Ep. 166 - The Kim Summit: Reality vs. Fantasy (ft. Sean Spicer)
Trump sat down with Kim and offered hope for denuclearization. But hysterical theoreticians worry that, while the meeting worked in reality, it didn't work in theory. We analyze the costs/benefits of the summit and the MSM spin doctors setting Trump up to fail. Then, former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer stops by! Finally, on this day in history, another renegade American president challenges a communist dictator to give peace a chance.
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President Trump sat down with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un for a productive meeting that offers some hope for a denuclearized Korean Peninsula and the world order.
But don't tell that to hysterical theoreticians on the left and right who fret and worry that even though everything in reality is fine and actually a little bit good, In theory, everything is terrible.
We will analyze the costs and benefits of the Kim Summit, as well as the MSM spin doctors who are setting Donald Trump up to fail.
Then, former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer stops by to shed some light on those media spin doctors, as well as the White House's strategy for dealing with them.
Finally, on this day in history, no coincidence, another renegade American president challenges a communist dictator to give peace a chance.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
Who knew?
I think I'm a hippie now.
I'm a hippie.
I want to give peace a chance, and all of the Democrats don't.
They want things to start exploding.
Something like that.
That was also true during Reagan's time, and we will explain that before we get to that.
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Okay, a lot to talk about.
I don't know that I have ever seen a diplomatic event receive stupider press coverage and analysis in my entire lifetime.
Other than maybe, do you remember the koi pond incident?
Donald Trump was in Japan with Shinzo Abe, and he fed a fish.
And then the media tried to make this into some huge gaffe, even though Shinzo Abe did the same thing.
So maybe other than that.
But this is receiving really stupid coverage on the left and the right.
And I don't know.
For reaction to pundits' coverage, before I give my analysis, in reaction to this historic Trump-Kim summit, we turn now to North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.
Mr.
Un, you have been watching CNN all morning.
What is your take on the analysis?
Why is everyone so f***ing stupid?
That's a great question.
That's actually my exact reaction as well.
The big takeaway here, the 30,000-foot view of this Trump-Kim summit in Singapore is stop trying to make the first inning into the ninth inning.
Stop it.
Stop trying to make this into the final thing.
Like, overnight, we're going to radically change the world.
We're in the first inning of this whole thing.
Secretary of State Pompeo is hashing things out.
We've been negotiating with North Korea for a very long time now.
Really, for decades, but under this administration, for months and months and months.
What you take away from this summit is broadly, we are on track for a deal.
That's a good thing.
That's the broad scope.
A lot of things could have gone wrong here.
Imagine all of the things that could have gone wrong that the media would have harped on and said, this is the end of the world, this is humiliating for America, and because none of those things went wrong, now they just have to make stuff up.
Here is what could have gone wrong.
Kim could have not shown up.
That easily could have happened, right?
That would have been absolutely humiliating, right?
He could have stormed out, he could have shown up, and then he could have stormed out, like when Trump called him fat, which actually happened...
We'll get to the clip of it later.
It is hilarious.
Trump called him fat in public.
He could have stormed out right there.
That would have been awful.
Or Kim could have gotten there and said, we're not going to denuclearize.
I got two words for you, Donald Trump, and they ain't happy birthday.
And that would have been truly humiliating for the United States.
The American president flies.
To this summit and then Kim could have said we're not going to denuclearize.
And Kim would have had a lot of leverage there, right?
Because he would have been playing on this sort of Obama paradigm of Obama was so desperate to get any deal with America's adversaries that he was willing to give them everything and to be humiliated.
Iran captures our sailors.
Iran demands we free up money in European banks.
Iran demands $100 billion of money flown over in an airplane.
Iran He had a lot of leverage here but it went very well.
Now what could have gone better here?
Because it didn't go...
I'm not saying this is some huge win.
This is a world-changing win.
No.
This is a minor win.
This is a step in the right direction.
This is basically good, but it's not worth screaming and pulling your hair right over.
And it's also not worth jumping around in the streets to be thrilled about.
It's just a good sign.
Okay, we can smile.
That's nice.
What could have gone better?
Well, I guess we could have worked out a treaty overnight for the immediate denuclearization and an end to a 70-year conflict.
Overnight with no concessions from the United States.
I guess that would have been better.
What are the odds that that would have happened?
Zero.
That does not exist in reality.
No negotiation would have let that happen.
The purpose of this meeting, and you wouldn't know this if you watch the mainstream media, but the purpose of this meeting was to get some goodwill for continued negotiations.
To have the two heads of state here meet one another, have Donald Trump feel the guy out, Mike Pompeo's felt this guy out, and that's what we got.
