Did Iraq have WMD's? w/ Ari Fleischer | PBD Podcast | Ep. 210
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PBD Podcast Episode 210. In this episode, Patrick Bet-David is joined by Ari Fleisher and Adam Sosnick.
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Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller Your Next Five Moves (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
This world of entrepreneurs, we get no value to haters.
Howdy, running, homie, look what I become.
I'm the one.
Okay, so we have a special guest here today.
Let me tell you who it is.
So think about the following.
Imagine you're having an intense conversation with your spouse.
She's asking you questions.
You don't know how to answer them.
Your parents are interrogating you.
You're going through all these series of questions.
A client is asking you questions about a product.
You're getting stuck on.
Imagine being, this is a job.
I really want you to think about this for a second before we get right into it.
Imagine being the former press secretary for the White House for President George W. Bush from, listen to the dates, January of 01 to July of 03.
We're talking 9-11.
And every day you're looking at this person on the big screen being questioned on every single small move being made.
And that is your job.
That's how you make a living.
That person is on the podcast today.
Ari Fleischer, thank you so much for making it time for being here today.
Beth, thanks for having me.
Glad to be here.
That's a tough job, man.
How do you do what you do?
That's not an easy job.
It was easy.
Reporters throw softball questions at you.
They love Republicans.
They love Bush.
Easy job.
Of course.
Bush was loved.
You know, the Republicans were always loved, and the press is fair to the Republicans.
But I'm actually curious because I watch it.
And by the way, our buddy Adam is not here right now.
Let me tell you guys why.
Adam lives in this retirement community called Miami.
And, you know, this retirement community in Miami, they go on a different time sometimes.
And he still is living the lifestyle of the anti-retirement community, which I'm sure you may be a little bit familiar with.
And so he had some other opponents late night last night, but he's on his way.
He should be here with us any moment when he does.
Tyler, you're going to open the door.
He'll come in.
He'll join us.
I hope there's no video of those appointments.
No, he keeps that private.
He's pretty discreet about it.
He uses signal to communicate with them.
So the message disappears.
So Ari, going into, obviously, we're going to cover a lot of different issues.
You just wrote a book called Deception, Snobbery, and Bias.
We got a lot of things to cover.
Trump, DeSantis, Musk.
I don't know if you're following the Sam Bankman Freed.
There's a lot of things going on right now in America.
A lot of complexities, divisiveness.
Last night I'm having dinner with David Solomon, CEO of Goldman Sachs, and they're having dinner.
And we're in Miami and questions are being brought up.
What about this?
And what about that?
And what about even his saying he's, I've never seen it this divisive before, you know, on how America is.
It's pretty intense.
What are your opinions about divisiveness, where we are today?
Is this the worst you've ever seen or is this pretty normal?
Oh, boy, it's a yes to all the above, really.
Yeah, this is the worst I've ever seen in my lifetime, but it's been worse in America's lifetime.
If you ask historians, election of 1800 between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams was way worse than this, much more acrimonious, the accusations they launched against.
Way worse than this.
Correct.
I mean, back then, you used to call people whoremongers.
You would attack their wives.
I mean, it was personal nasty.
Can you give us specific stories, examples?
Well, Andrew Jackson, 1828, I believe it was.
He, when he ran for president, he was accused of bigamy because the divorce that his wife Rachel had hadn't gone through yet.
The Pony Express hadn't dropped off the papers, in essence.
Wow.
And so he married Rachel before the divorce went through.
And so he was called a bigamist.
Rachel was called a bigamist.
She died during the transition before he took office in 1829.
And people said that she died of a heartache.
Politics in America has always been a noisy sport.
And back in the old days, it was all done through pamphleteers with the nastiest, most personal things said about each other.
We went through a much longer phase where it kind of got cleaned up.
I remember George H.W. Bush in the 1992 race against Bill Clinton.
At the end of their race, under all the pressure in late October, George H.W. Bush called Bill Clinton a clown.
And the press went nuts.
How can you call him that?
How can you use such language over the word clown?
And look where we are today.
Yeah, clown today is a soft, it's a compliment today versus what, you know, some things that are being said today.
So, but let me, maybe let me ask this question in a different way.
So now, election-wise, what has changed?
Like, what, you know, how we go back and look at, if I talk to Rudy Giuliani, he'll say, well, let me tell you what we did back in the days, the RICOL laws we changed to go after the mob.
Okay, great.
Well, let me tell you what happened in America right after 9-11, you know, TSA going into the airport.
That was a dramatic thing, November of 2001, when we changed it.
And you go into TSA, you should be able to go in there.
Now you have to do this, and you got to get your TSA pre and clear.
It's a lot of things have changed, right?
Certain laws changed, or Patriot Act.
We're going to get into some of that stuff.
But election-wise, what's changed with election over the years?
I trace it back to the end of Bush's administration, the one I worked for, George W. Bush.
And as a result of the war in Iraq and how this divisive the war became and the opposition to Bush over the war became, the Democrats started to call him a war criminal.
Now, I never previously heard, I was just referring to George H.W. Bush calling somebody a clown and being criticized.
All of a sudden, now, you're a war criminal.
Attorney General Al Gonzalez, you're a war criminal.
The language, the tone, things just started to change.
Social media is now invented.
It didn't exist when I was in office.
It came at the end of the Bush years and into the Obama years.
That allowed people just to let it rip with no filter.
And people said the meanest, nastiest things on social media.
And that just became part of the parlance that enveloped us as opposed to the older decorum where people said, show some respect.
Don't say those things.
Keep your thoughts to yourself.
Those old-fashioned notions, sticks and stones.
And then it got worse.
Obama comes into office, and certainly he was divisive president.
He had very low regard for Republicans.
Republicans had low regard for him.
Donald Trump, of course, said he wasn't born here, which was wrong.
He said he was born in Kenya, which was wrong.
It just starts the, it continued.
It snowballed.
And again, social media piles on top of it where people agree to these things.
And then it just continued on.
And then Trump's win.
Trump wins in 2016.
And half of America becomes unhinged and says it's because of Russia collusion and the whole Trump's illegitimate.
And for all the criticism of Republicans being election deniers, which is valid criticism, it was started by the Democrats in 2016 when they never accepted Donald Trump's election.
So all of this has made a pitted America, pitted camps.
I'm a believer, though, Pat, in a pendulum swings in this country, and it always swings back toward the center, always back to reasonableness and moderation, because that's the temperament of the American people.
We're going through a phase.
We're going through a swinging phase.
You think we're going to go back to being diplomatic?
Like you think, because the one thing, is there anything that's not going to change?
Is there anything that's going to change?
I think like what I think is going to change, hey, we're going to go left.
Oh, my God, we're going too far.
We're going to go right.
Oh, we're going too far right.
Oh, we're going to go left.
I think that part may be right.
But are we at a point where, you know how they say, well, the first time you have sex and you lose your virginity?
It's like there's a second, third, nobody.
And then it's like, ooh, let it rip.
You know, you're just, you're single.
You're not even thinking about it.
And it's a completely different story.
But the first time is the first time, then it becomes normal.
Are we living in the trolling era where this Jake Paul, this Dano White, this Connor McGregor, Trump, Elon Musk, where trolls are winning?
So it's becoming a playbook to say, I have to learn how to troll.
Not that these folks are trolls.
They're learning how to troll.
They're learning how to poke.
And schools, and if you go to a regular debate class you take, they don't teach you on how to handle trolls.
They don't teach you on those kinds of things.
They say, well, when you debate, you have to respect your opponent and you have to go based on this.
And then all of a sudden, boom, a troll shows up.
You don't know how to address that.
Do you think the trolling is here?
That's not going away.
And a name-calling and all of that?
Or are we gradually going to go back to being extremely diplomatic to each other?
We are living through a very vituperative era.
Trolls and just breakdown of old-fashioned treat people with dignity and respect, even if you disagree with their opinions.
The solution to that is easy.
One day, a leader will run for president who actually means it and can rise up and unite people.
We have politicians who run now saying I'm a uniter, I won't do this or I won't do that.
Then they get into office and right away get divisive.
We're going to get sick of this.
And one day a president's going to tap into that.
And a president who is genuinely somebody who people respect, he treats people with dignity.
He looks at the other party and says, I disagree with your ideas.
I'm going to defeat you on your ideas.
But I respect the fact that you love this country too.
And that is the hallmark of America.
We have always had a level of unity, acceptance, tolerance that unites us as Americans, makes us the envy of the world.
And a Ronald Reagan-style candidate who comes out and reminds people about what this country, this city on a hill, can be like is going to have a huge following by temperament, not necessarily by ideology, by temperament, because we're going to get tired of the vituperative era and the pendulum will swing.
You think so?
You think it's going to show?
I do.
So give me, I know everybody says, you know, we need another Ronald Reagan to show up, right?
And we need another, you know, John F. Kennedy.
Democrats will say we need a Clinton temperament to show up because Howie was.
Well, then Obama showed up.
But do you think a person like that can show up and take all the constant criticism and get the media to turn around and be kind and gentle and soft to them?
Not about the media.
It's about the country.
It's about the people.
Yes, I believe that the thing about the presidency and whoever emerges to run for president, they single-handedly have the ability to set an example.
This is what presidents do.
And when the example a president sets is to belittle, is to continue the vituperative streak that our nation is in the middle of, people follow.
When a president actually rises up and people read it and see it and believe that this guy actually does focus on unity, even if ideologically he's different from you or me, that president has a chance.
That's leadership.
It's about leadership.
I don't disagree.
So let me let me like when I watch you, you know, you're taking all those questions, right?
And I went back and watched some of the old stuff.
I even watched you with Chris Matthews back in the days, you know, the Chris Matthews back and forth.
And hey, you know, you're doing this and you're doing all this.
And you're like, that's an unfair question.
Would you also ask that question that happened under Obama's watch?
You're going to blame him as well.
And he says, that's fair.
And he takes it back and kind of moves on.
But for somebody to do what you do and to sit there and get the constant criticism, the tough questions, is that duplicatable?
Or is that just purely in the individual's psyche DNA that maybe somebody can get a little bit better in the area of answering the tough questions, but there's got to be a part of it that's your personality, your temperament to do that.
Because that's not an easy job, specifically during the time that you did it.
That's a very, very difficult time to do that.
Do you think someone can learn how to do that or some of that is natural?
I think a lot of it is temperament.
You have to, one, enjoy the press.
You really do.
You have to look at that briefing room as a fun place to stand your ground.
And you have to respect the fact that under our First Amendment, the press can ask whatever it damn well pleases.
And that's their job.
And just because you get asked a hard question doesn't mean you have to struggle.
You can give a hard answer in return.
Sometimes you can give a fun answer in return and poke fun at reporters.
It's just how you do it.
But what it comes down to is enjoying it, respecting the process, respecting the press, but standing your ground on behalf of what you believe in and what the president is advocating for.
That's what makes the job really fun.
How much of it do you, is it like anticipation you take out?
You know, like you see the current one, you know, it's a whole folder, you know, and SACI and many of these.
They had these, okay, what question are you asking?
Okay, I got eight seconds to go to the page on what it is, and then they just read it.
Oh, what you're asking?
Can you go into the overhear?
No, let me see what he said.
How much of it is preparation to say, like, are you sitting with a group of people saying, okay, guys, what do you think they're going to be asking us?
Ari, they're going to ask about this.
Okay, let's role play.
If they ask you this, what's your answer going to be?
I'm probably going to say something this.
Avoid that word.
Say this.
I wouldn't say that.
They'll attack you if you say this.
And then which ones are we working on?
Well, you're looking at all these people.
You know, those three can't stand you.
You know, those three ask softball questions.
You know, those three you like, but they ask tough questions.
I'm assuming all of it, you're a sports guy.
I'm assuming there's strategy to the madness as well, no?
There is, but there's also fundamentals.
Go back to sports.
If your swing's no good, it doesn't matter how much time you take BP.
If your mechanics are wrong, you're not going to be able to improve that much.
The single, the most important way to handle that job, you can't speak for the president if you don't listen to the president.
So the way to prep is you got to be in the Oval Office all the time.
I was in almost all the president's meetings.
I'd spend a third, a quarter of my day in the Oval, listening to what he listened to, hearing what he said.
And then you take that.
So now you've got knowledge.
You know what the president's doing.
Then you take that.
And yeah, you do get your staff before you go out and prep or before you brief.
And you say, fire away.
What are they going to ask me today?
And sometimes you go, okay, I got that one.
I got it.
I got it.
Got it.
All right.
Whoa.
Let's talk about that one.
