For Such a Time As This—Behind the Scenes at the Trump White House With Kayleigh McEnany
Charlie sits down with former White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, to recount some of her most vivid memories behind the scenes at the Trump White House as she confronted and contended with an extremely hostile press corp that attempted to derail the Trump White House at every turn. From her famous press briefing preparation binder, to how President Trump chose her to be his press secretary in the first place, hear her insider stories of what life was really like inside the White House. Also, Kayleigh examines the dramatic difference in the tone and the tenor or the press in the Biden Administration with Jen Psaki compared to her tenure, before explaining how her faith and how becoming a mother helped shape her time in one of the most high profile and high stress jobs on planet earth. Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Inside the Chaotic White House00:11:54
Hey everybody, today on the Charlie Kirk show, Kayleigh McEnany, former White House press secretary, good friend of mine, an exclusive conversation about her time in the White House.
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Hey, everybody, welcome to this very special episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
With us today is a friend of mine that I've known for quite a while.
Yes.
All the way back from Varney and Company days on Fox Business Network.
That's right.
Kaylee McEnany.
Kaylee, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
Thank you.
Good to be here.
Thank you.
I think you have spoken at every single young women's leadership summit.
Yes, I have, and I've loved every moment.
I mean, I was a young girl who loved politics.
I was a bit peculiar.
I was a second grader, like doing cheers for Bob Dole in the playground.
So, you know, it was a bit of an oddity at second grade.
And I never knew there were other women like me who loved politics and wasn't so much of an oddity, but I was just a young woman who was motivated by politics.
And to see these young women who remind me of myself, it's just really cool.
I wish I would have had this outlet back when I was young.
Well, you're probably the most demanded speaker here.
And so it is going to be packed and packed and packed.
And we put you at the last day for a reason.
And no one would leave early.
But so let's walk.
There's a lot of things I want to explore with you.
First, just tell our audience your story because it's pretty amazing from getting into politics and then becoming press secretary for the White House and not just press secretary, I don't know, during normal, boring times.
No, you were press secretary during lockdowns, virus, Fauci, the race issue during every, I mean, you were press secretary during probably one of the most people would say chaotic moments in American history.
Yeah, I think it is certainly the most chaotic, aberrational period in American history.
There's no doubt.
I mean, I'll never forget getting the job.
We had all locked down.
I was actually locked out in Florida.
Not so bad to be locked down at the beach.
I will say that.
But we were crossing a bridge and I remember getting a call and you've gotten a call from the White House.
I'm sure it's like an odd set of numbers.
I answered and said, This is President Trump.
And normally he would call me and just say, Oh, good job in a media interview.
I was with his campaign at the time.
But instead, he said, Do you want to be my press secretary?
And it came out of nowhere.
And I said, Well, of course I do.
And he said, Mark, get it done.
And presumably that was Mark Meadows who had just taken the job.
And, you know, it took a few weeks, but I ended up getting the job.
And it was just absolutely incredible to think about taking the podium during COVID-19.
Americans didn't know what this virus was like.
There's a lot of misinformation out there by St. Anthony Fauci and others.
And it was a pretty cool experience.
I had to lean on God quite a bit because I couldn't have done it myself.
So, what date did you take over the press secretary position?
Oh, that's a good question.
I know it was, I think it was April 13th, I believe.
Yes, it was like Friday.
Right in the middle of all of this.
Right in the middle, yes.
Yeah.
A few days before my birthday.
And I went in and they were doing these COVID task force briefings.
You probably remember them.
The president flanked by Fauci and Burks and others.
And I came into that.
I didn't know if I would ever give a briefing.
It had been 400 days since there had ever been a briefing from a press secretary.
And then one day he just looked at me and said, Kaylee, start briefing.
And I thought I would have, you know, a week or so to prepare.
And he said, do it before Friday.
And this was on Thursday.
So I had about a 24-hour period, but we got it done.
So the normal succession to become press secretary is you work in kind of the White House press shop as deputy press secretary.
This is not, I'm not that there's not anything normal or whatever.
It's just that, and then you kind of see how these briefings work.
But you came from the campaign, if I remember correctly, which was not necessarily low profile, lots of TV experience, you know, experience and all that.
And then you get put right into this.
President Trump says, just go do it.
Now, for someone who allegedly hates women, they find that really bizarre.
Like, you know, go represent our entire government, please, on the biggest stage imaginable.
