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Oct. 20, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:03:34
Dana Perino | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 73
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I remember prepping him for interviews at the end of the administration, saying, they're going to ask you what your legacy is going to be.
And he said, look, I read three books about George Washington last year.
And if historians are still analyzing the first president, then the 43rd doesn't have a lot to worry about because he'll never know.
Hey, hey, and welcome.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special, and I'm really excited to be joined today by Dana Perino.
She's host of The Daily Briefing and co-host of The 5Dana.
Great to see you.
It's amazing to finally get to do the Sunday show.
I know.
The best Sunday show.
Oh, thank you.
No offense, Chris Wallace.
Well, for people who don't know your background and have only seen you on Fox News, you first rose to prominence as President Bush's press secretary.
But what was, how did you I worked on Karl Rove's book and a couple of others and I remember Karl wanted to write just from when he was the president's campaign manager.
In 1998.
And I remember the editor saying, you can't just show up as the president's campaign manager.
You have to understand how.
And those are always the kind of the hardest first chapters for people to write.
Charles Krauthammer was the same when I worked with him.
Peggy Noonan didn't even want to do it.
But I do think it's really important.
And it's one of the things I love about your show is to dig a little deeper.
Like, how did you get to be this person?
And, well, my family's from Wyoming.
Both of my great-grandparents on my maternal and my paternal side homesteaded in Wyoming.
One became more of an entrepreneur, like with a motel that there's—I-80 goes right through Wyoming.
Big trucking route.
And so they had a motel there and a couple of other things.
But I feel like maybe where I identify the most is with my great-grandparents' ranch in Wyoming.
So it was the late 1800s.
They came from Italy.
My great-grandfather was a coal miner.
He did that all the way up to the 60s.
He did die of black lung.
He and my great-grandmother had Eight children, seven survived.
One of them was my grandfather.
And it's in the Black Hills of Wyoming.
A lot of people think, because I work for the president, I'm either from Texas, and I knew the Bushes, or that when I say I'm from Wyoming, there's sort of this, oh, then you must know the Cheneys.
I'm like, I didn't know the Cheneys either.
The Cheneys were from the other side of the state.
The Black Hills is about 80 miles west of Mount Rushmore, well, the ranches.
Right by Devil's Tower, so it's a pretty rugged country, good cattle country.
And my grandfather thought that he wanted to be a doctor, and so he was on that path.
However, World War II happened, and he then went and fought in the Pacific, and the Marines had him train as a medic.
But, like with many of those veterans, they felt like they had seen the world at that point, and they were done with it.
And he was needed back on the ranch.
He goes home.
But before he went home, he comes down through the Panama Canal, up in the dock in Philly.
That's when he's going to decommission.
The war was over.
And a friend of his said, we want to set you up on a blind date tonight.
And my grandmother's friends said, we want to set you on a blind date tonight.
Both of them refused to go until the last minute.
And it was love at first sight.
And they got married and had three children.
So my dad was the oldest of three.
I think he knew early on that he didn't want to be A lifelong rancher.
He's the first one to go to college at University of Wyoming.
One of the things about my dad that maybe helps explain me later is he loved news and he loved debate.
And so he used to, so this is before like speech teams existed, at the University of Wyoming at least, he and his roommates would take a topic And they would debate it, take one side, take a break, and then have to argue the other side.
So, he and my mom met at Casper College, and I was the oldest of two.
When I was two and a half, my dad got a job with Western Farm Bureau Life Insurance Company.
We moved to Denver.
And my dad, when the third grade started this tradition where I had to read the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post before he got home from work, and I had to choose two articles to discuss before dinner.
And I flash forward a little bit for you.
I know you have a daughter.
For anyone that has a daughter and there may be concern like how do you raise a confident young person?
I'm not excluding boys.
I just know my own experience.
This is the early days of feminist marketing.
There was this yellow T-shirt my dad bought me and in all black capital letters it said anything boys can do girls can do better.
Of course it's not true but it's one of those things where my dad was always like you can do whatever you want.
But having that opportunity to express myself and defend my positions about why I chose this article, why do I think it's important, gave me, I think, the confidence later on to do that with the President of the United States.
And I really encourage that kind of interaction with young women at their earliest ages, if anybody that's watching, if they can do that.
One thing that people don't realize, I don't think, until the Kamala Harris-Biden dust-up at that first debate this year, is that Denver was the city that was the subject of the busing desegregation that lost in the Supreme Court.
Denver then was the first to try to integrate schools using busing.
And so when I was in the fourth grade, instead of going to the school that was three blocks away from my home, I got bused 20 miles into the city.
I was one of only four white kids in the whole school.
I was talking to my mom about it, and she said, it's not that you didn't make friends, though I remember it kind of differently.
She said that on the weekends or after school, there was no one to play with.
She didn't know anybody.
And then because I got bullied and all the rest, I would have this anxiety about, well, what if they get mad at me?
What if they don't like me tomorrow?
And I would pray over and over again in this rote fashion, like, I hope they're not mad at me tomorrow, if they're not mad at me tomorrow.
So my parents ended up, after two years of that, Moving to a rural part of Colorado and that's where we grew up.
Went to University of Southern Colorado on a speech team scholarship.
Went to graduate school, University of Illinois Springfield.
I was getting a degree, I was going to be a reporter.
And I like covering politics.
That was what I really wanted to do.
But you can't always cover politics if the state legislature is not in session.
You've got to do other things.
And one day, the station I worked for, a CBS affiliate, said they wanted me to go cover this murder trial.
This young boy, two years old, had been murdered by this woman's best friend, who she'd been living with.
And the trial was starting, and they said, go and get an interview with this woman.
And I went to the courthouse, and I circled her three times.
And I said, oh, I can't do this.
And I went home and I told my dad, I said, I think I just got a graduate degree in something I don't want to do.
And he was great.
He said, As soon as you graduate, we'll just come home and figure it out.
Ended up going to Washington and worked as a House Press Secretary for a congressman from Colorado.
He was chairman of the Energy and Power Subcommittee, which is how I kind of unnerred on climate change issues, environmental issues.
I know them very well.
That's actually how I get back to the White House after 9-11.
My girlfriend called and said, could you come join us at the Justice Department?
And then from there I became Press Secretary.
