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Sept. 27, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:04:50
Sarah Sanders | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 100
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We were in Japan walking into a bilateral meeting with Prime Minister Abe and the president, who has every reason to be focused on the meeting in front of him and not concerned about, you know, my feelings or where I am, stops and says, hold on.
He turns, he looks me straight in the eye and he said, Sarah, the only reason they come after you is because you're good at your job.
The job of White House press secretary tends to be a revolving door of appointees.
Bill Clinton had five, George W. Bush had four, Barack Obama had three, and President Trump is now on his fifth, if you count Anthony Scaramucci.
While Scaramucci was only there for 11 days, and his predecessor Sean Spicer was there for 182 days, the president found his stride with Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who held the job just shy of two years.
Sarah joined the White House as Deputy Press Secretary, which put her in many circumstances, filling in for Sean Spicer, including during the controversial dismissal of James Comey.
Two months after that, in July 2017, she was made White House Press Secretary.
Having been with the President for nearly half of his term, Sarah worked through a lot of events in the Trump presidency, like the denuclearization meetings between Kim Jong-un and President Trump, which we'll discuss here.
Her new book is Speaking for Myself, Faith, Freedom, and the Fight of Our Lives Inside the Trump White House, a memoir with lots of stories and a behind-the-scenes look at working closely with the president.
Today, we'll dive into those stories, plus how Donald Trump and Sarah's father, Mike Huckabee, former governor and Republican presidential candidate, are different and how they're the same, if we should remove cameras from White House press briefings altogether, and the challenges the president's unpolished style often creates for a press secretary.
Hey, and welcome.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special.
Just a reminder, we'll be doing some bonus questions at the end with Sarah.
The only way to get access to that part of the conversation is to become a member.
Head on over to dailywire.com, become a member, and you'll have access to all of the full conversations with every one of our awesome guests.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, thanks so much for joining the show.
Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
It's good to be with you.
So, why don't we begin with what's happening next, since that was the first question I asked you off the air.
So, there was a lot of speculation when you left the Trump administration that you'd be running for governor of Arkansas, so that's a thing, correct?
Definitely very serious about it right now.
My focus is 2020.
I want to help the president get re-elected.
I'd love to make sure that the Republicans hold the Senate.
I'd love to see us take back the House and never utter the word Speaker Pelosi again.
So I am putting all my energy and focus right now into 2020.
After that, I'll make a decision about 2022, but definitely very serious about running.
So let's talk about the dynamics of the 2020 race.
We'll start with that, and then we'll get into sort of your experiences at the White House and all the rest.
You talk about all of this in your book that just came out, speaking for myself.
So let's talk about the 2020 race.
Obviously, one of the big areas of contention is President Trump's personality.
Joe Biden has tried to make this solely and completely about President Trump's personality.
The suggestion is that Joe Biden, of course, is Captain Empathy, whereas President Trump is mean, cruel, orange, bad man.
And it seems to be working by polling data at least thus far up until we'll see how the Supreme Court stuff plays out.
So knowing the president, what do you make of that particular contrast?
Well, I think there's a couple of things.
One, a lot of times I will tell people to look at the substance over the style.
You may not like the way that the president addresses every issue or how he interacts with people, but he's delivered on the things that he set out to do. I think the court's being a huge one and certainly going to be a big focus over the last little over a month that we have leading up to the election.
He's already put two Supreme Court justices in, more than 200 justices around the country.
I think that'll be one of the president's biggest and most lasting legacies and one of the areas of substance that I point to with the president.
Historic trade deals, the defeat of ISIS, tax cuts.
He's governed as a true conservative and so I always point people to the substance of who he is.
I also got to see that empathetic side from the president.
I spent almost every single day with him for two and a half years in the White House, and he was the person when liberal women were attacking me and trying to attack my family over everything from my hair and my makeup, my fitness to be a parent, even my ability to bake a pie.
It was the president who empowered me and defended me and gave me confidence to keep fighting.
And so I try to show that other side, particularly in my book, but every day I want people to know the Donald Trump that I got to know.
Let's talk about the sort of gap between the policy and the personality.
So, you know, as an outsider, and I've never met the president, there seems to be a pretty wide gap, and Americans seem to perceive this, that, you know, President Trump is a showman, he says a lot of things, many, many things, and those very often contrast with a lot of the policies, as you've said.
So, you had the job of trying to rectify these two things in public as the press secretary.
So, how did you balance that?
Because, I mean, we could see from outside that sometimes he would say one thing, and then you would repeat it, and then 24 hours later he would move in another direction.
So, how exactly did you hold all of that together?
I mean, some days it was not always easy.
But the president's job wasn't to make my life easier.
It was to do what he thought was best, fighting on behalf of the American people.
One of the things I always remind people of is that I was the spokesperson.
No one elected me to anything in that role.
They elected Donald Trump.
They wanted him to be the one to set the agenda, make the decisions.
Certainly there were moments where I didn't agree and I made that point to him and I had a good enough relationship with him that I could speak very candidly.
However, once the decision was made and we were moving forward, it was my job to go out and communicate the President's thinking and where he was on a particular topic at that moment.
So I always did the best I could.
one of the things that was very important throughout the process was spending a lot of time with the president and knowing where he was, knowing how his decision may have evolved from one place to the next, and being able to try and explain that to the American people.
Despite the fact he was often at odds with the press, he still understood the power of the press and knew that it was important for me to be in the room when those key decisions were happening and to be part of that discussion, not trying to learn it all on the back end.
And so that was one of the things I was very appreciative of the president, is he took me with him everywhere so I had a front row seat and the ability to really be part of the discussion as it was happening, not learning it on the back end.
And I think that made a huge difference in my ability to speak on his behalf.
How did you deal with the issue of Twitter?
So obviously you'd be in the middle of a press conference and he'd be live tweeting certain things.
And it seemed to me that there had to be a certain amount of caution that you applied when you were answering a question because you might not literally know what he thought about a particular issue while it was being asked.
And then the press would get very angry at you for not giving a definitive answer right now, right on the spot, because you weren't making assumptions about what the president thought.
I've talked to Dana Perino on the program, and Dana obviously was press secretary for George W. Bush, and her suggestion was that she kind of knew where Bush was at all times, and so she could sort of go ahead of him and kind of know where he was going to be at all times.
And because President Trump has so much of a direct voice directly to the American public, it seems like that made your job a little bit tougher.
