Sebastian Gorka

So it’s early days in what will become the Trump presidency. A kind of revolution of sorts is brewing over at Breitbart the way we hear it from Steve Bannon and others. Describe the year when you got there in 2014. Describe what Breitbart was, what it aspired to be, what it aspired to do in the political landscape.

Well, I think Breitbart is part and parcel of a global phenomenon which is a challenge to the reigning elites, which have not served either the right or the left for about 40 years. So whether you’re a Democrat or whether you’re a Republican, you look at what’s happening in Washington, D.C., you look at what’s happening in New York or elsewhere around the world, and you look at a political elite that’s basically betrayed you.

If you look at what happened to the economy, the outsourcing of jobs, the maintenance of a political class that becomes a permanent political class, Breitbart was in response to that. So it’s not an accident that in the last five years, we’ve gone from Brexit to Donald Trump to a [Jair] Bolsonaro in Brazil to [Viktor] Orban in Hungary to the recent elections in Australia. Breitbart is part and parcel of that reaction to a morally and financially bankrupt elite.

… Let’s take [Mitt] Romney’s loss, the reaction of the establishment Republicans to it, the “autopsy,” etc. Fill me in on your perspective of what was happening there to the Republican establishment, with the Republican establishment, in the post-Romney defeat.

Well, it’s clear the left, the Democratic Party, had an agenda. It was becoming an ever more radicalized agenda when we find out that leaked speech that Hillary gave to a group of bankers in which she spoke of her desire to see a borderless American hemisphere, so literally no borders between Canada and South America. 11Did Hilary Clinton call for open borders?View LinkWe see a side of the political aisle that knows what it wants, is extreme and is realizing it.

And on the other side with the establishment GOP and Romney’s a perfect example of the RINO [Republican in name only] class, we see a party that just doesn’t resist, that rolls over. As [Rep.] Louie Gohmert famously says, when we are in minority as Republicans, we act like the minority. Yet when we’re in majority, we still act as if we’re in the minority. So this train, this tanker of left-wing extremist policies, the radicalized, the Alinskyite left, has a plan and the Republicans have no response to it.

The response that comes out, of course, and that is flogged, and even Sean Hannity and others in the beginning endorse, is this idea of broadening the base, of using immigration and other things to present a kinder, gentler Republican Party that [Reince] Priebus and others write up in the autopsy. And that, of course, will bump into the ideology and hopes and dreams of [Jeff] Sessions, [Stephen] Miller, Bannon, you and others. Talk a little bit about how you felt about when you saw what seemed to be bipartisan immigration openness by the Republican Party during that time.

Well, first things first. I think it’s misleading to look at these events through the optic of ideology. Some actors may have ideology. Steve can speak for himself, and Miller can speak for himself. As I look at it, it’s not about ideology; it’s about attitudes, and it’s about love of country. Monica Crowley, my friend, said it the best. I heard her speak the weekend after the election after we elected Donald Trump to the presidency. And she said everybody misunderstood candidate Trump. They tried to think of him as an ideological candidate. He wasn’t an ideological candidate. He breaks all taxonomy. This is a Republican candidate who strutted around the platform at a campaign event waving the gay pride flag.

There’s no ideological box or taxonomy that applies to this man. She said he wasn’t an ideological candidate, he was an attitudinal candidate, and she’s absolutely right. Now, what was that attitude? That America is good, and we should be winning again, whether it’s in economy, national security, pride in our flag, everything else. It’s about attitude.

And as an immigrant, I am a legal immigrant to the United States, for me it was less about am I a paleocon, am I a Reaganaut, am I [Ludwig] von Mises versus [Friedrich] von Hayek? No, it’s about America is good. We are not to be painted as Obama and everybody else painted us, as the global cause of all ill. We are the greatest nation on God’s earth, and we must have pride in that. And that’s what we must return to. For me, that’s not an ideological statement; that’s an attitudinal statement about love of country.

There is a moment there, though, where it looks pretty dark for anybody who’s not a sort of establishment Eric Cantor-style Republican. What happened?

I think what is the phrase that Steve Bannon always uses? “The hobbits revolted.” You know, the hobbits woke up in the shire. Think about—look, let me share a story with you. I think it was May or June of 2017, and I flew with the president on Air Force One to Youngstown, Ohio, for a rally. And we landed at a base; we got off Air Force One. It was about a 20-minute ride to the stadium where we were holding the rally. And the president got in the beast, we got in the convoy, and we drove for 20, 25 minutes to the location.

