean, it's remarkable, remarkable, our capabilities. And there were definitely some times when they were just like,

Holy crap, we are good. Holy crap, we are good. So that was, I mean, I had that impression to some extent outside looking in. You watch movies and wonder, can we really do some of these things? And the answer is a lot of times, yeah, we can. You cannot confirm or deny. Exactly, exactly. Thank you for listening to The Sean Ryan Show. If you haven't already,

Please take a minute, head over to iTunes, and leave the Sean Ryan Show a review. We read every review that comes through, and we really appreciate the support. Thank you. Let's get back to the show. So we got incredible capabilities. On the other side of that, I was stunned, dismayed, horrified at the power of the Intelligence Community DEI office.

both at ODNI and at the different agencies. I mean, I'll never forget the first time I walked into CIA, first time I'd ever been there. I don't care what your view of the CIA is, how negative it is or how awful you think of it. If you walked inside the CIA the first time, you're like, I mean, this is something. This is like legendary stuff has happened in this building, good, bad, and otherwise, you know, whatever. I turned the corner to walk into the cafeteria and headquarters there, and there is a giant,

"Trans Lives or Human Lives" poster hanging outside the cafeteria. I'm like, "What is this?" And I keep walking up and down the halls and I see all these posters that they've got in there for the, you know, talking about people's identity and diversity, equity, inclusion, how important it was there. And, you know, I started talking to people there and how bullied, frankly, they felt. I mean, they did, you know, earlier this year,

there was an internal publication that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence put out inside the intelligence community. And it was a cross-dresser explaining how being a cross-dresser made them a better intelligence officer. Are you serious? Dead serious. In that same publication,

they were talking about the importance of the use of words, that we've got to be careful with the words that we use. For instance, when we're talking about Chinese malign influence, we should be very careful that the way that we're doing it is not bigoted toward Asian people. Or when we're talking about terrorism, we should be very careful not to say,

things like Islamic terrorism or radical Islamic terrorism or jihadist or, you know, all these different terms that they're saying are offensive in some way or another. Now, imagine if you are a totally normal professional intelligence analyst and you're sitting at your desk

taking all these threat streams that are flowing into you and trying to make sense of this stuff and analyze these things and produce reports so that the most important decision makers in our country can make the most informed decisions that they can. And you're having to spend half your time making sure you don't write anything offensive.

in your analytical writing. I mean, that is not just absurd, it's dangerous. It's dangerous. So given the opportunity to come back, you know, this is some of the stuff that's happening in the Biden administration right now. I think the Trump administration would definitely, you know, try to fix some of those things. I mean, we were talking off camera

when we were setting up in here about some of the implications that the DEI and the woke agenda had on intelligence agencies. And anybody who's watching this from one aspect, from the left aspect, is probably thinking, you know, we had talked about how many people have left the organization. And I'm sure there's 50% of the people out there think, oh, good, out with the old, in with the new. Right.

The problem with that is all of the experience that you've just lost by implementing something that has no business being in the intelligence world anyways. It just gets in the way of collection. And I mean, what we were talking about offline, I think it's important for people to think about this is, I mean, we just got out of a 20 plus year war.

And a lot of experience comes from war. And we've never been in a war like this. And so we have developed all this experience and capabilities and people that have been on some of the most high profile missions in the world, in the history of the US,

left because of these policies, because they got in the way of intelligence. Yep. Intelligence isn't worrying about that kind of shit. It's collecting and then presenting, you know, what we found and all of the... I mean, this isn't... You don't just regain 20-something years of experience overnight. Mm-hmm. You know, and...

