Ep 9 | Sean Spicer | The Glenn Beck Podcast

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How many of us go through life avoiding pain?

I mean, you're kind of sick if you don't, right?

I mean, we all do it.

We make choices specifically calculated to circumvent hardship.

We're genetically hardwired for pain avoidance.

But let me ask you this question.

How many times have you grown or improved from accomplishing something easy?

How do you know how far you can go if you've never been shattered?

John F.

Kennedy said, we do these things not because they're easy, but because they are hard.

Frederick Douglass, it's not light that we need, but fire.

It's not the gentle shower, but thunder.

We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.

If you combined a storm, a whirlwind, and an earthquake into one mega-natural disaster, I think that's what the equivalent would be of what my guest had to endure in the public eye.

You might even say he had the hardest job on the planet for a while.

He had to explain the comments and the actions of a very unpredictable boss while at the same time fend off attacks from a hostile media, all the while watching his likeness mocked, ridiculed, and laughed at on late-night television.

He's actually a very mild-mannered guy who had a bright future.

Now, what is his future?

In the end, he emerged with reflection.

He gained new insight on how we've lost the ability to communicate with one another.

What Frederick Douglass called the fire and the thunder gave him a unique outlook and a story that only he can tell.

And that is what you're about to hear.

Today's episode: Sean Spicer.

Sean, tell me who you were

before you were Sean Spicer.

Well, I hope to some degree I'm still that same person.

I think a lot more people know who I am versus who I think think I am.

I like to think of myself as a good person, as a loyal friend, as a hardworking individual, as a person of faith,

as a person who values family.

I think to get to your question, the difference is that I stepped into a limelight where people got to see me in a way that, A, I didn't even see myself.

And see a very small sliver of a person and say, make it, and make profound judgments as to who I was.

But I think that if you ask

the friends that I had before I walked into the

West Wing of the White House, they are still the friends that I have today and would say that I'm the same guy, except it's a lot harder to walk down the street.

We live in a really weird time where

people aren't always thought of as people

at all.

It's almost a

cartoon character or

I don't know, but they're not people.

Because you wouldn't say the things

to people that we say to each other now in person.

And

we get this little teeny sliver,

and that's all we know.

And that is just all who you are.

Period.

How much of that

are we responsible for in today's society?

I think there's some of it that we are responsible in the sense that when we say or do things, we are held accountable for them.

The difference, I think, to your question is that no one wants to understand the full context.

So if you screw up on a national stage, it's that becomes, in my case, the caricature of the rest of your life, or at least the foreseeable future.

And no one cares about anything else that you have to say or the context in which you said what you said in the first place.

And so, I mean, I guess to some degree, we're always accountable for what we say and do.

I think where I have a bit of an issue with the current environment is that then we sort of stamp a judgment on that person and say, therefore, you are branded this for the rest of your life.

And it's, you know,

I've been in Republican politics for over 20 years.

I've seen and always preached about the liberal bias and

I've seen it, but I had not seen it in the visceral nature that has existed in my world for the last 18 to 24 months in the sense that these same people who preach about tolerance and civility are the first ones to cast judgment, are the first ones

to denounce anyone else's views that they don't deem as being part of the groupthink and the progressive movement that exists right now.

To me, that's the troubling piece of this.

It's that

you feel like if you're going to get along in this current environment, that you can't be anything but part of the current progressive liberal mind meld that's going on.

And that's actually troubling as far as I'm concerned.

I've had somebody

who is

deep on the other side and somebody that I think people would look at and say, oh,

that person is

part of the movement.

And they have come to me and said,

I am being eaten alive.

I'm no longer pure enough.

I think

the left,

is there a difference between

the left and a Democrat?

That's a really good question.

I would argue that there is, but it's becoming harder and harder to be a Democrat that's not part of the left.

So do you say that as somebody who is in Washington, or you say that as somebody who is in the middle of the country?

Both.

I know people, I think, and it's somewhat true on the right, but I don't think as much in the sense that

there used to be people that you could talk to that would say, you know what, Glenn, I'm just not political.

I really don't get involved in this stuff.

It is hard now to not have a side, especially on the left, where if you don't agree to all the enumerated

progressive pieces of the agenda, then you are not good enough.

To your point, you're not pure enough.

And you can't just be liberal.

You can't just be a Democrat.

You can't be a hardworking, union-working, gun-toting Democrat that just says, hey, I believe in the financial and economic pieces of the Democratic Party.

Now you have to buy into the entire social progressive movement to be good enough.