On the left-hand side, all we saw for 20 minutes were shuttered, closed-down, disused steel mill after steel mill. On the right-hand side, for miles, we saw the local population standing there waving their American flags with their red “Make America Great” hats on. We got to the stadium. The president’s in the back meeting and greeting the local luminaries; I’m in the front in the crowd taking selfies with all these great people.

And it’s patently obvious to me that 95 percent of everybody in that stadium was formerly a registered Democrat. Their parents, their grandparents were Democrat. These are salt-of-the-earth manual laborers from Youngstown, Ohio.

When the president and the first lady come out on stage, he literally could not give his speech for several minutes. Why? Because in unison, the people of Youngstown are clamoring and chanting, “USA! USA! Drain the swamp!” This is Steel City. This is Youngstown, Ohio, hard-core Democrat steel valley, and they’re chanting in approval of a billionaire from Manhattan? That’s what happened.

This man connected with the forgotten men and women of America. And that’s why Gen. Michael Flynn was absolutely right when he called November 2016 a peaceful political revolution in America.

So now let’s back up for a second. By the time you join Breitbart—

You’re obsessing a lot about Breitbart. I was the national security editor of Breitbart remotely. I made sure there was quality control. I was a full-time professor of irregular warfare for the Defense Department, so the idea that I’m some big Breitbart insider—I was helping Steve have good product.

Good. All I’m looking for is what are obviously your discerning, discriminating and intelligent eyeballs on what happened there at that place, just as a point of departure for me in my film to get into the bigger story. And so what my film knows so far at the beginning is—

But my vault into the White House is not a function of Breitbart. My vault into the White House is a function of meeting the president when he needed a hand. So the idea that there’s some, you know, cabal-like Breitbart-White House immigration mill, it’s not a fair representation of history.

Well, did I say any of those things?

No, but there seems to be an obsession with Breitbart.

It’s not an obsession; it’s—

If you want to talk about Breitbart, Steve’s your guy. I’m not your guy. I’m not the inside Breitbart guy. I helped him bring quality control to his national security reporting.

Great. And along the way, you heard about, you saw, you witnessed a revolution underway in the country and at this place.

Absolutely.

… So I’m just trying to get back there to that place, and you happen to be one of the guys standing in that photo of the signature—of the signees of the Declaration of Independence. You were there, and I’m just trying—all I’m really trying to do—it’s not a cabal thing at all. I’m trying to say what happened in there that you saw that could help us piece together a story of what took place?

Piecing together the story of what took place is not something you will be able to do by focusing on Breitbart and Steve Bannon. Piecing together the story of what happened with immigration in America is 50 years of the American people being betrayed by the political class.

Got it.

So Breitbart is the codicil. It’s the appendix to that story. You know, what did the president say at one of his recent rallies? The political elite outsourced our jobs to China, and in exchange we got the opioids flooding in from China. That is a 40-year story. It begins with [Henry] Kissinger saying: “Oh, China. Let’s open to China. Nixon can open the way.” It begins with saying this absurd concept that if we liberalize China’s economy, they will liberalize politically.

Xi Jinping just made himself emperor for life in China. I mean, Kissinger couldn’t have been more wrong if he tried. It’s like [Francis] Fukuyama saying it’s The End of History and the Last Man and ideology is dead. So if your focus—I’m just the subject of the interview—if your focus is getting the immigration story right, and what we did in the first week in the White House, it is a much longer story than Breitbart and Steve Bannon.

Totally, and I get that. But I have to do it in pieces, you know, over—

Yeah. But again, if you want to reflect reality, it’s much bigger than Breitbart.

Oh, totally. Totally. We have to start somewhere.

Go ahead, go ahead.

Yeah. I mean, we can argue about it all day long, but let’s just head somewhere, because I’m very interested in how the early stages of the—I won’t even say the words “Breitbart” anymore if it helps—but in the early stages of a moment in American history, a handful of people—you know who they are, and I know who they are, and you know them very well—Sessions, Miller, Bannon, you, a lot of other people, [Matty] Boyle, [Alex] Marlow, all of—a lot of people, [Ben] Shapiro, thinkers, different thinkers than the traditional Republican thinkers—brought down with the help of some talk radio and some other places, brought down Cantor, and with the help of the people in Richmond, Virginia, brought down Eric Cantor, and it changed in some fundamental way, by our lights, the way the Republican establishment looked at that group of people I’ve just described. How and why did that happen?