That one's a curveball.
What are we going to say on that one?
Call the Secretary of Defense.
I need to answer on this.
Call the PR spokesperson at the Department of Transportation.
Get me more info.
So it all goes into it.
But again, the essential ingredient to surviving that room is having fun.
You know, I looked at it like it was intellectual chess.
I'd go in there going, if I say A, I can make them ask question B.
And I was already thinking of answer C, knowing I could take them to question D.
And I thrived on that.
Go back to sports.
That room was my field, and I was never going to let the press beat me on my field.
And so I looked at it like a sport, like competition, knowing what questions they were going to ask because you'd try to anticipate it.
So my hardest days, frankly, were slow news days.
If there was a major crisis, if something was terrible going on on September 11th, I knew every question was going to be out.
What did Bush do?
What did Bush say?
September 11th.
Frankly, from just a briefing point of view, those days were simpler and easier because I knew every question coming and I knew the answers.
The slow news days, nothing's really big.
Nothing's going on.
I'm going to get 25 topics.
That's the hardest question.
What a great perspective to think about.
It is more predictable the more crisis there is because you know what the 80% of the questions are going to be.
And the less crisis there is, you don't know what's going to be.
Adam, thanks for joining us.
I'm glad you made it.
Thank you so much.
How are you?
The retirement community sends their love, especially to you, Mr. Fleischer, from love from down in Miami.
But of the two of us, I guarantee you had a more wild night than I did.
I guarantee that.
Really?
I stayed home when you say that.
The way you say that.
I mean, some people are going to say, Pat's married.
How wild of a night did he have?
You had dinner at an amazing place.
I had a good dinner.
I came home and I even text you and I'm like, this place is wild.
I got to leave.
But going back to it, what you said, very important questions.
So you said, I was never going to let them beat me, right, at their game.
Give me your biggest victory during that time and the day that they maybe whooped your butt a little bit.
What will be the two?
You know, the biggest quote-unquote victory was after September 11th in the lead up to the war in Afghanistan.
I'll never forget this.
There was a front page story in USA Today saying special forces deployed to Afghanistan.
And this is before the first shot was fired, before anything took place.
And your special forces.
I was in the Army.
You were in the Army?
I almost went into Special Forces.
I thought you were a Ranger.
I was 101st Airborne.
Airborne is what I was.
I interviewed two.
You're very closely special forces.
I was down the street from them.
Yes.
If I would have re-enlisted, I would have gone into special forces.
So the story was special forces rangers deployed to Afghanistan.
And live at the briefing, and this briefing is covered on live TV everywhere.
Al Jazeera is covering it live.
I get asked to confirm whether or not we sent special forces.
We have the ground troops before the war began.
And I looked at the reporter and I said, you know, under our system, you have the right to ask me anything you want.
I have the responsibility not to answer.
Next question.
And I kind of feel America cheering for me when I said that answer.
Because, yeah, the press is going to ask for deployment information.
They want to know about the movement of our ships and our troops in advance of a war.
As if I'm going to tell them anything?
Of course I'm not going to tell them anything.
But it's such a funny dichotomy because every reporter in the room was pissed at me.
How come you won't answer that question?
But I knew everybody in America was cheering for me because they didn't want me to answer that question.
And that's when it was just so crystal clear to me that my job sometimes is to speak over the heads of reporters and say what the president wanted me to say to the people.
And that was in many ways my, you know, called it victory.
So follow-up with this next question is when you're, you know, let's just say you have two or three kids, you got four kids, and your personality, okay, you go to school and you're somebody that's a powerful person and people have opinions about your father, okay?
You go to, well, your dad, did you see your dad is all of this?
All he cares about is money.
Did you see what he did to these immigrants?
Did you see what they did to that?
And did you see what?
And as a kid, let's just say your brain is still at a point where you're kind of like, maybe that teacher was right.
Maybe that kid was right.
Is my dad really a bad person?
Is my mom really a bad person?
They're kind of messing with you.
And you're coming home, you're like, well, he's good to me.
I see how he is with me.
I see how he treats my mom.
I see how he treats.
Things are good, but man, why are they saying all these bad things about him, right?
Okay.
So if you're working with President Bush or if you're working with President Trump or anybody, you're working with President Bush.
Michael Moore comes out with Fahrenheit 9-11, okay?
You're working with Obama.
Dinesh D'Souza comes up with Obama's America.
4,000 mules, 2,000 mules?
No, no, no.
What was the one about Obama's America or something like that?
Yeah.
Not the one about Hillary, because that was a different one, but he did one about Obama's dream or Obama's America.
Yeah, Obama's America, 2016.
You know, and then, hey, you know, Richard Gage, who we had him on, let me tell you, 9-11 was an inside job.
You know, the BBC reported that the building's going down and before any of this stuff, and they knew about it.
And look at the reaction when he's reading the book and they're talking to the kids, and he knew what was going on.
Look at the way he reacted to it, and the camera's on, and everybody's watching.
And, you know, so let me tell you how Trump is.
Did you guys hear Trump is doing this?
And did you see Trump's documentary and all the bankruptcies?
And this is one of the worst businessmen of all time.
And it doesn't matter what side you're on, right?
I'm just saying this is your Obama's on the inside.
You're Bush's on the inside.
Trump's on the inside.
How do you, working with him and you're in the meetings, you're seeing things that's going on and you're seeing all of that.
How are you balancing it out to know that you're when you go into a restaurant?
I'm assuming during that time, if it's 2001, 2002, 2003, I'm just willing to bet if you go into a restaurant and you're there with your wife, I'm sure not everybody comes up and says, Ari, it's awesome, man.
What's up?
Dude, you killed it today.
That was amazing, right?
I'm sure there's some of it that's coming up and saying, you know, how dare you, you know, representing a president like that.
How do you not crack and break when others are trying to get you to pin you against the person you're working with?
How do you manage that?
It's easy, frankly.
Number one, Bush had really thick skin, so it didn't bother him.
And when it doesn't bother the boss, it tends not to bother the staff.
Now, if it bothers the boss, your boss is thin skin, throws stuff, how do they do that?
Why'd they report that?
Then, man, you're under pressure all the time.
He wasn't.
So I didn't have to be.
Secondly, I believe.
The most beautiful thing about the White House, and I don't care what party you are, is when you believe, it is so easy to fight and stand your ground.
And you take the incoming, you try to pay attention.
Maybe you'll learn something from the incoming.
You can rebut it stronger, learn you got a vulnerability, maybe we should address this.
But you take the incoming and you turn it around because you believe.
And that's how democracy should work.
If I can't stand there and explain what the president is doing and why he's doing it, and if I can't do it articulately and we take incoming, then maybe we deserved it.
But if I can explain it and say it articulately and drive more support for it, that's the job.
I love that.
How different was he?
I had the opportunity to invite him to an event, which was right.
I had the opportunity to invite him to the event, and that was in 2019.
Same event we had Kobe Bryant, the late Kobe Bryant at, and I had President Bush there.
And he, I'm coming out of the bathroom, he's coming to the bathroom.
It's the first time we make the connections.
Like, hey, hey, hey, Patrick, I'm going to wait for you over there.
Okay, great.
He goes to the bathroom, comes back, bunch of people there with the Secret Service sticker.
And, you know, and then we had a nice 45-minute conversation in the back, talking to him.
And then on stage, when I interviewed him, telling the stories, opening up.
And when we announced him being a keynote speaker, it was not like I'll remember.
We're at a hotel in Dallas.
And I announced our two keynote speakers.
And the first one just watched.
And I said, guys, I want to find out the reaction.
So put the camera on them.
There's about 1,500 people there.
And we're announcing it.
That's going to be at Mirage.
There's going to be 6,000 people there.
So I said, okay, first speaker, we're going to have at the event.
Everybody said, camera's ready.
They're live.
President George W. Bush.
What?
The reactions were priceless, dumbfounded.
And some were like, oh my God, our president's coming.
But it was a very different.
And then I said, Kobe Bryant.
They lost their mind, right?
And they were so excited.
Anyways, President Bush comes up and I interview him.
And he talks personal life, what things he did, what things he changed, just being very open about the whole thing.
And then we're doing pictures, secession with pictures.
And I cannot tell you how many people who were, you know, not supportive and send me messages, you shouldn't have brought him, you shouldn't have done this.
They're like, look, I don't know if I agree with policies, but I like the guy.
I kind of like him on how he is.
You know, wow, I like this guy.
This would be a guy I would want to have dinner with.
And then, so every time everybody was taking a picture, half of them were happy to take the picture.
The other half were like, I got to tell you, I thought, look, one girl said, I thought you were the Antichrist, but I like talking to you.
This was amazing listening to you.
Thank you so much for coming out.
How was he off-camera behind closed doors?
Was he funny?
Was he a storyteller?
Was he a prankster?
Was he always serious?
Was there a topic he always wanted to study?
Like, is he a guy that studied Andrew Jackson?
Did he have a favorite president that he would always read about?
Is there a certain book he would play backgammon?
Is he a dominoes guy?
Is he a chess guy?
What was he like?
Like, you know, the clip on Last Dance.
You know, you see the security guy coming.
Come on, Michael.
One more time.
Rolling the dice, 20 bucks.
Boom.
He beats Michael and he goes like this.
And he does the Michael thing back at him, and Michael's pissed off.
What was he like offstage, off camera?
I've heard what you said so many times from people who have seen him in his post-presidency.
He is gregarious, he's engaging, he's self-deprecating, he's witty as can be and funny and fun.
He was a great boss.
I don't care what industry you're in or what ideology you have, you want a boss like George W. Bush.
He was inspiring.
He was tough.
You were going to work your tail off for him.
You never wanted to let him down.
But boy, was he a good guy who was loyal and took care of you.
And you, in exchange, gave him your loyalty because that's the kind of relationship a boss should engender in any industry.
But yeah, he was a towel snapper, witty, lots of jokes.
You know, he would keep things light.
Now, after September 11th, that went away for quite a while.
But that's his nature.
And it came back.
He has a marvelous touch that inspires people through seriousness and humor.
And in his post-presidency, and I've done many of these events and speeches with him where it's a moderated QA, people get to see his humor.
And you saw it there, I'm sure.
And most of it's self-deprecating.
Most of it.
He makes fun of himself.
Yeah, it's very hard for some people to do that.
You can't do that.
And I got to tell you, for me, I love comedy.
I think comedy is amazing.
If I have to say, like, you know, when you say 128 months of economic expansion, you know, during the whatever era, was it Obama and Trump era?
You know, economy was the best when it was growing.
It was so awesome.
Interest rates, this.
I think the longest standing economic expansion for comedy was under President Bush.
I have to tell you, because Will Farrell to me is like, hello, hello, America.
This is your commander-in-chief of the world.
I'm here in Crawford, Texas, trying to grow Soul Patch and hanging out with Connie and Dick.
We're here to talk about something that really matters, like, you know, keeping steroids out of t-ball.
And are you just watching this?
I've seen that thing.
I don't know how many times.
And you know what I like about him?
He would say this one guy's like, yeah, he's my favorite comedian impersonator.
Because at some point, like, you have to laugh at yourself.
And if you can't laugh at yourself, these guys are not going to slow down.
But this, he's, I mean, this, if you look at this picture right here of Will Farrell and President Bush, I mean, this guy crushed it just a couple days ago.
I watched Will Farrell's first SNL session.
You and Vinny were showing it to me.
But for comedy, I think during my era at least, I think he's the GOAT when it comes down to comedy and people impersonating him.
Did you guys watch that?
Did you talk about that?
Would he joke about that?
Would he say, hey, so Ari, what did you think about that?
He wouldn't watch it, but he was aware of it.
Okay.
And he would laugh.
When somebody would say to him, here's what they said about you last night.
Would laugh.
You know, the whole thing where he used the word strategy instead of strategy.
As soon as he said that, we as a staff started calling our meetings strategy meetings.
And he liked it.
Because, again, the guy's got thick skin and a sense of humor, so you can do that to him.
I have a question.
Hi, Ari.
You know, we have a lot of conversations about legacy, whether you can create your own legacy or whether you can do your best or whether the world gives you your legacy.
When George W. Bush came into office, just side story, I was in Tallahassee, Florida, senior year of college, 2000, 2001.
I hope your chads didn't hang.
No, right.
I was working as an intern at the Capitol.
This was during the election.
This was right during 9-11.
And who was the governor of Florida at the time?
Jeb Bush.
So I was very familiar with the, I wasn't a big political person at the time, and I was there.
I was seeing all this.