We got this.
It all worked out basically pretty well.
Now, don't pop the champagne.
We don't have a deal yet.
We've just got a good step in the right direction.
Anybody that was expecting more than that, anybody who was expecting, you know, some overnight magical thing that would have gotten rid of all of North Korea's nukes that they've relied on for decades, they were trying to set up a narrative that Donald Trump would fail.
That's what they were trying to do, right?
Because that obviously wasn't going to happen.
And so when that didn't pan out, they could have said, ha ha, see, we were right.
There is so much bad analysis out there about this meeting.
We'll try to get to all of the objections and show why they're so ridiculous.
But let's begin with the main objection.
So the main objection here is that Western democratic statesmen would never meet with totalitarian dictators.
How awful, how terrible that would be.
That's never happened before.
This is totally unprecedented, awful.
No president has ever done this.
Well, except for a ton of other world leaders from Western democracies, like Churchill and Stalin.
Churchill met with Stalin, okay.
Well, okay, but other than that, and Nixon and Mao.
Nixon went over and piled around with Chairman Mao, another much more murderous dictator than Kim Jong-un, and they piled around and played ping-pong and swam around.
I'm sorry, also Kennedy and Khrushchev.
So Kennedy met with Khrushchev, a maniacal dictator of the Soviet Union, who almost blew up the entire world during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Also, Donald Rumsfeld met with Saddam Hussein, then a special envoy to the Middle East for Ronald Reagan.
Rumsfeld met with Saddam Hussein, another murderous Dictator who used WMD on his own people.
But other than, no really, except for Reagan and Gorbachev.
Reagan meeting with Gorbachev before the liberalizing policies of Glasnost and Perestroika.
Reagan meeting with the Soviet dictator, a guy who enslaved a gazillion people behind the Iron Curtain, and paled around and smiled and shook his hand and slapped him on the back.
Okay, so it actually happens all the time.
Oh, okay.
So, I'm sorry, because I thought, because I watched CNN, I thought this had never happened.
This was totally unprecedented.
This destroyed American credibility on the world stage.
Actually, it happens all the time.
So, this is actually much more of a no-brainer than any of those, right?
Does anybody really believe that Kim Jong-un is on the same level of wickedness as Stalin or Hitler or Mao?
Of course not.
That's not to say Kim Jong-un is a good guy.
He's a miserable, awful, vicious, evil thug.
But as a matter of scale, even as a matter of ideology, there is not a chance that Kim is on the same scale as Hitler.
Right.
So what is at the heart of Hitlerism or of Stalinism or, you know, its expansion, right?
So Hitler's plan was to conquer all of these countries, conquer all of this territory, expand, expand, expand.
Same thing with the Soviet Union.
Expand, expand, expand, take over the whole world.
We're going to have this giant empire, the Soviet empire.
What is Kim Jong-un's plan?
Is to maintain his own little neighborhood over there in Northern Korea.
To keep his own little tin pot dictatorship.
Kim is a gangster.
He's much more like Castro than he is like Hitler.
He's like Castro.
He's a little dictator of a banana republic.
And by the way, Barack Obama dealt with Castro.
Remember, Barack Obama deals with Raul Castro.
Everybody says this is wonderful.
And in that negotiation, Obama gave Castro everything.
In exchange for nothing.
Gave him everything.
Said American tourists can come here.
Even though I can't get the sanctions repealed from Congress, I'm going to make it much, much easier for Americans to spend money there.
I'm going to practically stop enforcing sanctions against Cuba, the Cuban Embargo Act.
When Donald Trump deals with Kim Jong-un, he gives him basically nothing.
Nothing yet.
Donald Trump gives Kim basically nothing yet.
And the yet is where the negotiations come in.
So lefties and Trump critics on the right are spinning this summit as this huge loss for America, this huge win for North Korea.
We shouldn't pay that really much attention because we knew they would do this.
Right?
Sean Spicer was talking about this yesterday.
And we'll have him on later.
We're going to talk with Sean Spicer.
He's coming up.
But he was talking about this yesterday.
He said there's no bar that Donald Trump could reach that would get mainstream media approval for this summit.
They'll find something wrong in the handshake or what he says or a joke that he made.
And that's exactly what is playing out.
But it gets so much crazier than this.
You've got to hear some of the hysteria that is coming out of the mainstream media.
And we will explain why it gets to the central issue.
This is a premise of the left and why basically everybody is reacting stupidly to this summit.
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So Brent Budowski, writing in The Hill, he says, this is the headline, Trump let Kim get away with murder.