Wow, that could be several doctoral theses, how and why did that happen. I think we arrived at a point in time where there were key individuals with requisite platforms who could demonstrate that half of the permanent political class, the GOP half of it, was not invulnerable; that we didn’t have to put up with this idea that individuals were elected by the will of the people. They receive a mandate from the people, and then they arrive in Washington, D.C., and for the next 10, 20, sometimes 30 years, have total and utter disregard for the people who gave them that mandate and enrich themselves and become completely unaccountable.

I think there was a moment where alternative media platforms, such as Breitbart, but just social media in general—and as far as I’m concerned, without patriots like Sean Hannity, without the president’s Twitter feed, Hillary Clinton becomes the 45th president of the United States. But I think there was a psychological understanding—the biggest part of all this is that there was a psychological understanding that it doesn’t have to continue as it has for 40 years. We can change it. The American people can hold the elites accountable. We are not condemned to having a political class that is wholly detached and unaccountable to the American people.

I think that—I think Breitbart is part of that; I think talk radio is part of that; I think Fox is part of that. But so many other things as well, numerous, dozens of podcasts and personalities who have said: “You know what? Just because it’s been like this for 40 years doesn’t mean it needs to continue.”

And how fundamental do you think it was to identify that in the base that you describe, those folks in Harrisburg, [Pennsylvania], and other places all over America, behind the blue wall, everywhere, how fundamental was immigration as an issue, as a driver issue, in all of that, from your opinion?

I think immigration was crucial. I think immigration was the blue touch paper on the bottle rocket that got things started. Remember, Donald Trump through Sessions launches his presidential campaign. His first substantive platform is immigration reform and the wall. Don’t ask me. I mean, I’m an immigrant to this country. Read Hillbilly Elegy. I mean, J. D. Vance’s book—he’s no fan of President Trump. It’s one of the few autobiographies I’ve read in the last 20 years because of its importance, because it tells you right there, the people in America were forgotten. They were treated as irrelevant to the political class. There was no concern for not just outsourcing, but the idea that from the chamber of commerce to the Democrat Party, illegal aliens were needed to provide cheap labor and what I call the New Democrat plantation, a beholden, new constituency for the Democrats that they believe can be locked in forever with benefits and eventual recognition. I think immigration was perhaps the most important aspect of 2016.

And how important was Sessions as the first United States senator to throw his support behind Trump?

Crucial. I mean, absolutely. Why does he become attorney general? Sessions putting on that red hat and being the first senator to endorse Donald Trump was absolutely pivotal.

And Miller comes to the party, Mr. Immigration. It’s burning up inside of him. And Sessions, but really Miller feels like an inside guy that really knows it and can make it happen, and he’s out there giving those early speeches for Trump. And the importance of Miller in the process?

Look, Stephen Miller has to be understood in totality. This isn’t just Mr. Immigration. Yes, he is the most important focal point of immigration policy in the White House. But this is a young man. Go back and listen to the—as a high school student, the times he called in to Larry Elder’s radio show in Los Angeles. This is a young boy steeped in conservative thought since he was a high schooler. So I think immigration for him is his passion, reforming the system in America that is clearly broken and has disadvantaged the poorest of the poor in America, including, including, legal immigrants.

If you want to touch the humanitarian aspect of what Steve and everybody else is doing, who gets hurt the most by illegal immigration? Not you, not me. It’s the person who’s come here legally from Mexico, has waited in line, paid their thousands of dollars, is a manual laborer doing work in an industry where he has limited, limited capacity for advancement until somebody comes along illegally and is prepared to do his job for half the amount in cash. This is the humanitarian story, and this is what the people miss about the president, about Steve, both Steves, and this is the compassionate aspect of the immigration reform platform.

Talk to me about what it’s like to win. What was that like?

Well, look, I’ll start with the run-up to the election. So I came out vocally. I started advising candidate Trump—I met him in the summer of ’15. I agreed to be an adviser on national security issues to the Trump organization, not the campaign. I started advising him, and then I came out vocally. I was a professor at the Marine Corps University, and then I guess in October, September-October, I came out vocally on social media saying, look, there’s only one choice in this election, and it can’t be Hillary. Everything from Supreme Court to the Second Amendment is in jeopardy.

So from that point onward, when people would ask me, “So what happens if she wins?,” I’ll be brutally honest with you, I see myself as a pragmatist, but I could not allow myself psychologically to even countenance—I couldn’t allow the concept to flit across the transom of my mind that this woman would win because of what it represented in terms of open borders, First Amendment rights, the Second Amendment.