And, you know, his, especially during 9-11, his approval ratings went up to 80-something percent, the highest we've seen in forever.
But to my question about legacy, you know, these days, you don't see a lot of them.
Like when you do see him, as far as being a nice guy, like that exchange he had with Michelle Obama when he gave her a piece of candy and like they're kind of being nice and friendly.
And, you know, he still hangs out with even the Clintons and he hangs, you know, he's kind of has that.
Obviously, the Bush legacy and Trump's are not exactly seeing eye to eye.
But at the end of the day, where do you think the Bush family legacy will end up living?
I mean, his father was a president.
His brother ran for president, governor.
This is a legacy family.
And he essentially was the pinnacle of it, right?
Last president.
Where do you see the Bush family legacy and specifically his legacy?
Well, since he left office, he's become more popular.
He left office, I'm sad to say, as one of the most unpopular presidents we've ever had.
His approval rating was in the low 30s.
Yeah, I mean, and that was Iraq.
And it's now people have really appreciated the way he has handled himself, how he doesn't criticize the incumbent president, Trump, or Obama, or Biden, because as he puts it, the job's hard enough, and I'm not going to add to their burdens.
He wants to put the country first.
And people appreciate that.
His legacy will still come down to Iraq in many ways.
And the history, the future of Iraq is still being written.
I do think it is the only Arab democracy in existence right now.
And it's a rough democracy.
It certainly is not a Western-style United States, France, Germany democracy yet.
But it is on the path, unlike any other Arab Middle East nation.
And this is tremendously important.
So I think it's going to come down to that.
And this is where people are going to say, was it worth it?
But there's one inescapable fact, and that was we turned out to be wrong about WMD.
And the information that the president had, which was the world's conclusion that Saddam had WMD, turned out to be wrong.
And we acted on wrong information.
And that is still going to be something that historians write about.
I believe to this day that if the CIA had said to George Bush, we're not sure.
He may have WMD.
He may not.
We really don't know.
I don't think he would have gone to war with Iraq.
He wouldn't have done it unless he was convinced they had WMD.
He was convinced because that was what the intelligence information said.
Right.
As far as blame goes, I mean, I think we look back at 9-11, what a tragic day.
The war in Iraq, Afghanistan.
Biden just pulled us out.
I'm not trying to shift blame or put blame on anyone, but are you saying that it's essentially the intelligence community's fault that Bush believed them?
Or what percentage does he have to own up to it?
What percentage is that?
He made the decision to go to war based on the belief that Saddam had WMD.
As I said, I think if he had gotten other information, he would not have gone to war.
But there's no question about it.
It was the world's intelligence communities that all reached that same conclusion.
It wasn't just the CIA.
It was Egyptian intelligence, French intelligence, Israeli intelligence.
All of them believed that Saddam had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, not nuclear, but chemical and biological.
Amazingly, Saddam threw out the weapons inspectors, destroyed the stockpiles that he did indeed have, and hit it.
And one of the reasons we were so wrong about this was Saddam put up a fake front to deceive Iran.
He wanted Iran to believe that he had WMD as a deterrence to Iran, a nation that's in Iraq and Iran fought in wars.
And so he created this whole web of illusion, of clandestine activities, moving things, secret communications, which of course our intelligence services pick up on.
And we reached the conclusion, uh-huh, see, he's got it.
It was a bluff to Iran after he actually did get rid of his WMD, which he would not tell anybody that he got rid of it.
So that's why the world intelligence communities reached that conclusion.
All right, question for you.
So at the time, George Tennett was the director of CIA, right?
Correct.
But he was not nominated by President Bush.
He was nominated by Clinton.
He was Clinton's CIA director.
Why would he keep him, though?
Why would he not fire?
Okay, so let me kind of play a little bit of a devil's advocate.
So this is a game of legacy game, okay?
So if you're playing legacy and it's a very competitive game, very, very competitive game in the darkest way, and there is no leaders' bulletin.
The only leader's bulletin you have is who has a worse reputation, who has a bigger legacy, who has a better victory.
That's how you compete.
In football, touchdowns, Super Bowls, Brady's got seven.
You don't.
He's the GOAT.
You know, Jordan's got six.
LeBron, you got four.
You know, he played 1,089 games and averaged 32 points a game, 30 points a game.
You did not.
You were 1,500 games.
The other day, I watched a statistic comparing John Stockton's legacy of consistency to LeBron James.
Do you know how many 82 season games LeBron's had?
One.
Do you know how many John Stockton's had?
It was like 18.
That's just some ludicrous number on what he did.
Like, oh, my God.
So we can track legacy based on stats.
Okay, now LeBron's got championship.
Stockton's got zero, so he can't brag about that part.
But why, why?
George Tenet's loyalty isn't to Bush.
Yes, you may say, well, no, he's an American.
His loyalty is to the country and it's to America and it's this.
So part of it's like it's inside.
So you're given intel.
The rest of us are watching the movie Vice.
And, you know, you watch the movie Vice, you watch all these movies, the W, there's so many movies that you read about.
I've read Decision Points.
I've read the book on the family, what Bush's family stands for, Prescott and what they did.
And I gave him a gift from his grandfather, Prescott's one of the buttons, and I bought a bunch of different things.
And I give him as a gift.
The legacy that you first go make your money and then you take care of your family and kids and then you give back to the country and you run for office or something like that.
It's a very, a lot of things I pulled from that family's legacy to want to apply to my own family.
But one, why keep the same director of CIA who was nominated and chosen by a Democrat, you're Republican, why not replace him with some others?
Nobody would say anything to you if you picked somebody else.
And two, you know, when you see a lot of the things that happen with Vice and how, well, you know, they went to war because this was a great business decision.
There's a lot of money to be made when you go to war.
You know, look at Dick Cheney and look at Donald's Rumsfeld and look at some of the darkest people in America and who they are and et cetera, et cetera.
And that's what the story is told, right?
So, one, why keep Tennett two, you know, the legacy that we read about where the motive behind it was money.
He kept Tennett because he viewed the CIA as a non-political position.
It wasn't the type of thing he needed a loyalist.
He wanted somebody who was good in intelligence and who had a steady hand.
That was the right CIA.
Let's just say I become a president.
It depends on who the person is.
And he hit it off with Tennett during the transition.
He liked Tenet, got it to him meshed personality-wise.
And so George Tennett was a Democrat.
He worked for Senator David Boren, who was the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
He was the chief of staff on Capitol Hill to David Boren.
President Clinton nominated George to be the CIA director, and Bush kept him.
And again, it was because he thought continuity was important, and it was not a political position, and he liked the guy.
So, again, the CIA's conclusions about WMD didn't begin on George Bush's watch.
They had said the same thing to the previous president, to President Clinton, about Saddam.
As for legacy, et cetera, you know, Bush never did anything for legacy.
And I don't care if people believe that or not.
He didn't.
He did it because he thought it was the right reason to protect America.
And he knew some of the things he did were controversial, but he did them anyway because he thought it was the right thing to do for America.
Any of this nonsense about money or oil or any of that.
I mean, doesn't that fall into the same trolling, vituperative, war criminal stuff we started talking about earlier?
It's the same junk.
It's the same excess.
It's the same extremes speaking out in a fashion that just they let it rip.
And Bush's instructions to me and the way Bush conducted himself was to rise above it.
He wouldn't let me go to the podium and fight back on a lot of these things because he didn't want to engage at that level.
And, you know, one of the biggest criticisms I hear from President Trump's supporters, Sean Hannity included, and I talk to Sean about this a lot, is Trump fought back.
You Bushies, McCain's, Romney's, you guys didn't know how to fight back and you didn't fight back.
Trump counterpunches.
And this is a legitimate difference inside the modern Republican Party.
How far do you go?
How much punching should you do?
How tough should you get?
And they said Bush didn't fight back.
Is there a better balance?
Like, do you think Bush should have fought more?
Do you think Trump fights too much?
Is there a more moderate approach?
Yeah, I think there's a balance.
I wrote a hotbed in the Wall Street Journal in the midterms for Donald Trump.
We're using a football analogy.
I said, the problem with Donald Trump is every time he gains yards going down the field, he gets a flag for unnecessary roughness or a late hit.
So if he gains 100 yards, he's knocked back 65 yards from all these penalties.
And I said, you can't win a game that way.
Yeah, I think there's more of a balance.
I think what happened in the Bush years, particularly toward the end of the Bush era, the White House staff got tired.
Everything was just so tough.
Things in Iraq were so bad.
Bush lied.
People died.
They were too tired to fight back, and they thought we're not going to get our message across.
And I want to remind you: back in that era, especially 2006 or so, we only had the mainstream media.
We didn't have Twitter.
We didn't have YouTube.
We didn't have social media.
We couldn't go around the press.
Bush didn't have followers online.
That didn't exist yet.
So we had to fight through the New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC, NBC.
Fox was a very different Fox back then.
So I just think the White House staff said, it doesn't matter what we say, the press won't cover us.
And so all these criticisms of Bush matching his low job approval stuck.
So could he have fought back more?
Should he have fought back more?
I was outside the White House at this point.
I had fresher legs at that point.
I would have loved to have fought more at that point.
But for the people inside, they just thought it won't work.
I want to show something.
Can you pull this up?
Because I still want to go back to the questions.
Director of Central CIA.
Okay, go all the way to the bottom.
Go all the way to the bottom.
All the way to the bottom, Okay, go, meaning to, yeah, go up a little bit.
Okay.
So George W. Bush.
Okay, stay right there.
Go a little lower on the Bush side.
On the Bush side.
Yeah.
So if you look at this, he had three directors of CIA, okay?
One of which was George, and he kept them till 04, specifically during that era, which was the issue, and then he replaced them with John, okay?
But that's not his guy.
But if you look at Clinton, he had five on.
He had five directors of CIA.
I interviewed James Woolsey.
He says, I don't even know why he put me in the job because he never talked to me.
We only talked twice.
So he, his director of CIA, January 21st, 1993, he picked them, right?
Studman.
Stutterman.
So go up a little bit to the next one.
If you keep doing the same exact exercise that we're doing, George H.W. Bush, it's his guy, right?
William Webster.
Keep going up, keep going up, keep going up.
Reagan, his guy.
Jimmy Carter, his guy.
Gerald Ford, his guy.
If you go to Nixon, his guy.
If you go to Lyndon Johnson, his guy.
The only person that didn't have the same director of CIA as the prior president is John F. Kennedy.
John F. Kennedy kept it because it was the same as go up a little bit as Dwight Eisenhower.
So he says, I'm just going to keep it.
But I don't know.
You know, you're Elon Musk.
You buy Twitter.
You don't keep the same exact guys that you have because they don't trust you.
They probably don't even like you because in the business world, the people at Twitter, how it was ran before, can't stand what Elon stands for.
So Elon lets go of how many people?
3,750 people, 50% of the sales force, the workforce.
What happens to that 3,750?
They recruit the other guys to quit.
You got another 1,250 that resigned.
You're like, dude, I don't trust these guys.
I got to get somebody in here that trusts, you know, that aligns with what I'm doing.
So I think that, my opinion, I'm not on the inside to say whether it's the right move or not.
I don't know if I would have done it that way.
That's my opinion.
Second, I had a couple Brazilian people here that I had on the podcast because I'm really curious to know what's going on with Brazil.
One of them is the son of the former president of Brazil, Paulo Figuerdio.
I'm not even sure if I'm telling the last name right or wrong.
And the other one was Rodrigo Constantin.
And I'm talking about Brazil, what's taking place.
And I had a friend here, Marvin, who's from Honduras, who follows politics very closely.
And we compared Bolsonaro against Lula, okay?
So Bolsonaro against Lula.
Lula has been in the political world for a long time.
Bolsonaro is more a doer.
He's a guy that's going to go out there and compete.
He's allowed.
They're both allowed.
One is louder than the other.
That's what they compete for.
But who's more street smart?
Probably Lula is more street smart than Bolsonaro is.
Meaning, he's wise because he's been playing dirty for a long time, 50 years.
He can do laps around Bolsonaro on how to play politics.
So to the people that say Bush could have been behind it, I don't know if the credibility is if Bush was behind, you know, like 9-11 for money and all this other stuff.
But can I say a little bit for my own level of skepticism that maybe there are somebody on the inside that they could care less about legacy.
They want to figure out a way how to maximize their job at the White House to make money.
And we have a president today that's done that.
You've seen it.
You've read it.
It's been all over the place.
They use that last name in the job.
And Clinton's been criticized for that.
He's been criticized for that Biden.
A lot of people have been criticized for that.
So do some people get in and use their ability to persuade?