All right, how's he going to go on from there?
That's what he writes, quote, Trump is now a danger to the Democratic alliance.
By the way, I thought he was a danger after net neutrality and tax reform.
Isn't that the big danger?
Isn't that going to kill us all?
Okay, but now, I guess, now he's super serious.
Now he's a danger to the Democrat alliance.
Budowski goes on, quote, he is the only president in American history who treats America's friends like enemies and its enemies like friends until, except the last president, Obama.
Who treated our allies in Israel like enemies and our enemies in Iran like friends.
And a lot of statesmen deal with adversaries with both diplomacy and with strong-arm tactics.
Basically, every claim he makes is not true.
Statesmen regularly meet with dictators.
This guy is upset that Donald Trump was mean to Justin Trudeau of Canada.
And it's funny, we talked about Trudeau yesterday and how he's like a little whiny little boy.
People forget that Ronald Reagan was also mean to the last Trudeau of Canada.
Because obviously, little boy Justin Trudeau, he got his position through nepotism.
His father, Pierre Trudeau, was a former leader of Canada.
And Reagan didn't like him either, because they're like these whiny lefty, you know, they're just not...
Enjoyable people to deal with.
So, okay, I guess they forgot about that.
Here is some mainstream media analysis and buildup to show you exactly what I mean.
The optics are very significant, and as you know, a lot of analysts have suggested this is already a public relations win for North Korea because the North Korean leader is being well received on the international stage right now.
Is it already a win for Kim Jong-un?
And that's a big win for him, regardless of what comes out of this summit.
Him on the world stage in a way that no leader from North Korea has ever been.
I think this is a huge win in terms of respect, legitimacy.
So, this is really funny, isn't it?
They say, hey, regardless of what happens, this is going to be a loss for Donald Trump.
Well, how do you know that?
They're so transparent in trying to set up Trump to fail.
They say, no matter what happens, he's going to lose, right?
Okay, can we all agree on that?
Like, no, he could lose if, if, you know, Kim storms out or insults the United States on the world stage, but he could win, right?
It could be a sort of win.
And this is also funny because do you remember the Olympics, which happened five minutes ago?
Do you remember during those Olympics in Korea, how the left loved putting the Kim family on the world stage?
Because their argument now is if you put Kim in the spotlight and you put him next to American leaders, then that's going to be bad.
That's going to be really bad, except for five minutes ago when it was great, when that dragon lady became the breakout star of the Winter Olympics.
They said, oh, she stole the show.
She's the breakout star.
Oh, but that was when it was the Olympics.
That was when it was a left-wing thing doing it.
Now that Donald Trump's doing it, it's bad.
Do you follow that logic?
And by the way, what's going to happen now is the left is going to say, well, sure, okay, that was hypocritical, but now conservatives are hypocritical to enjoy this summit.
Not true.
Not true at all.
The Olympics was the left cheering on brutal dictators despite Donald Trump.
This summit is conservatives dealing in diplomatic flattery in the hopes of peace after all of the other strategies that we have tried for several decades have failed.
That is a huge difference.
All of the other strategies have failed.
And this one offers at least sort of hope for a victory.
So you remember also about six, seven months ago when Donald Trump was threatening war, the mainstream media said it was horrible.
Remember he was saying, my button is bigger than your button.
I've got fire and fury and nuclear weapons that I could write.
And they said, that's awful.
It's going to lead to World War III. Now Donald Trump is doing the opposite.
He's pursuing diplomacy.
The media, do you know what they're saying?
You're going to be shocked to hear this.
They're saying it's horrible.
They're It's kind of weird.
It's like he's kind of damned if he does and damned if he doesn't.
The real answer, of course, is that we have to do both.
We need to have credibility and the credible threat of violence, and we have to pursue diplomacy.
The media are reporting that this is a big win for Kim.
This is the huge win.
What did he win?
Ask yourself that, because they're all going to report that.
That's going to be the headline.
This was a huge win for Kim.
Okay, what did he win?
Did the United States lift the economic sanctions?
No.
We have some of the stiffest sanctions in place that we've ever had against North Korea.
That's the main leverage.
That's actually what's at issue.
This negotiation is between nuclear weapons and economic sanctions.
That's what it is.
You can either have a gigantic nuclear arsenal or you can participate in global trade.
That's it.
Basically, we're trying to get the North Koreans to give up the weapons in exchange for participating in the international community.
We still have all the sanctions in place.
All of that leverage is in place.
That's why it's not like the Iran deal.
Now, what else did he win?
He got publicity on the world stage.