So I kind of put myself into a twilight zone of we’re going to win because we have to win. How did it feel on the day? Remarkable. I was sitting on my porch with my teenage son in Virginia watching the returns come in on our laptops. Was very worried about, I think, 10:30, when my former colleague at Fox, Bret Baier said: “Looks too tight in many districts. We may not be able to call this until the morning.” And I thought if we don’t track this live, the options for shenanigans just skyrocket. But once things started turning in Pennsylvania, in Florida and elsewhere, the feeling was incredible.

I’ll tell you what I’ve said to audiences across the country. Remember what happened on election night 2016. We were told on the night of the election—I’ve saved the tweets from The New York Times, from the Huffington Post—that Hillary Clinton had between a 92 and a 96 percent chance of winning, 96 percent chance of winning. This is a woman who had spent $1.4 billion on a position she thought was owed to her because of her last name and her gender. The media was in her back pocket except for talk radio, Fox and Breitbart, and a few others like the Daily Caller. She owned the media in America.

And then we won. If you want to call it divine intervention, you can call it divine intervention. I had a friend tell me, “Look, we had two wheels over the edge of the cliff before the election, and then he pulled it back.” And I corrected my friend. I said: “It wasn’t two wheels over the edge of the cliff. It was three wheels over the edge of the cliff. And the real estate magnate, the celebrity TV show star from Queens saved the republic.” And I still believe that.

When you went in there, Mr. Gorka, with Steve, Julia [Hahn], the two Steves, as you say, Sessions over at Justice, what was it like? What did you think you were going to get done? What was the feeling? What were you all aiming for at the end of that transition heading in there?

Well, it’s not well understood that when we came into the White House, it was a real small group of people. It was a handful. It was a band of scrappy insurgents who came into the building who truly understood the Make America Great Again agenda and who were loyal to the vision of the president, and just as important, who understood the president and why he won.

This is the reason for why we had the struggles we had in the first year. In part and parcel, it’s the reason for why I left the White House. It may be the reason for why Steve left the White House when he did. When we came into the building, there were less than a dozen of us in senior posts who were true MAGA people, who believed and understood the enormity of that peaceful political revolution in the prior November.

Apart from that, we were surrounded by 20-something kids who were doing the junior jobs who were great but weren’t really infused with what happened or understood the significance of it. And then over time, more and more Bushies arrived, so more and more people who were from the swamp who had long resumes and were plugged into positions of importance and significance.

And this was, in part, why we struggled for so long, because we didn’t have a lot of people in the building who really represented what had happened in 2016. And even up to the Cabinet level, whether it was H. R. McMaster or Rex Tillerson, we struggled. My argument to Mike Flynn and others was get rid of as many as you can who are holdovers and pick good people from the campaign who understand why the president won. They may not be experts in trade policy, they may not be experts in cyber or what have you, but we’ll train them up. It will be six months of sweat and tears, but we’ll get there.

They chose not to do that, and I think if you look at the leaks, if you look at the damage done by people who were clearly Obama holdovers or even just Bush types who were really not fans of the president, we paid a price in the first year. But with the arrival of [John] Bolton and others, we’re back on track.

When what became known as the Muslim ban, the executive order is signed on that Friday at the Pentagon, were you aware that it was coming? Were you aware—

Oh, yeah. Steve had given it to me. So I was given the travel moratorium executive order maybe Wednesday or Thursday to review. He wanted my outside eyes on it to see if there are any problems with it from a national security perspective. So I was fully aware, yes, absolutely.

What did you think of it?

I thought it was absolutely necessary, and I was very, very glad that we were taking action so rapidly.

What was necessary about it? Is it a clarion call? Is it a starter’s pistol firing? Is it lighting the fuse on a rocket? What is it?

Well, it’s a recognition based upon the Obama administration’s analysis that there are seven nations that are hotbeds of terrorist recruiting, and we don’t have the requisite tools to either screen individuals coming from those countries or the host nations are simply not capable of doing the requisite screening themselves in a way that we can trust the safety of the American populace will be vouchsafe.

So, yeah, I think it was a wakeup call that the war on terror is still a real thing, and we have an open door to some of the most dangerous nations in the world.

In the chaos that occurs, how much of that is political artifice and device by Steve and others to just wake people up, and how much of it is planned or just sort of happens?

This idea that there was a deliberate attempt to provide the appearance of chaos across the administration, that’s a fever dream of the left and of the mainstream media. What Steve likes to do and what the president is naturally very capable of in an instinctual fashion is to do important work, crucially important work, and then have others look at stuff that’s less relevant. … Steve likes to think he can do that in a strategic eight-dimensional-chess kind of way. The president just manages—it’s the tweet factor. I’m going to stop the dictator in North Korea from launching ICBMs across the Sea of Japan, but in the meantime, the media can have conniptions over my tweet regarding Bette Midler. I mean, that’s what he’s very good at.