And I can only imagine, like, if there's a meeting and everybody's sitting there saying, President Bush, we have very strong data that there's weapons of mass destruction.
And then you ask the question, what do you think we should do?
I think we should attack and defend our country.
Because if we don't, we seem like we're weak and we're not doing our part and we have to do something about it right now.
Now, boom, you come out and you give the message.
It's like, oh my God, this is crazy.
This is amazing.
And then later on, like, there was no weapons of mass destruction.
So maybe somebody manipulated a way to get somebody to make a decision that they would have never supported themselves.
I don't know if I'm making sense.
It's a long-winded question I'm asking.
But you don't think somebody that gets inside has negative motives that will use it in a way to monetize and make money?
Because that's what a lot of people in politics have been criticized for doing.
No?
No.
You don't think so?
First of all, George Tenet didn't come to the conclusion that Saddam had WMD.
The CIA did.
His agency did, his experts, his analysts.
I don't know who the head of Egyptian intelligence is, but he didn't come to the conclusion.
His analysts did.
Same thing with Israel.
Same thing with France, etc.
He's the guy, no?
Yeah, but it's not like they make up the facts.
They have their teams of experts who go and find the facts, find the allegations, find the beliefs, the conclusions that they can put together.
But let me talk to you about intelligence, generally speaking.
One of the things that I learned at the White House is intelligence is maddening.
You know, on the TV shows, people make it look like, oh, my God, the envelope just came in.
We opened it up and here's the report from our agent in the field.
We got the goods.
Holy, take action.
And in come the paratroopers.
Most intelligence reports are mindlessly frustrating because we have reasons to believe X, but then there's also Y.
And then we have people who tell us Z. Our analysis shows it could be X, Y, or Z.
This is what you get for most intelligence reports.
They'll put a probability on it.
They say, oh, our assessment is the probability leans in the direction more of X, but we don't discount Y. You read one of these things and you're like, what's your conclusion?
Give me a conclusion.
That is the way most intelligence reports work.
It's like a consultant.
WMD, like a McKinsey or Gartner, you hired him and they say, you know, our assessment is 62% chance this is where you're losing your money.
And is it kind of like that?
Well, it's more because the other side, North Korea, Iran, Russia, China, gets to hide things.
And it's not like we can just walk in and say, give me your stuff.
You can't hide it anymore.
I need to know.
Well, that's the whole thing.
It's going to be better intelligence, though.
Yes.
But my point is, it doesn't always lead itself to 100% declarative knowledge.
It leads itself to surmising, believing, taking things and trying to piece it together.
In the case of WMD, they put it together, and with the exception of the State Department intelligence, one of 17 different intelligence agencies in the United States, with the exception of state, every single American intelligence community concluded, it wasn't that it was likely, it wasn't that it was probable, they concluded Saddam had stockpiles of biological and chemical.
Does that mean 100% what is concluded?
Because I like what you said.
There's a 60%, 80% chance.
There's X, Y, or Z. What number did they give to the 20?
The CIA would never put a number on it.
They're smart enough bureaucrats not to do that.
But the famous quote was when George Tennett said to George Bush, it's a slam dunk that he has WMD.
Okay, so now, so, so, so slam dunk that he's given that, that's coming from a guy, George Tennett, who was the director of CIA since 96, 96 to 01 September.
That's five years of experience being there.
You have enough time to know who's on your team, who's capable, who's not, who you have to fire, who you have to keep.
It's not like you don't have that experience to do that, right?
So I don't know.
All I think about is like President Trump.
Okay, a guy becomes a president.
You know how some people yesterday were debating to say who's going to be on the Republican stage to debate, right?
And we're at this dinner.
Everyone's kind of throwing their names.
Well, let me tell you, you know, we know obviously Trump's going to be there.
Well, what do you think about DeSantis?
Well, I think he has to do it because he's got a perfect resume right now.
Why wouldn't you do it?
You know, he's going to do it.
And the other person I think that's going to be there is from Georgia.
It's what's his last name?
Brian Kemp.
Not Kemp.
It's Ratzenberger?
Oh, man, it's another name.
Anyways, I'll think of it.
I'll say the name.
The governor of Georgia, people are talking about him running for president.
What's Brian Kemp?
Brian Kemp.
Okay, yeah.
But then maybe I'm messing it up with another name.
And then I said, what about Zeldon?
He said, oh, Zeldon's not capable.
He's very boring.
I said, dude, the guy lost by only 5% in New York to Hoko.
What are you talking about?
Yeah, but he's boring.
I said, I know they're trying to get him to become the chairman of RNC, but he's not running to be there because he thinks he's going to be president.
Sometimes people run to get a job.
Like a lot of people run to get a job on the administration of who they think is going to win.
Okay.
Hey, hey, you sit this one out.
I'm going to give you this job.
Hey, you sit this one out.
I'm going to give you this job.
And it's a negotiation, right?
Kind of like that day we all saw Elizabeth Warren, Amy, Bernie, everybody just sits it on.
Hey, we're all getting behind Biden.
And here's what you're going to be doing.
Fantastic.
We're all happy.
This kind of worked out.
So I'm convinced.
I'm convinced.
We were debating James DiEugenio.
He wrote the book, JFK, Revisited with Oliver Stone, and he's turned into a movie documentary, all this stuff.
And I said, the swamp killed JFK, no?
Well, yeah, of course the swamp killed JFK.
The swamp killed Lincoln.
No?
No, it wasn't Lincoln.
I said, well, you know, it wasn't Swamp.
No, you know, it's all this other.
Well, he was kind of doing stuff that his own party didn't like.
Civil rights, all this.
What are you talking about?
Well, yeah.
Well, the swamp kind of went after Reagan.
Well, not necessarily.
Well, Reagan was kind of trying.
Well, the Swamp went after, Swamp went after Trump, right?
Yeah, well, then who is not part of the swamp in politics today?
What are you talking about?
Who is not part of the swamp?
Give me names today that are not part of the swamp, that have roles inside.
They're silent.
They can't say anything.
Is McConnell Swamp?
Is Biden Swamp?
Is Obama Swamp?
Is, you know, Bush, all these names you're going through to be part of the swamp.
So for me, some people want the job for resume.
Some people want it for a nicer profile on Wikipedia.
Some people want it because they want to brag about it.
Some people want it to make money.
You don't know everyone's positive and negative motives.
All I'm saying is when President Bush is picking his team and you're bringing him inside, if CIA can't find that for a fact, if WMD was right, how does President Bush, or not just President Bush, any other president, know for a fact people you're bringing in, their motives are positive or negative?
Maybe some of these other guys, the Dick Cheneys of the world, and Donald's motives were negative.
Maybe his is pure, but others are negative.
Do you think that responsibility lies on the person that picked those people or no?
All right, let me get down to the brass tacks on this.
Do you think that George Tenet gave Bush the advice or gave him the information that he gave him about WMD because George Tenet wanted to make money?
No, I'm talking about Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.
I'm talking about the thing about Tennett is he should have fired Tennant.
I don't keep a tenant.
Why do you keep a tenant?
His loyalty is not for you.
You get rid of a tenant.
Your dad was working with the CIA.
Your father, like if there's anybody, I'm trying to see who gave the advice to keep Tenet.
Who was it?
Your dad's got a lifelong resume of all this stuff.
So maybe a part of it for me is not even on W because I'm convinced George would have, W would have called his father to say, hey, what do we do with Tennant?
And his father probably gave him some kind of fatherly advice.
And 10% of the influence was probably from props.
He says, okay, let's keep Tennant.
Why are you keeping Tennant?
I think George Bush would just disagree with you on this one for the exact reasons I said before.
You know, during the transition, he interviews Tenet.
He likes Tenet.
He thinks Tenet's non-political and tenet's knowledgeable.
Simple as that.
And it wasn't like he had his guy.
No president wants to have his guy at CIA.
What you want is an honest broker at CIA who will tell you the facts, whether you like the facts or don't like the facts.
Slam dunk?
That's a fact?
That's what he believed.
This is what the CIA concluded.
But to say, Ari, you and I, you're an odds guy.
If you like sports, it's all about odds.
We're in the odds game.
It's a slam dunk.
You know, like when who was the one guy that said shift, Adam Schiff?
Is it Adam Schiff?
Interesting?
Yeah, listen.
It's proven.
We have Intel.
Listen, it's Russia.
Oh, okay.
What are you talking about?
So let's go back to intelligence and how President Kumo's intelligence.
So let's look at Iran today.
When I look at the intelligence information that's leaked into the news, when I see people say that Iran is six months away, three months away from nuclear, from having a nuclear weapon as a result of their centrifuge fusion development systems, how does anybody know that?
Three months, six months.
The intelligence is never that precise.
And so if you're the president and you want to know, do we have a threat from Iran?
How do you evaluate whether or not, based on what happened in Iraq, we have accurate information about Iran?
It is so hard to make these judgments.
And I don't think it's because the CIA or Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney or anybody else has ulterior motives or because they want to make money or they want to do this or do that.
It's because nations are really good at hiding their secret stuff.
And you think it's easy to penetrate these nations?
You think it's easy for us to put spies in places?
I expect us to be the best.
I mean, I brought the...
We're probably the second best.
Mossad is the best.
China is the best.
Mossad.
So I brought the director of Mossad, a former one, Shabit Shabi.
Anyways, I had him on.
We had a conversation together on intel that they got and who they trained and how they trained and all this other stuff.
Wouldn't we want to compete to be the best so we can get this kind of intel?
That's why we are the greatest country in the world.
How do you get a guy, tenant, that no one talks about today?
Slam dunk?
Are you kidding me?
Like this cost, how many trillions of dollars?
That we're paying because one guy said slam dunk, our taxes went up.
Our debt went up.
I have a hard time with that.
Well, and lives were lost, more importantly.
All of that.
This goes back to the fundamental question about Bush's legacy, which you asked about.
And this is why I said to you, as somebody who I'm reluctant to say it, but I have to say it, is his legacy is going to invariably be tied to the future of Iraq and to the fact that we were wrong on WMD.
Are you worried that your legacy gets caught up in that?
Couldn't care less.
No, but I don't think that's, I don't think that's the, and by the way, I don't think that's the question, though.
My only thing, the question isn't tying this to President Bush.
I'm not putting any of it on him.
The only thing I'm putting on him is why not bring somebody that you trust that you know in instead of a tenant?
And track record shows this has only happened twice.
And the other guy that did it was a guy named John F. Kennedy, an NU.
So that gap of how it's been done for however long is a long gap of 40 years, whatever the timeline is, 37 years to do something like that.
So then the other part, the other part is a person like Trump gets in.
Okay.
When a person like a Trump gets in to put a team together, my biggest concern was who he's going to pick.
And the reason why my biggest concern was who he's going to pick is who do you trust to put in there that actually has the role?
Do you only bring outsiders?
I mean, he still did a great job with his policies.
But you're going up against people that have been doing favors for each other for years and you're coming and you want to put a team.
Who is on your side?
Who would be on your side?
Like, who do you pick?
Do you go and pick people that were former Bush people?
Do you go and pick former Reagan people?
That's a long time ago.
Do you go after George?
Well, George doesn't like you.
Do you go and put, you know, and then the people that you bring in, what are their motives?
So when people talk about the motives of WMD and money being made, again, this goes to Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, some of these guys where they are and what their motives were to make money.
Because obviously money was made when you see what their background was, with Halliburton and all these other things that they were sitting on.
So let me ask this question from you.
What are your thoughts on Lincoln Project and what they're doing?
Hold on, I need to go back and clarify something because when I said you asked me about my personal legacy and I said I could care less, I want to make sure it doesn't bother me what the critics say.
I faithfully and accurately reported to the American people the information that the White House had.
And so I know what I said and why I said it.
It was because it was provided to me as accurate information.
So I stated it as such.
I don't want anybody to think when I say I don't care.
I don't care about the consequences or the loss of lives, et cetera.
I want to make sure people don't misinterpret that.
I also believe that you do care about your legacy in general, though, no?
Yourself, personally?
Look, my job was to be the president's spokesman.
I reported to the president, and it's what he thinks about.
It's what he cared about.
I'm not even touching it in 9-11.
I'm just saying, Laurie Fleischer, like your legacy, it does matter to you, though, no?
You know, you build your legacy over different years.
I'm very proud of everything I did in the government, including at the White House.
I'm proud of the communications company I've built.
I love what I do.
And so I have fun.
And it's my bosses and my clients that I care about.
I really am not the type that really worries about image, name.
What do people say?
How many Twitter followers do you have?