Kim gets plenty of publicity on the world stage all by himself.
That's totally fine.
He already got legitimacy, by the way, on the world stage from April's Panmunjom declaration in South Korea.
That was when they went a couple months ago to South Korea and declared they're going to pursue denuclearization and an end to the Korean War.
So he's already got that legitimacy on the world stage.
That's been building for a long time.
So what else did he get?
He got a handshake and some flattering words from Donald Trump.
By the way, I don't know if you've watched any clips of Donald Trump over the past four decades, but he can be a little hot or cold, you know, if you're nice to him and he's getting what he wants.
He can be effusive.
He can be over-the-top flattering.
And then the minute you turn on him, he just knifes you in the back.
And he kind of goes back and forth because that's what he does because he's a New Yorker and he's a real estate guy.
You know, that's how he talks.
I don't think people put a whole lot of stock in some flattering words from Donald Trump.
And also American leaders have always shaken hands with murderous dictators.
In fact, this goes all the way back to the founding of the country.
Thomas Jefferson and John Adams made nice with the Barbary pirates who were enslaving our sailors basically at the foundation of our country.
They made nice.
They said nice words to them.
They made concessions to them.
This has been going on since the very beginning.
So what did Donald Trump say?
Donald Trump said Kim is talented.
This is obviously true.
It's sort of damning with faint praise because Kim's talent is at enslaving his own people and murdering all of his opponents.
But it's obviously true.
You know, the guy took power at age 26 and managed to keep hold over this bizarro world communist dictatorship long after communism was relegated to the ash heap of history.
But also, what else did Donald Trump say about Kim?
Seven months ago, he called him short and fat.
He sent out that tweet.
He said, oh, I would never call Kim Jong-un short and fat.
Actually, by the way, Donald Trump called Kim Jong-un fat in the room at this summit.
Listen to this and then watch the look on Kim Jong-un's face.
Very nice.
Getting a good picture, everybody.
So we look nice and handsome.
It's beautiful.
Perfect.
Thank you very much.
So, for those of you who weren't watching, you gotta look at Kim Jong-un's face in this because he says, you know, "Yeah, we gotta look really thin, really nice." The camera pans over, and Kim Jong-un looks there like Larry David.
You just kind of see, we're going to look really thin.
And then it goes over, and you're like, bum, bum, bum, ba-da-da-da-da-da.
That's really...
A perfect way to start, too, because it's not just an offhanded thing.
That's a little dig.
That's a very Trumpy, very New York little dig to say, who's boss here, right?
Oh, we're going to look...
Hey, you've got to work pretty hard to make us look thin, okay?
Hey, you get it, don't you, Kimmy?
You get it, little Un.
I don't know what...
Is it Unnie or whatever Kim Jong-un's nickname is?
He probably doesn't have a nickname.
Now, okay, the big concession that is being reported here...
Is that Donald Trump said that he would cancel a joint military exercise with South Korea as a concession toward denuclearization.
And everyone's freaking out.
They say, oh, South Korea didn't know about this.
By the way, South Korea issued, the president of South Korea issued a statement talking about how wonderful this summit was, how great Donald Trump did.
So, you know, those headlines take them with less than a grain of salt.
But also, the point that everybody's missing here is that the war game that's being talked about isn't scheduled to happen for a full year.
The joint military exercise that's been canceled isn't scheduled to happen for a year.
By the way, you'll recall another big event in Korea was recently canceled, and then it wasn't canceled.
The summit that he said that at, right?
The summit, Donald Trump said, the summit's canceled.
Too bad it's over.
And then a couple days later, Kim comes back to the table.
He says, okay, it's back on.
This is obviously just a negotiating tactic.
He's obviously saying, look, we're going to try to not have to have this military exercise.
But then he later said, in that same discussion, he says, look, in six months we'll see if Kim does what he says he's going to do.
If not, I'm going to have to say something else.
I'm going to have to change my mind.
He told a joke.
He says, I'm going to come up with an excuse to explain it or something.
But what he's signaling there is, okay, In a year, I sure would like it if we don't need that joint military exercise.
Because, by the way, we only need these provocative exercises if North Korea is provoking us and saying they're going to blow up the world in nuclear weapons.
That's why we have to show them that we've still got giant planes that can blow them to smithereens.
Also, by the way, This handshake did not come cost-free to North Korea.
They're saying, oh, well, it put him on the world stage with the president, and that's a big propaganda win.
I don't know, maybe.
I mean, he's already been elevated to these levels of running a country.
He does run his own country, right?
This handshake doesn't come cost-free.
Information is very tightly controlled into and out of North Korea.