Certainly, there were many days, particularly early in the morning, you'd wake up at 5 o'clock, you're talking to morning show producers, and you think that the message of the day is going to be one thing.
And by 6.30, the president's tweeting, and the message of the day becomes something totally different.
And so you have to be able to adapt.
I think one of the most important things is to be fluid, not be so hard and fast, like, this is what we're doing.
We have no room to like deviate and move and being able to do that enabled me to be able to work with the president very closely and not create a lot of friction between the two of us.
So in a second, I want to talk about the press's characterization of your job, what it was supposed to be, how you did it and all of that.
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So let's talk about the press's perception of the job that you were doing and what the job was supposed to be.
So I found the press's take on what they thought you were supposed to be doing utterly bizarre.
So they obviously understood when Robert Gibbs was press secretary that his job was to spin on behalf of the president.
They understood that when Jay Carney was press secretary, his job was to spin on behalf of the president.
When you were press secretary, suddenly it became, what is your personal opinion?
About what it is the president is doing.
And I kept making the point that literally your personal opinion does not matter in this job.
It's like being a PR spokesperson for Nike and then they ask you how you feel about the Nike brand shoes on a specific day.
That's literally not your job.
Your job is to defend the president's policies and everybody knows that.
And so it seemed like the press was engaged in this gaslighting where their characterization of what they wanted you to do was different than they'd ever demanded from any press secretary that I can remember.
Yeah, and it goes back to what I was saying before.
At the end of the day, no one voted for me.
My name wasn't on the ballot.
My opinion wasn't what the American people not only wanted to hear, but deserved to hear.
They needed to know what Donald Trump, the person at the end of the day making the decision, felt on the matter.
And so there was a constant pushback.
Of them trying to put me into a place where I was giving my opinion.
They get very angry when I didn't do that.
But they got angry with me about a lot of things.
And I think that role changed a lot under Donald Trump because he does talk so much to the press himself.
That changed the dynamic, I think, of, you know, the interaction between the press secretary and the press.
One of the things a lot of people miss is they think the press secretary's only job is the briefing, and they forget or don't know that almost every reporter in the country, particularly those that are assigned to cover the White House, have the press secretary's phone number, email, and direct access to their office.
I was talking to the press all day, every day, starting from, again, 4.30, 5 o'clock in the morning until midnight every night, working stories, giving information, answering their questions.
So even when you're not in that briefing room, you're still constantly interacting with the press.
In fact, it was a lot more productive outside of the briefing room.
When you had people who were really trying to get information for the story versus people who, like Jim Acosta, constantly trying to be the story instead of report the story, which is really what the briefing room became, a way for a lot of reporters to make a name for themselves and try to have these viral moments where they get into arguments with the press secretary and raise their own profile.
The purpose of it, I think, changed drastically from the end of the Obama administration to where we are now.
I mean, I think that's clearly true.
I think part of that is obviously the allegiance of many of the press to a lot of the same principles that Obama held, but it also had a lot to do with their particular hatred for Trump.
I mean, there is a Trump derangement syndrome in the press, and combined with the fact there are a lot of lucrative book contracts to be got if you can be a Jim Acosta type.
And ladies, find you a man who loves you like Jim Acosta loves Jim Acosta.
That dude loves him some Jim Acosta.
In dealing with that, I mean, I'd suggested that, frankly, I thought it would be productive for, just like with congressional hearings, the TV cameras to be out of there.
That it actually is wildly counterproductive to basically be setting up a scenario where we make reporters stars for asking a question that isn't really a question, it's basically a haranguing statement for 45 seconds, why don't you agree with me that the president is a very bad orange man who's bad and orange, and then expect you to answer the question, do you think that future administrations should consider Basically saying, you know what?
We're going to do these press con— We'll do these pressers, but we're going to do them off-camera, so that you ask serious questions.
I think that there could be a scenario in which that is effective.
One of the only advantages of having the camera in the room was that I think the American people did get to see just how out of control the press became.
If you hadn't had the cameras, I don't think people that supported the president would know how bad the press had gotten over the course of those first couple years in office.
So there is, I guess, maybe a little bit of a silver lining as people got to see the truth of Jim Acosta and others grandstanding in the room and giving, you know, five minute monologue speeches before they ever got to your question.
And so people would constantly ask me, why do you call?
Why would you even call on Jim Acosta?
Just ignore him.
I'm like, because I want people to know what, you know, it's really like in that room.
And if the press has the Jim Acosta gets to be the face of the press, Yeah, I can't argue with that.
It's not a bad place for us to be in.
I mean, as you say, you've dealt with a lot of these people off camera, and you've dealt with a lot of them on camera.
I've noticed that, you know, I have a lot of conversations with folks on the left that are on radio or on camera, and very often it's very different off camera.
People suddenly become a lot more willing to talk, they become a lot more moderate, they become a lot more personable.
Were people the same jackasses off camera that they were on camera in the press room?
Some were.
Some were better.
Some were the same.
There was definitely, I think, a lower temperature from the majority of the press in off-camera back and forth.
But the hypocrisy was just as bad.
Let me give you an example.
So, the day that the president announced I would be leaving the White House, A group of reporters came into my office.
They were like, we're so sad you're leaving.
We've worked so well with you.
You've been great.
One reporter, which I won't name names, but is crying in my office.
Actual tears.
She is a reporter on one of the major TV networks.
And fast forward to the following day, I'm sitting in my office and she pops up and I see on the ticker tape they're talking about me.
So I turn the sound on and she's like, Keep in mind, less than 24 hours before, she's crying in my office, telling me she's going to miss me.
We've had a great working relationship.
Now she's on camera saying... I mean, it was only a matter of time.
She'd lost all credibility.
She had to go.
The relationship between her and the press was too much.
This was what needed to happen.
And I'm like, are you kidding me?
You're literally like...
I had tears in your eyes yesterday and now like I had to go.
So I think there was such a intense dislike towards the president that so often I think reporters, even if they had a good working relationship with you at the end of the day, they hated Donald Trump so much more than they could ever like you that it wasn't going to be able to wash it away.
I mean, I wonder if the members of the press understand that this sort of kabuki theater that they're constantly playing has real world consequences.
That when you demonize somebody day in and day out publicly, and then you're nice to them behind closed doors, that when they go out in public, they can get accosted.