That's never been what I take my motivation from.
And I never will.
I know Pat once asked this question about Lincoln Project.
I saw that speech you gave at the Reagan library.
It's like an hour speech, I want to say.
How long ago was that, by the way?
Well, I've done several there.
Was this when my book just came out?
Yes.
Okay.
Yeah, that was July.
There's a lot of questions I can ask you with that, but I'll be very specific on this one.
You said that if you get into politics, if you truly believe in what you're doing, and if you follow your heart, your passion, you truly believe, whether you're Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, whatever, there's no more fulfilling job in the world.
Why do you say that?
Because there's only one industry for beliefs other than religion, and that's government.
I mean, how exciting is it?
How influential?
How powerful can it be to make decisions that can move worlds, move the nation, change people's lives?
You know, we were talking a little bit about Iran.
I am so focused on the future of Iran and that nation with so many young people.
And if the United States can use its power and its leverage to bring about change in Iran and throw out a theocracy that has been suppressing tens of millions of Persian people who are so Western-oriented to begin with, what a powerful, peaceful change that'd be in the Middle East.
You can't do that from Wall Street.
You can't do that from any corner of the earth.
You do it in government.
Government is where you can make so many changes in life, not only in that, in social issues and economic issues and examples that you set for children about what's right or what's wrong.
And that's why I encourage young people, despite the polarization of today, if you believe, if you think global warming is going to melt the earth in 12 years, then get your butt to Washington and do something about it.
If you think that taxes need to be cut, that capitalism needs to have an injection of something to make it thrive, get down to Washington and pass laws.
This is what is exciting.
Now, not everybody's like that.
Many people want to go into different careers.
Many people find the government to be full of BS.
Fine, don't go.
But for those who want to make a difference, government's a fantastic deal.
Do you think it'd be better ⁇ how do I position this question?
Is it better for young people to get a real life, real job first and then get into politics?
It's a mix.
Or get into politics first, and then after you get into politics, then you're going to end up in the lobbying world and all that.
And that has a lot of gray areas there.
So is there a better recipe for people?
First, you know, for my example, I went right from college by accident into politics.
I moved home to play baseball, and then I got a job as a press secretary for a New York State Assemblyman who ran for Congress, and he lost.
But I got the bug, so I stayed in politics for 21 years, and then I left Washington.
I never wanted to be a lobbyist, and I have no political clients.
I built a private sector company, mostly in sports.
Everybody has a different path.
But the way you can have Washington be the most effective for the American people is to have people who reflect America.
That means, yes, have a bunch of people who worked in business and then go to Washington, a bunch of people who worked in nonprofits and go to Washington.
A bunch of people of a religious background and then go to Washington.
And have people who go to Washington right away as young people who are young and idealistic and believe it's a mix because America is a mix.
So there's no one formula.
You want something that looks like the country.
I think what you're saying is not so much diversity, but diversity of thought.
Yes.
Diversity of opinions.
I'm a big believer in the latter and not the former, not diversity for diversity's sake.
I think what Adam's trying to say Aries, he's running for mayor of McCarthy.
For the non-retirement community.
Non-retirement to everybody here.
But it's okay.
Let's go back to the wonderful question of what do you think about Lincoln Project.
I think there are a bunch of charlatans who are making money.
You really believe that?
Yeah.
Tell us how you really feel a little bit.
You hold it back a little bit.
Even like Steve Schmidt, who is Kane's campaign manager, he's at the head of the tip of the spear.
Sure.
I mean, Steve has had a transformation.
He worked for George Bush, too.
He no longer is a Republican.
He can't stand Republicans.
He was responsible for Sarah Palin in many ways, and he's always lived to regret that.
So I think he's doing penance.
Look, you know, their beliefs are genuine in that they can't stand Trump and they want to build something that fought Trump.
But now they have built something to fight Republicans.
But the organization itself was corrupt.
It had terrible internal problems, personal problems, embarrassing problems.
Like what?
Just financial problems.
Are you serious?
I want to hear about it.
Well, one of their founders had real serious issues with his personal behavior and his personal life and the way he treated employees who were his subordinates.
You don't know about that?
Conway, who are you talking about?
No, no.
You don't know about this?
Rick Wilson?
Well, I'm not going to.
Look, it's all public.
I really don't follow Lincoln Project for a living, but they've had a series of embarrassing issues and issues involving real financial problems in their own organization.
Look, I'm all for groups being contrarian and for Democrats who take on Democrats, Republicans who take on Republicans.
It's part of our mix.
I just don't like that one group.
So I bring this up.
Okay, so maybe let me ask a different question.
What do you think about Liz Cheney?
I like Liz ideologically for being a conservative.
I have no problems with her vote on impeachment.
That's what she believed in.
That's what she did.
I do have problems with her serving on the 9-11 commission as 9-11 committee because Nancy Pelosi asked her to do it.
As soon as Nancy Pelosi rejected Kevin McCarthy's Republican selections for the committee, no Republican should have joined that committee.
You mean none.
You're saying 9-11.
The January 6th committee?
I'm sorry, January 6th.
Okay, gotcha.
January 6th.
Gotcha.
Gotcha.
You said 9-11.
Yeah, I'm sorry.
The January 6th committee.
Got it, got it.
So again, to me, it's principled.
If you want to vote to impeach Donald Trump, vote to impeach Donald Trump.
That's a principled position and then deal with your constituents.
But serving on that committee, Congress cannot work if Republicans can't appoint Republicans to committees and Democrats can't appoint Democrats.
If all of it has to be done at the behest of the speaker, then there is no opposition party.
Everything is controlled by the speaker.
She should not have let herself get put in that position.
So she's fighting a personal vendetta against President Trump, which I understand, but I think she went too far.
So the reason why I brought up Lincoln Project is we saw how they went after Trump, the videos they make, and it's constant.
No problem.
And by the way, credit to them.
I think they influenced the 2020 election a little bit.
I think they had some influence.
I don't know what percentage.
I don't know what number.
They definitely had an influence on what they did.
They were very good marketers, what they made, what they did.
The part that's confusing to me is they said they stood for conservative beliefs.
Now they're going after DeSantis.
Did you see the they go after all Republicans now?
Yeah.
They are not conservative.
Who's funding Lincoln Project, by the way?
I don't know.
They were able to raise a tremendous amount of grassroots money, a tremendous amount of money from Democrats who viewed it as a bunch of Republicans, McCain people going after Trump.
So Democrats like that contrarian play.
And boy, were they well-funded.
Yeah, I'm trying to see if the similar names are behind it.
Lincoln Project raised a whopping $39 million from July through September, helping fuel anti-Trump and Blitz.
Yeah, I'm curious to know who's funding these guys.
Is it there was a guy in Ohio, him and I would always debate.
And he would say, but Patrick, you don't understand.
I'm a Republican.
But Patrick, you know, I'm like, listen, I'm an independent myself.
I'm pro-capitalism.
I'm fiscally conservative.
I'm about to leave me alone, freedom.
I have some libertarian tendencies, some independent tendencies.
And fiscally, you would consider me a Republican fiscally because I want to be left alone economically.
Let me do my part.
I'll pay my taxes.
I'll do my part.
But, Pat, I'm a Republican.
But, Pat, I'm a Republican.
And that's how he convinced people to kind of flip.
So one day I say, Carl, you can fool a lot of people, but you can't fool me, man.
Your strategy on how you're doing it, you're full of shit, is what you're doing.
I say, I understand the power of what you're doing because people are listening to you saying, well, let me tell you, as a Republican, I'm embarrassed of my party.
I'm embarrassed of my party.
It's a very, very good tactic and strategy.
Okay.
Because guess what CNN wants to put on all the time?
Anybody that says, I'm a Republican and I'm embarrassed of my party.
So you've got, what's his name?
Denzinger, Adam Kenzinger.
And some of these guys are like, oh, I'm embarrassed.
All of these guys.
All of these guys.
Joe Walsh, our friend.
Yeah, we had Joe Walsh here.
It was a very friendly time that we had him on the podcast.
But are they at this point like non-they're so irrelevant that no one's following them?
Because they're still getting some traction on Twitter when I see them.
Are they irrelevant?
Are they not going to have any impact?
Are they still affected?
I think for those who are in the business who pay attention and know about the Lincoln Project's problems and issues, they're irrelevant.
But if you've got enough tens of millions of dollars and you can put advertisements on the air, people can watch, and that has influence.
But I'll caution you.
Our system is so big.
So you spent $10 million on a campaign.
Other people spend hundreds of millions of dollars.
Mike Bloomberg for president was insane.
$100 million in like a month.
I have just seen so many examples of people using money thinking they can solve a problem.
And the American people say, ah, I could care less about your money on voting my way.
So money is a piece of politics, but principles and ideas are much more important.
Lincoln Project is one of many people who have their ore in the water spending money.
I have a question regarding Lincoln Project because it's fascinating.
We've talked about it a million times, Pat, especially during 2020.
But this, what do you think life is like in the Conway household?
You got George Conway, one of the constitutional lawyer, I want to say, one of the founders of the Lincolns Project.
And then you have his wife, Kellyanne Conway, as unabashed, you know, Trump supporter as it gets.
Some may say that she's the reason he got elected in 2016 because she stood up to the press.
The daughter is making TikTok videos saying how much she hates the mom.
And they, I don't even know if they have the other kids, but that household must be so combustible.
You know, they say like, what's harder to be married to, whether you're inner faith, interpolitically, you know, inner religion, you know, black and white, you know, intermixed, interracial, but inner politics, especially these days, it's so divisive.
That household has to be insane.
How do you interpret all that?
Yeah, I'm reluctant to put myself inside anybody's relationship.
You don't know all the facts.
I will say this.
When I worked at the White House, and for anybody who works in the White House, I don't care what your party is, when you leave that difficult place where there's a lot of burdens put on you, you should be able to come home to a loving family who supports you.
And if they don't support your politics or your boss's politics, they should have enough love and respect for you to keep their mouth shut publicly.
But that's not what they're doing, though.
That's all I'll say.
That's what anybody should do.
And I 100% agree with what you're saying.
Go ahead, bud what?
I mean, I'm just thinking of you, okay?
You're out there.
You're a known person.
You're a public figure.
You've got money.
You've got, okay, so imagine Jen, who is fully supportive of you.
It's the most supportive, loyal, loving wife.
It's amazing what they have.
Imagine if you are doing your thing and you come home to Jen and she's literally talking trash about you and your boss every single day.
And you've got kids and you're sitting down at the dinner table.
That's got to be so uncomfortable as a husband, as a wife.
How do you guys can meet?
Yes.
I would never be married to that person.
It just wouldn't work out because I ask 101 questions to us before you get engaged.
I'm being dead serious on our second day.
Chris Caplette, you best have my back.
I'm not playing that game.
I'm not going to tolerate that game at all in our household.
Now, having said that, you can manage that with your marriage, but you don't have that conversation when the kid is born and saying, hey, you best have my back or else I'm not bringing you to the world.
The kids are like, who the hell are you?
Of course.
You chose to, you know, you guys chose to procreate.
I'm going to be whatever way I want to be.
Ronald Reagan's son is not a supporter of Ronald Reagan, his biological son, not Michael Reagan.
So how do you do that?
Was he a bad father or did they do a bad job?
Kids have a mind of their own.
So I'm less on the kid and more on the spouse.
I think that's a total problematic.
Yeah, of course.
The kid is the kid.
You're embarrassed about it.
You feel bad for them.
And I don't even like to watch those clips and say, oh, did you see they can't have their household?
It's a little bit of a double-class.
There's a million stories of kids fighting with their parents.
I mean, we can go on for days, years about that, but husband and wives on air politically saying exact opposite messaging.
That's unheard of, is what I'm saying.
Kellyanne Conway is one of the goats of her job.
What that woman did, I don't know if anybody is as good as she is in what she did.
Not many people.
She's on the list of the best at what she did with her job.
If there's no Kellyanne Conway, Trump doesn't win 2016.
I agree with you.
She's that much of a beast.
I don't know if you agree with me or not or you disagree, but I think she's amazing at what she does.
No, I think she provided President Trump, Candidate Trump, an invaluable service.
I think she was one of the calmer, cooler heads at the White House in the early years when she was there.
You know, she's not part of the president's reelection in 2024 here.
She's more a free agent now and an analyst on Fox News.
I told her, I said, if this is going to happen again, you've got to be here.
Her and I were talking about this a few months ago at an event.
But anyways, that's a different story.
So, you know, I want to ask you about somebody who has a reputation of being a sweetheart that people love this guy, just a very kind, loving personality.