Now we have images of Kim Jong-un palling around with Donald Trump, talking about friendship between him and Donald Trump, a new era, we're going to let the past be the past.
That undoes a lot of North Korean propaganda.
There's been propaganda throughout North Korea for the past 70 years about how America's this evil country and we're going to come, we're still at war.
They're the enemy, they're inhuman.
And now you see this picture and they're palling around, right?
And Donald Trump is the big guy in the room.
Just physically, he's this giant guy compared to short, fat little rocket man.
He's smiling, he's calling Kim fat in the room.
It's hard to undo those images too.
It's hard to undo those images, and those cut against a lot of North Korean propaganda.
So even that, which is the only possible win that North Korea could say they got here, even that is a double-edged sword.
But this is the big lefty argument, right?
The big lefty argument is optics.
They say, oh, the optics just didn't look good.
I don't know why they didn't look good.
Oh, the optics of Donald Trump standing there with it didn't look good.
And this is my central argument about the left.
The left cares about the appearance of the thing rather than the thing itself.
So, you know, they say, who cares if it works in practice?
Does it work in theory, right?
That's their argument.
Bad optics.
Bad optics for whom?
Who is this bad optics for?
This is another central premise of bad optics, right?
It's this prejudice of the left.
The left thinks, oh, we would never be duped because we're smart people.
But those rube, idiot masses, they can be duped by optics.
That's the premise, and that's the prejudice.
Oh, it's bad optics.
What are you saying, bad optics?
What you're saying is it's not actually bad, but it looks bad to stupid people.
Everybody else is so much stupider than we, we blessed few in the media.
And that's why the bad optics matter.
That's totally wrong.
In real life, the actual people who get fooled by optics are precisely the people who worry about those optics so much of the time in the mainstream media.
This is why Donald Trump communicates so well, right?
People understand what Donald Trump means, and the mainstream media worry about the optics.
All the theoreticians, they worry about the optics.
You know, Donald Trump announced his presidency, or his presidential campaign.
He said, Mexico's sending criminals over the border.
Now, the mainstream media, the Never Trump movement, they all worried.
They said, oh, the optics.
People said, what was wrong with what Trump said?
He said, well, it's not that it was wrong exactly.
It's that the optics were bad.
People knew what he meant.
Americans knew what he meant.
They are sending criminals across the border.
Not everybody's a criminal, but they are.
There are a lot of crime comes across the border from Mexico.
First of all, by definition, illegal immigration is a crime.
Also a ton of drugs.
Also a ton of gang members.
Also MS-13.
Speaking of MS-13, that animals remark.
He said, MS-13, they're animals.
And they said, oh, the optics.
Oh, the optics.
It sounds like he's calling immigrants animals.
No, it doesn't.
He didn't say that.
But maybe idiots would think that.
Right.
But you, mainstream media, you are the idiots.
The people are not the idiots.
You are the idiots.
And finally, the final, because we'll have to move on.
We've got to get Sean Spicer on.
The final stupid media narrative here is that this was reckless, impulsive.
It was driven by ego and narcissism.
It's reckless.
What was he doing?
Donald Trump has been explaining this for decades.
He's been talking about doing this for decades.
Here's Donald Trump explaining precisely what happened in 1999.
North Korea is totally out of control.
And would you rather have a very, very serious chat with them now?
And if necessary, you might have to do something fairly dressed, Or would you rather have to go after them in five years when they have more nuclear warheads and missiles than we do?
You go in, you start negotiating.
And if you don't stop them from doing it, you will have to take rather drastic actions.
Because if you don't take them now, you're going to be in awfully big trouble in five years from now when they have more missiles than we do.
We're a bunch of saps.
What if the North Koreans don't play ball, develop a nuclear capability, go forward with their missile development?
Does the United States act unilaterally?
Excuse me.
If spoken to correctly, correctly, they will play ball.
Look on another front what happened recently where Clinton has asked our trade, our so-called trade partners to come so we can renegotiate some fairness into trade, right?
They don't show up.
They say we're not coming.
Why would Germany show up?
Why would France show up?
Why would Japan show up?
They've been ripping us off for years.
So why would they come here?
It's ridiculous.
It's interesting that these old clips do shed a lot of light on Donald Trump's thinking because he's thinking about this.
Essentially, he pivots at the end.
He's just talking about trade, right?
He goes from talking about Korea to talking about trade because he views these things as trade negotiations, as business negotiations.
And this is Donald Trump's strength.
First of all, what else are we going to do, right?
These other strategies haven't worked.
So why not give this a shot?
What's the loss?
The loss is...