And you handled yourself with such grace and you start, you came up with this amazing thing, the binders.
Tell us about the binders and the tabs of all the research.
Well, thank you.
And, you know, yes, certainly that is the case that you're normally deputy press secretary and you kind of get some institutional knowledge.
The only institutional knowledge I had was when I was an intern during the Bush era.
And, you know, that wasn't really deep institutional knowledge.
So there was a learning curve and I knew that coming into the job.
But, you know, I knew I had the preparation.
I had gone to Oxford for a year.
They have a tutorial system where you read your paper out loud and then the tutor grills you.
So you always have to have footnotes.
You always have to have facts and be on your toes.
And then, of course, I went to CNN where I was an eight-on-one conservative, one conservative.
Those ridiculously long panels.
So they had to like pan out.
And they're like, well, somewhere over there is our conservative.
Exactly.
And the pummeling you get on those panels prepares you for the White House press briefing room, I think, more than any time being a deputy press secretary could.
So you always had to have your facts.
And that's how the binder developed.
You know, I got the first draft that my team gave me and I said, guys, where are the footnotes?
Where are the stats?
And my team was great and they quickly rose to the occasion.
But, you know, I just demanded the same kind of statistics and work that I did at Oxford and at CNN.
And I had a great team around me.
So there was 400 days without a press kind of briefing.
Is that right?
Yes.
So they had the coronavirus task force briefings, but it had been 400 days since not my predecessor, Stephanie Grisham, but my predecessor before that, Sarah Sanders.
So we had been through another press secretary, not had a briefing.
And I took the podium for the first time after 400 days.
A lot of pressure.
You had ravenous wolves of members of the press.
Like finally, but then they met their match.
And it's, it's, so how does it?
This is not a question I ask often, but Barack Obama gets asked this question.
How does it make you feel when you see how easy the current press secretary has it?
Oh, it's incredible.
Look, I mean, I just was yesterday or a few days ago, I was looking through some of the questions from my press briefings, and I just wanted to compare the two side by side, you know, a straight objective comparison.
And the questions I found that were posed to the Biden administration were, how's the White House cat?
Did the dog, was Biden's dog involved in a biting accident?
Is he okay?
He was asked, how does it, or Gentaki rather, was asked, how does it feel for Biden to sit in the Oval Office?
That's exactly.
And then I was asked, is the president happy the South lost the Civil War?
That was literally one of the questions I was asked from.
Oh, Yamichi?
No, it wasn't Yamish.
It was actually Ryan Lizza.
Oh, that's right on par.
That is right on par.
I would just love. to have seen, which never would have happened, how the press would have reacted if Donald Trump Jr.'s text messages would have come out filled with the N-word.
Do you think you would have gotten a question about that?
Oh, there's no doubt about it.
There's absolutely no doubt.
And to watch the press bury this, just like they did the Hunter Biden story during the campaign, and to see how they were wrong about Lafayette Square, see how they were wrong.
You know, they said the president cleared protesters with tear gas to take a photo.
That was never the case.
I told them that, but they didn't believe me at the time.
Now we know the truth.
The IG report came out.
Same on the origins of COVID and a lab.
The president was right on that.
Russian bounties.
He said there was not Russian bounties on the heads of Afghan soldiers or excuse me, American soldiers in Afghanistan.
He was right about that too.
And we told them the truth, and they never believed us.
It's amazing.
There's been a lot of vindication since I left.
Yeah, in the last year, it's been a full propaganda campaign to try to remove Trump.
And quite honestly, it worked.
And it's too bad because so many Americans are just programmed to kind of live in this place of comfort of the information that's provided to them.
And that's just the beginning of it.
And the hydroxychloroquine stuff, which has been proven to be right.
Exactly.
And the lockdowns, which has been proven to be right.
And almost every single one of these things, which was called like, you're a bad person.
This is a conspiracy theory.
Sit down and shut up.
All of a sudden now is really the media is either forced to admit or there's some sort of study that shows that they were wrong.
And the Lafayette Park one is another good example.
The Loser and Suckers one from the Atlantic story.
We weren't even allowed to talk about the Hunter Biden story.
Yep.
And I asked people this question.
I said, do you think that Tony Bobulinsky is a household name?
Or why is Michael Cohen a household name and not Tony Bobulinsky?
Right.
And that's because we have an activist press that literally just cares about destroying not just Donald Trump, but his entire political movement.