So in a second I'm going to ask you about working in the Bush administration, what that was like, and I'm going to ask you about President Bush and being press secretary, but first let's talk about life insurance.
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Okay, so let's talk about your time in the Bush administration.
So when did you actually first get to know President Bush?
So you joined the administration in the DOJ, but that doesn't necessarily mean you know the president.
So how did you actually get to know the president?
I started trying to think of when I first... He might have known about me.
I had worked with Ari Fleischer on Capitol Hill.
Josh Bolton was a big fan of mine, so was Andy Card, because I had been doing the White House Council on Environmental Quality press for the White House for a long time now.
Media bias is not new, okay?
And being hard on Republicans on environmental and conservation issues is not new.
We were on the front page every single day.
In fact, I'll tell you something that a lot of people don't know.
On September 10th, 2001, what was the White House Communications Office working on?
Stayed till 10 p.m.
at the White House.
Big issue.
Front page New York Times story coming the next day.
They got a problem on their hands.
It was the Cheney Energy Task Force.
Right?
The next morning, the world changes forever.
And you look back on that now and like, oh my gosh, we should have just said, yeah, of course Cheney's chairing the Energy Task Force, you idiots, of course!
But it's just a different time.
But I did all this stuff on Bureau of Land Management, all the climate change issues.
There was an issue about coal-fired power plants called New Source Review that the Clinton administration had been very clever in filing these little lawsuits.
Little time bombs that would pop up, and then the administration and the next administration would have to decide, are you going to pursue this ridiculous lawsuit against these coal-fired power plants?
And if you're not, does that mean you're a dirty polluter?
So we dealt with a lot of that.
But I started in the White House press office as the deputy on the first day of the second term, and got to know me then.
It's actually kind of a funny story.
I feel like the first time he ever really knew who I was, I got kicked out of the Oval Office.
This is one of my most embarrassing moments, but Dan Bartlow's communications director, he said, Dana, would you mind sitting in with the president as he does this interview with David Ignatius?
David Ignatius has just returned from Iran.
The president's agreed to sit down with him, and they're going to have this conversation.
And I'll come for the pre-brief for the president, but I have to go to this other meeting.
Can you just sit?
And I was like, yeah, I know how to do that.
But I was pretty nervous.
My first time sitting with the president, Oval Office, syndicated columnist.
So we get to the Oval Office.
Dan's starting to explain what's happening.
He said, Mr. President, David Ignatius is here.
And the president says, oh, I'm not doing an interview with Ignatius.
And Dan said, no, you are, remember?
He said, no.
I said I would talk to David Ignatius about his trip, but I'm not going to do an interview with David Ignatius because then he'll write about it, and then it will look like I'm negotiating with the Iranians.
Through David Ignatius, and I'm not doing it.
And therefore, she doesn't need to be here.
And he looked at me, I don't even think he knew my name, and he gave me one of these head nods to basically get out of the Oval Office.
So I leave by the grandfather clock, and I think my office was like 30 steps away.
Go down to the lower press office, I had a pocket door, I closed it, and I called Peter, my husband, and said, I was tearful.
I wasn't crying, but I was tearful.
And he said, what happened?
Tell the story.
And he said, well, just think for the rest of your life, you can say I've been kicked out of better places than this.
But then over time, the president got to know me.
One of the things I think was one of my highest compliments I got from him is that he was never surprised by a question from the press when I briefed him.
I was like super covered.
I have all the bases covered.
What was his relationship with the press like?
Because obviously now we have short memories and everybody pretends that, as you say, the fake news began with President Trump and that no president has ever been hit by the press like President Trump.
Some of us are old enough to remember when George W. Bush was president and they were calling him Bush Hitler and suggesting that he was a war criminal.
So how did you handle press relations?
Well, yeah, you kind of do have to go back in time a little bit.
Remember, he had watched his father go through media bias.
Remember the wimp?
The wimp factor?
That was in the front cover of Newsweek, I believe.
President Bush kind of never got over that on his dad's behalf.
Like, if you insulted — 41 and 43, as we'll call them, both said it was harder to be the father of a president and the son of a president than it was to be the president because of the criticism.
When the criticism is aimed at you, You can kind of handle it, but if it's about your loved one, it's different.
By the time I come on the scene, he's seen his dad go through it, he's been elected governor of Texas twice, he's gone through the recount, he's in war, and he's been re-elected.
He had a respect for the First Amendment, and he also was his father's son, and so respect was to be given to the press.
And also, the president gave me a real leg up.
He told everybody in the administration, if you are at a meeting and you go back to your desk and you have a message that Dana Perino called, she's the first person you call back.
Because I would say, unlike today, it's just different now, but I would spend 85% of my day preparing for the press briefing.
And part of that was being in meetings, listening, helping shape the message and all of those things, but it was really press relations.
I do remember Ed Gillespie, however, the communications director at the time, strategic advisor for the president, started a thing called setting the record straight.
And it was a document that we used to put out, we would take an article, and now it's just like, common, this happens on Twitter all the time, or it happened to the, well you think about the New York Times and Kavanaugh, that happened immediately.
We would try to do that from the White House or from the RNC, they would give that a shot.
I have this one young man, Carlton Carroll, I remember, we used to have to announce over the intercom that we had put a press release in the bins of people at the White House.
And Carlton Carroll over the intercom said, there's a setting the record straight in the bins, and I suggest you read it.
That was kind of our pushback.
Bill O'Reilly used to give me a little bit of a hard time in commercial breaks saying that I was too easy on the press.
And looking back, I think maybe that's true.
Maybe that's true.
But I also had good relations where, especially with the White House press corps, I don't think I would change how I handled it.
Because I used to think if I'm speaking in front of At the podium.
If the president were watching me, I would think, would he be proud of what I was saying?
And if the answer was no, I didn't say it.
So how has the job of press secretary changed?
Because now we've seen, obviously, that position elevated to such an important point in American life that people aren't allowed to appear on Dancing with the Stars if they apparently dissembled from the podium.
Honestly, roasting you at the commentary magazine on the same night that Sean Spicer did Dancing with the Stars, I think I was probably even more nervous than Sean Spicer was.
Because he loves life.
I mean, you weren't wearing like a green No, I knew that I was the only female roaster, so I was like, I'm wearing the white dress to be a little different.