Nothing that Kim doesn't basically already have and nothing that can't be revoked.
But this is Donald Trump's strength.
Donald Trump negotiates with the worst people on earth, right?
The idea to not meet with Kim is one of fear.
Oh, I fear.
What if this may lead to this optic and that doesn't...
Just do it.
Just do it.
Just do it now.
And then if that doesn't work, we'll do something else, okay?
Just don't be afraid.
Stop being so fearful and just try something.
But this is Trump's strength.
He negotiates with the worst people on earth.
These real estate guys in New York, mobsters, literally mobsters.
If you want to do New York real estate, you have to talk to the mob.
And you certainly did in the 70s and 80s before Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump's lawyer, cracked the mob in New York.
Reality television.
I mean, TV, those people are...
Trust me, I see them all the time in Hollywood.
They are like the worst people on Earth.
And politics, right?
So he deals with these people and he's negotiating in a way that you would talk to thugs, in the way that you would talk to gangsters.
And that's what literal gangsters are in New York real estate and it's what Kim Jong-un is.
He's a gangster and Trump is talking to him like a gangster.
And we'll see what comes from it.
It's a...
It's certainly a step in the right direction.
To call it an amazing win is obviously premature.
And to say that this is possibly the end of the world is also clearly wrong.
This was a step in the right direction.
If it goes in the wrong direction, we'll pull it back.
Nothing lost.
Those sanctions are still in place.
We still have the position of strength.
We've got to bring Sean Spicer on to talk about all this ridiculous media spin.
I spoke with Sean last night.
We're going to have him after the break, but I'm sorry if you're on Facebook and YouTube.
Sorry, guys.
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And also today, we've got a great show coming up later on today.
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It's going to be the big boss, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, leader of the multiverse, myself.
We're going to have Zoe Rachel, a longtime friend of all of us, end of the show, and international television and film star, Nick Searcy, Peabody Award wedding.
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Okay, we're going to bring on Sean Spicer, then we'll tie this all back together on this day in history, but we'll be right back.
Okay, so I talked to Sean yesterday.
Sean Spicer, really cool guy, former spokesman for the president, White House press secretary.
He's got a new book coming out called The Briefing.
And I usually read the book before the interview.
The book really is not out yet.
I don't have an advanced copy of it.
It's coming out next month.
But I've talked to Sean about what's in the book.
It sounds really interesting.
I can't wait to read it.
By the way, that Father's Day special is going to be at 4 p.m.
Pacific today and 7 p.m.
Eastern.
Be sure to tune in for that.
And here's our talk with Sean Spicer.
Sean, thank you for being here.
Thanks for having me.
So you had the hardest job on planet Earth, a White House press secretary, spokesman for the President of the United States.
How would you rate your tenure at the White House?
You can be a letter grade, numerical, Siskel and Ebert, thumbs up.
How do you think that you did looking back on it now?
You know, I think that considering the nature of Trump's presidency, that he was a disruptor, that this is a guy who didn't come at this with a group of political loyalists that a lot of people have had in the past, I think we did really well.
When you look at what we accomplished in the first six months and the groundwork that that laid to things like tax reform, I think it really was a disruptive time, but it also was a productive time.
Absolutely.
I certainly agree with that.
Can you take us behind the scenes a little bit?
I've always wondered about that job, more than the chief of staff, more than even the president, what it is like in that pressure cooker for the press secretary.
What does a typical day look like?
It's a great question because I think there's a question of what does the job normally look like and what does it look like under a Trump administration?
Because one of the things that I did is really speak to a lot of my predecessors and try to understand the battle rhythm of the day, what happens, the process that they all undertook.
That was vastly different under Trump because, you know, for the most part throughout my career and throughout the career of most press people, you're advising the principal as far as what to say, when to say it, and, you know, even what platform to use.
With Trump, he's pretty much the lead on a lot of those things, and that's a very different dynamic.
And when it came to the briefing, obviously the intensity and scrutiny during the Trump administration was vastly different than it has been under any previous administration.
And so the job in itself is very, very different than it was in the past.
And part of the, you know, you mentioned the book earlier.
I walk through a day in the life, what it used to be like to get ready every day and The short end of it is getting ready for a final exam every day.
Well, you know, I really look forward to reading it.
I always try to read the book before the interview, but I don't have a copy yet, so I'm eagerly looking forward because it sounds really good.
And I agree, obviously, the Trump administration is just a different beast than these previous administrations.
I thought you handled yourself wonderfully.
I was a big cheerleader of Sean Spicer and Sean Spicer.
I knew there was one.
I knew there was one out there.