That obviously brings up the situation that you had eating at a restaurant with your family where the proprietor of the restaurant basically tossed you out of the restaurant.
Maybe you can talk about that a little bit.
Sure.
I was in Lexington, Virginia at the Red Hen.
I'd had a pretty intense work week.
I drove down from D.C.
to meet my husband and his extended family at this restaurant.
I walk in.
I've been there a couple minutes.
The owner comes over and asks to speak with me.
I think, sure, how nice.
She wants to say thanks for visiting her restaurant.
What I didn't realize is she actually wanted to kick me out of her restaurant after letting me know she thought I was a horrible person and I didn't belong in their community and she asked me to leave.
So I said okay.
She was like frantically trying to video me leaving.
I whispered to my husband, I've been kicked out.
What a lot of people don't know, and I write about in my book, is the second part, that my husband and I went home, and the rest of his family went to a restaurant across the street, and the restaurant owner actually followed them to the second restaurant, gathered a group of their friends, and protested and harassed them outside of a second restaurant, until one of the members of my family came out and said, look, Sarah's not here.
We actually, several of us, voted for Hillary Clinton.
We didn't even vote for Donald Trump.
Like, go home.
You're not helping our cause.
And Sarah's actually a pretty nice person, so it'd be great if we could have dinner with our family.
And so they eventually left.
But the level of hatred to not only kick me out, but then follow the rest of my family and protest them at a second restaurant where I'm not even present, I think just shows the level of hostility and how out of control the radical left has become.
And it seems like this is now a national problem.
You were the first kind of public face of this happening, but you saw people descend on Tucker Carlson's house, you've seen people just eating at restaurants in Washington, D.C.
like normally on the street now, and you're seeing Black Lives Matter protesters invade the restaurants, drink people's drinks, shout at them, demand that they hold up their fist in solidarity, and all the rest.
You've been around politics for a while.
Where do you think this level of animosity has come from?
Because it is something that is Elevated.
I mean, I remember being pretty bad during the Bush years with Bush-Hitler and Bush-no-blood-for-oil and all this.
But this is an entirely new level, it seems to me.
I've never seen anything like this.
And again, growing up in politics, you're used to the intensity.
I was prepared going into the White House that we would be challenged on our policy, on the president's agenda.
I knew that it would be difficult and we would have to fight back.
I never was prepared for the level of personal attacks.
that would come. You know, I was the first White House press secretary in the history of our country to require secret service. They don't give you that just because people say mean things. It was because there were credible threats against me and my family. That's when it became very difficult, too, as a parent. I know you're a parent, and knowing that your job is directly impacting the safety of your family is really hard to process and makes it hard to keep fighting.
At the same time, it also emboldens you to make sure that you don't let the radical left win, that you don't let them bully you into being afraid to be who you are or ashamed of standing up for what you know to be right.
And so while it was difficult, it was important for us as a family to hold our heads high And keep fighting and keep pushing.
And so we've tried to do that and tried to make sure our kids know to do the same.
So in a second, I want to ask you about your role as a powerful woman in the Trump administration, how the press obviously do not appreciate these sorts of things, and neither do many members of the Hollywood entertainment complex.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so let's talk about the fact that you're obviously a very high-ranking woman inside the Trump administration.
You're a very powerful person.
You're likely to be, if not the next governor of Arkansas, then a chopped competitor for the next governor of Arkansas.
So with all of that said, it's pretty clear that the left, which is very big into women's empowerment, is not big into all women's empowerment.
Their treatment of you was obviously horrendous.
Up to and including the White House Correspondents Dinner where your looks were mocked openly and this was taken to be totally normal because obviously you're a Republican.
What were your thoughts on that?
Well, you know, it's interesting.
The liberal women were the meanest and nastiest, all in the air of women's empowerment, which was pretty shocking.
You would think even if we could politically disagree, we could agree that it's good to see women rising up in the ranks.
I was the third woman to be White House press secretary, the very first mom to ever hold that job.
You would think that would be a point of pride for all women, but unfortunately, the radical left women only are about women's empowerment as long as you think like they do, talk like they do, and believe in the same things that they do.
That only applies to that sector.
If you're a conservative woman, then they're not for the empowerment of that side.
One of the incidents that's probably one of the most impactful for me personally during my time at the White House, it was after an LA Times reporter had mocked my appearance in a pretty mean way, so much so that they eventually had to retract part of the story because it was so hateful, which as you know, that is not something they do regularly in the LA Times.
It was right after the Correspondents' Dinner.
It had just been kind of a rocky time, even.
Like, a lot of my colleagues didn't know how to address it, so just kind of ignored bringing it up.
But we were in Japan walking into a bilateral meeting with Prime Minister Abe, and the President, who has every reason to be focused on the meeting in front of him and not concerned about, you know, my feelings or where I am, stops and says, hold on.
He turns, he looks me straight in the eye, and he said, Sarah, you're smart, you're beautiful, and the only reason they come after you is because you're good at your job.
And then in very colorful words that I won't repeat on here, he says, don't let them get you down.
Kind of slaps me on the shoulder, and he's like, now let's get back to work.
And so in that moment, he's the one that realized, like, I needed encouragement.
It wasn't the women on the left that were standing up for me, but it was Donald Trump.
And to have Him as the ally and the one to empower me certainly, I think, propelled me and gave me reason to keep fighting, knowing he believed in me and trusted me to carry his message.
How did you deal with the sling scenarios on a personal level?
I mean, obviously, if you're in this space, you're going to get a certain amount of it.
That doesn't mean it doesn't hurt.
I think that there's this misperception in the general public that if you spend your life in politics and you're attacked, well, that's sort of the normal day's work and you never feel the pain.
But obviously, that's not true.
So how do you deal with that?
Certainly, there are moments that are pretty difficult, you know, when people are saying really horrific things about you.
I don't think anybody, no matter how tough they are, can just completely block it out.
So, there are days where it gets to you, but I try to, like, not allow the distractions to take me away from what I came there to do.
And knowing that I had a family that supported me and loved me no matter what, I had friends that did the same, and frankly, I had a faith that defined me.
Knowing that I had a God who had created me for a specific purpose, gave me confidence to block out.
I didn't need the New York Times or the Washington Post or anybody else to define me.
I had a Creator who had already done that.
Knowing that and knowing who I was as a person before I ever stepped onto that stage or stood behind that podium gave me what I needed to keep going and keep fighting.