And anyone who's just there because they...

you know, their father or their mother or their grandmother, their grandfather were a Democrat is not good enough.

And they are almost ostracized.

And you see this with some of the few remaining folks.

In my world, where I see it are sort of the long-standing political operatives, to your point about Washington versus the country, where I bump into a lot of these guys who have built a career in Democratic politics and now are finding themselves dragged further and further to the left because either their clients or the issues or the campaigns, and I say campaigns, not necessarily political, but sort of the advocacy campaigns that they work on.

are creating issues where if they're doing working for a corporation, they're trying to figure out how to outleft the next.

And I think people who would consider themselves Democrats now are troubled.

And you saw that in the last election, where a lot of people then ended up saying, Well, then I'm going to vote for Trump because I'm not necessarily a Republican, but I don't agree with the progressive left.

Let me ask you the same question, other direction,

Ted Cruz,

conservatives.

They come.

Ben Sasse,

what, second most conservative person in the Senate?

If you step out of line with the Trump train,

it's going to cut you in half.

Oh, yeah.

Isn't that the same thing?

To some degree.

But there's two things.

One is that there is clearly this, and they're branded never Trumpers.

But there is no question in my mind that you still have this swath

of Republicans, in some cases elites, in some cases pundits.

But there is a clear delineation between those who are bought in on the who are Trump Republicans versus Republicans or however you want to define the Trump.

So what is a Trump Republican?

I think where I see the big break between sort of the traditional Republicans and conservatives and Trump is agreeing to the style.

Right?

If you look at what Trump has championed, tax cuts, less regulations, judicial, strict constructionalist judicial,

these are Republican, conservative ideals that people have fought for decades on.

Pretty much everything except tariffs.

Everything except for tariffs.

And I can, as a former assistant U.S.

trade representative, make an argument that what Trump...

Now, I would agree that there is fundamentally a difference between what Trump supports.

I will grant you that.

But at the end of the day, what he is really arguing for, if you look at what he did with NAFTA, what he did with South Korea, he updated trade agreements that I think benefit American workers.

But he hasn't taken the tariff away.

That's correct.

And that's where I would agree that there is a demoniacal.

Yeah, if he was doing this as something and said, we're going to get a better deal, stick with me, guys, we're going to get a better deal, and then take the tariff away, I would agree with you.

Brilliant.

Right.

And I think that he's

the jury's still out on that.

But I think to the nut of your question, there is, in my mind,

where this all comes down to is style.

Right.

What these guys don't like, what the Ben Sasses and some of these other folks, when they ask him, when you ask a Jeff Flake, what don't you like about Trump?

It's what he said, what he tweeted, how he he acted, what his expressions were.

It's not the style, the substance and the policy.

It's, I don't like the way he acted and the style in which by he did something.

That's where the difference is.

And that's what I think is interesting is that, and I understand it, but I think, frankly, it's sort of, it's like anyone else.

When you look at the quality of a person, you'd say they're really hardworking.

If only they were smarter, they'd be the ideal worker.

And it's sort of like when people look at Trump, they go, well, if he would only stop tweeting, if he would only do this, well, then he wouldn't be who he was.

And I'm not saying I agree with everything he says or does or how he does it, but you can't look at a person and say, well, if only if that's like looking at me and for those of us who, you know, aren't viewing the podcast online and say, well, if you were only 6'4, you could play in the NBA.

Unfortunately, I'm 5'6.

And there are qualities to each of us that I think we would like to improve or make the case that if they had this, they would be X.

Well, no kidding.

In the case of Trump, I think for a lot of folks, I don't think he'd be president if he wasn't tweeting and being, have the style that he had.

He wouldn't be, and he wouldn't have gotten all the things done.

Kavanaugh would, no, I'm convinced no other president would have, even Reagan, had the balls to just keep going.

No, you're absolutely right.

There is no one.

Or to publicly

go after a North Korean dictator on Twitter, call them names, go to the UN Security Council and publicly ridicule them, and then say, hey, let's make a deal.

That just doesn't happen.

But is there,

back to the original question, just because,

let's use me, I really detest his style, but I give him points for everything he's doing.

Is there,

are we an all-or-nothing society on both sides?

Do I have to agree with every single gender on the left,

or I'm a heretic,

And on the right, do I have to agree with every single thing Donald Trump says or does, or I'm a heretic?

The answer, in my opinion, no.

That I don't, because as I said to you earlier, and I agree, there are certain the way that my mother and father raised me, the way as a Christian that I am brought up teaches me to be kind and forgiving,

and it is not the style that he uses.