And so a lot of people then get cynical when they start to hear this kind of pattern.
They don't feel like, oh, we won.
We're on the right side of the argument.
They're like, no, we knew this early.
How are people supposed to process this?
Well, we've got to fight back with the truth.
Yeah, it is easy to get cynical.
You're exactly right.
But we've got to hold them accountable.
And that's what I tried to do from the podium, you know, go on offense.
My dad said when I went into the administration, come up with a phrase that you want to encapsulate your tenure.
And I said, offense only.
I'm tired of playing defense.
I'm tired of watching Republicans get one version of stories, one set of headlines, and Democrats getting another.
And we're going to fact-check the press.
So when they asked me about a tweet of mine, I'm going to fact-check some of their headlines in real time.
And that's the kind of attitude as Republicans I think we must have.
Because you're right, Tony Bobolinski, of course, Hunter Biden's business associate.
I said to the press, hey, guys, do me a favor, watch the Tony Bobolinski interview.
They agreed.
They watched it.
I said, what do you think?
And this is at the height of the campaign.
They go, it was interesting.
That's it.
Crickets.
It was interesting.
And now we know the Hunter Biden story was real as Hunter is under federal investigation.
Yeah.
And I mean, these people are, and I have to really be careful saying this.
I don't.
But I don't actually think these are good people.
I don't.
I mean, they were so nasty to you.
They were so mean to you.
They were so awful to our country.
And then I have to see the way they treat Jensaki.
They're asking Gensaki, so what's your thought on whether or not Joe Biden thinks that President Trump's going to get indicted or not?
I'm like, wait, hold on a second.
What?
Wait, what's his thought on whether or not a former, like, what kind of crazy question is that?
Right.
How about this?
How about the crisis on the southern border?
Are you going to hold China accountable for the lab leak?
How about the 1 million Muslims in concentration camps?
How about rising inflation?
The Media's Silent Reaction00:15:50
No, no, no.
Instead, the line of questioning is: what is the current president's opinion on something that's happening in the state of New York?
And so, you have some insight into the press, and I don't want you to get into intentions and all this.
I know that's really hard because it's all speculation, but it seems as if that they really are activists, they're not journalists, and they're really in the business of personal destruction.
That's right.
Look, there are definitely a set of reporters in the press corps, and I could probably count them on one hand, maybe two, who are good reporters.
And I've had one of them came up and, you know, in a hushed tone said to me on the tarmac, I come from the old school of journalism and kind of recognize that it has changed for the worse.
And then you have people, and you're right to call them activists like Caitlin Collins, like Jim Acosta, who are activists.
And I said that much from the podium.
I said, Caitlin said to me, Hey, why didn't you call on me?
And I yelled back, I don't call an activist because at a certain point, we've got to call out their activism, not engage in that kind of activism, because it's destructive when you are shouted down by a Playboy reporter in the back of the room at the end of each briefing.
And where are the other reporters, the good reporters, saying, Hey, we're going to come together in the White House Correspondents Association and push out someone like the Playboy reporter who's shouting from the back of the room and is making us all look like buffoons.
Look, can I tell you something that really bothers me?
When good people get scheduled for cancellation for no reason, that's what's happened to Mike Lindell.
I was just with Mike Lindell with 15,000 of my closest friends in Wisconsin, and Mike Lindell was hosting an entire event, and the media went after him like you wouldn't believe.
And they're trying to take my pillow out of every single store.
Mike Lindell is a good person.
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So the way a lot of people view the media right now, our listeners, obviously, is they totally think it's a broken and corrupt institution.
And I'm not really sure the right way to fix it, to be honest.
And just because they seem that they have all this power and they want to use the power to keep themselves in charge, which is really dark and awful.
And there's so many stories they could actually win awards if they actually went and investigated right now.
But they decide they don't want to do that.
Instead, I think there was a massive story recently on whether or not Donald Trump had his pants on backwards or forwards or the cicada that fell on Joe Biden's neck.
These were the major stories of the last couple of last couple of days.
It's crazy.
And I mean, we've gotten to a point where 79% of independents, this was midway through Trump's presidency, of independence.
These are not Republicans, said that they believe that the press intentionally makes up fake stories and intentionally reports them.
So the good news is people recognize it.
Edelman Trust Barometer trusts different gauges the trust of different institutions.
They found the media is at their lowest point of trust.