I see. On that weekend, as all hell seems to be breaking loose, certainly in the press, Stephen Miller goes on television and defends the president, reportedly in a way that endears him to the president even to this day. True?

I’ve never asked the president as to whether Steve’s performance that weekend especially endeared him. That would be a peculiar thing of me to ask. No, look, I got a—what was it, Friday night—Friday it was signed. I saw the firestorm of reaction in the media to the executive order. And 2:00 a.m., I think, on Saturday, I texted Steve, who sleeps as little as the president does, and I said: “Steve, look, we need to communicate this better. There’s a real reason for the safety of all Americans why we did this. I have done some media in the past. Wink and wink. Can I be of assistance?” And so he responds back at 3:00 a.m., “Text… ”—what did he say? “Text Spicer now,” which I did, and then I was deployed as well, I think come Monday morning, to defend what was an absolutely defensible executive order.

So yeah, there was no intent to create the visage of chaos, but there was an absolutely apoplectic response by the left and the media. And we dealt with it. And as you see, it may have taken us six months, it may have taken us nine months, but we fought it all the way to the Supreme Court, and we won.

Now, let me ask you about something that happened. There is another side, as you suggest, Mr. Gorka, where—and that’s Ivanka [Trump] and Jared [Kushner]; that’s Gary Cohn; that’s a lot of people. … But the pull to the left, or at least to the middle, what’s that like inside for those of you who are waging a flanking maneuver on your side?

Well, I’m glad you ask this, because this, again, is fake news. The idea that there are two camps inside the White House, the populist versus the globalists, and they’re at each other’s throats, it’s just lazy journalism. That is not how the White House functions. Every White House, whether it’s the Clinton White House, whether it’s the Bush White House or whether it was our White House, has personalities and almost always A-type personalities that clash and differences of opinion. But the idea that there’s two camps and somebody’s trying to outflank somebody else, it’s garbage; it’s just fake news.

What you did have is you had—and I have to be explicit on this—Jared and Ivanka are not in some camp by themselves trying to undermine those who believe in MAGA. Steve put me on the Trade Council as an observer. I was every Tuesday watching Jared do his thing for the president, and I can tell you this is a young man, very bright young man, who I saw driven by one thing and one thing alone, and it wasn’t some ideological competition with the right or the hard-core right. He was driven by one desire: to make sure that his father-in-law is incredibly successful and that his agenda is realized.

Likewise with Ivanka. Now, Gary Cohn is another question entirely. This is a man who believes in globalism, in no borders, in free trade that is exploited by those that we don’t have a handle on, such as China. So yeah, there are individuals who are problematic, Rex Tillerson likewise, who has since left. But the idea that there’s two camps at each other’s throat, no. Bad, lazy journalism.

Good. So let’s have some real journalism here at this moment. How do you explain the fact that it feels like a lot of executive orders, that certainly Bannon and Miller and maybe you wanted to roll out, don’t roll out then, including the DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals] executive order; that things do slow down in that period. I understand there’s a lot going on—Flynn, indictments, [James] Comey being fired, a lot going on in those months. But it does seem like that issue, which is a sort of central—lots of promises made out there on the stump to the base, gets moribund, at least for a few months. So how do you explain that?

I think you just explained it. It’s not a question of these guys are losing; we’ve got to put them onto the back burner. Think about what happened in the first year of the administration. Think of what happened in the first 24 months. Look at the Heritage Foundation. The Heritage Foundation, every time there’s a new election, writes a book called Mandate for Leadership in which they have a laundry list of all the things the new president should do based upon a conservative mandate.

For President Trump, they wrote a mandate of leadership with 362 policy recommendations. After his first year in office, Heritage went back to their report and did a spreadsheet of what he had accomplished. In the first 12 months, according to the Heritage Foundation, the mothership of the conservative movement, Donald Trump had realized over 60 percent of their 362 conservative dream items.

Now, that’s a great record after eight years in office. It’s an amazing record after four years in office. After 12 months? I call what we had to live through, and what the nation is still living through right now, having to live at the speed of Trump. If you look at the economy, if you look at the fact we came in and the president said to us, “I’m not signing any new orders, any new orders, unless we first eradicate two standing orders,” because the Obama administration went crazy with executive orders. “We have to rescind two for every one I sign.” We said, “Great, Mr. President. … We got the government off the back of the American people, off small- and medium-sized businesses.