But I would argue to your point is that we've had politicians on both sides of the aisle for decades now that have given us the most eloquent talking points, who have told us what we should and what we want and what our ultimate goals and aspirations are and achieved very little in many cases.

Richard Nixon was a monster and didn't act like it.

I mean, you know what I mean?

I'd rather, that's one reason I don't like political correctness.

You know exactly who Trump is.

Yes.

There's no hidden anything.

That's who he is.

We're never going to find a secret tape of him.

It's It's called Twitter.

He's already said

the secret is out and open.

Okay.

So

when you come into the White House,

you're expecting

what?

Because you've watched him operate.

Yeah.

And

it's an interesting observation because I...

Knowing everything that I did, I still expected some degree of normalcy and protocol and decorum of tradition and historical norms.

Now,

looking back, you or anyone else could look at me and say, well, what part of the movie hadn't you seen?

Because you knew how this was going.

And I think, you know, if you look back, one of the things that Trump said is, well, once I become president, then I'll do this.

And he created somewhat of an impression that that's what he was going to do.

And, you know, and I think, frankly, I looked at that and said, okay, so let's set up a structure and an operation in a traditional way.

And frankly, that was not the way that we probably should have looked at it.

There are things that we should have adjusted for and strengthened and bolstered and not necessarily put our attention to that we, you know, for example, let me give you a silly example.

We focus a lot of attention every week on putting out a weekly address.

which was something that every president had done and frankly had outlasted its usefulness

regardless of who the president was, but especially under President Trump.

Sitting there and him sitting in front of a chair and talking about policy for 12 minutes or whatever it had usually been was something that had outlived its usefulness.

But it took a ton of man hours to actually produce every week and a president who really didn't want to do it and yet we were focused on doing it because it was what you were supposed to do.

Now that's just one small example, but you think about how much time and effort was put into a product and

something that

nobody heard, that he didn't want to do, that we were doing only because tradition dictated that we were supposed to do it.

How long did that last?

Four months.

And it was a painful, because we were always finding excuses as well, oh, this week we can say that he's traveling and therefore he can't.

And it was painful.

We would have to, you know, we did one

on the deck of the USS Gerald Ford that was about to be commissioned.

And it took a lot of time and effort to prepare.

And yet, in retrospect, you look back and you you say, Why were we doing some of these things?

Why did we structure things?

And if you think about some of these little tasks, they require a team,

a ton of build-up to them for something that, frankly, to your point, no one was watching.

And he detested the idea of doing it because he knew that he knew how to communicate better than anybody.

And he was thinking to himself, Why am I wasting this time doing this outdated forum

that no one's watching when I can tweet that will get massively more amounts of attention than this product.

How much,

this is kind of a bet between me and my wife.

How much of

this one?

How much of his tweets are

he's really thought this through and he's, you know, really, and how many of them are him sitting on the John at three o'clock in the morning going oh this will drive him nuts I don't know too many of them come out at three in the morning I've never really focused on where he tweets so let's get both of those out of the way

I do but I want to be clear

There are days in which I look and I go, wow, that was spectacularly strategic.

Like you will go, to your point, it's like, oh, my God, this is going to drive this, which will drive this.

And then there are other days in which

I wonder, I go, did he do that intentionally?

Because he'll never tell, just so we're clear to your question, he never tells you.

He never goes, don't you like how I, you know, created this narrative arc that's going to end up in this place because I set this, you know, lit the wick on fire here.

If it turns out unbelievably successful, of course, he's going to tell you that's exactly what I intended.

If it doesn't, he's going to say, well, you know, the problem is it ricocheted it off, you know, this wall first.

But in many cases, I do think that there is a strategic element to how he's thought this out.

Others, when I'm going, how did you?

You know, could you have, because there are some where you're like, in terms of the attack,

there's timing where I go, wow, he really changed the narrative.

That's one thing that you can never take away from.

You can be talking about anything in the world.

He'll tweet and suddenly it's breaking news.

You know, he just tweeted X.

He can change the narrative in a way that I don't think not just any politician, but no one that I've ever seen can do.

And that's that's an unbelievable talent.

Now, when you use it and how you use it comes down to what you're asking about.

And that's something that only he kind of keeps in the back of his head.

So when you would come up and you would say,

I haven't talked to the president about that,

I've always thought that was a cop-out for every other president.

Yeah.

But when you said that,

I was like, yep, probably not.

I mean, especially if it was within 45 minutes of the briefing.

You can't, he's the president of the United States, right?