So the American people are wise to this.
They do see the headlines.
They are smart.
But when you get to a point where big media colludes with big tech, that's where it becomes highly problematic.
There was a poll out recently that I think it was one in six Biden voters would have changed their vote had they heard about the Hunter Biden story.
They, you know, talk about influencing an election.
There's simply no doubt that Twitter and big media and big tech all together influenced an election.
And it was the most interfered with election in American history.
And I mean, the fact you could suppress the New York Post story because we don't like what they have to say, even though it ended up being totally true.
And then, oh, that was another lie, that this was somehow Russian intelligence.
Right.
And by the way, not only that, last year we went through two impeachments, right?
We went through one in the Ukraine and the other one was ridiculous.
And we had to go the whole phone call thing.
Then a couple months later, we had to deal with the whole virus and the lab leak.
And this, if the Democrats actually wanted to permanently sever the country, they're doing a great job.
Yes, they are.
But the point to Russian disinformation, this is where it becomes so laughable that anyone with a brain cell can see through the antics of the press.
You know, Politico, I believe it was, published 50 intelligence officials who said that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russia disinformation.
Well, the average American says, I'm hearing about Russia an awful lot.
I'm hearing about Russia collusion that didn't exist.
Now this is Russia disinformation.
It's always Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia.
So they're not even good at their job at avoiding reporting because they just point to Russia and people see through that, especially now in the wake of us knowing it is Hunter's laptop.
Where even now some people are saying, well, do we truly know it's Hunter's laptop?
I'm pretty sure if it has hundreds of pictures of Hunter, text messages of Hunter, emails of yes without close on emails from Hunter, it is indeed Hunter's laptop.
No, we know it's Hunter's laptop.
It's been third-party corruption.
They've never denied it.
Yep.
And there's also information and phone numbers that are corrupt.
There's a lot of forensic analysis that's been done on this.
We knew this back in October.
It's so simple.
Yes.
But the media saw this as a threat.
And at all costs, they needed Donald Trump gone.
Donald Trump stood in their way of every single one of their very, very treacherous schemes.
And so what are people supposed to do to consume information and hold powerful people accountable?
Because, I mean, I only know like one or two people that work in the White House.
You remember working in the White House and a lot of my friends did.
It was nonstop leaks, nonstop pressure from the Washington Post and New York Times.
Nonstop.
It was as if they were sitting in the meeting with Trump, you know, in the Oval Office, and they would find out what happened quicker than even someone who's working in the EOB would.
And there's no such pressure right now happening on the Biden White House.
I have not seen one leak.
I don't know.
I know like one person working there.
It's Ron Klain.
Yeah.
Well, they're very disciplined.
There's no doubt about that.
And Ron Klain, they call him President Clain.
He really is running our government.
He is running our government.
Yeah, but they did have one leak recently, which was really interesting.
Kamala Harris, when she had that disastrous trip down to Guatemala and Mexico, there was interestingly, and I noticed it too, because you're right, there have been no leaks, but there was finally a leak of people within the White House saying, that was a weird trip.
And I'm paraphrasing here.
Why can't she even answer a simple question?
And it's interesting to see the White House leaking against the vice president.
It makes you curious about the dynamic because we finally got a leak and it's against the vice president.
So it seems like maybe there are some knives out between the VP's team and the president's team.
Yeah.
And I mean, it's just, it was nonstop during the Trump era and they would turn staffers against each other and they threaten stories.
None of that is happening right now.
And that kind of internal dynamic actually hurt the Trump administration's ability to govern the country for the well-being of all the citizens.
But the activist press doesn't care about any of that.
They're very much sociopathic people.
So you have a book coming out.
Tell us about that.
I do.
I'm really excited.
This is, I guess, the second time I'm talking about it.
I talked about it at the Young Women's Leadership Summit.
I was so excited to announce it here.
But it's called For Such a Time as This, My Faith Journey Through the White House and Beyond.
And yes, exactly.
And that comes from the book of Astler.
You're exactly right.
And it occurred to me that should be the title because when I was going up to D.C., I was very nervous, almost in tears.
And my dad said, Kaylee, you know, maybe you were made for such a time as this.
And interestingly, a Democrat commentator sent me the exact same phrase.
And it just stuck out in my head that, you know, God puts everyone in a certain place in a certain time for a reason and a purpose.
I think I was at the podium for a reason, for a purpose in that time.
