I didn’t have a chance to answer because, as often happens, President Trump answered himself. You’re just the audience with the president sometimes. He goes full stream of consciousness at Trump speed and in Trumpspeak. If I was annoyed at being interrupted, Trump was furious that his presidency had been interrupted before it began. The game was rigged from the start.
Now he told me, “I had nothing to do with Russia. This crap is hurting our country. I’m getting tough with China. Obama left us in horrible shape with the North Koreans. Guatemala and Honduras must take back their illegal immigrants. I promised I’d get our freeloading allies in NATO to pay up. And all people want to bother me about is Russia.”
Stream of consciousness is the best Trump because he is so clear about what he really wants and thinks. His instincts are impeccable.
It was clear to me that he wasn’t going to get over it because the media never would. For all Republican Speaker Paul Ryan’s hope that first year to pass the American Enterprise Institute’s ten-point plan or some billionaire-donor vision of a Grand New Party with Ryan’s Young Guns—all of whom were over forty-five—none of that was going to happen. The time for white papers had ended; the time for white knuckles had begun. Even if Russia wasn’t the fight we picked, it was the fight we were in. Now we needed warriors, not budgeteers, to win it.
It was on Air Force One that Trump inducted me into his posse and a new band of brothers formed. We would call and text constantly. We had a standing meeting every Monday night to compare notes, congressional votes, and strategy.
The president wasn’t shy about calling us by name, much the same way he did on Fox & Friends on April 26, 2018. He had been asked about some Republicans still lukewarm to his leadership style.
“Look: we have some absolute warriors. We have, I just watched your show, Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows and Matt Gaetz and DeSantis and so many…. These are all warriors. We have great people in the Republican Party.”
Warriors had to be willing to make the case for the Trump presidency in any territory, on any program or platform, at any time. We had to fight, fight, fight whenever and wherever. This wasn’t going to be a “kayfabe” fight, as they call staged battles like those the president had in his old gig as a WWE guest star; it was a shootout and we had to be ready to take the hits.
The president watches his haters on television and loves it when they are deboned live, on-air. He knows that his best defenders go beyond the friendly confines of Fox News to face down the likes of Chris Hayes, Chris Cuomo, and the vipers of The View. I’ve done them all. GOP Rep. Lee Zeldin of New York, one of our most cerebral congressmen, once asked why I went on so many programs with hostile hosts. “Aren’t you worried they’ll get you?” he asked.
“Win all your home games and go at least .500 on the road,” I told Zeldin. Nobody ever became a champion ducking tough competition. Zeldin would go on to conduct his own very effective media battles. By the end of the Russia fiasco, I had faced down and exposed Peter Strzok, America’s once premier counterintelligence agent. After that, Sister Act celebrities like Whoopi Goldberg don’t seem so tough.
It has been the honor of my life to have been on this team—these Four Horsemen of justice Trump named on Fox & Friends, along with many others such as Rep. Devin Nunes guiding the battle. We fought every day for our president and for the voters who put him and us there, often against our own government and party.
I often think of how those of us who defended the president wound up in the positions of power that now determine the direction of our country and whether that is Providence’s hand. It’s fashionable these days to talk about reality being a “simulation,” as if all of nature is reducible to whatever science fiction movie we last saw. It does seem sometimes as if there are players in the game, and then there are those who are just spectators, or, in video game parlance, “NPCs”—non-playing characters. D.C. is full of NPCs. President Trump wanted us to be players.
The rewards for stepping up have been intense. Meadows is now White House chief of staff. DeSantis is now governor of our third-most populous state. Jordan at one point served as the Republican lead on not one but two congressional committees. But we didn’t know that would happen then. We ride or die with Trump, and we intended to ride. Not for nothing, the president’s favorite movie is Braveheart, which features the line, “They may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom!” I kid, but bands of brothers have been formed from far less.
Ryan wanted to push his lobbyist-pleasing agenda and refused to help. From health care to immigration to defending the Republican majority and president, he took failure from a hobby and made it his career. Ryan had followers in the ironically labeled “leadership” willing to tote his off-key note. Democrats sent out hundreds of subpoenas during their reign of harassment, but when we were in the majority, Speaker Ryan didn’t authorize a single one. Oversight Chairman Trey Gowdy and Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte followed Ryan off the political cliff. Devin Nunes and the rest of us were furious, though Devin is far too much a soft-spoken gentleman to admit that now.
Gowdy, a tough former federal prosecutor, never liked President Trump. Gowdy and I both lived in our Capitol offices, and