So let's say you're 45 minutes away from when your briefing is about to start.

He may be having lunch with the Secretary of State or a world leader or what have you.

You can't just walk in and go, can you explain to me?

So I'd literally say, I don't know.

Or, you know, it would be 7.38 in the morning and suddenly he'd be up in the residence.

you know, tweet out something.

I honestly wouldn't know.

Wouldn't have an opportunity to talk to him.

There were times when I'd call, say, could you tell me what that means?

Or, you know,

was there one that you could point out that you thought was spectacular and one that you thought, oh, dear God, no, just that it's just going to destroy my day.

I think the two that, I mean, not just, well, there's that, that's, okay, so the first one has got to be the Kofe tweet because

you're thinking to yourself, okay, this looks like,

you know, as someone who has trouble spelling,

admittedly, I'm thinking, okay, this is clearly a mistype.

Like, but you don't know, because maybe it isn't.

Maybe it's, you know, and

so you, you,

so from that one, and then obviously there was the one about Mika Brzezinski that, you know, and I'm not a big fan of some of the stuff that, how they behave themselves a lot of times.

I just, as I mentioned earlier, I thought that sort of the

attack on them, while I understood why the president was frustrated with them, I'm thinking this is going to, we had just had this massively successful, if I'm remember the timing right, we'd been on a roll

and, or even the one about Obama tapping the wires.

So there were days in which I understood, because of some conversations that we had had, why he had a particular level of frustration or concern or problem.

But we would be doing something where we had had, in particular, the joint address, that first one that he gave, that was just getting wild acclaim and praise.

And we're going, now this is going to change the subject.

Because in many cases, I think people were looking for a reason not to talk about the good, and we would hand it to them.

He's gotten better at that, don't you think?

He has.

I think that in the last, look, the first six months were unbelievably disruptive.

But that's who he was.

I mean, and it's not, I don't say that as a bad thing.

I think part of it was that he was very clear.

I'm not coming here

to be the next successor in the line of people who can do exactly what the people before them them have done.

I'm coming here to shake things up.

And so

I think that,

but all that being said, they've gotten their footing in a lot of ways.

And so it's, you know,

to your point, I think a lot of times there's a little bit of miscuing.

Now he's understanding, especially the full impact of every time he says and does stuff, the implications that it has, and the strategic advantages that it can have.

George Bush told me before he was leaving the office,

he said

he was very frank on how things were going

in Afghanistan,

which the media was making it look like a bloodbath on our side.

And it was actually going very, very well.

And

he shared some things, and I said, Mr.

President,

why don't you say those things?

And he said for a couple of reasons, but one thing he said was,

as a president, I have to watch everything I say, every move.

There are people that are analyzing in Russia and China.

What did he mean by that?

When he looked that way, what was he doing there?

And he said, so you have to be very, very careful on everything.

In that conversation, I never heard him search for a word.

You know, George.

Yes.

Right?

I would never want to be across a negotiating table from George W.

Bush.

The guy is off the charts brilliant, knows it, it has recall,

but when you put a camera in front of him,

there's two, and I had had a chance to meet him a few times when he was governor

in these private meetings, and it was, I was like, this is it, he's going to be the guy.

And since then, I saw him a few weeks ago at an event, and he is personable and funny and smart, as you said.

But then, the second when he was president, he would, you know, that's where you got the,

but until you've been there, right,

and having been the spokesman for it,

you realize that every single word

is looked at in the context of, I remember this

when Obama took office, Gibbs made some comment about our relationship with Britain.

Now, anyone who's I'd had the luxury of been in the foreign policy realm to some degree at the end of the Bush administration, we have a special relationship with Britain.

China is a responsible stakeholder.

It's all the diplomatic

speak that ensures that that relationship, everybody gets that it's being maintained at a level that it always has been.

The second that you change that moniker, suddenly everybody's freaking out.

Well, what's changed?

Did we break up?

Are we back together?

And Gibbs said something that was just a little off.

And suddenly there was this concern in Britain: what's going on?

What's happening?

And it wasn't anything, but you're right.

Bush understood clearly that every movement, look,

non-look, word, enunciation suddenly communicates this posture of the United States.

Did our position change?

Is it getting better or worse?

And until you are on that stage, you don't fully appreciate it.

And I think

you and me and a bunch of other people who have had that opportunity and privilege to see him privately and then obviously observe him as president know

what a contrast there is because he is brilliant and funny and warm and caring.

Totally different men.