You know, it's funny.
Can I tell you a funny story that you just brought that up?
I've been at an event for my son in the last hour or so, and I walked in and one of the other parents said, gosh, that tweet you put out about Trudeau was hysterical.
And I said...
Are you being serious?
Because you know that's not me, right?
And they were like, what do you mean?
I was like, you're following a parody account.
That is...
A lot of people will...
I'll see those tweets all the time.
And I think the reason the parody works so well is because the account of Sean's spicier, or the spicier version, it actually does channel a lot of that spirit you brought to it.
I mean, I actually always felt you were...
I felt you were far kinder to those blood-sucking leeches in the media than they deserved it all.
I thought, you know, you handled them very well.
Do you have any regrets about them?
I found they would always try to gin up these fake gaffes about you, like, you know, you were lost in the bushes or something, or you made a completely accurate statement about the number of people who viewed the inauguration, and they would pretend like you were saying these crazy things.
Do you have regrets about that?
Do you wish you had, I don't know, been harder on them or something?
Well, there's a lot of interactions that I've had, you know, whether it's personal or professional, when I'll look back and say, you know, could I have been better at that?
And I think just because there, you know, it's a lot of the advice that I look back on was stuff that, you know, most of our moms teach us.
Right.
Two wrongs don't rake a right just because they said it doesn't mean you do too.
And so there were times when I think I probably let them get the better of me once in a while or we escalated too quickly because But you're right.
I mean, there were times when I looked at and I thought to myself, wait a second, the job of the press secretary is to speak on behalf of the president of the administration of the American people.
And it was too often that I had to talk about myself.
And that's not a good place to be as a press person.
Right.
Well, this gets to a real question because there seems to be this media crack-up in the last few years.
In the old days, the networks dominated.
Republicans had to play with these guys, even though they were quite hostile.
Now we have all of these other outlets.
We have Twitter.
We have live streaming.
You've been in Republican communications for a long time.
People know you primarily as the press secretary.
You were...
Communications director for the RNC, House Budget Committee, chief strategist of the RNC. You've known them for a long time.
This question has two parts.
Should Republicans still talk to outlets that are hostile to them, the New York Times, or should we tell these lefty mouthpieces to go pound sand?
And second, are there any good journalists that you would still recommend, these guys are doing hard work, they're not just partisan hacks?
Two great questions.
On the first one, yes, we should talk to them.
Because you don't seed ground, you don't grow the audience, you don't allow people to hear conservative ideas if you ignore them.
I believe, just like, you know, that if you look at what the church does in terms of missionaries, the idea is to go out there and to spread the good news.
And I think if you are a social and fiscal conservative, then part of what you want to do is go out there and explain to people.
Because what happens more than anything is a lot of these mainstream outlets either cover conservatives in a very nasty way or don't cover issues of importance.
And so by being out there, it allows people who might be watching this to say, hey, I never thought of that issue in that way.
Or I never knew that I shared the views of a particular person who might be espousing them on a policy or what have you.
And so I think it's a great way to grow the movement.
And secondly, yeah, there are a lot of great reporters in that briefing room.
And the interesting thing is, and I actually have a part in the book where I talk about this, where there are some really good reporters at a lot of reputable outlets.
It's not always just the broad brush, the Washington Post, the New York Times or whatever.
There are good reporters at a lot of these institutions.
And what I want to do is make sure that we call balls and strikes better, that we call out the bad reporters and then we praise the good ones.
Because when we just say fake news or the New York Times is horrible, then we sort of dismiss the ones that are actually doing a decent job.
And I think what has really killed things is two things.
One is social media, where reporters almost act as if people don't have Twitter accounts themselves because they express these opinions and things that really expose their liberal bias.
And second is the need for a lot of these reporters to get on television.
Mm-hmm.
That makes perfect sense.
The sensationalism of it, obviously, not every reporter is just Jim Acosta, who I believe is played by Will Ferrell these days on television.
There are people at these outlets who aren't just the editors.
They are doing work.
And I agree.
I think it might be something about our Catholicism that we just are perfectly willing to talk to anybody and go into the belly of the beast.
But I have taken too much of your time.
You've got to run.
You are with your family right now.
That's an Thank you.
You know, the funny thing is, after reading your book, I really felt inspired.
You know, people ask me all the time, why did I want to write a book?
And I just felt your book really laid out a lot of the policies that I think were so key to the Democrats' current state of being that I just needed to kind of put my thoughts to paper.
But I think it was a lot more writing than you probably did, though.
Well, perhaps, although I did a lot of research, and I will say, Sean, I always knew you were a gentleman, but now I know that you're a scholar as well.