So they were just priorities. Again, immigration, the most important policy platform of the campaign. But again, what did we do as soon as we came into the White House? We decided we are not going to accept Obama’s vision that ISIS is a “generational threat,” meaning we’ll just have to get used to it. Our children, our grandchildren will be fighting ISIS. The president said that’s garbage. It’s a ragtag group of 60,000 guys with Kalashnikovs in the Middle East. He unleashed the military, and I have to give Steve credit—said, “We need a bumper sticker for what we’re doing,” and he said, “We must eradicate the physical caliphate.” That goes to Steve, kudos.

And what happened? Within five months, five months, the caliphate, the first caliphate since the dissolution of the original one in 1924, was history because we had a president who trusted our military and was prepared to use it. So it’s just so many things were happening, whether it’s renegotiating trade deals with Canada, with Mexico, making sure NATO is no longer beholden to this freeloader complex where 70 percent of the members do not pay their dues they agreed to pay; whether it’s making sure that China is not intimidating its neighbors; North Korea’s not exploding nuclear warheads illegally in their test detonations; on and on and on.

Immigration fell by the wayside temporarily because of the warp speed at which we were moving.

When Sessions recuses himself, impact?

I’m trying to think if I can tell you what the president told me. I’ll give you my words. Probably one of the most consequential, unnecessary mistakes of the first year of the Trump administration was Jeff Sessions’ recusal. Absolutely unnecessary recusal.

Impact on the president? Did he know it at the time?

I think he’s spoken about it. You’ll have to look at what he said, when he said. Look, impact on the president—I think it’s impact on the nation that for the next two years, we have to listen to this febrile insanity that show hosts on cable TV are saying the president is an agent of the KGB colonel who runs Russia. We have chairmen of intelligence committees like Adam Schiff saying, “I have incontrovertible evidence of collusion,” which he never provides. Yeah, Jeff Sessions’ recusal makes that in part possible and costs the nation $40 million and massive distractions in the targeting of the president and his family and his team for explicitly political purposes.

And as one of the lead people on immigration, immigration rules, standards, everything else, the cost of losing his access and influence to that cause?

Well, look, I’m not sure. As long as Stephen Miller is there to advise the president on key immigration policies, I think the damage was limited with regards to the recusal. So I’m sure it had some effect, but not significant.

In fact, it may have been a good thing for Miller.

Possibly, possibly.

So we find ourselves in the fall of 2017, and DACA is on the table, and the president himself, who—we’ve gone back and looked—is at a very sensitive position about the “Dreamers” themselves as individuals. We’re not talking about the policy here now. I know you weren’t there anymore at this exact moment, but you know this man, and you know his struggles, interior or internal and political at this moment. How big a problem is it for Donald Trump when Sessions says: “I can’t defend this anymore. We’ve got to push this towards Congress. We’ve got six months to do it, and it’s going to be tough”? And the press starts to beat the hell out of Trump, and he sees those pictures of crying Dreamers on television. Tell me about the pickle he’s in at that moment.

Well, look, I think looking at it from that angle is not, perhaps, the most useful way to look at it. You’re constantly asking me questions about how much trouble did this cause the president. The president is an unusual character. He relishes the conflict and the tension that others run from. This is perhaps what the Democrats, Nancy [Pelosi] and [Chuck] Schumer, stunningly for the last two years, have failed to understand. It’s not a man who—this is not a RINO Republican who runs from conflict. He’s prepared to stare you down.

Add to that the additional, unusual characteristic, which the left will never believe to their dying breath, that Donald Trump is an incredibly compassionate man. He doesn’t have to, in one of his first actions, pardon that black grandmother in prison who was there for drug dealing. He doesn’t have to pardon the heavyweight black boxer, [Jack] Johnson, who was prosecuted purely along racial lines. There are much higher visibility pardons he could have done, or he could have waited until his second term in office.

But he cares. Why does he invite the Parkland shooting victims to the White House? Not for a photo opportunity, but because he truly cares for these children. So in terms of DACA, why would he double his offer to the Democrats? The Democrats wanted whatever it was, 800,000, and then he offers 1.6 million in terms of DACA amnesty. That doesn’t sound like a man in a pickle; that sounds like a man who truly cares.

And again, one of the stunning things the Democrats still don’t understand, and Nancy, what she did when she accused the president of being a criminal minutes before she tries to negotiate an infrastructure deal with him—I mean, just how asinine can you be?—this is a man who is prepared to deal with anyone if it is in the interests of the broader American community or the world.