So many assets are lost now. The military and the intelligence agencies all over various government roles. It's

Really, you know, it's a tragedy because all that experience will have to be regained through more conflicts, and that's going to take a very long time. No, I agree. There's a serious brain drain that has happened as a result of that because people just don't want to fool with it. I mean, they just really don't want anything to do with it. So I think there's some things that we need to do, you know, going forward to prevent this. And one is...

even the places where the intelligence community is recruiting talent, a lot of them come out of Ivy League schools. And look what's happening on campus at these Ivy League schools right now. And these people are getting indoctrinated into this kind of woke ideology. It's certainly not the place, especially with the antisemitism we're seeing on these campuses right now, is that really the place that we're gonna draw from to have a truly diverse workforce? 'Cause here's the thing,

Diversity is actually important in intelligence, just not the way that they're talking about. It's important. I remember back during COVID when we were trying to analyze streams of intelligence coming in to try to make sense of COVID origins and all of that kind of stuff. It's really helpful to have a Mandarin speaking virologists to be able to decipher that stuff. That's the kind of diversity that we need to

to operate on the streets of Tehran. Who's going to have a better chance of pulling that off? A native Farsi speaker who lives, is from there, or me? Probably not a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Alabama boy. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. This is the kind of diversity that's actually important in the intelligence industry.

in the intelligence world that we've lost that in favor of this woke stuff. So I think getting more kids that are top students out of state schools and HBCUs and different places with different backgrounds than we have to this point, I think that's another thing that would be really, really important. - So this talks a lot about your faith as well, correct? - Yeah. - How has that developed since leaving?

Well, the great thing about writing a book is it forces you to think deeply about

whatever your topic you're writing about. And so my goal was, let me take some of these cool stories from inside the White House, inside the intelligence community, and let me think about a faith takeaway from each of them, a biblical lesson that could come from them. And so it forced me to really dig into the Bible more deeply than I ever have before to come up with these lessons. I had this kind of like, these columns. I had a cool story column,

and then I had like lessons that I would like to talk about column. And so I was trying to kind of like mix the two of them together, find the story that fit with the lesson. And then sometimes it was like, I've got a cool story, but I don't know what the lesson is.

And it forced me to like really dig in and like explore that. And so that really deepened my faith in a lot of ways, having to search for those lessons for sure. Man, how long did it take you to write that? A couple of years. I would imagine. In fits and starts. I mean, I didn't write it all at one time. So I would, you know, I'd get a little inspiration and go for something for a little while, write a few entries and then put it away for a while and then come back to it. So yeah, over the course of a couple of years. Anything specific you want to bring up with?

Any specific stories? Oh, gosh. I'm trying to think of what would be. Man, there's so many that I could point to. I'll just give you a couple that will help you understand what the book is like. So the story that I told earlier about going into the doomsday bunkers and that experience. I walked through what it's like inside there and all these different things that we saw. And then I talk about how think about the people who actually work in there 24-7.

that work in that facility all the time, that every single day, their entire life is devoted to thinking about our impending potential doom and how much anxiety it must take, it must have, those people must have about things if that's the environment that they live in every day. And that sent me down a rabbit hole of...

understanding how big of an impact anxiety is having on American society right now. 80 something percent of Americans say that they feel anxious on a day-to-day basis and they're worried about the future. And then that led me down a rabbit hole of like, well, what does the Bible say about anxiety? And how do we live a life where the Bible says, don't worry about tomorrow for tomorrow will worry about itself. And it also talks about how if God

cares about a tiny raven, what happens to a tiny raven, how much more does he care about what's gonna happen to you? Also talks about how God raises up kings and he takes down kings. Our God is sovereign, he's in control of everything.

But we also see in the Bible that preparation and faith are not in conflict with each other. So it's not saying, don't worry about the future. Everything will take care of itself. Don't prepare. Moses built an ark to prepare to save his family. The Bible says that even God sent John the Baptist to prepare the way for Jesus. So we prepare, we do the right thing,

but we do it in faith knowing ultimately that our God is in control of everything that happens. So that's an example of how I take a cool inside story of what it's like in the doomsday bunker and then talk about what does the Bible say about anxiety.

There are a million examples of that in the book. We talked a little bit earlier about the allure of power. C.S. Lewis wrote a lot about power. He called it the attraction of the inner ring or the inner circle. So all throughout life, we are attracted to the inner ring. When you are in elementary school or in school, you wanna sit at the cool kids table at lunch.