I think technology has changed a lot of things.
Marlon Fitzwater is one of my favorite people.
He was press secretary to Reagan and Bush.
Imagine being press secretary for eight years.
His book called The Briefing is probably one of the best ever written about Washington experiences, and I recommend it highly to anybody who's thinking about going to Washington.
Well, fast forward from Marlon Fitzwater to Mike McCurry.
Now, he's President Clinton's press secretary.
He's the first to allow cameras into the briefing room.
That changes the dynamic a lot.
He says he regrets it.
I think it was kind of inevitable.
People want the video.
In January of 2009, on the day that I leave the White House, I didn't even have a Twitter account.
And the Obama team really takes social media to the next level to win the election.
They use it a little bit differently, but I do think that, this is my own perspective, I've done no research on this, but it's my gut, that just as radio changed things for FDR and forever, and at the time, people were like, what is he doing?
This is so inappropriate, he's on the radio.
And then you get to Kennedy, all the way through Reagan, and the use of television.
And that changes everything.
And I do think that whether you like the tweets or you don't like the tweets, the fact that the President of the United States communicates directly, not through the media, that has changed things.
I don't think it's for the better or the worse.
I think it's fascinating.
And I still think there is a role for the press.
It's interesting.
Conservatives tend to hate the press.
Until the press writes a good article, then it's like, well, look what the New York Times.
Even the New York Times wrote that.
I had a rule in my office, always read the article twice before you complain about it.
And that helps soften things.
So your relationship with President Bush was obviously very close, and that meant that when you were Press Secretary, your message was much more on message with President Bush's.
How would you answer questions where you didn't quite know what the President thought?
Because that obviously, the gap between the President and the Press Secretary has been very obvious in this administration, where the Press Secretary will go out there at least early on, say something, the President will then undercut that, or The press secretary, in fear that they might cross the president, will give some bizarre answer on something that might normally seem sort of obvious to everybody.
This is a great question.
I have a great story about our connection.
One of the things is Dede Meyers was given bad information.
Actually, given.
Bad information from the National Security Council about a strike.
I think it was in Afghanistan, actually.
And she had been at the White House on a Saturday.
Reporters asked her, like, hey, we're hearing about activity.
She goes and she asks the National Security Council.
They say, no, it's not happening.
She tells that to the press because they were afraid.
They didn't want to upset the operation.
But that hurt her incredibly.
Fast forward, Scott McClellan gets into this thing.
Whatever he said, he heard.
I was hyper aware.
One, I never, ever, ever want to get in trouble for anything.
I like the gold star on the chart at the end of the day.
So I would be super cautious about things like that.
The other thing is, and I think Obama and Trump are like this as well.
President Bush let me be with him anytime I wanted.
So I would listen to all of the things that he would say.
I didn't always raise my hand.
I could raise my hand if I wanted to, but I could observe everything.
So the story I was going to say about this is the only time I didn't double check to make sure was really high stakes.
I woke up one morning, four o'clock in the morning, I used to get 4.12.
I would wake up.
My alarm was at 4.20, but I woke up at 4.12.
And there's all these emails that say from reporters, they want to know what the president thinks about Prime Minister Maliki of Iraq sending troops into Basra.
And I'm like, let me, you know, I'm just still drying my hair, guys.
I'll get back to you as soon as I can.
And they're all, and I don't know what.
That came over me except for that I had been with the president so much.
I'd been in all the secure video teleconferences with Maliki and Karzai.
And finally, I say about 5.45 in the morning.
I think I gave it to Reuters.
I said, the President of the United States supports Prime Minister Maliki and reminds everyone that this is exactly what the world was thinking Maliki wouldn't do, but he did it to help protect the minority there in Iraq, in Basra, because Basra was a mess.
About five minutes later, all these articles start coming in from the wire services.
Petraeus is furious with Malachy.
Gates is furious.
Rice is furious.
Nobody knew that this was happening.
They're so mad at Malachy, and I thought, Oh, my gosh.
I could get fired today.
I really did think that.
My stomach sank.
I was so nervous.
Get to the White House.
Senior staff meeting's late.
Bush White House was never late.
Josh Bolton comes into the Roosevelt Room from the Oval Office side, not his office, and he's standing there.
Instead of sitting down, he said, I just came from the Oval Office.
I'm going to tell everybody in this room that if anyone here says that the president doesn't support Prime Minister Maliki, they are wrong.
And I had the little piece of paper.
I was like, I said it.
I said it.
He's on record.
I have it.
It's there.
Late 2008, 2009, we did interviews with Charles Krauthammer, four of them, that Charles decided never to publish.
It was up to him.
And Charles says to the president, when did you know that The Surge was going to be a success?
The president says, well, Basra and Maliki sent the troops in, and nobody thought he would do it.
And he says, you know, Charles, Nobody in my administration was with me, except for Dana, and that he remembered meant a lot to me.
I tell that story to say that we were super close.
I understood him, he understood me.
In a lot of ways, he was like a second father to me, but if he, as Commander-in-Chief, had asked me to mop the floors for eight years, I would have done it.
So in a second, I want to ask you about what the press always gets wrong about George W. Bush.
We'll get to that in one second.
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Okay, so let's talk about what the press gets wrong about George W. Bush.
So, I mean, I was covering from afar what was happening with the Bush administration and the typical press It was frustrating.
sort of account of President Bush is that he was a bumbler and that he was a clod and that he and that he was indecisive.
And that still kind of maintains to a certain extent in the press to be the narrative, although now they're redrawing it because they hate Trump so much that any Republican who came before is is by proxy now normal and good.
But what was that like?
I mean, you knew him personally, obviously.
It was frustrating.
It was frustrating.
I don't know if you've ever worked with somebody that you know to have so much respect for them and you see them behind closed doors and And then in front of the camera, it just doesn't translate sometimes.
And I think he tried really hard to connect with Common Man.
Like if we went and did an interview He loved the crew.
He didn't care about the talent.
He loved the crew, right?
So behind the scenes, people knew.
So we started doing these things, these off-the-record meetings on foreign policy.
We would invite reporters in.
The New York Times, I think, refused to come because it was off the record, but everybody else came.