So I look forward to reading yours.
Yes.
There were a couple.
At some point, we have more time.
I wanted to debate a couple of the issues that you raised in there.
Right around the 200-page mark, I thought you got into some pretty meaty stuff.
It does.
It's an esoteric reading, too.
So we'll really have to go into the different layers that we have there.
But I suppose that'll be for a future episode.
Sean, thank you so much for being here.
I really appreciate it.
And I'll talk to you next time.
You bet.
- Thank you. - Gotta love that guy.
So the book, by the way, is The Briefing.
I look forward to reading it.
I've got a pre-order and it's gonna be great, I'm sure, because Sean Spicer was there at the moment, at this moment of this colossal new administration coming in and he dealt with the press really, really well.
It's funny because a lot of people criticize him for being too harsh on the press.
I think he was far too nice to them.
But I thought he did a really good job.
Look forward to reading the book.
Before I let you go, we only have a couple minutes here at the end, I do want to point out something on this day in history related to this Kim summit, because people aren't drawing the connection, and it's because, as with so many things that come around with Donald Trump, they're looking just at the surface level, and they're not seeing all the little jokes and all of the little coincidences that happen underneath it.
So let's get to this day in history.
On this day in history, in 1987, Ronald Reagan went to Berlin and gave a very famous speech to a Soviet dictator, Miki Gorbachev, to tear down this wall.
The Kim summit took place on the same day.
Now, it seems like it was yesterday because, you know, it was in Singapore and we're here in the United States, but this was June 12th.
So the Kim summit took place on June 12th.
Tear down this wall took place on June 12th.
This could be a coincidence, but it's a pretty big coincidence.
And you've got to remember the people around Donald Trump, the people setting up After this summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, these are pretty sophisticated people who've been around politics for a very long time.
Now, I think Donald Trump is pretty smart as well, but a lot of people, they say, oh, he's a dummy.
He's a dummy.
They fail to realize, by the way, that all the really successful presidents have played dummies.
Ronald Reagan did it.
Bill Clinton actually did it.
George Bush did it.
They forget that part.
But even if you think that Donald Trump is a dummy, all the people around him are pretty sophisticated.
Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, these are guys who were around during the Reagan years, and it's really hard for me to believe that that is a coincidence.
And it's, by the way, both of those speeches, the summit and the tear-down-this-wall speech, were about the exact same thing.
It was an appeal to renew arms reduction talks.
Here is Ronald Reagan at the Berlin Wall.
There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable.
That would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace.
General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate.
Mr.
Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. open this gate.
Gorbachev, Mr.
Gorbachev, tear down this wall.
What a speech.
And a line written, by the way, I think, by Peter Robinson, who also has the great show on Common Knowledge.
Tear down this wall.
Ronald Reagan applies two techniques here.
He's harsh there, right?
Tear down this wall.
Tear down this wall.
He's also nice.
If you seek peace.
And he was nice to Gorbachev.
He would flatter him.
He would shake his hand.
He would pat his back.
Here's just a little clip I pulled up on the internet of Ronald Reagan flattering dear old Gorby and the significance of that.
Today, we are commemorating an event that is highly symbolic.
Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev shook hands on the step you see behind you.
It had all started right here with a handshake that changed history.
They shook hands.
This is, you know, when we look back at history, we sometimes remember it in a very distorted way.
We just remember Reagan bearing down, tear down this wall.
But there was also the friendliness to Mickey Gorbachev.
We just remember him saying, we're going to build up Star Wars, SDI, we're going to run you out of the arms race, right?
We forget that Ronald Reagan was begging for the abolition of nuclear weapons with the leader of the Soviet Union.
Stormed out of a meeting.
Because they couldn't abolish nuclear weapons.
There are two sides of this, and there have to be two sides to these negotiations.
The harsh, the credible threat of violence, the tough guy, and the diplomatic niceties and the diplomatic flattery and the handshaking and the back patting.
So far, that's what we're getting out of this.
That's a good day.
That's a win.
Might all go wrong tomorrow, and then in six months Trump is going to come up and say it was all wrong.
That's going to be all over again.
But for today, this is a good move in the right direction, and we should be Happy about it.
Not thrilled.
Not popping champagne.
Just happy.
It's a good step in the right direction.
Take yes for an answer, people.
Come on!
Okay, we've got some really crazy shows coming up this week.
I don't want to ruin it for you, but we decided my first week after the honeymoon is just going to be this insane week.
It's going to be pretty wild, so be sure to tune in tomorrow and through the rest of the week.