When you get into college, you wanna be in not just a fraternity or a sorority, you wanna get in the good fraternity, the good sorority, you wanna be inside that circle. When you get into your professional life, you wanna be in the good unit. You don't wanna just be in the military, you wanna be a SEAL. You wanna be on SEAL team two. Oh, and if you can, after we get done with that, you know what, I think I wanna go in CIA. I wanna go get in that unit right there that's doing that classified mission that I can't even talk about. So in the military aspects of it, there's the way. And in our professional lives,

You wanna work your way up. I remember for myself when I would often walk with the president in the morning, he would get down from the residence off of the private elevator on the ground floor of the residence and I would walk with him out into the Oval Office. And we'd talk about the news of the day, things that were going on that day, whatever it may be. And this is when I was a comm staffer before I was at DNI.

And I would get into the Oval and often waiting for him were the CIA director, the chief of staff, the director of national intelligence, maybe the vice president.

and they were ready for him to come in and have his intelligence briefing. So I would get ushered out of that room and that door would close behind me and it would eat me up inside 'cause I just like, what's going on behind that door right now? What are they talking about? I wanna be in that room. Like, I always wanna be in the room, in the know, in the inner ring.

And this attraction of the inner ring is something that follows us throughout our entire lives. But here's what C.S. Lewis says about it. He said, "It's like an onion. "Even if you peel it, you keep peeling it, "one layer to the next, one ring to the next, "closer and closer into the inner ring "until there's nothing left." 'Cause when you peel an onion, ultimately it's gone once you peel off that last layer.

So unless you can conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider, you will remain your entire life. And so I talk about how that, the interplay with that and what God's vision of work in our careers are. These are the kind of stories and lessons that I try to get into in the book. - Very interesting. You know, earlier we had talked about the attraction to power in DC.

Anybody that wants to get into the White House politics, into upper-level government, is seeking power. Do you... I've had a little bit of interaction with D.C. when it's actually due to this show. I've made some friends in Congress and Senate, whatever. But in this last round...

There's been a lot of veterans that ran and that got in there. Some have done a fantastic job. Some have fallen flat on their face. And a lot of us are disgusted with how it turned out. I don't feel like, and I knew some of these guys from before. And for the last State of the Union, I just got invited there by Tennessee Congressman Tim Burchett. And so I got to see,

a little bit of a peak behind the curve, not much, but, you know, and I've been there a couple other times for some other stuff, and you can see the change. And some of these guys, I really think they had good intentions. Yeah. You know, and I don't think it was about power. I agree with that. And then they get in there, and it's, I mean, shit, they haven't even been in there two years, and it's already, some of them have been there longer than two years, but it's,

You see a switch flip in a lot of these guys, and it's disgusting. Yeah. But, so I guess this is kind of two questions. One, I mean, with that being said, do you think there are a lot of people with good intentions that go in and then...

get flipped? - Yeah, sure, sure. - So it's not always about power? - 100%, 100%. You know, there are a few different aspects of this. So first of the military guys that go in, first of all, I think that's a great thing. I would love for more people who have at least shown that they're willing to serve our country and put it all on the line, those to be the kind of people that go and serve in the halls of Congress. That'd be amazing thing to get more of those folks in there. So great deal of respect for you and all the people who have served in that way.

The other side of that is what we talked about earlier too, that physical courage and moral courage are not always in the same package. Sometimes they are, they can be, but a show of physical courage is not necessarily a guarantee that the moral courage will exist there. And so sometimes it's just people, their character gets exposed. Just like I was talking about for myself, you get in there and you learn things about yourself that you wouldn't have otherwise.

And people get ate up with it, man. People get ate up with it. I mean, I see it all the time. People who plan their lives around election cycles because they're angling for the next job, to run for the next thing, to climb a little bit higher up the ladder. And it's really, really hard to guard against that. And D.C., the entire incentive structure, it perpetuates that. Everybody there, I guarantee you, if...

you were there and they didn't know who you were, the first question would be, who do you work for? - Oh man, it was disgusting. - Yeah. - You know, there was some good people. There was a lot of people who was, this is how it would go. I would get introduced.