The other thing he said in the same meeting, it was the day that Obama said as a candidate, I'll fly jets over into Pakistan.

I'll just bomb Pakistan.

And I was thinking, no, no, right now, Pakistan is our ally.

You can't just do that.

And I asked the president about it, and he said

something,

he meant this to

make me feel better, I think.

But it scared the hell out of me.

He said, don't worry, it doesn't matter who sits at this desk.

When they get here, they are going to see that on many issues, their hands are tied and they're going to do exactly the same thing.

Obama comes in, says, I'm going to shut down Gitmo, I'm going to shut down the war.

He pretty much did exactly what Bush was doing.

My question is.

Donald Trump doesn't care about every little word or every little look.

He doesn't care.

He is a bull in a china shop.

Do you believe that it would

somebody who was in the Obama administration told me the problem was Obama was a radical.

He was a he believed these things.

He believed in hope and change and all the things he talked about.

But when he got in, the system was there and it was the Clinton system and it was just, no, no, you can't, no, no, no.

We'll give you a little bit here.

Trump doesn't have that, does he?

No, there are guardrails, right?

That's what this is, is that when you walk into office, you've got the National Security Council, the Department of Defense, the Department of State, that are filled by a bunch of, and I do think this is true, in a lot of cases, well-meaning people who, the problem is they've got these guardrails, and they go, you can only drive between here and here, right and left, and that's it.

Because otherwise, we don't know what's on either side of the guardrails.

And if you go over the guardrail, bad things are probably going to happen.

No, key word, probably, because no one's ever driven off the guardrail.

You come in, you go, well,

you can't close down Gitmo because if you do this, you're going to release these folks, and they're going to go here, and bad things will probably happen.

And if you pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement, if you pull out of the Iran climate, here's what's going to happen.

If you move, God forbid, if you move the embassy to Jerusalem, oh my goodness, bad things are going to happen.

And I think Trump's view was, I don't care.

I got elected to do certain things, and I'm not here.

And what happens, I write about this in the book that I think was so interesting.

I've been in politics 25 years.

My job was to advise people and tell them, this is what you can do, this is what you can't do, and this is why.

And

what was hard for me is that after a few months, I'd say to

then candidate Trump, well, you can't do this.

You got to do it this way.

Or if you screw up, this is how you have to do this.

And he would look at me and go, okay, I'm not going to do that.

I'm going to do it my way.

And what happened was he was proved right over and over and over again.

Now, I'm not saying that, like, in some cases, I still think that in some cases you should say, hey, I'm sorry, I'd like forgiveness, or I shouldn't go after this person.

But he proved that you don't necessarily pay the political price that you supposedly, you know, this is sort of the odds behind the curtain, that it's going to be huge and it's going to be terrifying.

And oh my God, what's going to happen?

He showed really quickly, well, that's not true.

And all of these bad things as he was making decisions on Paris and Iran and, you know,

all of these things where he said, I'm just going to do it.

It's the right thing to do.

I'm going to move the embassy.

I said I was going to do it.

It's the right thing to do.

And look what's happened.

Nothing.

There's no war.

Nothing bad's breaking out.

And yet it showed that America kept its word.

And I think that what's fascinating about Trump is that he's realized, it's sort of like if someone says, don't touch the third rail, it's going to electrocute you.

And at some point, he puts his hand on it and goes, didn't electrocute me.

And so the next time it's hard to say, oh, well, Mr.

President, don't do these things that you're saying you're going to do because bad things are going to happen.

Because really, I did this and nothing happened.

I did that and nothing happened.

And he's kept his word over and over again.

And where I think he's shown is that for the most part, if you do the right things for the right reasons, because you believe in them, and it's not saying do dangerous things.

He's not sending nukes off to somewhere or going to war with country, but he's doing, frankly, U.S.

policy, which is we said that we're going to do the following, or I think it's in our country's interest to do X, Y, and Z.

Even on the terrorist stuff, which, you know, I think you and I probably agree.

I'm not a huge terrorist fan, but I understand why he did it.

And yet, the economy hasn't gone to hell in the handbasket.

In fact, we're seeing continued economic growth, unemployment continue to go down.

And every month, everyone keeps saying, oh, it's going to get worse.

It's going to get worse.

When we took office, they said he'll never get 3% growth.

That was cooking the books by the OMB.

And yet all of these things that he's done, whether it's regulations or tax cuts, the world hasn't crumbled as everyone predicted.

And that's what's different with Trump is that he's willing to go out and do what he said he was going to do because he realizes that it's not,

it is what he believes is in the best interest of the country and based on his experience.