It was like, fine, well, if you don't want to get the president's thinking, whatever.
Fine, don't come.
And to a person, they would leave and say, Why isn't that the person that you see on TV?
You know, a president has multiple audiences that they're talking to all at the same time.
The American people, our troops, our allies, and our enemies.
And you have to keep all of those things in mind.
And I think, I don't know if they realize how funny he was.
And also, here's another thing that really bothers me.
This is how I had a reporter who wrote a book about working in Washington, women working in Washington, and she called me and she says, so, how hard was it to be in the Bush bro White House?
What are you talking about?
I was the press secretary.
If I needed something on foreign policy, I called Condi Rice.
If it was homeland security, I called Fran Townsend.
Got an education question, I'm going to call Margaret Spellings.
You know, council's office, Harriet Meyers, ledge affairs, that was Candy Wolf.
I could go on, but I think I've made my point here.
It's very frustrating.
He was a promoter of women, but we didn't promote it in terms of, we didn't put out a press release every time a woman Achieved a new position because it was on the merits.
It was just a meritorious situation.
There were gay people that worked in the Bush administration.
Now, a lot of people did come out after the administration, but I also think when gay marriage became accepted and the Supreme Court ruled, that changed so fast with society.
I feel like people think he was quite an intolerant person, and he was not.
How did you handle leaks in the White House?
So that's obviously been a huge issue with this administration.
There were some problems with leaks in the early Bush administration.
By the second term, it seemed like that had been locked down pretty well.
I can't even remember a leak that we had to deal with, actually.
One time, I did think there was a leak, and then the president said, no, that was Hadley.
Because Steve Hadley had given some information about it.
Anyway, no, we didn't really have leaks.
Though, if there ever was a leak, I think it's so interesting.
You can take it to the bank.
The press office never leaks.
Because they have to clean up the leaks, but they're always suspected of the leak.
But I tell you, it's almost 100% foolproof that the first person to complain about a leak is the leaker.
Absolutely.
I remember it from the John Roberts nomination.
There was somebody in the council's office and something was in the paper like, that's not accurate, that's not true.
I get this call at 6.40 in the morning from a guy I never even really talked to and I realized like, oh, he's the leaker.
So let's fast forward from the Bush administration to now you're on Fox News.
So what was that transition back into TV and news like for you?
Because you started off there and you ended up there.
Although what I was doing when I couldn't land the interview at the courthouse was very different from what I do now.
I knew when I left the Bush administration that I wanted to Stay in the conversation.
I also wanted to be somebody that could continue to defend and promote the legacy of George W. Bush.
And I enjoyed explaining things to people.
I enjoyed that.
One of the things I made the mistake of doing, and a lot of people do this when they leave public service, is you say yes to everything.
I was burning the candle at both ends.
I was working later hours than I had when I had been at the White House.
Eventually, after just being a contributor for a while, being the guest, I almost always, for those first two years, was defending the Bush administration.
Because you remember, President Obama, remember, get a mop?
He would say it over and over again.
It was a constant, a gentle, respectful way of pushing back and setting the record straight.
So I did that.
And then I got nominated by McConnell, and then President Obama agreed, and I got Senate confirmed to the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees Voice of America and the like.
I do a lot of work, care a lot about Africa.
It was kind of put into me by the bushes.
And I was coming back from Nigeria.
I was at Dulles Airport, and I got a call asking me if I could come up to New York for five weeks to do this temporary program with five people at a table, and that was eight years ago.
So we moved up here and did that.
I think the hardest thing was, as press secretary, I was very used to Explaining somebody else's decisions, explaining their decision-making.
I could tell you exactly why he did it, what his opinion was.
I knew all of that.
It wasn't until I came on The Five that I was challenged to say, well, what do you think?
And I realized that there's a big buffer in that.
Because if I'm your spokesperson, it's not me that they're criticizing.
Right.
So that was new for me.
I remember Greg Gutfeld at one point turned to me and said, no, what do you think?
Not what the administration thought.
Like, what do you think about?
I think it was the legalization of marijuana.
And I really had to spend some time thinking about it and think about how I would articulate.
I think that was the hardest part.
And then also for a while, maybe this is just true of every It might not be true of every network, but for a while, because the show was called Temporary, and everything is temporary, right?
You can be fired at any time.
That can happen.
I wasn't sure.
Am I going to have to leave doing this commentary work and go back and being a spokesperson for somebody or doing PR work, etc.?
And when I finally realized, oh, I can let go, I started having more fun.
So I want to go back for a second.
You mentioned the legacy of George W. Bush, and President Bush has famously said that, you know, he only thinks that his legacy is going to be written 100 years after his presidency, and then we'll really sort of know.
Well, we're not 100 years out, but we are 11 years out from his presidency or 10 years out from his presidency.
What do you think that the Bush administration's legacy is and President Bush's legacy will be?
I really have to hand it to him for having this viewpoint.
I remember prepping him for interviews at the end of the administration, saying, they're going to ask you, what your legacy is going to be.
And he said, look, I read three books about George Washington last year.
And if historians are still analyzing the first president, then the 43rd doesn't have a lot to worry about because he'll never know.
Abraham Lincoln went, unfortunately, murdered, dies thinking he's unpopular.
I don't think that they'll ever really know.
That looking through the prism of today, you know, I'll even have people say to me, oh, you know, I really miss real Republicans.
And I understand what they mean in terms of civility, like if that's if they're looking for civility.
But I also believe, and I learned this from President Bush, democracy is self-healing.
And we have the greatest country.
We've been through so much.
We've been through a lot worse.
Forty-three used to talk to me about when he graduated from college, how terrible the country was actually fighting each other in the streets in the late 60s.
And we're a long way from that.
I think that his work with veterans will continue.
Obviously 9-11 is the turning point for so many things.
And for a presidency that was supposed to be about returning To domestic policy, tax cuts early on, right?
Improve education, less government, no foreign nation building.
That all changes in a moment out of necessity.
And I think that is something I think people will look back and say, he was able to focus the mind and through His strategy was to help other presidents for the future have tools in place to help protect the country from it ever happening again.
I think that that will be the most important part of the legacy.
I'd be remiss if I didn't talk a little bit about the war in Iraq, because you mentioned it a little bit earlier.