And this is, I don't like parties. But I went because it's the State of the Union. Whether I like the guy that's doing it or not, it's history, right? And it's just cool to witness something like that. And

When I get introduced, hey, this is Sean, former Navy SEAL. They could give two shits. Former CIA, they could give two shits. Sean has a top ten podcast in the world. Now they care. Now they fucking care. Yeah. And now they want to shake my hand. Yeah. And now they want to be my buddy. Yeah. And it's... And, you know, we were talking about fame and all this other shit downstairs, and I don't buy into it because it's not real. And... But to see, like...

Man, it just makes you look like such a fucking scumbag. No doubt. You know? When I left, I'd always heard it said, you know, when you leave here, your phone's going to stop ringing. And I didn't fully appreciate that because I'm special, Sean. How could these people really like me? Because I'm like such an interesting guy and they like are really into me personally. And the day I left the White House, my phone legit did not ring.

Like for the next 24, no one reached out. No one gave a hoot. And a lot of those people I have not spoken to. People that I would have spoken to at least every week, if not every day, the second that I was no longer in proximity to the President of the United States phone don't ring anymore. And again, that's why I think it was like a good thing for me to experience this

And all of these things, I mean, I'm a firm believer that God is preparing us for whatever the plans that he has for us in the future. Going through that now, being able to go back, even when I went back to D&I after being in the White House, I was much better prepared for all of these dynamics having experienced

all sides, the good and the bad sides of it before going back into it. DC is a sick place, bro. It is a sick, sick place full of sick, sick people and not sick in the way that you might think. These are people who honestly, in a lot of ways, they don't know they're sick. They don't know they're ate up with

in the way that they are. They still think that they're good people. They don't think that they've lost themselves to it, but they have and they don't know it 'cause they can't snap themselves out of it because they're surrounded by

people who have the same problem that they do. And so that's why I think it's a great thing for people to come from outside of DC into it to serve for a period of time. This is the vision that our founders had. Not that people would be career government employees or career politicians, but they would come in and serve for a season and then go back to their lives. - Well, on top of that, you're not supposed to be living in DC as a Congressman, right? You're supposed to live in your district. - And work in DC, right. - And work in DC.

But now everybody just becomes a DC resident. - Yep, yep. - And screw their district. - Yep. You know the most politically untenable position that I hold, I can't believe I'm gonna say this. So maybe I should caveat this by saying I'm not actually proposing this, but as a thought exercise, we should triple the salary of a member of Congress. Now you say, "That is an insane idea." Right? It's an insane idea.

Let me tell you why. Now, it'll never happen. It's a thought exercise. There are two types of people that serve in Congress right now. One type of person is rich and they don't need the paycheck.

So it doesn't bother them that they're going to have to have two residences, a place in their district and a place in D.C. It doesn't matter. Their family's not going to have trouble making ends meet on $180,000 a year, even though the cost of living in D.C. is nuts. So $180,000 or whatever it is sounds like a lot of money, and it is. So don't get me wrong. Not in downtown D.C. But when you have two residences, all the things that go along with it, it makes it where you got to either be rich or it's the best job you've ever had.

So now it's the other end of the spectrum where it's like, oh man, if I can get into Congress, it's going to be the most money that I've ever made. I'm going to have power. I'm going to be able to go to a dinner every night where some lobbyist is paying for dinner. So I'm going to have all these experiences that I otherwise wouldn't be able to afford. And what's missing in Congress is the middle of that, which is successful entrepreneurs,

people who have shown excellence in the private sector and doing some things outside of the government, but they haven't had a huge exit where they made 100 million bucks selling their company. You know, they've got a family