He's still locked in a battle.

I just read from,

I think it was CNN,

and they published a story the other day that said,

so-and-so even agrees that

the Russians tried to game the election

and,

it had this effect and this effect.

And I thought, they are still,

they are still, it's like Al Gore with 2000.

It's over, dude.

It's over.

The president also, I think when he first came in more so than now,

the press was trying to delegitimize him

using anything they could.

But he couldn't just

step in and become the president.

He was feeling that,

for instance, the infamous

press conference,

where you had to be thinking, why are we even talking about this?

Yes.

Clearly, the pictures show that

the crowd was not as big as it was in others.

It doesn't matter.

Yes.

You're right.

Not only does it matter, but it's like, why are we...

everything that you just said is right in the sense that the press was trying to figure out how can we find some nitpicky way of saying that it's not,

you know, that the people on the mall weren't as many as Obama.

But at the end of the day, who cares?

Yeah, first of all, Obama was the first black president.

But a million things.

It was overcast and raining.

There was added security.

Who cares?

The point is, is that you came in as a transformational president.

You were already doing things, right?

And my view is that you rise above it and basically say, oh, yeah, but guess what?

I'm already doing this, this, this, and this.

And no one is going to vote

on or decide whether or not you're being successful or unsuccessful by how many people showed up at any event, right?

I mean, whether it's a town hall or a concert, like it's, if you're a, I mean, I guess that's a little different because there isn't a monetary aspect to it, but

you know, he was doing so many things.

Now, to the nut of your question, I don't mean to sound like I've taken a bunch of psychology psychology classes, but I think that there's an element which, if you spend enough time around him, you understand that you can only take so many punches without going, oh yeah, I'm going back at you.

So, if you just look at the evolution of the campaign, it was, you're not going to run, you're not serious, you can't win, your campaign sucks, your data's not as good as theirs are.

You could, you know, I mean, I would, on a daily basis, hear, well, you know what, Hillary's got 1,200 people in Brooklyn.

You guys couldn't possibly compete with her.

They have this, you're not good enough.

At some point, it gets in your head and you go, oh yeah,

we did do this.

We did beat you on this.

We did excel at this.

We did do, I mean, and when you constantly are told you're not good enough or you have this inequality or inequity that is not as good as what it's supposed to be, it's difficult on a daily basis.

It builds up and you go, you know what?

Here's what we did do.

And here's how I'm going to hit back.

I agree with you.

At some point, I mean, this is what, as me, as the press secretary, there were plenty of times when I wanted to just rip the bark off somebody.

And I had a fabulous team, including us, you know, led in internally by my wife, who would just go, you know what, Sean?

Calm down.

Let it go.

Let it go.

Don't worry about it.

Don't worry about it.

No one's going to remember that.

Focus on this.

Pivot off of that.

Don't let this story get to you.

Don't worry that kitty521 just tweeted this at you.

But it's difficult.

Glenn, you know this.

From, you know, when, you know, now online, when you lived in your people who don't know you take shots.

And no matter how many shots there are, it still hurts to some degree.

It's, it's, you know what, I didn't do anything to you.

I don't know who you are.

I don't know why you hate me.

I'm a good person.

I didn't mean anything or I made a mistake and I'm not looking.

And yet the vitriol

gets to you.

And there were days when I wanted to lash out.

And like I said, my wife, sometimes my colleagues, sometimes friends would just say, my mom, hey, be better than that.

Don't worry about it.

Two wrongs don't make a right don't just because they i mean and and

i had a good group of folks that would talk me down i don't know that that's and i think sometimes the president just after it's not just the campaign and being president but it goes back you know to being in business and and this legitimacy factor And so I say all that because I think to some degree, if you've been told forever that you're not good enough, you're not as legitimate as the next person.

And you've continued to hit these bars of success and said, what do I have have to do before you say, I actually did something good?

I actually succeeded.

And so, it's easy for a lot of people to sit back sometimes and say, How come you guys made such a big deal out of this?

And in retrospect, in a lot of cases, I look back and go, You know what?

You're right.

We probably should have been the bigger people.

We should have pivoted and focused on this.

I get it.

But retrospect and hindsight are really easy to look back on any situation.

And I've said this to people, I am a fairly reflective person.

So, whether it's a conversation that I had with my wife, and and I get better every day, where I'll look back and I'll call her sometimes and go, Hey, this morning I probably should have listened to you a little bit more, or, you know, I cut you off, or whatever.