What are your thoughts on Dick Cheney?
I liked Vice President Cheney.
He was a curmudgeon, a tough guy.
But, you know, what people don't understand about my job at the White House is I worked for President Bush.
I was Bush's spokesman, and Bush was the boss.
Cheney was a vice president.
The outsiders thought Cheney's in control.
Traney's in charge, which Bush always could care less about because, again, the guy's a confident guy with thick skin, and that criticism was so wrong that it never bothered Bush.
So I looked at the vice president as one of many good advisors that Bush had whispering in his ear.
Sometimes he was a little too truculent.
You know, I think what the CIA would.
What does truculent mean?
Across laymen.
A little too tough, argumentative.
Cremudgeon.
Man, his personality.
He's curmudgeon.
Personality is curmudgeon.
Professionally is a little truculent.
Gotcha.
But he did it because he believed.
It had nothing to do with money and nothing to do with Halliburton.
It was because he believed.
You don't believe that.
You don't believe any of the money?
No.
Fully.
No.
First of all, he severed his ties to Halliburton.
So literally, how could he make a profit off of anything that he did?
Because Halliburton severed ties.
He was no longer with them.
So whatever money Halliburton made or lost was immaterial to the vice president.
He didn't hold anybody into company.
He was an ideologue.
He was a shareholder.
I think he had to divest.
I'm sure everybody, presidents and vice presidents, I think, are not allowed to have any stock or mutual funds.
But presidents are not allowed to have any stock.
Yeah, I think they all divest, or it's blind trust.
It's probably a tough.
It's probably a blind trust.
Yeah, it's a blind trust.
But anyway, to the point, he was an ideologue and a very big believer in the old neocon muscular foreign policy and that he was very much on the side to get rid of Saddam.
What the CIA would tell you is if there was any interference they ever got from the White House, it was not from President Bush and not from President Bush's people.
It was the vice president and the vice president's people who put pressure on the CIA to conclude that there were ties between Saddam and al-Qaeda.
That's an angle that the vice president particularly thought was true, and he really wanted the CIA to run that down.
President Bush, and the CIA would tell you this, always said to the CIA, just tell me what you know.
And he gave him no pressure one way or another.
He said, just tell me what you know.
Ari, for every 10 times you spoke to President Bush, how many times did you talk to Dick Cheney?
Well, Cheney would be in a lot of the meetings.
So Cheney would be sitting there.
But as anybody from the White House will tell you, Cheney didn't talk much.
Bush did the talking.
Bush's advisors did the talking.
And then Cheney would get together with Bush once a week for their private lunch.
And that's when Cheney would say to Bush, here's what I think.
That was the vice president's opportunity then to influence the president, which he did.
But in the meetings, in all these different meetings, Cheney didn't talk much.
I guess what was their relationship?
Meaning, Cheney's how many years older than George W. Bush?
Yeah, but that didn't matter.
A dozen, 20 years?
So what?
It's got, I mean, well, a little bit.
Maybe seniority, wisdom, I kind of...
That means Joe Biden knows more than anybody else.
Well, yeah, that's a whole nother conversation.
But the knock on Cheney was that he was this evildoer running the show.
Would you agree to that?
At least the knock on it.
Yeah, oh, and I dealt with that all the time before 9-11, especially.
I mean, the knock on the Bush administration was Cheney's in charge.
Right.
And it was always nonsense.
Complete nonsense.
Right.
There's the reality, then there's optics.
But the press always has to have something to chew on.
And so that's what they chewed on, which was a meaningless thing to chew on.
Got it.
But you did say that he was the one that kind of wanted the CIA to chase down the story about al-Qaeda, Al-Qaeda.
Yeah, I think the CIA would tell you that.
So what does that mean exactly?
He kind of wanted to invade Iraq.
Oh, is that what that means?
Cheney definitely wanted to depose Saddam.
Oh, wow.
He thought it would promote world peace and would be in America's interest.
It wasn't Cheney's decision, though.
It was Bush's decision.
And how much a part of Bush's decision was influenced by the fact that his father went to war in Iraq?
Zero.
Desert Storm.
Zero.
Schwarzkopf, and he didn't get the job done, quote unquote.
You don't think that played a little part of going after that?
Put yourself in George Bush's shoes.
America has been attacked.
September 11th takes place.
CIA says on September 11th after the attack, it's not a question of if, it's a question of when there will be a second wave.
There will be a second wave.
And that starts to create all the infrastructure and the decisions that Bush starts to make about how to fortify America and never let us be hit again.
Bush's entire mentality is we got hit once.
I will never let this country be hit again.
Saddam has zero, nothing to do with September 11th.
And I said that repeatedly from the podium.
Right.
That's why we invaded Afghanistan.
Correct.
We got Iraq first.
Correct.
But again, put yourself in Bush's shoes.
So Saddam had nothing to do with 9-11.
But you are told there will be a second wave.
And then you're told Saddam definitely has WMD.
And Bush's mindset is: I will never let this country be attacked again.
So you can decide, all right, he's got biological and chemical weapons, and there's nothing America can do about it.
We'll just have to hope he never uses them.
Or I believe in the doctrine of preemption, and I'm going to take Saddam out because he is WMD.
And that is the decision that George Bush ultimately made that people argue about for decades now, whether it was right or wrong.
And I repeatedly have said now, it was based on false premises that he had WMD when he did not.
Got it.
Have you read decision points?
Sure.
Have you read it, Adam?
I'm not sure.
I'm not familiar with it.
The book that President Bush wrote?
No, I have not.
Okay.
He talks about that, I think, in the last chapter or second to the last chapter.
It's actually a very good book to read.
Straight up.
It's a very good book to read.
If you haven't read it or listened to it audible, it's a very, very good book to read.
He says, you know, exactly what he's saying here.
Did the president ever have any conversation about nuclear attack come up or no?
Nuclear towards them or no?
It came up once in the fact that Dick Cheney went on, I believe it was NBC Meet the Press, and he went too far, and he said something along the lines that Saddam is developing or has developed nuclear capacities when he didn't.
We did not have intelligence saying that Saddam had developed nuclear.
He had biological and chemical.
And then he had to draw that back because the vice president went too far.
But it was inside the administration.
We had enough to worry about with biological and chemical if that was the conclusion.
We didn't have to worry about him having nuclear.
Now, one of the pieces that Coleman Powell used at the United Nations turned out also to be false information, that Saddam had some, I think it was centrifuges, some metal tubes that were used for nuclear development, which caused alarm bells to go off.
But we never concluded, or CIA never concluded, that Saddam had nuclear.
I guess my question is more different.
Like, okay, so if you go back and you look at what do you think is a bigger, bigger attack, you know, you look at a bigger event.
You think Pearl Harbor or 9-11?
I don't compare them.
I learned from a smart man once who lost two of his three children that you don't compare tragedies.
But you would say both are pretty big, you know, tragic events that happened, top, you know, in the top events that happened in the history of America.
Fair enough.
Absolutely.
Okay.
Do you think it was a right move on us to, I know FTR didn't do it, but Lyndon Johnson, not Johnson, Truman ended up deciding to nuke Japan.
You think that was the right move on us?
Yes.
You think it was?
Yes.
Okay.
Saved a million American lives.
So that was the right move for us to make.
At what point do you think it would be a right move to do that again if somebody does that to your country?
What a great question.
You know, the world has changed since World War II, where everything was a gigantic land army, navy, known troop movements.
We're in a more stealthy world now of terrorism.
You know, I don't think the right response, if a terrorist detonated a dirty bomb in New York City this afternoon, who are you supposed to nuke?
There's no one to nuke.
You have to do it through special forces.
You have to do it through these behind-the-scenes clandestine operations.
If Russia today launched a series of ICBM missiles at the United States, would we have to respond in kind?
Yes.
Because we know who it is, the source.
And because if you ever say no, we won't, then you're inviting the attack.
If you want deterrence to work, you better mean it.
So do you think like right now, you know, hey, all I'm asking for is for NATO to back off of Ukraine and stop inviting them?
NATO is opening the doors for Ukraine to join NATO.
And that's a way of NATO saying, yeah, Putin, we thought you were strong.
You're really not.
If a small little place like Ukraine is able to hang with you and you haven't done anything yet, yeah, we are letting Ukraine considering them joining NATO.
What do you have to say about that?
So then he goes and sits there as a man running a country called Russia with a rich history of animosity towards one country in the world, which is America, because philosophically we're on complete opposite ends, at least at one point, before Ronald Reagan comes up and says, tear down the wall, et cetera, et cetera, Gorbachev.
Okay, great.
Do you think Putin's at a point where it's a turning point where he's got to make a decision?
You think he's sitting there or no?
He's not there and he's going to just sit there and negotiate and figure out a way to do this and lose this and allow Ukraine to join NATO.
I cannot put myself in Putin's head.
I was hoping he could do that.
I don't know what his calculations are, what his breaking point is.
I think it's amazing, the resistance of the Ukrainians.
I heard Mike Pompeo, the former Secretary of State, say the other day that it doesn't surprise him that Russia hasn't been able to pull this off.
He said their ability, the ability of any nation to move hundreds of thousands of forces and have supply chain and vehicles that work.
He said, that's a daunting task.
It's so hard to pull off that he said, it doesn't surprise me, Russia couldn't do it.
I think Russia is now being seen for what it is, which is an absolutely overrated military power.
They still have nuclear weapons.
So as long as those nuclear weapons can fly, there's a danger and we have to take it seriously.
But the ability to pull off a significant land invasion is really, really hard unless you drill all the time, train all the time, prep all the time, which the United States does.
We're one of the few who can do it.
Russia's hollow.
You know what?
By the way, would you agree that most people thought Russia would have destroyed Ukraine?
Yes.
Most people were not like, if it's like a football game, like, oh, they're going to crush him.
And then I'll say, oh my God, what the hell happened here?
This was not supposed to be the Patriots were supposed to beat the Giants, but they came back.
This is very weird.
Is it really Ukraine, though, or did they kind of, to use your sports analogy, they've got a couple all-stars on the sidelines that you're popping out?
Right.
It's like a last-minute guy you pull in.
But I guess, okay, so Shamat the other day is talking to Lex, I think.
He's talking to Lex.
He's on his podcast.
And the conversation was about America with the interest rates and what we're doing and Powell and increasing the rates.
We can't afford a war right now because, you know, money is so expensive for us right now that we couldn't finance a war right now.
You know, where us, we're not ready for some like that.
How much of that is true?
Like, do you think if something did happen and America needed to finance a war, it wouldn't be, you know, they would still do it?
Versus how much you think rates and a person like Powell, you know, he called them the most powerful man in the world because him increasing the rates is preventing America from being on attack mode.
You have to kind of take the step back.
Do you agree with them?
War should never, ever be about whether we can or cannot afford it.
War should only be about do we have no choice but to fight it.
And if you have no choice but to fight it, then you're going to fund it.
So you just have to get the sequence right.
And it has nothing to do with money.
But, you know, to Donald Trump's credit, Trump's right when he says he was the one president of the recent note who's kept us out of wars.
He ended wars.
You know, he gets the credit for destroying ISIS.
Other leaders in the Middle East share in that credit as well.
But Trump stepped up and empowered the military and sent the signal to the Arab Middle East: fight these suckers, take them out.
I'm going to have your back, as opposed to President Obama, who said, you know, we can't attack them.
And Trump got it right.
And then Trump did keep us out of wars.
And I also believe that with the withdrawal from Afghanistan, if Trump were president, the Taliban would not have gotten away with what they did and Kabul would not have fallen.
I think Trump's conditions-based withdrawal was valid.
And I think the Taliban were scared to death of Donald Trump because he's irrational.
People don't know what moves he's going to make next.
He took out Soleimani in Iran.
And so people thought, don't mess with Trump.
Nobody thought that about Biden.
You don't find Biden intimidating?
The most popular president of all time, 81 million votes?
That's like a Guinness Book of World Record.
But going back to Trump, so questions about obviously Trump announces he's running for office.
Okay.
You know, yesterday, hey, they're going after his taxes and they're going to get this and they're going to get that.
And they're, you know, trying to figure out a different way to eliminate him from running.
During dinner last night, these are all successful business folks and everybody has different opinions.
Well, you know, I hope they are able to get him on taxes because if they do, he can't run.
I don't want him to run.
And well, if he wins, he wins.
You got to let him run.
No, he's the worst thing that ever happened.
Well, he had a economy was good when he was doing this.
Well, it's not fair what they did to him.
No, he deserved everything.
He's the shadiest.
He's the lion.