So, you actually had a very long tenure as press secretary.
We know that some people did not have quite as long a tenure as press secretary in the Trump administration.
By the calculations of our producers, you lasted for 64.09 scaramoochies.
So, what does it take to be able to last that long in a job as volatile as this one?
Well, I mean, I think in large part having a good relationship with the President made all the difference.
Being able to have candid conversations with him and feeling like I knew where he was.
I mean, it wasn't always perfect, certainly.
I had moments where I made mistakes, but I had a good enough relationship with him that when those moments came, we fought through it and moved on.
But him trusting me and having confidence in me to carry his message made a huge difference.
But also having a really good team around me and feeling like I was prepared when I stepped out there every day was imperative for me surviving some of the most difficult days.
But I think at the end of the day it really came down to having a very good and strong foundation with the President.
I also had the advantage of going second.
I tell people that all the time.
Sean Spicer had an impossible job on any day, but he had to do it before any of the rest of us.
And so getting to be his deputy, I learned things that did work and things that didn't work.
And so having that six months or a little less than that before I actually had the full job helped prepare me in a big way.
So how do you think Kaylee McEnany is doing now that you're no longer there?
I think she's doing great.
I think she is giving it back to them as much as they give it to her.
And she is tough.
Something a lot of people may not know is Kaylee and I both had we I like to say we learned from the one of the best in the business.
I'm a little biased, but she actually interned for my dad as one of her very first jobs out of college and worked on his show at Fox.
And so we had a good mentor in the early days to give us a good foundation on how to fight back.
So, you mentioned that you were the first mom to be press secretary.
Obviously, I'm married, I have a wife who is a doctor, and we have three children who are under the age of seven.
And that means that, contrary to popular opinion, you can't have it all.
And that means that there has to be a certain balancing act that goes on.
So my wife has chosen at times to take off work.
She has chosen at times to work full time.
Right now she's working per diem.
But I think, you know, particularly women are put in a particular situation because they want to spend a lot of time with their kids where they have to decide how to balance their life.
So how did you decide how to make that balance?
How did that balance work?
Some days it worked really well, and other days it didn't work quite as well as I'd hoped.
We tried to engage our kids.
I tried to take them with me when I could so that they could see what I was doing.
I wanted them to know why we were making the sacrifice as a family that we were.
And when I couldn't be there, in the moments that I was able to be home, I tried to be really intentional with my kids.
Put my phone away and make sure they knew, even if it was ten minutes or a full day, Knowing that my time in that moment was all about them and that they were a priority.
And so looking for moments I could really have that.
There are some really great stories about my kids coming with me to work.
Some that ended pretty poorly.
My son got a hold of my phone at one point.
My work phone that I'd set aside and not locked.
And I was doing something with my daughter.
I come back.
I pick it up.
I realize I have like dozens of calls and emails.
And text messages from reporters like, Sarah, what are you saying?
What are you trying to tell us?
And I'm like, oh my gosh, what's going on?
I think we're like at war or something because I have so many missed calls.
Finally, I find an email where there's a tweet embedded in it and it wasn't my boss's, it was mine.
And Huck, my four-year-old at the time, had put a tweet out on my official White House account full of emojis.
It was trains and stoplights and boats and cars.
Thankfully, it was Infrastructure Week, so it was perfectly on message.
Otherwise, he would have been in a lot more trouble.
But there were definitely some very challenging mom moments.
But at the same time, I want my kids to live in a country that is as amazing as America is right now.
And it's important for us to be involved if we want to continue to have America hold the values that are so important for our family. We have to fight for that. It's not going to just happen and Especially now I don't think there's ever been a time That's more important for us to stand up for what's right and to be willing to make some sacrifices It's one of the reasons we continue to want to serve At the same time, one of the reasons I left the White House is because there are a lot of people that can be White House Press Secretary.
At the end of the day, I'm the only one that can be the mom to my three kids.
And I wanted to take that time to spend a lot more time with them over the course of the next couple of years, especially before they become teenagers.
And, you know, frankly, I don't want to be seen with this in public anymore.
Strike while the iron is hot and get in some good quality time before they're too embarrassed to be seen with us.
But finding that balance is hard, but having a good partner makes a big difference.
And my husband helps with everything and keeps our family afloat.
And then just looking for moments to be intentional I think for us has been what helped us get through.
How did you meet your husband?
He worked on my dad's campaign.
I was actually his boss.
HR problems?
Yeah, I mean, you know, it was a campaign.
So every good campaign usually has at least one marriage.
My dad didn't become president that year, but I did get married and he got three grandkids out of the deal.
So I tell him all the time, it worked out in some ways.
But he's from Kansas, from Kansas City.
He'd been working for Sam Brown back, this was in 2008.
On his presidential run and when Brownback got out of the race, he actually came out to volunteer for a couple weeks on my dad's campaign and never went back.
We hired him on the spot pretty quickly after he started and shortly after we started dating and here we are ten and a half years and three kids later.
So what was your best day as press secretary and what was your worst day as press secretary?
My hardest day, and I don't know if it was the worst, but it was definitely the most difficult, was the day of the Las Vegas shooting.
And knowing I would be the first voice from the administration to speak to the country, a country that was hurting, that was grieving.
And I knew that there were no words I could offer that would provide real comfort, but that I had to come out and do the best I could to offer Something to a country that was hurting in the way it was, and the responsibility of that weighed really heavily on me.
So that was definitely the most difficult day, I think, that I had in the administration, and the hardest.
The best day?
Honestly, we had a lot of good days, despite all of the nastiness and all of the negativity.
I loved the people that I worked with, and I really loved working for the president.
He's a very fun person to be around.
He has a bigger-than-life personality, a great sense of humor, and some of my favorite moments were at the end of the day, sitting in the back dining room with the president and one or two other people, just visiting and hearing him tell stories from, you know, life before being president and some of the things we had witnessed.
Um, in the White House.
So, there were a lot of good days.
One of probably the coolest things I got to do was, um, at the UK state dinner.
And to meet the Queen is pretty cool.
I don't care who you are, like, that's a fun thing to do.
And so, um, that was a big moment.
And the President actually selected me to sit at his table on the night after for the reciprocal dinner.
And I sat next to the president and Prince Charles and had, you know, an hour and a half to visit with him, which was pretty fun.