And I'm not perfect, but what I try to do is at the end of the day, go, okay, could I have been a little bit better about this?

Or could I have tried to show that whatever it is, professionally, personally.

But I don't know that every one of us is wired that way.

Some of us have this insati desire to hit back when hit.

And so I can only explain it that way because for people who don't deal with it every day,

who

don't have to walk down the street and have people yell at them, who don't have people online attacking them, who don't get random phone calls, whatever, it's easy to sit back sometimes and say, hey, I can't believe you reacted that way.

But it's like people who are Monday morning quarterbacking and saying, yeah, next time you have a bunch of 200-plus pound dudes rushing at you, coming at your head and trying to knock you down, you tell me that I should have thrown the ball right.

It's easy.

I think what you've hit,

and this I think is where I made my mistakes with Donald Trump during the election.

He had no record, so I didn't believe he was going to do the things that he's done, which he has.

So things have changed there.

And

he was so

crass

that it just

couldn't understand how anybody would do that.

So I lectured people

instead of doing what a friend does and say,

what's happening in your life?

What's causing you to hit back?

Why are you looking to that guy?

And you just said it.

And the left doesn't understand.

The media doesn't care.

They don't look at it.

They won't examine it.

They don't care if they do.

They have punched half of the country in the face for decades.

Bingo.

Bingo.

The left controls academia.

They control government.

They control media, control so many institutions.

They control history.

They control books.

They control everything.

So I tell this one story in my book about how when I was in college, we invited Louis Sullivan, who is President

George H.W.

Bush's Health and Human Services Secretary, to be our commencement speaker at this liberal arts college that I went to.

And everybody was cheering it.

He was this African-American Republican.

It was their way of feeling good about having, until they found out that he was pro-life.

And then they protested him until the point that he said, thank you, I'm not going to attend.

And it wasn't until years later, I went up at this event and I said, Dr.

Salvin, I apologize that my class made you go.

But this idea that

I said to someone the other day, they go, well, my son,

you know, in the age of Trump, it feels less safe on campus and doesn't feel that he...

And I said, wait a second.

Do you know what it's like to be a conservative on a college campus?

You want to talk about the last 12 months.

I want to talk about the last 25 years, 30 years, 50 years.

Do you know what it's like being a conservative and being able to have a conversation at a dinner party?

Walk down the street.

I told one reporter the other day, I was having this discussion in a moderated Q ⁇ A, and I said, we're in Washington, D.C.

I said, put a Make America a great hat and walk down 15th Street in D.C.

She looked at me and goes, why?

What would that, what do you mean?

I go, you try it.

Put a Republican shirt on, put a Donald Trump hat on, walk down on Main Street.

You'll see plenty of Obama and Hillary shirts and bumper stickers.

It's cool.

But to be a conservative in this world is difficult.

And the problem, to your point, where you hit the nail on the head, is that they have no understanding of what that's like.

They don't care to either.

They don't have.

I think they don't want to open that door.

I don't know why they won't look at it, but they won't even open that door to look at it.

I met with a network executive after the election, and she said to me, we missed this.

So here is our remedy.

We are going to open up pop-up bureaus in different key areas of Trump country.

In other words, their idea of, well, since we don't, we missed this election because we didn't get it.

We were headquartered in L.A.

and New York and Washington, D.C.

and other major urban areas.

So

we didn't get this.

what was going on in Michigan and Pennsylvania, this sense of disconnect and of being overlooked by the government and by the elites and being diminished.

And that was their remedy.

Look, we'll set up a pop-up bureau.

We'll go there for a few weeks.

We'll interact with these people, maybe at a gas station or somewhere where they will be conducting commerce.

And then we will go home.

But the idea of...

We'll try one of these things called Walmart.

But their idea of getting outside the beltway is going to the Iowa State Fair, interviewing people in the terminal on the way out, and then saying that they've gone out to Middle America.

And it's amazing to me the lack of,

and you put it correctly, attempt to understand it.

I get that they don't get it, but they don't even want to get it.

Right.

And that leads us to

being in two separate groups and both sides being angry at each other.

and both sides seeing saying

we get it and you don't yes and there's and not only you don't get it, but you're bad.

Yes.

Right.

That's that's the even more difficult problem that we have, which is that there is this

decision that is made so early in conversations now where it's, well, I voted for Hillary.

Well, then you must be the following attributes.

And if you voted for Trump, you are a sexist, monogamous, racist, horrible person that doesn't care about people, women, fill-in-the-blank, minorities, whatever, because you could not possibly care if you voted or supported that or if you're even a Republican these days.