Whether it’s a dictator in Pyongyang or whether it’s the Democrats who want to impeach him in some kind of absolutely crazy, non-rational dedication to a false narrative, this is a man who, whether it’s DACA or anything else, if you want to negotiate, he will negotiate with you. There’s a reason he is perhaps one of the most successful real estate magnates in the toughest real estate market in the world, New York. So, you know, yes, certain things, there are vicissitudes of politics and your interlocutors taking certain stances. But at the end of the day, none of this is molasses in the works. This is a man who will deal if you want to deal with him, and DACA was one of those instances.

Can you help me understand the arc of Fox News? So back in the day, at the beginning of the “autopsy,” even Sean Hannity is in favor of the Republican establishment’s position. And he so articulates it, and so does Murdoch and Ailes and all of them. They really seem to be on that side. Trump wins, Fox comes this way pretty strongly… Chart that course for me, will you, of what happened there. Did you notice it happen?

Well, look, I think, again, I’m not sure that it’s the right question. The idea that there is a chart, there is a navigational determination for Fox News, it’s not how they work. It’s important to understand the separation between the news division and the commentators, which is something you don’t see on MSNBC or CNN, where everybody seems to be a commentator. So Sean Hannity may have changed his views on certain issues to do with immigration, but that’s Sean Hannity; it’s not Fox News.

To say what Bret Baier—I mean Chris Wallace or Bret Baier—these people don’t have a charted course, or they don’t—as far as I’m concerned, the most fair-minded journalist in American television today is Bret Baier. You can’t tell me on one policy issue where Bret stands. Why? Because he’s a professional. So the idea that the writ large is some conglomerate view of immigration at Fox, I don’t buy it.

Look, I was a commentator. I was paid by Fox as a national security analyst before I was in the White House. I returned after the White House. But at the end of the day, I was never told by anybody at Fox, “This is what we are saying today.” I don’t think that’s how they operate.

So that’s interesting, because Bannon absolutely says he declared war with Breitbart on Fox because Fox was in the corporate—

Who did? Steve did?

Steve did. And he said, “We were at war with them until they came all the way across to our position.”

That’s Steve.

Say what?

He declares war on lots of people. That’s Steve.

And?

I don’t agree with it. That’s Steve’s take. I mean, look, again, look at the personalities. Can you tell me what Bret Baier’s policy is on opioids? Can you tell me what his policy is on North Korea? You can’t. Why? Because he’s a professional, down-the-line journalist. He’s not an opinion host. And let me be clear, Sean, to his credit, always says, “Hey, guys, I do opinion television.” Unlike Rachel Maddow, he actually says, “This is my opinion, and I’m an advocate.” But the idea that he represents everybody at Fox News headquarters or Fox Business, he doesn’t, and he’d admit that to you.

So the power of Fox & Friends and the power of the evening programming, which we know the president watches quite a bit of, its power to influence the president is high, low, changing, important?

I think there are individuals on the Fox News network and Fox Business who the president trusts their analysis. So yes, you could ask the same question for the influence of any media outlet on any president. In this case, it’s certain individuals at Fox are people the president’s trusting of their judgment.

Does it surprise you to hear that Bannon told us he pursued Lou Dobbs, strongly, to be a presidential candidate before he landed on Trump?

Steve has lots of crazy ideas. It doesn’t surprise me, but, you know, that’s Steve.

Yeah. Now, let’s talk just before you go, let’s talk just a little bit about what has happened around the shutdown, around the post-fall election, during the lame-duck session. From what you can tell from outside, and you must have conversations with people inside with some regularity, what was going on? What was happening in that period right before and right after the midterms? Now we’re on immigration land, but we’re really on shutdown, the wall, all of that. What is your perspective on what was happening in there?

Well, I can tell you because I met the president in the Oval Office during the shutdown, and I shared with him a story, because my national radio show had just launched, and I had an incredible caller call in. So he sounded as if he were an immigrant, maybe from Mexico. He’d served in the U.S. military. His son had recently returned from serving in Iraq, I think it was, and had been killed by an illegal alien in a traffic collision. And this caller on my national show said: “I lost my son to this illegal alien. I am now a government contractor. I’m on furlough. And I want the president to stick out this shutdown for as long as it takes to build the wall.”

It was an incredibly powerful and moving call. And I shared that with the president, and it was clear to me even before I shared that anecdote that he was absolutely determined that the wall is nonnegotiable, and whether he has to start the government up or not, he will find the funding. Mick Mulvaney and others will find the funding. DOD assets that already have been given a mandate to fight drug operations will be used.