They don't want to, you know, why would they subject themselves to the scrutiny that's going to go along with that? They're going to have to sacrifice the lifestyle that they have in their small town somewhere with their family, and they're going to be gone from their family all the time. They don't see a pathway. Granted, it is service, so sacrifice is expected, right? But also, it's very difficult to do this with, if you're a,

upper middle class entrepreneur type person with a family of five, how in the world can you see a pathway to running for Congress and representing your people that is not

financially ruinous to your family. Now, again, it's a bad idea. It'll never happen. But my point is that we're missing a huge segment of talent that has absolutely no interest and no pathway in ever serving in government. How do you think this flip happened so fast, this obsession with power and

money, greed, whatever it is. Because I see it. Now I see it. Now I knew people before they were in there, and now I see them after they're in there. So the reason that I support term limits is because of human nature. If every single day, every single person that you talk to tells you how great you are,

and they need something from you, and they're asking you for something, please help me with my issue, Sean. We really need, you are the greatest. I'm so glad that you're representing me. Would you please help me with this? And then every lobbyist that comes to you is like, hey, come out to dinner tonight, man. We'll take care of you. It's gonna be a fun time. Let's go out and hang out. Let's have a good, you know, every person is, you're so great. You're so great. You're so great. Some point, human nature says, you wake up one day and you say to yourself, I'm pretty great.

I am pretty great. All these people are right about me. And the second that that happens, and it's a subconscious thing, you've been had. And so I think it's human nature is what we're complaining about more than it is just DC. And the only check on human nature, I mean, it sounds like a broken record, but I really believe that, number one, a sincere faith in which you truly believe that there is a higher power in this universe than you. It's more important than you.

Second thing, I think having people with families up there is a big deal, a big deal, making policies that are pro-family policies. I think that's getting harder and harder to do because, I mean, I'm not going to bullshit. I thought about running the last time.

A lot of vets were thinking, a lot of my friends were thinking about running because everybody in my circle is very concerned with the way the country's going. And you know what the one common denominator is on why nobody wants to do it? Family. They don't want to put their family through that shit. Yeah, 100%. Through the scrutiny, through the lies, through it, you know, and...

I mean, I think that was designed on purpose. Yeah, no, I agree with that. It's hard for me to, I mean, in some ways it's kind of hypocritical of me because I think about that too. I don't want to, I love the fact that I get to spend so much time every day with my six-year-old, years that we'll never get back. You know, I love the fact that if he wants me to sleep in bed with him every night,

I can do that if I want to. If we want to just hang out one day and just go to the trampoline park all day, I've got the ability to do that with him. So I feel hypocritical saying like more people with young families need to get out there and do it, but I just think it also changes, so much about being a dad has changed my perspective on a lot of these policy issues, and it's a much more personal thing when I'm thinking about the impact that this stuff has on him. I mean,

Think about all the wars that we have gotten into where other people's sons were sent off to bleed and die because some politicians whose kids would never go through and do it made that decision. I mean, the whole GWAT, man. The whole Iraq war, I think, was a big money grab for the Halliburton, Cheney's organization. But...

and a lot of other wars. But that's a big one for my generation. What I was getting to though is, I'm not talking about the separation of family, I'm talking about the scrutiny, the coming home and seeing your six-year-old boy

overheard something on the media of them just ripping you apart. Maybe it's lies, maybe it's truth that you never wanted to come out of a mistake that you made 25 years ago. And that's more what I was getting at is the slander, the defamation. Totally. That type of stuff. Yeah. One of the things that I don't think I'll ever forget it, being at the White House, when you're

When you walk from the West Wing to the East Wing, the residence is in between. And on one side, closest to the West Wing, is the Rose Garden. Very famous. Everybody's seen it a million different times. But on the other side, in the same place where the Rose Garden is, on the other side, there's a small little garden on the East Wing side of the house. There's never any press over there. There's never any people from the outside allowed to go over there. White House tours don't go over there.

And I remember walking over there one day and seeing Barron Trump. Can't remember how old he must have been at the time. So now he just graduated high school. So he's 18 now. So this would have been, so he's probably 11 years old. And there's a soccer goal set up out there. And his Secret Service security detail is out there. But they have their backs to him. They're looking out, you know, protecting him. They're doing their job. And it's Barron Trump.

there by himself kicking a soccer ball into the soccer goal over and over again by himself. And I started thinking about exactly what you are right now, that this 11-year-old boy has to endure everything the left has thrown at his dad, at his family, the things that they've written even about him, a little boy, whether he likes it or not. And I just...