And knowing that the president had picked me and given me that seat when it could have gone to any number of other higher ranking individuals or donors or whoever else, and he picked me to have that seat was pretty remarkable.
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Again, whenever you look at any administration, it seems like there's just a lot of organized chaos.
Basically, the sausage gets made.
We don't really see how the sausage is made, but you know a sausage is being made.
With this administration more than any other, because there's been so much leaking, because there's been so much heavy, intense press coverage, and because the president, again, goes direct to consumer a lot, it means that there's a widespread perception that basically it's kind of catch-as-catch-can in the White House.
How does actual comms policy get done?
Well, because the president is so hands-on and enjoys speaking with the press as well as the public so frequently, I mean, he has to be very much involved in that decision-making.
But when there are things, particularly like a policy rollout where we have a longer lead, I think it's a very traditional shop.
You build out a comms plan, you execute comms plan, you build out surrogates and talking points, and all of the things that you would find in any normal administration certainly take place in the Trump administration.
However, we have a bigger microphone in our president than they have in some previous, and we use that to our advantage.
Sometimes it's challenging.
Sometimes we have to work our way through a couple things.
But using the president and letting him, because anytime he speaks, we know it will be covered.
And so finding the best ways to highlight a particular message and where we put him in terms of a crowd or direct to camera, things like that.
But always involving the president is a big part of anything that we do in the Trump White House for communications.
So one of the great frustrations for people who, you know, like Trump or want to vote for Trump, and you see this a lot with the polls, even among Republicans, is that for every tweet that is good, there is a tweet that is not so good.
There is a tweet for all ages, for all seasons there are tweets.
And so there are a lot of people who, including me, who have criticized the president on these grounds.
And I've said that, frankly, I think that his best 2020 strategy is actually to follow the Joe Biden model and go to the basement and let Joe Biden be the issue.
Because if you look back at 2016, basically my theory is that whoever an election is a referendum on loses.
And in 2016, the great misperception is it was going to be a referendum on President Trump, instead it was a referendum on Hillary.
Nobody liked Hillary, so Trump ended up president.
If Joe Biden is pretty obviously trying to make this a referendum on Trump, now there's a bit of an opening because of issues I think we're going to discuss in a moment with the Supreme Court and radicalism in the Democratic Party.
It seems that the president might want to actually recede a little bit.
Has there ever been any success in unplugging the phone?
That's not really his personality is to let to take the backseat.
But I think that at the same time, while there are some people that would like to see him do that, most of the people that support the president love that he's out front and center.
They love that he is the one on the front lines every time, fighting, taking the questions, doing the punch back.
And I think people find him refreshing because he's not a scripted robot.
He's not your typical politician.
It's one of the other reasons he won in 16, not just the referendum on Hillary, but they wanted somebody who would do business different.
They didn't want the status quo, and that was exactly what Hillary was offering, was more of the same.
They wanted somebody to come in and shake up Washington and operate in a way that it never has before.
And now he has a record of having done that and being successful.
I think he should continue to focus on the fact he's still the disruptor.
He is still the change agent.
He is still the same guy that he was in 2016, but now He actually has a record of success to back up how he has conducted himself over these past four years.
He set out to do a number of different things, a lot of which he has done, many of which most people said not only would they not happen, but would have the adverse effect.
They said he would absolutely crush the economy.
He built a booming economy.
They said there's no way he'll get tax cuts through.
He did and got better rates than anyone expected.
Nobody thought he would defeat ISIS.
Nobody thought he would move the embassy or make any progress on peace in the Middle East.
And just in the last couple of weeks, he has made significant progress, more so than we've seen in decades.
Historic trade deals that haven't happened in previous administrations and that everybody said were impossible to get done, he's delivered on those things.
So now I think he has to continue being who he has always been.
What I've found in politics, anytime you try to change somebody and make them something other than who they really are, It never works, and people pick up on it really quickly.
Donald Trump's not changing.
People know who he is, but now he has a record of accomplishment to back up what he's been saying, what he's been doing.
I think he should really focus on that.
If he can be a little more disciplined in that message, I think it'll go a long way for him in November.
So speaking of that, obviously we have some debates coming up.
This is going to be pretty momentous in terms of the debates.
By the polls, he's down pretty significantly nationally.
It seems a lot closer in some of the swing states.
So what seems to be in the offing under even the most optimistic circumstances is a sort of repeat of 2016, where there's an electoral vote loss.
I mean, an electoral vote victory, but a popular vote loss seems to be most of the forecasts that are the most optimistic for President Trump, which means he has some heavy lifting to do in the debates.
What do you think his debate strategy should be?
He's been focusing a lot on the fact that Joe Biden is diminished, which is pretty obvious to anybody who watches Joe Biden.
And we weren't starting from world's highest point with Joe Biden in the first place.
And the president's been focusing a lot on that.
There's been rumors he's not prepping too much for the debates.
What do you think the president ought to do with the debates?
Well, I think in some ways the president's been prepping every single day.
It's not like this is a new thing for him.
He takes questions from reporters literally almost every single day, so he's got a lot of muscle memory that Joe Biden certainly doesn't have, because not only does he not take questions when he does, they're usually scripted and softball questions.
If the press actually pushes on Biden, which I'll be shocked if they do, he's not going to have that same foundation that The president has because he does this all day every day.
So the idea he's not prepping, I think he is doing some prep sessions, but I also think every day he's in office he's doing that.
One of the things he has to do is what he did in 16.
I think that's changed some of the narrative.
I think people need to be reminded of the things that he has accomplished in these last four years.
He needs to talk about some of the areas that right now are front and center, law and order being one of the biggest things up until this past week when I think SCOTUS has certainly moved to the top of the list. But prior to that, every poll suggests that law and order is top of mind for the majority of voters, particularly those undecided voters in the middle.
He's the only candidate in the race who has credibility to talk about standing up and fighting for law and order.
He's been doing it since day one.
It's not new for him.
So I think that has to be a huge contrast point that he makes with Biden, and he's going to have to be the one that holds Biden's feet to the fire because he cannot count on the moderators to be the ones to do that.
I think he's pretty good at that, so I feel pretty safe on that front.
The other thing is the economy.
That's certainly a big topic for a lot of people.
He should talk about his achievements there and what Joe Biden would do to the economy, to individual taxpayers, and how that's going to impact them.