And it is fascinating to see how so many people on the right have now run headlong from the war in Iraq, suggesting that not only was it based on bad information, which is fairly Fairly true, at least with regards to the weapons of mass destruction, but that it was immoral or that it was fought for nefarious reasons.
For oil.
For oil.
And I mean, I'm talking about leaders in the Republican Party suggesting this, that the Bush era foreign policy was truly a liberal foreign policy.
I've heard folks on various networks suggest.
And what do you make of that sort of recasting of the Iraq War as something that, I mean, I'm old enough to remember when Republicans spent eight years defending it.
So what do you make of that?
So I really like Decision Points, President Bush's autobiography.
He takes 14 decisions of his presidency and explains them.
And what I also like about it is he said, I'm done debating it.
So I'm going to tell you what I knew at the time.
You can't force people to have a legacy based on information they didn't have at the time.
And I still maintain that the world is better off without Saddam Hussein.
And I hurt for our veterans that have come back and have injury and for the ones who didn't come back, for the Gold Star families.
I do think that defending what they did, why they went.
How many young people volunteered?
It's an incredible number because they believed in freedom.
That was the other thing was that this innate belief in freedom.
That was a rallying cry.
And now it seems quaint.
And to me, I look at all around the world, solving problems at their source Will help a lot of things.
Would help a lot of things.
Our immigration problem at the border, for example.
Law and order, things like that.
I also feel like the national security reasons for why you go to war.
Was there a threat?
Was there a credible threat?
One thing I admire about President Bush, as well, is that he never blamed the intelligence agency.
He never did that because he knew, as president, he needed them.
Right?
And that they had it wrong.
Things can go wrong.
And I think that he, as he writes in his book, if he had other information at the time, would he have gone to war?
No.
That's not the information that he has.
So let's fast forward to today's politics and talk about what's going on now.
So obviously things are incredibly different than they were in 2008, even 2004.
And we are living in this bizarro world in which President Trump is the president.
And that is a shocking development for people who are traditional followers of politics because obviously he came from literally nowhere in the political landscape.
And just steamrolled over all the other primary Everybody.
So first I want to get your sort of analysis of what the hell happened in 2016, because we have a bunch of competing sort of narratives about what happened in 2016.
On the right you have this narrative that President Trump put together this brand new coalition that had never been done before, driving people out to vote like no one in history.
And on the left you have this idea that President Trump stole the election and that truly Hillary Clinton was just sort of a failure at recreating the coalition of Barack Obama, but that the new normal is Obama's coalition and Trump is an outlier.
How do you analyze that?
Well, I'm definitely with the former.
I think the latter is really dangerous.
If Democrats think that, they're going to lose again.
I'm also troubled by this notion that you have actual Democrats and many women Democrats saying a woman can't put a woman up in 2020 because a woman just can't beat President Trump because America's not ready to vote for a woman.
Wait, Hillary actually won the popular vote.
She screwed up her strategy in three states.
And so I feel like all this women's empowerment nonsense that you hear from Democrats basically saying, oh, wait, actually we can't beat him.
OK.
I actually think that the popular vote might not be achievable for President Trump, though he's given it a shot, going to New Mexico, going to California, if he can increase those vote totals there, even if he doesn't win those states.
New Mexico might be in the cards, California obviously is not, but if you can increase the number of people that vote for you and improve on the popular vote, that would be something.
I also think that Americans were much more ready for change than traditional politicians or political observers thought.
They were much more comfortable with it.
They had had it.
I'm very interested in the voters that voted for Obama and then Trump.
I don't feel like the Democrats have done anything to win back those votes.
I haven't.
I feel like their economic arguments are pretty poor.
And I remember Mitch McConnell saying on air at the first State of the Union after Trump wins, after that first year of his presidency, he's like, Dana, look at this list.
Look at all these things.
And in any Republican administration, if you didn't know who the president was, would Republicans be pleased?
And the answer is arguably yes.
From judges and policy, deregulation, all of these things have made sense.
I also think that Republicans are quite lucky that President Trump decided to go with them.
Right?
Because had he thought that there was an opportunity and the timing was right, he could have.
Steamrolled over the Democratic Party as well.
Well, now he's doing that.
He did that with the Republicans, and now he's doing it with them.
I did recognize about two years ago, I said, they're going to come after the Electoral College.
This is going to be the new thing.
Even though Obama won the Electoral College, they never talked about it again.
But now, they try to say that it's racist, that it's unfair.
And I said, I'm talking about Carlton's show.
I'm like, watch, they're going to come for the Electoral College.
It won't happen in our lifetime, but it is under threat.
So in a second, I want to ask you about sort of my theory that Trump is reaction to not only the Obama years, but in part to the Bush years in an interesting way.
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I want to throw out a theory about what drove Trump directly over everybody in the Republican Party, including President Bush's brother, right?
President Bush's brother, right?
And just steamrolled everybody.
And just steamrolled everybody.
And that is there was this roiling anger inside the Republican Party dating all the way back to the Bush administration in which Republicans, I think to a certain extent, rightly felt that Republicans had not defended themselves against the predations of the press.
And that is there was this roiling anger inside the Republican Party dating all the way back to the Bush administration in which Republicans, I think, to a certain extent rightly felt that Republicans had not defended themselves against the predations of the press.
President Trump has spent an enormous amount of time bashing the press.
President Trump has spent an enormous amount of time bashing the press.
It's one of the things that for all of my quibbles with the way that he acts, for all of my serious criticisms of his character, and even for my criticisms of his overuse of the term fake news, when he's a hammer in search of a nail, and there are a lot of nails for him to hit.
And for Republicans, it felt a lot during the Bush administration, like, why won't President Bush come out and defend himself?
We're out here fighting for him.
Why won't he defend himself?
It was really frustrating.
And then in 2008, John McCain had somewhat of the same thing going on, where it was he was being savaged in the press as a racist and as a bigot.
And then it was suggested that he was Bush term three, even though he had significant differences with President Bush.
And And then he was in the background saying, well, I'm never ever going to mention Jeremiah Wright.
And Republicans are going, what the?
Why?
And then in 2012, it was Mitt Romney, the most genteel, milquetoast human being ever to walk the planet, running.
And his entire campaign was basically, Barack Obama's a really good dude, but marginal tax rates are out of control.