Couldn't help but like stop and like say a prayer for the kid that he's like gonna have to endure this, you know, because of the life that they live and the sacrifices that they have made for the country.

it affects families in a different way. I mean, I even think about like my stuff now, you know, I get plenty of criticism. People say wild things about me and you know, whatever. It doesn't really affect me anymore. It doesn't really bother me, but it bothers my wife when she sees it. So I get exactly what you're saying. - Yeah, I mean, so being a man of the word and a Christian, what do you think we're approaching end times here?

- Well, I think we ought to live like we are. - I mean, there's a lot of things happening that are in that book. - Yeah, yeah. So the title of the book is "The Darkness Has Not Overcome." It comes from the Gospel of John 1:5. "The light shines in the darkness, "and the darkness has not overcome it." And I named the book that because I do think that we're at a time where it feels very dark out there, and there's a lot of really bad things going on. But the end of that book is clear about who wins.

And so I think that we have a lot of hope in the midst of this darkness if we're looking for it in the right places. And even in Congress, State of the Union, not this year, but last year, I went up there as well. A friend of mine in Congress invited me the next morning, six o'clock in the morning, to meet him at this House Office building. And I walk in and there's eight or nine members of Congress there have a Bible study with each other. And nobody would ever know about it. I write about it in the book.

They weren't looking for credit. They weren't looking for publicity. Guys sitting there talking about things they wish they had done better the week before, opportunities that they missed that they wanted to share the gospel, colleagues that they were praying for, talking about things they were struggling with, eight or nine guys. And I had such a cynical view of Congress and still do in so many ways, but it changed my perspective on things a little bit, not because there are people in Congress that we should place our hope in, but there are people in Congress who place their hope in Christ.

So I do think even though it's really dark time, that there is hope if we're looking in the right places, but we're not gonna find it on the never ending cable news, TV programs. We're not gonna find it in politics at all. The most important event in human history, most important event in human history, it's a big statement now, so this better be good, whatever it is that I'm gonna say. The most important event in human history is the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Tiberius was the emperor of Rome when that happened. Pontius Pilate was the governor of Judea when that happened. But they were not the central characters of the story. Jesus was. So why on earth would we make politicians the central characters in our story today? When politics has consumed everything, talk about it nonstop, every aspect of life is politics, politics, politics. And the Bible's sitting there saying, "Politicians aren't the central characters, Jesus is."

sitting there waiting for you. That's where our hope is. So for me, it is a dark time. Feels like the end times. We better be living like it is because the Bible says, no man knows the day or the hour that he's coming, but he's coming. So we should live like he's coming back today. But we have a hope in knowing that our God is still in control. Man, that's very well said. And I think that's the perfect spot to end the interview.

So thank you. - Thank you for having me. - I will ask one more thing. - Do it. - If you're gonna get back in the ring? - Yeah. - Are you? - Yeah, stay in the ring, man. I'm a fighter, man, I want it. I want it, let's go, let's get after it. - Right on. All right, Cliff. Well, man, what a fascinating interview, which has covered so many aspects of your career and your experience in government and intelligence and with the books.

- Man, thank you for coming. And I just want to say, man, I'm very thankful that we connected. - Me too. No, and thank you for this platform, what you have built. It's extraordinary. And conversations like this that never happen in the mainstream media could never happen.

not just because of the format, but because they don't want to talk about the things that you're willing to talk about on here. And so, you know, I told you off here, I'll tell you now, you know, the reason Tucker Carlson came on your podcast, he said, I was looking at this and I said, this is an honest man. And I met him and he is an honest man. And so you keep doing that and this thing's going to keep blowing up. So thank you. I will. Thank you so much. All right, brother. God bless. God bless you. Check out the podcast that inspired Taylor Sheridan's latest series.

There's a stretch of road in a royal rich region of West Texas. This region of West Texas, known as the Permian Basin, is in the midst of the biggest oil boom in history. This is a story of roughnecks, billionaire wildcatters, and wannabe dreamers. My name is Christian Wallace. From Texas Monthly and Imperative Entertainment, this is Boomtown. Boomtown. Wherever you listen.