And I think everyone who reads this book has a purpose they're designed to fulfill, and they just have to find it.
So it'll be about my journey through the White House.
There will be some cool behind the scenes moments, like when the president of the United States got COVID-19, the most serious threat to the presidency since Reagan was shot.
I'll take you into those scenes, but it'll also be about my faith journey and how I leaned on Jesus Christ during those times.
Amazing.
So is it available for pre-order yet?
It is.
Although that's the most important thing.
The Amazon link is up.
So you just Google my name and for such a time as this.
And we'll do a cover reveal in about two weeks, but the pre-order link is up and it will be out December 7th.
Yeah, it'll do very well.
Thank you.
I'm sure.
And so talk more about your faith and how important that was in the White House.
We live in an increasingly secular society.
I believe there's a massive spiritual battle happening in our country right now.
And there's a lot of people that were praying for you and praying for your success.
Talk about the role of your faith when you worked in the White House.
You could certainly feel those prayers, I will say.
You know, Sarah Sanders, who came before me, she used to tell me she's wonderful.
She told me that before each press briefing, she would read her Jesus calling book, a devotional.
And she, the day of my first press briefing, people didn't know this, but I literally, my mom and dad can attest, was in tears at two o'clock when I was supposed to take the podium because I was paralyzed with nervousness.
But Sarah Sanders sent me a picture of her Jesus calling from two years prior to the day.
And it was the perfect message about overcoming through faith in Christ.
And I had complete serenity when I got to that podium.
And it wasn't anything about me.
It was the prayers of so many Christians that I could feel.
And you're exactly right about the spiritual battle playing out.
And I saw each and every day, like when the president got COVID-19, you'll remember they dubbed the Amy Coney Barrett nomination a super spreader event.
Well, what some people haven't pieced together is Franklin Graham was there that day.
They were doing the big prayer march through Washington.
And Franklin Graham and some of the greatest pastors of our time were in the White House meeting with the president.
So you have COVID-19, the invisible enemy, lurking in this super spreader event, while you have these pastors who represent all things good and Christians praying through DC.
And it was just such a clear juxtaposition of good being there, but evil lurking in our midst.
But the good news is Christ can overcome all.
And I get into that chapter by chapter.
It's amazing.
I want to just reemphasize this.
So you have a press briefing.
This is not like a regular speech.
I just want to have people understand this.
So you have this, you're literally sitting on top of each other because of the way the White House configuration is.
And there's like this sliding door.
And you walk out and you have probably 30 or 40 rather high IQ, hyper aggressive, wannabe celebrities with masks on.
So all you see is their eyes.
And you walk up to this podium and you're looking down at them and they're staring at everything you do.
And then you have probably 15 or 20 cameras and you know that there's 30 or 40 million people that will watch this.
And then you have precisely what you have to say.
And then you have to defend things that you didn't say on behalf of a bureaucrat or on behalf of an appointee.
And if you say one word wrong, it could derail the entire mission of the federal government in the midst of a pandemic.
But they don't care because that's success for them.
Yeah, that is.
And then so you have to be precise throughout the entire thing.
You have to be interesting.
And then you also have to be able to answer the questions from the opposition.
And then you have to then be able to know your stuff because if you quote one thing wrong, that becomes the story, not all the benefits from all that.
Yes.
And even if you do everything right, they will still take you out of conversation.
That's exactly right.
I remember I literally gave an answer.
I believe this was to Yamish.
I forget exactly who, but I talked about the science being on the side of reopening schools.
I went through data.
I said the CDC director said kids are minimal spreaders, that they're not at risk from COVID the same way adults are.
And I read statistics and facts in science.
And I said, with the science should not stand in the way of opening schools because the science is on our side.
Did everything right?
Jim Acosta takes the science should not stand in the way, tweets it out as if to suggest I just said science doesn't matter.
When in fact, I had footnoted my answer with all of this science.
And even Jake Tapper had the audacity or I guess the courage to call him out.
Not particularly a fan of Jake Tapper, but even Jake Tapper said, guys, we're taking her out of context here, which was a kind thing for him to do.
But even when you do everything right, they will take a snippet, they will twist it for their own purposes and design.
It's the highest stakes imaginable.
And it's rather remarkable.
And it just in the way that there's no comparison to what's happening right now.
This is not even, this is not a press briefing.
This is a lunch with friends, which was happening with Jen Saxon, right?