And so along comes Trump in 2016, and he's a giant, pulsating middle finger.
And a lot of Republicans just say, OK, that guy, because we're sick of this.
What do you make of that theory?
I think that's right.
I also feel like, but also back in time, if you go like after 9-11 and the country's at war, one of the worst things is inauthentic behavior.
It wasn't in President Bush's nature.
Although when Kanye West suggested that he was a racist after Hurricane Katrina, he says that was the thing that hurt him the most when he was president.
As a leader, he was a turn-the-other-cheek kind of guy, focused on the goal.
And I'm like that too.
I just have to be who I am, but sometimes that doesn't work so well on cable news.
I'm not a fighter, really.
I will argue my point, but I also have a longer-term view of life and a legacy, and I think that he probably did too.
I imagine when I say that I thought about what he would be thinking of me, I imagine he thought, what would my parents be thinking of me?
And that he has a deep faith and a relationship with God, and he was going to live that faith.
So fast forward when people are thinking that their culture, their very way of life, their very being is under assault.
And then here comes somebody who is willing to stick up for you.
There's power in that.
And I was very good friends, I am very good friends, with Brett Kavanaugh.
I worked with him in the White House.
I remember when I was spokesperson for Justice Roberts, then Judge Roberts, that confirmation wasn't easy.
People think that it was easy.
It was easy after Chief Rehnquist passed away, because then there was another opening and it was fine, then Alito became the target.
But at the time, I remember, I didn't understand, I'm not a lawyer.
I didn't understand why I was getting all these questions about the right to privacy.
I was like, I thought this was supposed to be about Roe v. Wade.
What are we doing?
And I went to Brett Kavanaugh on a Friday night, 7 p.m.
He was, of course, still there.
Knock on the door.
I'm like, could you help me?
And he does.
He helps walk me through it, watching what Brett Kavanaugh went through when he was confirmed.
Now, when I was his spokesperson in 05, The big controversy about Brett Kavanaugh going to the circuit court was that he had written a torture memo or something, or he had said a torture... But, arguably, all of these accusations about his character in high school and college would have been brought up in 04 and 05.
Never heard a whisper of it.
Nothing.
And I was with my husband in Spain on our 20th anniversary when Kavanaugh did the second hearing, the second testimony, and I've never seen my husband outraged.
And I cried the entire time.
And I really thought nothing will unite conservatives like this.
And when it's a choice between two people, whoever the Democrats come up with and President Trump, I think that the Democrats are going to have a really hard time.
I mean, so what the hell happened to the Democratic Party?
Because something has gone deeply awry here.
Well, maybe it's that they're having their own moment, right?
They're having... Fast forward eight years from now, if we do this interview again, we'll look back and go, oh, the Democrats were really mad because...
Whatever it might be.
I mean, I understand why they're angry.
I do think that there was this sense inside the Democratic Party that they were never going to lose another election, and that Barack Obama had forged a coalition that was unbreakable because it did not rely on traditional white voters, and that this was the growing demographic.
So as long as that demographic kept growing, he was never going to lose again.
They had kind of a parallel situation.
They didn't deal with Bernie Sanders early.
They changed the rules to accommodate him.
He has a following and movement.
He wasn't even a Democrat.
And it just so happened that Trump ran the tables, Bernie ran into the Hillary Clinton bulwark, basically, and now they're all still paying for it.
And they're going through transitions.
It's quite common for a party, if they get two terms at a White House, which is almost always the case, that that next eight years It's pretty turbulent for whatever part.
I don't know how the Democrats will end up.
There's a lot of realignment going on.
It's kind of fun to live through it now.
I would say in 2015 and 2016, I don't know if I loved watching Republicans fight amongst themselves, but now I feel much more like an observer.
And it's pretty fun to watch.
I kind of hope there's a contested convention for the Democrats.
That'd be fun.
It hasn't happened.
I asked Brad Hume, I said, what's it like to cover a contested convention?
He said, I don't know.
I've never done it.
So it could be really great history making.
So who do you think emerges, and we're going to get in the political prognostication game here, and I've lost too much money betting on politics to actually do this much anymore, but I'm going to ask you to.
It's fake money.
It's like house money.
But let's talk about the Democratic primary process.
So right now you've got Joe Biden, who is well-liked by a lot of Republicans.
I know a lot of Senator Cruz, who is really opposed to him, talks about him.
Very friendly.
A lot of Republicans are very friendly with Joe Biden.
Obviously, I've spent my entire career commenting from the outside, so I know very few Democratic senators.
I know a lot of Republicans and very few Democrats.
And so from the outside, it has always appeared to me that Joe Biden is a political manipulator, that he is fairly good at that, but that he is actually sort of just a genial kind of bumbly guy.
Does he look hungry for it?
No.
It's sort of like, remember when you read in the New York Times that Barack Obama tells Joe, you don't have to do this.
And it seems like that is kind of the slogan for the campaign.
There's no real verve.
Where's the energy?
And even in his crowds, it's like, he's the next thing.
I do think there's a lot of similarities to the Romney candidacy.
The thing is that the Democrats keep hoping, his opponents, that he's going to crater.
He's not.
He stays atop the poll, so he won't crater until one of them decides to go after him.
Right.
Castro tried.
Failed.
Think about Marco Rubio.
Marco Rubio tries to go after Trump.
Fails.
And I think Bernie is kind of a non-entity.
He has a core base of support.
They'll always be with him, but it's not growing.
Not really shrinking, it's not growing.
Kamala Harris, you know, when you're pulling fifth in your home state, and Andrew Yang, who is authentic and likable, does crowd surfing, it's just different.
If you're fifth behind him in your home state, you've got problems.
Now, changing strategies.
I think that Elizabeth Warren It's getting a lot of positive press right now.
She has a lot of energy.
When I talk about that energy, we saw the media talking about her four hours of taking selfies.
It's called a photo line, but like selfies, whatever you want to call it.
There's energy in her speech.
And now at her speeches, people are finishing her lines.
Like, they've gone back multiple times.
They like her.
So there is something there with Elizabeth Warren.
But I would say this.
She missed her moment.
She should have ran in 2016.
She should not have endorsed Hillary.
She should have taken on Bernie.