Personality is going to drive so much of it, and I think the president really rises to the moment in these types of events, and I expect him to do that.
He has to know, too, going in, the deck is fully stacked against him.
Joe Biden, all he has to really do is put a couple of coherent sentences together, and they'll say, oh, it's the greatest debate performance we've ever seen.
So he has to be fully prepared for that, and I think he will be.
The mandate for Biden is remain alive and breathing.
Yeah.
And for the president, I think he's going to have to get pretty aggressive, which he likes to do anyway.
But I think he actually has some room to run now.
So that brings us to the question of the Supreme Court seat.
So obviously you've seen the press pushing against the idea that Trump should even fill the seat, which is absurd, or that Mitch McConnell should vote on the seat.
But it seems to me that there is a real opening to hit Biden here.
And the opening is that the Democrats have pretty openly embraced an incredibly radical position, which is that they want to kill the filibuster, that they want to add states in the United States Senate with 51 votes in the Senate, which is insane, that they want to pack the Supreme Court and effectively lead to the dissolution of the country.
Because there is no circumstance under which many of the states in the country are simply going to acquiesce to a federal government with 51% of the votes in the Senate Basically ramming through any unconstitutional thing they want after having packed the courts.
Seems to me the president can pretty easily say to Joe Biden, listen, you want to be the guy who is returned to normalcy.
You want to be the guy who is non-volatile.
I may be volatile personally, but I'm not the one claiming that I want to tear down the institution of the United States Senate and the institution of the United States Supreme Court.
So will you right here say that you're not going to get rid of the filibuster?
Will you right here say you're not going to unilaterally add states?
And will you right here say that you're not going to pack the Supreme Court?
I think that would be a huge moment for the president.
I think you're exactly right.
I can tell you certainly where I'm from in Arkansas, people are not going to support just a total overhaul and a complete destruction of the institution of America, which is exactly what the radical left is pushing for.
I mean, look at what AOC said just this week where she said, I hope this radicalizes you.
The idea that the president fulfilling his constitutional obligation, she hopes that that will push people to become more radicalized.
I'm like, wait, what?
Is that real life?
Did she really say that out loud?
And she did.
And I find that terrifying.
I think every person that loves America should be afraid of what Joe Biden and the Democrats bring.
Should he be elected?
And I think the president absolutely has to remind people of how far to the left the liberal mob has gone and who's really in charge of that party because it's not Joe Biden.
He's already proven he doesn't have the ability or the willingness to stand up to him.
And so he will be completely owned and operated by that radical left.
If people don't like that, they have one choice and that's Donald Trump.
One of the things that I think is pretty astonishing is how the press have somehow tried to put the onus on Republicans for filling a Supreme Court seat.
Again, you had a rough job because your job was to deal with these people every single day.
I mean, we talked about sort of the difficulty of having to deal with the slings and arrows.
How difficult was it not to unleash on them on a regular basis from the podium?
There were definitely moments where you have to really like almost count to 10 internally so that you don't like just lose your mind and yell at them and say, are you crazy?
And there were definitely probably more moments that I wanted to.
But at the end of the day, I knew that that wasn't going to solve anything.
They were hoping to push you to a place to explode or to break and then they win.
And as hard as it was, I knew for myself and for the president, it was going to be a lot better if I could keep calm.
That's one of the things that I think being a mom probably really helped prepare me for being press secretary, is your kids are constantly pushing your patience and testing you as a parent.
And so you get very used to saying no a lot, repeating yourself, and having extreme patience as a parent.
So that probably helped keep me a little bit cool, calm, and collected in those moments where I didn't want to be.
So when you were a kid, did you know you wanted to go into politics?
I mean, your dad obviously was the governor of Arkansas and then he ran for president.
At some point, did you say, maybe I'll just like go be a veterinarian or something?
No, there were definitely plenty of days where I was like, what am I doing?
I don't want anything to do with this crazy circus.
But at the same time, I actually loved politics from an early age when most kids were going to summer camp and, you know, going to the pool.
I was hitting the Arkansas festival circuit, passing out flowers, asking people to vote for my dad.
And I loved getting to see my state in that way.
I loved getting to interact with people.
And then fast forward to once he was actually elected, meeting people whose lives had been changed because of things that he had done as governor.
And so getting to see that come full circle is pretty powerful.
And I loved that I got to do that with my dad.
I worked on all of his campaigns from the first time he ran, I was nine, up until 2016 when I was his campaign manager when he ran for president.
So getting to do that in that way, and for somebody that I really believed in, I think propelled me to love politics as a whole.
I've worked for some amazing people, John Bozeman, Tom Cotton.
President Trump.
And so getting to do that, I think, has, you know, for better or worse, locked me into a life of politics.
But I don't think I would change it or want to do something else.
Anything else would be so boring after this.
So what was the culture shift like from working for your dad in campaigns to working for Donald Trump?
They are very, very unalike in a great variety of ways.
Most obviously that your dad is very overtly religious guy and President Trump obviously is not.
So what was the shift like?
You know, in some ways they're obviously polar opposites in terms of personality, but they both were very much a populist message.
What some of the things my dad was talking about as far back in 08, kind of Main Street America, forgotten men and women, was very close to what the president was talking about in 16.
And those were pillars for both of their campaigns.
So that part was one of the things that actually made me want to support Donald Trump was that message that was so similar to my dad's.
On style, they're very, very different, but they also are very much their own person.
And I'll never forget one day, my dad, this was actually when I was working in the White House, but my dad had put out a tweet that was getting quite a bit of attention.
And Jared Kushner said to me, he said, I finally get it.
He said, now I know why you're good at your job.
He said, I just read back through some of your dad's tweets.
He said, he's got a pretty hot Twitter feed too.
And I was like, yeah, I'm used to working for somebody who speaks their own mind and is not controlled by the special interest or the donor class or anybody else.
It was one of the things.
My dad was always an outsider.
Even after having been a governor for almost 11 years, he was never part of the establishment.
And so despite the fact they were very different people, they still sort of operated sometimes in the same way.
And, you know, I liked that they were people who were always their own person, no matter what.
So you've seen government from sort of the state level and also from the federal level.
So what are the differences and what do you think the role of the feds versus the state should be?
Because that obviously is coming into very clear focus as the question for the future as the federal government sucks up more power, becomes more centralized, and as Democrats threaten to basically subsume all the states under the rubric of the federal government.