That's not a press briefing.
This is like an interrogation coupled with kind of like a war briefing.
It's this really weird thing.
It's like really bizarre in the sense that it really doesn't exist anywhere else in the country.
And you kind of just look at it like, oh, she's just kind of giving a speech.
No, you have to understand it from her actual visual optical perspective.
Every time you look up from that podium, you have 30 really like treacherous people that are staring at you, waiting for one thing.
And you know that it's not just them, but they represent outlets that they could push a button and every single Apple device in the country gets an Apple news notification.
Kaylee McEnany says this, this, and this.
And then you kind of get off the podium, you get up the podium, that sliding door closes, and you ask your team, so how did I do?
Everything was great.
It was awesome.
And then you look at like, that's not what I said.
Exactly.
Yes.
There were many moments like that when I'd go back to my office and I'd say, that is not what happened.
But people can see it, especially people who watch the briefings in their entirety.
But that's why it's so important to anticipate the questions and anticipate counter-arguments and be prepared.
How can I take this and go on offense?
And it was interesting.
We would plan questions going from Sunday, 7 a.m. all the way to the briefing.
And we would often identify a much harder question than any of them even asked.
And we're like, how did they not think to ask this question?
This is the toughest one.
But sometimes they never quite got there.
But all of this to say, the purpose of the press briefing is to bring news to the American people.
And what was so sad to me during my time, there were children dying in the streets, like Secoria Turner and Legend Talafero.
And we in the government were doing things to fight crime in the streets.
And when I tried to bring that message, they didn't care.
And when I talked about the police officers who have perished amid the riots, David Dorn, they didn't care.
And I'm not saying they didn't care like they're not compassionate people, but they didn't care enough to write a story about it, to ask a question about it.
And therein is the problem with the press.
If your narrative, a child dying of crime in the streets, doesn't fit the left's narrative, it is just entirely ignored outside of local news.
And to me, that is the real tragedy.
At the end of the day, it's those families, those victims that end up losing because there's never light brought to their stories.
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Overwhelming the Press Corps00:05:09
So as if you didn't have enough on your plate, you also were the press secretary during the race stuff.
And that's what you're getting at.
And from the George Floyd stuff to the riots, to the burning and all that.
And they did, I mean, that was when the press went from, you know, we really want to take you down to a whole nother level of.
And you navigated that perfectly and seamlessly.
But they were, of course, trying to, you know, do what do what they do.
So I want to ask you a question that you might not have been asked before.
A lot of people say, Charlie, I get sick to my stomach before I speak.
I have to give a presentation.
How did you overcome kind of just the not just the nerves, but the anxiety?
Like, what was your day to get you actually physically in a place to be able to do that?
Because that's not easy.
I mean, I know when you speak and you have a lot of eyeballs on you, you got to be you got to be right in that strike zone.
Walk us through kind of the crescendo of the day that got you to be where you were at 2 p.m. every day.
So if we had a press briefing on a Monday, let's say, I would read through, I get hundreds of news alerts that come to my phone in my email, and I would read through every single news alert, every single headline, and make a list of topics.
My two closest aides were Chad Gilmartin and Julia Hahn, and they would do the same.
Julia's incredible.
She's brilliant.
She used to work for Breitbart, I think.
She did.
She did.
She's brilliant.
And we would sit down and come up with a list of topics, and we would run through every single potential hardest question we could be asked.
Julia would send me a draft binder.
Starting at like 7 a.m.
This the day before we did.
Wow.
And I would look through the draft binder, make notes, Google statistics, facts.
I wanted to overwhelm them with information.
And the next day, we'd start at maybe seven or eight, and we'd start running through the questions, reading through the binder, preparing, preparing, preparing.
And then I'd go to the bathroom, oftentimes get on my knees and say a prayer.
Or if I didn't do that, my team, we would all in my office, last thing we would do, we would get in a circle.
And there's a guy named Ben Williamson who worked for the chief of staff.
I started calling him Reverend Ben and then Pope Ben as the briefings got harder because he would always pray with us.
And that was the last thing we did as a team before we walked out.
And I think it worked.
It gave us a lot of peace in the tough moments.
And so I hope everyone understands that because there's this idea that there's like 600 people prepping these things and there's these massive war rooms and there's like you research that and you do that and you research that as if you know you have kind of like the 24 CTU thing.
You remember 24 Jack Power?
Of course.