And she would have been the candidate against Trump.
I don't know how that would have turned out.
Yeah, I mean, I feel the same way, because I feel like, as you say, her press has been inerringly glowing.
I mean, since the Pocahontas stuff, it's been just endless great press for her.
And I think that now that Bernie is starting to drop in the polls, he's going to have to come after her with a hot poker.
I mean, he really has no choice.
Right.
And when that happens, he's going to hit her for inauthenticity, and he's going to be right, because she is inauthentic.
I mean, she's been playing at, I'm the authentic, progressive voice in the room.
She is certainly not.
I mean, if you go back and you read what she was writing in 2003, 2004, she was actually kind of interesting and heterodox.
And now she's cribbing off a Bernie sheet and then pretending that she came up with all these ideas herself.
I mean, even Stephen Colbert exposed her on the middle class tax stuff.
So I think that Biden is default candidate.
I do think that Biden's candidacy has a serious shot against Trump just because default Democrat could do fairly well against Trump because of his personal foibles.
Meaning that running a dead person against Trump might not actually be the worst strategy.
You don't necessarily need somebody who is transformational and feels energetic.
I do think it's going to be close no matter what.
Also think about this with the Democrats.
And maybe this is true for Republicans as well.
Probably is.
The governors.
That used to be seen as great presidential candidates because they've been executives of a state, they're not from Washington.
But here's the thing, they're not on TV all the time.
Nobody knows them.
So here you have Governor Hickenlooper and Governor Bullock, two very accomplished people that can't get a foothold.
And I think part of that is that there's just so much national attention now rather than state-based.
Let's talk for a second about the transformation of the Republican Party.
So you mentioned all the chaos inside the party in 2015, 2016.
So how do you think that the new Republican Party stacks up to sort of the Bush-era Republican Party?
What's changed and what's the same?
Well, I think that a lot of the people who were Reaganites come through, even to today.
But one thing also, I thought you would mention that Republicans were very frustrated with the Bush administration for spending.
I think that was the Tea Party, but it didn't seem to matter with Trump.
It doesn't now, right?
So that's a quick change in eight years.
But Kristen Soltis Anderson, she's not the only one, but she told me about this chart where the majority of people are not fiscally conservative and socially liberal.
Right, no one is basically, yeah.
They're socially conservative and fiscally liberal.
And that's where you have somebody like Elizabeth Warren saying, I will increase the average Social Security check by $200 a month.
Nobody cares how she's going to pay for it.
I actually think on that, what would President Trump say?
All of a sudden, he's going to say, well, we can't do that.
No, I think up the ante.
Just keep going.
And the consequences of this kind of spending and debt, deficit, It seems to me that we took a lot of grief for that in the Bush administration, that you don't hear so much now.
Maybe that's okay.
Maybe it doesn't matter.
Maybe you could get to higher growth.
Maybe deficits.
I don't know.
It is kind of a partisan thing, spending.
Republicans care about it during the Obama years, maybe not so much during the Trump years.
Democrats railed about it in the Bush years.
I think the spending issue is super important.
I also think that there's some innovation that needs to be done.
And I like states doing the experiments, especially when it comes to health care.
If we could figure out a way to unleash the free market, to be able to allow competition in some way to help with health care, I do think that Americans would realize we don't have to go to a Medicare for All model that will break the country.
There's some rallying to be done, but the Republicans right now You have to ask yourself, on the Trump campaign, what do you want to do in a second term?
Can we answer that?
Like, what do you want to do?
Now, most people would say, stave off the crazy.
And that might be enough.
It really might be.
It might be enough.
But I also wonder, the other thing is, and I always keep this in mind, remember I said that President Bush ran to do these things?
9-11 happened, changes everything.
I'm always like, something could happen.
I think for President Obama, it was when Ed Snowden released all of those documents.
Changes everything.
Reveals all the nation's secrets.
Caused huge problems all around the world.
Nothing has ever really been the same.
For President Trump, hasn't happened yet.
But the Iranians hitting a Saudi oil facility?
It's a pretty big deal.
So let's talk about how you maintain being a happy, well-adjusted, nice person in this space, because that is indeed a rarity.
And there are nice people, but I have yet to hear anyone say a bad word about you, which is an amazing thing.
I haven't talked to Greg Gutfeld.
He might give you a few.
He might give you a few.
Yeah, but everybody has bad things to say about Greg, so that's different.
Yeah, I really don't think that I would actually have the career I have now without Greg, because he really gave me the confidence to come out of my shell.
I remember Brian Kilmeade one time filled in for Greg and he said, I had no idea you were funny.
I was like, well we were at war, what was I supposed to say?
I was raised Lutheran.
The gold star on the chart extended to Sunday school.
I've relied on my faith many times and I'm grateful to have it.
It's funny, sometimes you forget that you can be a little bit lax in your relationship with God and then something will yank you back to reality and you think, You think you can try to fix it, and you realize, oh, actually, you need to turn it over.
And the serenity prayer is really important to me.
So knowing what I can do, what I can't do, and the wisdom to know the difference is something that I think is important.
I also think there's just, maybe it's not a Wyoming thing, but I feel like this is where I got it.
There's a dignity And for example, at the podium I never let anyone see me rattled.
And President Bush used to say, you might think she's nice, but she's tougher than you realize.
And maybe a little bit of that, too, is that I hold a lot of it in.
But I learned a lot from President Bush.
I remember towards the end, there was an interview with these two great guys, Terry Hunt and Steve Holland, AP and Reuters.
They were like frick and frack.
They came everywhere with us.
And Holland is still there at the White House today.
They came in to interview the president at the last moment, and the president said something about, oh yeah, Bill Clinton was here yesterday for lunch.
And they're like, really?
And I'm like, we didn't know.
He didn't put out a press release every time.
And they asked, are you friendly?
He's like, yeah, we are.
He said, you know, I call him on the days when nobody else would.
Remember when the Obama team went after him in South Carolina, suggesting that he was a racist?
And he said, I called him on that day.
And I always remember that.
Like, oh, call your friends on their hardest day.
You called me once on a hard day.
And I also remember this.
At the end of the administration, Peter and I were headed to Africa.
We're going to do a little vacation, but also volunteer at a PEPFAR site.