Well, I think it's one of the reasons that it's scary what's happening at the federal government because they are Trying to impose so much on individual states.
We have to make sure.
I think at no time has it been more apparent in decades how important it is to have strong governors and strong mayors on the local level that are fighting back against some of the craziness that we see so often.
The federal government outside of the president, you get to the legislative branch, is so broken.
They are so polarized that they have become completely paralyzed.
It is almost impossible to really get things done where we are right now.
Hopefully that shifts after the election and we see a little bit more ability to work together.
But unfortunately right now there's just no sense of working together.
At the state level you still see some of that.
And I think it's one of the reasons governors are so important, is making sure that you have somebody there that reflects the values that you have, because they may be the only thing protecting you from an out-of-control federal government.
Having been sort of at the locus of all the controversy for several years, do you think that the red versus blue divide is bridgeable at this point?
Because it feels increasingly like not.
I mean, I say this as a person leading a company out of California and into red America.
I've spent my entire life here in L.A.
except for three years where I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which was no less blue.
And now we are moving to, you know, dead red Tennessee.
I mean, Nashville is a blue area of Tennessee, but Tennessee's a very red state.
And it feels increasingly like the sides are pulling apart.
Do you think there's any coming back together?
I hope so.
I'm very much an optimist and so I want to believe that we can come back together and I'm hopeful that we can do it without having some type of major event.
I think we saw glimpses of it in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.
You saw a little bit of the politics pushed away.
I'm hopeful it doesn't take some major moment or something bad to happen before people start to block politics out again.
But I want to be optimistic and believe that at the end of the day, the good in people will outweigh the bad and that we can start focusing a little bit more on everybody's good instead of starting with what's wrong with somebody when you first meet them instead of maybe there's something about this person I could like.
How does your husband deal with all of this?
He is one of the most laid back, patient people I've ever encountered.
I don't know that I could be married to anyone, literally anyone else, that could be more perfect for me.
He is just so patient, so supportive, and he works in politics as well, so I think he knew a little bit about what he signed up for, probably not quite to the extent.
But he really, I think, takes it one day at a time.
Sometimes it's frustrating for him because he wants to be able to be more protective and fight back, and at the end of the day, that can be very challenging not to be in the middle and pushing back when somebody's attacking your wife.
But, you know, we take every day in stride, and he's a person of deep faith as well.
I think that has really helped both of us get through even the most difficult days.
So what triggered your decision to leave the White House?
You mentioned that you had family concerns and you want to spend more time with the kids.
You're going to go back into politics here pretty soon, it sounds like.
So what triggered the decision to move on?
Certainly we wanted to move our family from D.C.
back to Arkansas.
That was a big priority for us, for our kids to grow up there.
We have family in Arkansas and friends there.
And so that was a big piece of it.
And also just wanting to have that time.
Have a break away from the intensity of Washington.
Being the White House Press Secretary is a 24-7, all-consuming job.
You have no control over your schedule.
And so I really wanted some time to be able to do that with my family.
We wanted to move before the school year started so my kids could start at their school in Arkansas, not move in the middle of the year.
So that was sort of a catalyst for doing it during the summer.
And we are so happy to be back home.
What was the thing that you didn't expect most about the White House?
What was the most unexpected thing about working there?
Because obviously you've been around politics your entire life.
I think in part one of the biggest surprises for a lot of us, I think if you look back, Most people in an administration, very few people actually know who they are.
Not that many people knew who the White House press secretary was in previous administrations.
If you weren't, you know, interested in politics and maybe a political junkie and outside of DC, you get into middle America, nobody knew who the press secretary was.
But in a Trump administration, everybody knew who you were.
You became instantly recognizable.
You were, you know, the punching bag for SNL and many other things.
And so I think that level of celebrity status in a way for better or worse to Not have any moment where you go anywhere where people don't recognize you I think was something that a lot of us were very surprised by and even people who weren't necessarily the public-facing members of the administration quickly became household names and I think that was very new even for those of us who'd grown up in politics mean I Again, most people don't know who a lot of the staff are.
They know the principal, but not everybody else.
In the Trump administration, everybody became a household name very quickly.
Did anybody from Hollywood ever reach out to you and talk to you on a personal level, or was it just, okay, we're going to cast whoever we can as this person to make fun of them?
You saw a lot of that, obviously.
Nobody ever reached out to say anything nice.
There were a few Hollywood actors who have said quite a few mean things, including one who encouraged people to kidnap my children.
So, no, unfortunately we didn't get a lot from any of the Hollywood elite class.
There were a few conservatives, you know, Jon Voight and a handful of others that reached out and were very supportive.
James Woods.
But in terms of kind of the mainstream Hollywood, nobody ever contacted us for anything positive anyway.
He talked about the upside of traveling with the president.
What was that like? I mean you were with him a lot on Air Force One, you were with him overseas a lot.
How were those trips?
They're incredible. I mean to get to travel alongside the president and see the world in that way is remarkable.
I went on every single foreign trip the president took from the day I entered the White House until I left and had a front row seat to history.
Watching him interact with world leaders, I got to sit at the table with Kim Jong-un, President Xi, Abe, Macron, and be in that room as negotiations are happening, as history is unfolding, is absolutely remarkable.
That must be some interesting conversation to watch.
I mean, obviously, we've seen President Trump speak in various terms about his relationship with Kim Jong-un.
What was that like?
It was pretty surreal.
And, you know, as we were walking into the room, it was very tense.
So far, the day had been good.
This was the very first summit in Singapore.
And I think I'm going to kind of lighten it up a little bit.
And I make a joke to Mike Pompeo, and I turn to him, I said, hey, Mike, thinking this will kind of like relax me mostly and bring the temperature down.
I said, so am I the only person in the room who either hasn't killed someone or ordered somebody to be killed?
And I kind of laugh, and he looks around the room, and he's like, no, you're the only one.
I was like, oh.
I was like, I saw that going differently.
I was like, well, that wasn't exactly what I was thinking you were going to say.
But it was surreal.
But the president was masterful in that back and forth of bringing in topics that he knew were of interest to Kim, whether it was sports and NBA basketball or And then being able to transition from something, you know, in a way so meaningless to talking about denuclearization for a country and watching him kind of do that back and forth was absolutely incredible.
What do you think is the thing that people get the most wrong about President Trump?