So I went there with a message from my listenership, and I needn’t have worried because it was clear to me the president understands that this is more than 50 percent of why he’s president, and the wall and immigration reform is nonnegotiable for him.

And the role from your perspective of Stephen Miller in all of this?

Oh, he’s number one. He’s the first policy adviser on these issues.

And is this—is the purging at DHS [Department of Homeland Security], is all of that Miller and Trump in a kind of mind meld? Why does Miller survive? Why is he in there so long? Everybody else is kind of gone, and there’s Steve in there tight with him. Is it the immigration—

Again, I find this amusing when the media says the removal of or the resignation of six people is a purge. Then they’ve redefined the word “purge” in the Webster’s dictionary. A purge is not six people. I have no idea—

OK, the clearinghouse, the—whatever you want to call it.

Do you know how many people Clinton fired in the ninth month of his first administration?

I get it. All right.

The White House was literally emptied by September, OK? All right?

So a few people were let go at the very top of DHS.

I have no visibility on what Stephen Miller’s involvement, if any, with regards to DHS personnel is. But I’ll tell you one thing: The president was not satisfied with what he saw as how DHS was implementing his policy directives at a time when we really have a crisis. When you have Obama’s secretary of homeland security, Jeh Johnson, says, “This is a crisis the likes of which we have never seen,” then you are on very strong grounds to see your department execute the requirements of securing the border in a far more effective fashion than they did.

So I think, you know, it’s not a purge. It’s—if a CEO sees one of his directors fail egregiously in their mission, guess what happens in the private sector. You get read the riot act, and if you don’t deliver, you’re fired. And that’s what happened.

Exactly. Somebody we talked to said maybe what should happen is that DHS in this moment, in this—now it is a crisis, like a serious crisis—should be run out of the White House.

No, no. I’m not in favor of—there’s a reason we have departments. There’s a reason we have Cabinet-level individuals. The White House and the National Security Council is there to be the driver of policy. The departments are there to execute policy. So no, I think that individual has as very outré understanding of the American governmental system.

Miller shouldn’t be running it from the White House?

Of course not.

Let me ask you one other thing. When the separations are happening, the television news, the 60 Minutes, the crying babies, the whole thing, the impact of that on Donald Trump. … Tell me what Donald Trump thinks when he sees that on all the screens in his private quarters.

I can’t speak for a specific instance of the president seeing a specific image when I wasn’t there. Yeah, I have no answer to that. So at the end of the day, he knows one thing. He inherited an absolute disaster. When we talk about children in cages, who did that? Obama put children in cages. 22The Washington Post: Who started family separation?View LinkWhen we talk about sanctuary cities not allowing the federal agencies to pick up multiple convicted felons after they are arrested for another offense, that’s not his fault. That’s not a function of one press moment or one photograph. That is the disastrous immigration reality that he has inherited.

And at the end of the day, whether it’s the situation in North Korea, whether it’s opioid abuse, whether it’s the economy or whether it’s integration, the president’s driven by one thing. Not transitory images on television screens. He is driven by the desire to fix broken problems.

And heading for the presidential reelection campaign, how big is this as an issue for Donald Trump and the Republican Party?

Look, who was it who said we always vote on our pocketbooks? I’m a national security wonk. Now I’m a radio host. But at the end of the day, that person was right. Most Americans are apolitical. We live in a bubble. We are apolitical creatures. If you get out of New York, Boston, D.C., most people do not spend hours every day trawling through political coverage. They want to be able to pay their car payments at the end of the month and buy their kids another pair of sneakers for the next school year.

So when they vote, they vote based upon economics. And as such, if the trend lines continue that we have seen, which are absolutely incredible, the most powerful economy we’ve ever seen, then there is no problem for the president. It is a cakewalk back into the White House in 2020. If we stop for a second and look at it purely through the lens of policy, of all the things that are out there from national security to the economy, it is the most important. The president’s success in his first term will be measured by his supporters not solely on economics or national security, but on the wall and immigration reform. …

So there he is in 2020.… That base that identified immigration as a really important thing is still watching. That’s really what’s going on.

Oh, the base is still watching, but you’ve got to be cognizant of the fact that they’re also watching what the left is doing. And what they’re seeing is what? Obstruction, obstruction, obstruction. I would not want to be a Democrat politician right now. I would not want to be Nancy Pelosi and be asked, “What have you done for me lately?” I mean, what have the Democrats put on the table since they won the House? For the average voter?

I mean, if you think—most people have no interest in Russia. They don’t think the president is an agent of Putin. If you don’t believe those things, then you’re going to ask a very tough question: “Nancy, what have you done for me?” The answer is nothing.