So you're watching everybody on where they're at.
This is what they're saying at dinner last night.
It was so interesting.
And they were open about it, like the way they were talking.
Like, these are people, you know, some of these names.
Yeah, these are names you'd major names.
Yeah, I'm not mostly Republican.
No, not at all.
Well, of course, the Democrats.
100%.
Wall Street type stuff.
Nobody was independent.
Everybody was left or right, is what they were.
It was very cross-the which was great.
It made dinner exciting because there was a little bit of a back and forth.
So we know Trump is running.
Are you on the mindset that DeSantis for sure is going to be running?
Nothing's for sure in this business, right?
But it sure seems like he is.
And I hope he does.
Do you think anybody else will run?
Or is there anybody you'd like to see run down?
Oh, you have running?
There'll be a small bunch of them, nowhere near like 16 when we had 17 candidates or something like that.
But I think there's going to be eight or nine, at least at the beginning.
I think a couple of them are going to be Chris Christie and Larry Hogan.
I think the governor, former governor of New Jersey, and the current governor of Maryland.
I don't think they have a chance.
You've got to be a real conservative, populist candidate to be successful in today's Republican Party.
But I think there'll be a small smattering.
The issue for Trump is if it's one or two who are conservative, populist, outsider candidates running against him, he could lose.
If it's three, four, or five, they split the vote and Trump wins.
Who's your dark horse?
Meaning, everyone's talking about Trump, DeSantis.
You know, even Mike Penn shows up.
And you didn't give any validity to Pompeo's thinking about it.
Nikki Haley is thinking about it.
Wouldn't surprise me if there's some other governor who comes out of the woodwork who's kind of laying low now, who moves in later.
But, you know, DeSantis is the flavor of the month, legitimately so.
I think he's a great decision maker.
I love the way he just confronts big things and makes fundamental decisions.
I think his vulnerability, especially in Iowa and New Hampshire, is going to be he's not a retail politician.
He's not an enjoyable, laughable, backslapping kind of pal.
And in New Hampshire, that's really important.
Iowa, to some extent, because those are the initial primaries and caucuses thing in the Republican Party, right?
Correct.
Those are the first two.
And as they say, in New Hampshire, somebody asked, who are you supporting?
And the resident of New Hampshire said, how should I know?
I've only met the candidate three times.
They take it seriously.
There's retail politics there, and most candidates camp out.
When you say retail politics, the old, hey, you're shaking hands, kissing babies.
Hey, hey, hey, I have a beer with that guy, that old thing.
Spending time in meetings in people's living rooms.
Not everything is a giant ballroom.
Not everything is a rally.
In New Hampshire, they want that local touch.
That's not DeSantis' strength.
So look, what I love about where we are today, and I'm open-minded on Donald Trump.
There's a lot about Donald Trump I object to, especially in terms of his personality.
There's a lot I admire about his policies.
But my position personally and as a Fox News analyst is I like being a consumer.
Make these guys compete.
And then me as a consumer, I'll tell you what I'm going to do at the end of the day.
I want to watch it, see how it plays out, and decide who's the strongest and who's the best.
You know, I think the issue for Donald Trump is he made himself too hot to handle.
Has he just made everybody start to realize, people have realized it before, but now say it publicly, that do we really need all these controversies?
Do we need all the baggage that comes with what Donald Trump does and the way he does it?
Yes, he was great on the economy.
Yes, he was great on foreign policy.
Yes, he was great for achieving peace in the Middle East.
Yes, he was great for Israel.
A lot of issues which are important to me.
But the question is, has he made himself so hot to handle that none of that matters?
Can you have somebody who's equally good as a decision maker, equally good on policy, who just doesn't go too far and can actually attract independents and Democrats?
That's what I want to see play out in the primary.
So you're not sure yet.
Do you think both of them have a chance of winning the whole thing?
Like if he becomes, Trump becomes a Republican nominee or DeSantis becomes a Republican nominee, do you think both of them have a chance of winning the whole thing?
This early stage, I would say somebody other than Trump has a better shot at winning the whole thing because Democrats and independents just, I see a very difficult road getting them to support Donald Trump.
And one of the biggest factors in the upcoming primary is going to be if all the polls start to show that just say DeSantis, DeSantis is beating Biden, DeSantis is beating Harris by five points, and Trump is only beating them by one.
That is going to be a shocking message to Republican primary voters who say, I'm not taking a chance.
I do not want somebody who could lose this thing.
So keep your eye on those head-to-head polls as they start to emerge in early 2023.
You still trust polls?
You just said a month ago, 238 seats, and we're going to win Senate and we're going to have the House and it's going to be a red wave.
And first of all, you ain't the only one.
I think 99% of people, everybody got it wrong on what it was.
You think it was really the Roe v. Wade that was the biggest driver?
What do you think was the biggest driver last minute?
Two.
One is the reason that a party gets its clock cleaned in its first midterm election is the referendum on the current president.
In 2022, it was a referendum on Joe Trump.
It was a referendum on two presidents.
If it had only been a referendum on Joe Biden, Republicans would have had the 25, 30 seats in the House and have control of the Senate.
But Donald Trump never left the stage.
He still hovered.
So independent voters, especially, instead of breaking overwhelmingly against Joe Biden, they went split right down the middle.
Democrats carried him by two percentage points.
That was the biggest factor of all.
Then Roe v. Wade did play a role into it as well.
That helped motivate a lot of Democrat turnout.
Don't you think the whole, we've got to save democracy, these election deniers, like we had like that.
Don't you think that was also a major factor?
But that ties into the whole Trump staying on the field.
That was a factor that motivated high Democrat turnout.
And the turnout in the midterm was quite high.
Typically, there's a massive drop-off between a presidential year and a midterm.
This drop-off was not near as high or as much as a historical dropout.
But isn't that all because since 2016, every election has been record turnout because whether you like him or not, Trump made you pay attention to politics.
Yes.
You know, Obama, whether you liked him or not, like, yeah, okay, cool guy, whatever.
He didn't like, it wasn't must-see TV.
Trump, must see TV.
He's been Trump 2020.
I don't know if you know that or not.
Massive.
But he, what I will give him credit for is, you know, he woke a lot of people up.
Whether you like him or, you know, don't like him, support him or do not support him.
This record turnout is all due to him for the last eight years.
Right.
I agree.
Oh, I agree.
I mean, 16 broke all the records and then 20 broke all the records.
And now 22 for midterms.
What do you think?
18 had a higher turnout than 22.
Okay.
But that was the first year of Trump.
That was Trump.
First midterm.
Well, he got crushed.
It was.
It's about the midterms.
And this is why this whole notion our democracy is in trouble.
Our democracy is frigging thriving.
That's why people are turning out so much.
Whether you love Trump or you hate Trump, our democracy functions.
It works.
You know, I can make the case that there's a reason for low turnouts because people are happy.
When things are good and calm, you don't have to turn out.
All of a sudden, people see a threat to America, Donald Trump, or I love Donald Trump.
So we have massive turnout.
That's a healthy, thriving democracy.
And what settled it?
The will of the people.
That's what makes a democracy work.
Let me ask a different question here.
Let's change it up a little bit.
You know how sometimes you're like, you watch certain people and you're like, you know, I wish this guy would have done XYZ.
I wish this guy would have ran a business.
I wish that guy would have ran up.
I wish this guy would have ran.
Is there anybody that you looked at and you said, this guy, I wish he would have ran for president?
He would have made one hell of a president.
Is there anybody that you've said that to or you've thought about?
Because this is the industry you've been a part of.
Yeah, I mean, I've occasionally had thoughts about that with Peyton Manning until he declares his candidacy and then the press will tear him up.
Are you being serious?
You know, I do think about outsiders.
I do.
That's why I'm asking you.
I think I've always been open-minded about Donald Trump, despite the fact that I work for establishment figures.
I've always just looked at things much bigger and thought.
But the problem is, as soon as you're in the New England vote, Republicans don't get it anyway.
As soon as you enter the fray, as soon as you enter the campaign, you get torn up.
So who's got the ability, who's got the thick skin to handle that?
And most athletes don't.
You know, it's really hard.
Look at Herschel Walker in Georgia.
He could still win, though.
Yeah, it's tough.
He could still win.
Neck and neck.
That's going to be a tough race.
But you also hear the names like Tom Hanks and The Rock and Oprah, Michelle Obama.
Yeah, and part of it's the infotainment side of politics.
You know, I do like to think about that.
But like I said, again, as soon as you enter the ring, boy, you're going to find out what you got.
And you're going to find out if you have thin skin or thick skin.
Anybody else outside of Manning?
Like anybody for you to say that this guy's got thick skin, he could do it.
Because it's funny how you took it as it's not just communication.
It's not just witty.
It's not just being, you know, funny or even having good policies.
You have to have thick skin.
Who is there that you'd say this guy can manage all of it?
Is there anyone?
Yeah.
There's nobody I would put my finger on right now.
I think what I love about American politics is somebody emerges off the bench and becomes a star.
And we don't know who that is.
And we're not supposed to.
We don't need to know who the big name of 2023 is yet.
It's up to them to prove it to the American people.
And so when I hear the Democrats say they have no bench after Biden, I always go, that's bull.
You got a deep bench.
It's just that nobody knows your names yet.
They will emerge.
Same thing for the Republicans.
You think Newsom's running?
He says he's not now.
He said he's not?
Yeah.
I can't believe what I think there's a silver lining for Republicans in the fact that we underperformed in 2022.
And that's if Republicans had taken the House by big numbers, taken the Senate, Democrats would have risen up and said to Biden, we are not placing our future in an 82-year-old guy as our nation goes into recession who's really unpopular and just lost the House and Senate.
So now the Democrats are going to get stuck with Joe Biden.
They're going to have an 82-year-old nominee in 2024.
And I think that's a huge opportunity for whoever the Republican candidate is to clean the guy's clock because I just don't see the American people going for an 82 to 86 year old second term president.
Neither do I.
To follow up on Pat's question, just because you've been around presidents, obviously George W. Bush, the historian John Meacham, you're familiar with him?
I think they believe they asked him, well, if there's one characteristic that a president can have above all, what would it be that makes him a good president?
And I believe his answer was measured.
Got to be measured, right?
Almost like stoicism.
Okay.
You know, Pat referenced being charismatic and being energetic.
And, you know, you talked about living room politics.
What was the term you used?
You know, when you can, like, what you do in New Hampshire, what do you call it?
Oh, retail.
Retail politics.
I was thinking curmudgeon, vituperant.
No, not at all.
Truculent.
What words did I use?
There's a lot of words that we're trying to define over here.
I'm Googling a lot of things.
But if you could give your assessment, if there was one word that would make a good president, you said, you know, not thin skin, like all these words we're using.
What word would you use?
Moral.
A lot happens from moral strength and moral authority.
That's how you inspire people.
People think you're a good person doing things for good reasons.
They will follow you.
They'll disagree with you on some issues, but they'll say, he knows more than I do.
I hope he turns out right.
If people think you're immoral, if you do things for wrong reasons, you can never get that back.
So moral.
Measured, I like that, but measured's internal.
Measured is what you do when you've got the CIA telling you one thing and you've got somebody else telling you another.
You've got one expert saying, 2008 market crash that you've got to intervene.
And another expert saying to you, don't intervene.
Whatever you do, let this figure itself out.
That's where a president has to be measured.
Listen to both sides, ask good questions, and come up with an answer.
But measured is not how you sell policies.
You sell policy through charisma and a compelling approach.
Can I give you a little bit of pushback?
You know, sort of the dichotomy between Trump versus Biden was that moral argument.
Well, you know, Biden's a nice guy.
You know, at least he's a good guy.
He's not Trump, who's this evil character.
He's a good guy.
You know, that whole thing.
So maybe that was the moral versus immoral equation.
I think people made a judgment about Trump's morality.
I don't think Joe Biden inspired people on the basis of morality.
I think for some people, particularly the media who fell for it, they just thought Biden was a good guy.
That's what I'm saying.
Exactly.
But that's not moral.
That's a different measure.
I'm not sure about Biden's morality.
I think there's a lot we don't know because I do think he lied about what he knew about his son's business dealings.
A whole series of texts and emails and photos have come out that show Joe Biden lied about that.
He's been contradicted by evidence.
And, you know, when I see Joe Biden saying about Mitt Romney, that Mitt Romney and Republicans want to put you all back in chains, as he said to a black audience in 2012, I do question Joe Biden's morality.
Joe Biden has a history of playing on America's racial divisions.
Jim Crow 2.0, put y'all back in chains.
Semi-fascists.