Is that he's somebody who doesn't love the country and isn't actually fighting to make it better.
I think that not knowing that misses who he really is.
So how did you navigate all the various personalities?
You know, a lot of turnover inside the Trump administration.
We had a Secretary of State, and then we had another Secretary of State.
We've had a couple of Secretaries of Defense.
And when they come in, they are greeted very often with warm words.
When they leave, less often are they greeted with warm words.
So what was it like trying to handle all those personalities?
I think in some ways growing up in both kind of church work and politics, we used to have kind of a joke in our family that they're very similar in that we take everybody.
The church accepts everyone.
In politics, you're constantly trying to build a bigger base, so you take everybody.
I was exposed to a lot of different personalities growing up in both of those environments.
And so learned how to work with a variety of different people, particularly as I grew and started doing campaign work all over the country or constantly interacting with such a unique cast of characters.
And having that background, I think, put me in a good position to work with a lot of different personalities in the White House.
I'm pretty up front about where I'm on a particular issue.
I don't play games.
I'm very direct.
And I think having that kind of relationship, I wasn't trying to go behind anybody's back.
I wasn't driving my own agenda.
I was there to serve the country and help the president.
And not trying to play all the different sides, I think, made a big difference for me.
So President Trump's talked a lot about what he's gotten done during his first term and agreed a lot of it's been very good.
Not a lot talked about in terms of what he's going to do in his second term.
So what do you think a Trump second term looks like other than sort of more of the same in terms of tax cuts or deregulation?
I certainly think those will be big pieces.
I know he'd like to see additional tax cuts.
Deregulation is probably one of the things that has been most effective for the economy under the first term that you don't hear a lot of talk about.
So I think that he'll continue aggressively on that front.
I think trade is going to be a major part of the president's second term is really trying to focus on Getting rid of the big trade imbalances that we have with other countries.
It's a huge personal priority for the president.
I think it will continue to be top of mind for him in a second term.
I think infrastructure is one that is something the president actually really loves and enjoys and wants to see.
I mean, he's a builder.
Well, we need more Infrastructure Week.
We haven't had enough.
Infrastructure Week always went so well.
I don't know why we didn't do it every week, but I do think that it's something that is personally important to him and I think that will certainly be another thing that he really wants to see happen because it's always talked about and it just keeps getting kicked down the road and nobody ever really does anything that has a lasting impact.
I think that's something that For him personally, he wants to see happen.
Prescription drugs is another big area that he is personally invested in and wants to see.
So those are some of, I think, kind of the, you know, 100,000-foot view areas that he will want to focus on in a second term.
One of the areas of highest controversy, obviously, for the president has been a lot of the public relations surrounding COVID.
So there's been a lot of talk about why he let Bob Woodward anywhere within a 100-foot radius of the White House.
There's been a lot of talk about His personal handling of his commentary surrounding COVID.
I think a lot of that's been unfair in the sense that nobody had a handle on what exactly was going on with COVID all the way through February.
Joe Biden was holding rallies in early March.
Andrew Cuomo didn't shut down the state of New York until late March and all the rest.
But what do you think that the administration could have done better and what should they do better with regard to their messaging around COVID?
Well, I think they should talk about the things that they did right and stop trying to defend and just focus on, like, getting us through.
You know, he, I think, made some very early decisions that were very important.
Certainly stopping travel from China was a key part and something that he talks about frequently, particularly given the fact that Democrats were attacking him for that.
So there were some things they did early on that I think were very important.
They should remind people of that.
But now, let's move forward.
Let's figure out what it looks like on the back end.
I think they should focus on where we're going, how we're coming out of it, and not try to spend so much time, just from a purely messaging perspective, so much time on everything that maybe didn't go right and focus on all of the things that they're going to do moving forward and shift the narrative away and take that away from the Democrats.
That's what I would do if I had the ability to kind of shape that message.
So do we need more on teleprompter Trump or less on teleprompter Trump?
Because, you know, I'll be honest, every time he gets on teleprompter and reads a speech, it's not as high energy as it is when he's doing a comedy rally.
But at the same time, it is a lot more on message.
He gave a speech last week about American history and patriotic education that I thought was absolutely phenomenal.
I think many of his best moments have been these teleprompters, whether it's a State of the Union address that's really well planned or whether it is his speech in Eastern Europe about the nature of Western civilization.
Seems like a lot of what he says On teleprompter is quite excellent.
And some of what he says that is off teleprompter is entertaining.
Do we need more on teleprompter Trump?
Less on teleprompter Trump?
I think he has to have that balance.
I think if we had only teleprompter Trump, he wouldn't have won in 16.
Because some of that energy and that personality that you see come through in those rally moments is what makes people love Donald Trump.
Because at the end of the day, it's still very heavy about personality.
And if you take all that away from him, I don't think that's a good place for him to be in.
I don't disagree that some of his biggest moments and best speeches are those teleprompter speeches.
But one thing that I think people don't realize is how involved the president is in crafting those words.
And that I think his team and speech writing team does such an excellent job of capturing what the president's policy is and putting it in such a beautiful way when he gives those big speeches.
But the president's very involved, you know, The classic sharpie marker changes that you'll see right up until the moment he steps on stage.
He may be making edits to those speeches.
So I think they're both important.
I think you have to have a good balance.
I wouldn't want to see them try to strip away all of the personality of Donald Trump and put him on a teleprompter.
One, that's just not any fun.
I don't think anybody wants to see that all the time, but I do think as you go into these final days, a few of those big speeches that really drive home his message in such a clear and concise way will be important and good for him to do.
All right, I'm going to ask Sarah Huckabee Sanders a few final questions, starting with whether President Trump really knows a lot about policy, or whether he really does not, and also about her own political viewpoints, since she's been spokesperson for Trump.
What are her political viewpoints?
If you'd like to hear Sarah's answers, you have to be a Daily Wire member.
Go to dailywire.com, click subscribe, you can hear the rest of our conversation there.
Well, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, thank you so much for stopping by.
It's been a pleasure, and I hope this is more welcoming than the Red Hen.
Certainly, thanks so much for having me.
Thanks for watching.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Our technical director is Austin Stevens.
And our assistant director is Pavel Lydowsky.
Associate producer, Nick Sheehan.
Our guests are booked by Caitlin Maynard.
Editing is by Jim Nickel.
Audio is mixed by Mike Koromina.
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The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.
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