And I leaned my head back against the chair and I said, nothing I do for the rest of my life will ever be this difficult or this important.
And it really hasn't.
And I'm so grateful to be an American, to have the opportunities that I've been given.
I haven't had a lot of hardship.
I also can't stand disruption, drama.
I hate it when others are mean.
And maybe it has to do also if I go back to being bused.
I think that had a real impact on me, like the worry that somebody wasn't going to like me or seeing somebody else be hurt.
And my parents were very helpful to refugees.
So on the weekends, through Lutheran Family Services and Lutheran World Relief, we would help resettle refugees from the former Soviet Union.
And I think that gave me a real appreciation for being out of your comfort zone.
Also, life's short.
You don't want to live mean.
Sometimes I laugh in spite of myself about President Trump's nicknames.
The only one I really liked was Little Rocket Man.
For personal reasons and personal bias reasons, Sloppy Steve was my personal favorite.
Actually, Sloppy Steve.
That's pretty good.
That's pretty good.
I understand the power of it and the marketing and the skill and the political acumen.
The president's super smart about that, right?
He has the strategy.
I just know, like, it would hurt me to see somebody made fun of.
It's probably why I'll never run for office.
Probably.
I'm never running for office.
Don't ever.
Nobody.
No, I'm not going.
I'm not going to do it.
So for folks who don't know your husband, Peter is just a delight.
So how did you guys meet?
Like I only met him recently.
I've known you for a while, but I've only met him recently.
I'm so glad you got to meet him because – He's such a kick.
Also because he listens to Ben Shapiro every day.
And he does this long walk in the mornings with Jasper at the park and sometimes he comes back and says, did you hear what Ben said?
Of course I heard what Ben said because I listen too.
So I'm glad that Peter and I have you to share in our fandom.
I have an 18-year age difference.
I was 25 when I met him on an airplane.
We were seated next to each other by our seat assignments.
We were going from Denver to Chicago, and then I was going on from Chicago to D.C., and it was really love at first sight.
And I moved to England eight months later, lived there for a year with him, and then we came back to the States in 1998—99.
And then 9-11 happened and we came back.
One of the things in my book and the good news is that I talk about is my favorite piece of advice is that choosing to be loved is not a career limiting decision.
A lot of people put off relationships or marriage or family because they think they want to achieve a certain level of professional success and then they'll find love and do all of those things.
And I try to tell people it doesn't have to work that way.
I actually feel like I couldn't have done any of this without Peter.
And then of course there's Jasper.
So you've written full books about Jasper.
You're not a dog guy.
My wife is trying to get me into it right now.
You're totally going to cave.
I am.
For security reasons too.
Because I keep being told that if you really want to be secure in your house then you need to have a dog outside.
I've always maintained this when Elizabeth Smart was kidnapped.
If they had had a dog, it never would have happened.
Yeah, I mean, I get this a lot.
So my kids are into it, my wife is into it.
I have a feeling within two years I'll be... Oh good, you're getting a dog.
Yeah, exactly.
I will be a dog acolyte in all of my prior anti-dog positions.
Do you remember the time that you sent me, you were going to do an ad for some sort of dog thing, and you said to me, like, no, you should take this one.
This is more for Dana.
That is exactly right.
It is one of the more awkward ad reads in the history of The Ben Shapiro Show.
And that's saying something.
Oh yeah.
There have been some real bad ones and that one definitely is like right up at the top.
I grew up with dogs.
And especially on the ranch.
And my grandfather was such a good dog trainer.
My uncles too.
Very, very good dog trainers.
So I learned that.
I had a dog with Peter.
We got him in Scotland.
Hungarian Vizsla breed.
Short hair, sleek, they're sweet, smart.
Henry was with me from when I was 26 to when I was 40.
One of the things I love about dogs is that they don't care that in that time I became the White House Press Secretary and moved to New York and was on The Five.
They're just your constant, it really is, you know, man's best friend.
The other thing is Greta Van Susteren called me the night Henry died about six months after we moved to New York and she said, you'll have to get another one.
I said, well how can I do that?
I live in New York and there's no grass.
Well, she was right.
And so we got Jasper.
Jasper has grown up with the five.
He is seven and a half years old.
I believe that dogs help bring a family closer together.
Not that you need that.
I know I'm not trying to... Oh, no, no, no.
Listen, keep making the case.
If you are arguing with your spouse or you're having a tough day, but you go out for a walk with the dog, it really is a tension reliever because you laugh at them.
It's funny.
They worry about them, whatever it might be.
Also, they're a great buffer for politics.
Like, when I go to the dog park, I don't talk to politics or anybody.
I'm like, oh, sorry, dog park.
And you have to try to find commonalities with your fellow humans.
And right now people feel very polarized or they feel like that.
I don't know if you get this.
This lady ran into me in the street the other day.
Oh, Dana, I just want to say hi.
I love your show.
I'm a Democrat, but I love your show.
Why do you have to say that?
Right.
And what I found is that if you have a dog, it's like, oh, your dog's so cute.
And then it becomes like, oh, your dog's cute.
And then you don't have to have the thing of, oh, well, I'm a Republican.
I'm a Democrat.
I'm a libertarian.
I'm so conservative.
Whatever it is, there's no identity politics at the dog park.
Except if you have a Bichel, which is a superior breed.
So in one second, I want to ask you a final question, which is going to be whether Dana Perino believes that there is hope for a nicer America.
We'll get to that question in just one second.
If you want to hear Dana's answer, you have to be a Daily Wire subscriber.
To subscribe, head on over to dailywire.com, click subscribe, watch the rest of our conversation there.
Well, Dana Perino, thank you so much for stopping by.
It's always great to see you and look forward to having you on when we start doing repeats.
Oh great, I would love that, if I make the cut.
In the meantime, we'll continue to allow the Ben Shapiro Show to bring your marriage closer together.
Okay, thank you.
That's what we do here.
Thank you so much, great to see you.
Great to see you.
Thank you.
special is directed by Mathis Glover and produced by Jonathan Hay.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Associate producer, Colton Haas.
Our guests are booked by Caitlin Maynor.
Post-production is supervised by Alex Zingara.
Editing by Donovan Fowler.
Audio is mixed by Mike Karamina.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.
Title graphics by Cynthia Angulo.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.
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