You're like the double decker with all the data analysts.
What you just told me is that you have a core team of two and a pretty decent sized team to go brief 40 million people daily.
Yes.
So our press team, exactly.
We had like, I think it was 10 to 12 on the press team.
There's more people writing the Colbert every night.
That's true.
Literally.
There are literally.
There are more producers for late night comedy than producers to put on a press briefing.
Yes, but these are high quality people.
I would take Julia and Chad and Julia's team of, I think she had seven or I think she had four people.
I would take that team any day over the Colbert.
Oh, no, for sure.
Ellen's staff, all the staffs combined because she's such a high talent person.
As you know, you've met her.
Yeah.
And it's just an incredible juxtaposition.
So let's talk about where the country is right now, kind of in closing.
A lot of people are losing hope.
A lot of people are wondering what's next.
Do you have any insight into what President Trump might be thinking of doing?
I've talked to him recently.
He seems like he's in good spirits.
Do you have any insight of what he might be doing?
I don't.
I don't.
I've talked to him recently too, and he is in good spirits.
We'll see what he decides in 2024.
But in the media term, 2022, and he's back out there.
It was great to see him.
I believe he was in North Carolina.
And I think more on the horizon for him, it sounds like, in terms of rallies and getting our majorities back.
That's the focus, laser focus right now.
Yeah, Georgia and Arizona in particular.
Yep.
And so can you just speak to kind of what some of the big issues are that you think we need to be focusing on to try to win back these majorities and also just try to win people over to the conservative message?
Look, I think certainly the culture issues are very important.
You know, people, I was just watching Fox and Friends, and they were talking about them getting rid of holidays and calling them days off in our school.
You know, we're talking about not canceling people.
They try to cancel anyone in Trump World.
Now they want to cancel apple pie.
I mean, these kinds of issues, people realize the insanity of it.
But in addition to that, I think really crime on the streets, the fact that crime is going up in all of these Democrat strongholds, the fact that, you know, a little boy, Aiden, loses his life and is shot in his car seat.
And he says, Mommy, my tummy hurts, and is a victim of murder there.
And there are so many other examples.
You know, I think that that's really important that we put a focus on that law and order safety.
New York City is literally crumbling right now.
I go there often and it is crumbling.
So we got to focus on securing our streets and an inclusive economy message.
You know, President Trump got more of the black vote, more of the Hispanic vote than his predecessors did.
And he did that by having an accessible economy and focusing on issues that American people care about.
Crime and culture.
I think those are the ones.
I mean, what's so sad about New York is that they actually did this themselves.
It was a safe city.
It was an enjoyable city.
And they decided to be ideological, not pragmatic.
They decided to go try to defend some ridiculous, esoteric idea instead of actually what works for their citizens.
And now people are dying.
Yeah.
And it's more dangerous than ever.
Balancing Career and Family00:01:43
So the final thing for women out there that are listening either on radio or podcasting, it's harder than ever to be a young conservative woman out there.
You are the role model for that, and for good reason, also a mother and a wife and a follower of God and Jesus.
What advice, what are the big takeaways do you have for young conservative women in particular?
Yes, well, that's very kind.
I mean, number one, be bold when you speak, even if others don't, you know, stand up in applause in your classroom, plot in your classroom.
You are speaking for a lot more people than you know.
You know, there are silent professions of I support you, I support you on Harvard Law campus when I was there.
So if you are courageous enough to speak up and be bold, others not only will follow you, but will appreciate your voice.
But number two, don't if you want to be a mother and a wife, not every woman desires that, but if you have that on your heart, you don't have to sideline that for your career.
You can do both.
You can have it all.
It's never a wrong time to have a baby, to get married, to do those things in life.
I decided, you know, in the middle of a presidential campaign, what better time to have a baby?
But I did it and it was the best decision I ever made.
So just know you can have it all.
You can have a high-powered career.
You can be a mother and a wife if you so choose and desire.
I love it.
Well, for such a time as this is the book, we're going to have you back on to promote it throughout.
But Kaylee, God bless you.
Thanks so much for coming on.
Thank you.
An amazing job with Turning Point.
It's such an honor to be here and to speak.
Thanks.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us your thoughts.
Freedom at charliekirk.com.
If you want to get behind us and our program, go to charliekirk.com slash support and get involved with Turning PointUSA at tpusa.com.
God bless you guys.
Speak to you soon.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.