Joe Biden loves to play in that arena for the purpose of dividing the American people and drawing support to the Democratic Party.
But when he says that Mitt Romney and Republicans want to return this country to slavery, you're going to tell me that's a moral statement?
That's a moral man?
That's a man playing some of the lowest politics around racial lines.
Identity politics.
Vicious game.
Thank you for that response.
What's this right here?
2018.
Son, I love you more than you'll ever know, but you've got to get your things together.
You need help.
Joe Biden voicemail to Hunter Biden's a wonderful go a little lower.
Go a little lower.
Go a little lower.
And a message to the former Price of the Stat.
I call to tell you I love you.
I love you more than the whole world, pal.
You got to get some help.
I know you don't know what to do.
I don't either.
Well, that's not the real one.
No, the one I was looking for is the one where he says, hey, man, I think you're clear.
Right.
There were Times story.
Exactly.
The Times is releasing a piece.
I think you're clear, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
What do you think about what Musk is about to do here with all the stuff he's releasing with Twitter?
You know, I love it.
On the other hand, who cares about Twitter?
I mean, why are we all so hung up on this stuff?
You know, if Twitter went away, I'd be fine.
I like Twitter.
I tweet.
It's a great way to get your message out, et cetera.
But life is bigger than that.
And that's all always.
Oh, Ari Flasher.
I think you just poked the bear a little bit.
Pat is very big on Twitter right now.
Oh, no, no.
I'm curious to know what he thinks about it.
For me, my thought is for a guy to buy Twitter that is officially not running it the same way that YouTube, Google, or something.
Well, that's why I began this by saying that.
I love it because he's a contrarian voice.
The fact that now he's being criticized as he's looking like a Republican running Twitter.
How many freaking Democrat billionaires run media outlets?
As soon as that happens, you take over the Washington Post, you take over, you run the New York Times, local newspapers.
As long as you're a Democrat or a liberal, it's perfectly acceptable.
It's the way it should be.
But if you're a Republican, you cannot run a media outlet if you're a Republican, according to the media.
Jason, but the bold, Elam wasn't super political on Twitter until Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren started attacking him for no reason.
Then others followed.
Of all the dudes they would have, could have attacked, they chose the guy most capable of helping government solve problems, strength choice.
Several other major Democratic politicians attacked me too, all around the same time.
It was coordinated outside of party leadership and independents like Manchin.
They are all essentially, they are essentially actors on the political stage, not directors or scriptwriters.
Do you agree with them?
Yes.
And look, I think Elon Musk is the best counterpuncher in America.
Elon Musk knows how to fight back, and he doesn't go too far.
And he's very witty and good at it.
Donald Trump could learn a few lessons from that.
Donald Trump, when he counterpunches, often ends up hitting himself in the chin, his own chin.
So there's a lot about Elon Musk I like.
But again, my bigger point here is I'm going to continue to tweet as long as Twitter exists.
I'll continue to use that as a form to get my message out.
But there's life is so much bigger than social media.
Ari, I think you're being a little bit naive.
And, you know, of course, there's life more than social media.
But when you're trying to have a voice without people silencing you, you kind of need other options.
And I like what happened yesterday with Tim Cook and Elon Musk getting together.
I think Elon Musk even responded to Tim Cook, or he said something about it.
He was at the Apple headquarters and he tweeted about that.
And then even yesterday, when they interviewed Sam Bankman Freed at New York Times, and at the same event, Reid Hastings was interviewed.
And they said, hey, so what do you think about Elon Musk?
I think he is the biggest genius creative in the world.
He says, he has a different style of leading.
I have a different style of leading, but I think he's a genius.
I think he's good.
I think we have to be a little bit more patient.
I was very surprised for Reed Hastings to say that.
And Reid Hastings, I think, gave $3 million to Newsom or somebody.
And he's a major contributor to the left himself.
So for him to say those words about Elon was great to see.
And now Tim Cook's position, where they're not planning on taking Twitter off Apple's app, all the other stuff, it's great to see.
I think you need opposition.
That's all I'm saying.
I think we need opposition.
Very simple.
I totally agree with you.
But I guess if I were to give advice to a president, I would tell the president, don't tweet and don't look at Twitter.
Did you see what Trump said yesterday?
He said, he had no plans of coming back to Twitter.
He's going to stay on truth.
So you think that's the right move?
That's a financial move.
Because he has no choice because it's a smash.
That's true.
Yeah.
That's what I said.
I said, go ahead.
Can I ask one follow-up about media in general?
Back to that Reagan speech you gave a few months ago about your book.
I mean, essentially, that's what this is about.
You talked about media bias and they're no longer journalists.
They're more activists.
And you gave the analogy of, you know, there's in the White House press briefing room, there's for every 12 Democrats, there's one Republican, you know, this kind of stuff.
I admit it, I used to only watch MSNBC and see it.
And I would watch Fox business.
We need to fix it.
Well, I'm being fixed.
I've been neutered.
But we talk about this all the time by getting a mixed media diet, right?
Like if you watch CNN, watch Fox a little bit and contrarian views, different viewpoints.
And don't just listen to the mainstream media.
Watch podcasts and watch this.
And like fully, fully consumed.
You know, I like watching this, looking at this all-sides media bias chart.
You familiar with this, Tyler, if you can pull that up.
What media outlets, I think we could all fairly state that CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, they're on the left, no doubt.
Fox, Newsmax, OAN, Daily Wire, even.
They're on the right.
We all know this.
Where do you find your center these days?
Who do you think is really playing the center, actually being the old school Walter Cronkite?
Just give me the news.
Nobody.
Who do you trust these days?
Let me put it this way.
I think the best show on the air of anybody is Fox News 6 o'clock with Brett Baer.
Brett Baer's a beast.
That is an old-fashioned, solid news show.
The reporters who go from the White House lawn or the Treasury Department or LA, they're playing it right down the middle and giving you the news straight.
And it's an hour long as opposed to the networks, which are 30 minutes long.
So that's, to me, the most objective best show on the air.
Of course, Fox at Night with Sean and Laura, et cetera.
That's opinion TV.
But, you know, what I do, and this is thanks to Twitter in large part, I follow reporters left and right.
And so I'm constantly getting deluged with this view, that view, this news, that news.
But I also know how to read a story in the New York Times and see the bias right away.
And I barely read the New York Times anymore.
There's some things I'll read.
But you're a professional.
Most average Americans, they don't know.
They're not in-depth.
You know, all right, is this a biased report?
Is it not?
I don't know.
They're just.
And I hear it all the time from people.
Where can I go to get the news straight?
Right.
I don't have enough time.
And, you know, somebody like me, I'm a news consumer, so I spend time doing this stuff.
I watch CNN in the morning.
I watch Fox later in the day.
This is literally your life and your business.
But the average working American, they're working nine to five.
They got bills to pay.
They're living paycheck to paycheck.
They're just like, all right, what's going on today?
Let me watch the news for a half hour.
Right.
And they put on the TV or they read an article, whatever, and that's what they got.
And my complaint, and this is one of the reasons I wrote my book, is too many mainstream media reporters, especially in the era of Trump, turned themselves into anti-Trump activists.
That's what they thought journalism was about, was getting rid of Donald Trump instead of reporting it straight, fair, to the middle about Donald Trump and critics of Donald Trump.
Sorry, what can be done about that?
You know, what I wrote in my book is that I really hope that conservatives go into journalism schools and that journalism schools have to really attract conservative thought.
It goes back to your point about diversity.
It's not about the chromosomes or the makeup of a class or what skin somebody has.
It's about diversity of thought.
How many people own guns who go to journalism school?
How many people who pray every day go to journalism school?
Journalism schools just don't represent the breadth and depth of America, which means newsrooms don't.
So I don't think it'll ever fix itself until the media legitimately and intellectually and happily welcomes conservatives into their ranks.
But they don't seem to want to do it because those people are alien.
Look at what they're doing to Elon Musk.
You cannot own Twitter if you're a known Republican.
One more follow-up.
What percentage of journalists, writers, contributors, whatever, are college-educated Democrats?
Yeah.
It's a big theme of my book that the fundamental flaw of journalism today is it's college-educated Democrats writing for fellow college-educated Democrats.
I cite a poll that showed if you're a Democrat with a high school diploma, the press doesn't understand you, you think.
Independence, high school diploma, or college degree, the press doesn't understand you.
For all Republicans, you think the press doesn't understand.
The only group of Americans who said to the Gallup organization that they think that the press understands their life are college-educated Democrats.
The press is now in a cocoon.
They have driven themselves into this little small, narrow ideological cul-de-sac that they know how to go round in the cul-de-sac, but they don't understand America.
Do they recognize that, though?
No.
No, because they're too like-minded.
Their newsrooms, their management, everybody's cut from the same cloth.
And then they think there's something wrong with their customers.
It's the only business I know that's losing customers, losing money, and instead of saying, what's wrong with us, they say, what's wrong with our customers?
And then they continue to lose customers, of course.
You brought up such a good point.
Such a good point.
You said, someone asked you a question.
They said that, Reagan, they said, like, well, you know, if there's so much money in the media, they got to make their money.
And you said, well, because that's because they're not relying on corporate advertisers as much anymore.
And it's a subscription-based model.
And you gave the metaphor, the story of one time the New York Times printed a favorable story about Donald Trump.
And their subscribers, like, what the are you doing?
And we're going to unsubscribe.
I think they lost their most subscribers ever the next day.
And they changed the headline on the story.
So if you're reliant on subscribers, you're going to be just reliant to their opinions and their emotions rather than actual advertisers that want to make money.
That's overwhelmingly what's happened to the print press.
Damn.
And it's happened on TV too because people have sorted themselves.
Conservatives tend to watch the stuff that reinforces their views.
Liberals watch the stuff that tends to reinforce their views.
So you don't want to piss off your readers or your viewers either.
Your base.
But this is also what we haven't seen yet.
And I think it's going to take a decade or maybe even two to see is the power of podcasters.
I think it's going to be going in a complete different direction the next decade or two, where a lot of these guys, you think people are getting numbers right now.
We haven't even seen people having 100 million subscriber channels yet.
Wait till people have 100 million subscriber channel and they're doing a clip.
Every clip they're doing, they're getting 14 million views, 18 million views.
You lose the game.
So this race of 10 to 20 years, it's going to be a very media is going to be a very, very different game the next 10 to 20 years.
And they're scared shitless.
They have to make the right adjustments.
They have to understand how to be straight up.
I think one thing I'm most excited about with Twitter is he lost $750 million of advertising per year because 50% of the top 100 advertisers dropped off.
That's a big number.
And to replace that $750 million, all he needs is 7.7 million people out of his 250 million active followers to pay $8 a month.
If 7.7 million people on Twitter pay $8 a month, he no longer needs those $750 million of advertisers.
I'm willing to say, if 30 million people pay $8 a month on Twitter, it's game over.
He doesn't have to bow down to big pharma.
He doesn't have to bow down to nobody.
He becomes the biggest threat in everybody's business.
Big pharma, one of the these big advertisers are worried the fact that they may not need their money.
Imagine you have money to pay to companies and they're like, yeah, we don't want your money.
It's like, what do you mean you don't want my money?
I've been able to buy you for a long time with your opinions because I can't do it anymore.
No, we don't want your money.
Oh my God.
It's like, you know, when a 22-year-old girl is like, oh, look, I can get anything.
I want my looks.
And also, it's like, hey, it's kind of changes.
Well, that doesn't work anymore.
I actually have to have some substance.
These big pharma companies are going to be sitting there saying, not just big pharma, a lot of these other advertisers saying, man, we are no longer attractive the way we used to be 10 years ago.
Games about to change, my opinion.
Folks, if you're watching this, we're going to put the link below to Ari's book that just came out in July called Deception, Snobbery, and Bias.
Let's make sure we put that in the chat as well as in the description for you to be able to order this book.
And obviously, based on what he said, he's a die-hard fan of Twitter.
We'll put the link to Twitter as well.
Send a message to him.
Ari, appreciate you for coming out.
This was fantastic.
Really enjoyed talking to you.
And hopefully we'll do it another one as the election gets a little closer.
No, you guys are great.
And you're right about the future in podcasts.
They are changing the communications business.
Yeah.
Well, with that being said, please subscribe to the PBD podcast, guys.
Subscribe to Value Tainment and subscribe to Ari Fleischer's channel at Ari Fleischer on Twitter.
There it is.
Okay.
Great channel.
Before it goes away.
Later on today, we have Andrew Schultz later on today.
We'll have Andrew Schultz on a podcast later on today.