I learned that lesson because I knew my audience, and my audience rebelled when I said, What are you doing?

And

I did what I think the rest of the media should have done, and that is say, Well, I don't think I'm smarter than the rest of the country, so where do I have it wrong?

And when you do that, you start to activate empathy and you start hearing the pain that the country is in.

And I've heard it from

I've heard it from both sides now.

And I think there's a slice of Democrats that we have,

I have, I should say, I have.

By not being more careful with

by just throwing blankets over people.

There is a difference between a socialist and somebody who just wants more welfare for the country.

You know what I mean?

True.

That's a Democrat.

Somebody who says, yeah, I think we should have bigger, more robust government health care.

That's not the same as a socialist.

The socialists now, they're coming out, the democratic socialists, they're the ones saying no to capitalism.

And it's not a Canadian system, because that's a capitalist system.

It's not Norway, that's a capitalist system.

It is no capitalist, socialist,

state-run kind of thing.

And by saying, well, that's social, you just want more socialism.

I think we took a whole section of people that are, you know, my grandparents Democrats.

And we gave them no place to run because they said, well, I'm not a socialist.

And the actual socialists at the time were saying, I'm not a socialist either.

I'm just like you.

Right.

You know what I mean?

And so they got into bed.

And now those people are waking up

and they don't have a place to go.

Correct.

And that's we, but I think it's on both sides where we've driven people to corners who there is no way you can be in the middle now.

You can't sit in the break room at work and say, I don't have an opinion.

I don't want to discuss this.

Well, why not?

Don't you think that this is wrong?

And people are.

Can you see how they're not

killing people?

What would you, I mean, right.

And everything comes down to

black and white.

I had an individual the other day that posed this question to me at an event that I was doing and said, yes or no?

And I said, with all due respect, sir, it's not a yes or no answer.

And he said, it is.

Do you think that we should be spending X amount of dollars?

And I said, but you're acting as if it's a binary choice.

The only two options are yes or no, spend or not spend.

And I said, that's just not how it works.

You could, the question is, what do we do to improve it?

And then what's it going to cost?

What other reforms can we make?

But you're asking me a purely, should we spend X dollars on X problem full stop?

And we've created this system where you're either black or white, odds or even.

You know, it's, it's, there is no in between.

Pick your team.

And if you're not on it, then I'm going to question you as to why you haven't chosen either me or them.

Because if you're with them, then this is who you are, and this is what you are, and you're wrong, and you're bad.

And that's that's to your point, we're jamming people into corners because the dialogue has stopped and the listening, as you point out, has stopped.

We're not saying to them, well,

what's causing this?

What are you upset about?

Or what's the issue?

And okay, it's interesting.

Here's a way that that could be solved.

Would you think that that's

a good way or not?

It's okay.

Well, if you're not with me, then you're a bad person.

You're You're with them.

I remember

SNL did some funny mocking of me in a chalkboard.

Were you played by a man or a woman?

I was played by a man.

Then you got that going for you.

Jon Stewart used to imitate me,

and it started to grind because

he was much more unfair.

And then

it hit a tipping point for me when they did the restoring sanity thing on the mall after we had done restoring honor, which was a really remarkable event.

And they just mocked it.

And you could tell

they didn't even know what it was.

I could take it for a while.

When they started in on you,

was it ever?

That's kind of funny.

Yeah.

First one.

First time.

So there's two aspects of the question.

Number one, the first time it happened was when

it was Saturday Night Live.

It was in February.

And I'd woken up.

We were getting ready to go to church.

I had gone to bed just after my wife.

She had said, Hey, did you see Saturday Night Live?

I said,

No, I went to bed right after you.

And she looked at me.

She had gotten up early and was getting everything ready for the kids so we could go off to church.

And she said, You're going to want to watch this.

And

we have two small kids, and we were rushing to get out the door.

And I said, I'll watch it when I get back.

And we're in church, and my personal phone, not my White House phone, was buzzing just over and over again, text coming in the whole time.

And I thought this was a test from up above.

And so I was very good.

And I did not like it.

I thought, okay, God, you got it.

I get it.

I get what this is.

And so I walked out and I saw a bunch of whatever.

And we drove.

My son had said, can we swing by Dunkin' Donuts on the way home to get a donut?

And I was just like, no, we're going home.

And I sat there in my kitchen and I watched it, right?

And this was not, as they say in the business, the cold open.

It was midway through.

It had the C-SPAN logo come up.

And I see Melissa McCarthy up there.

And

now it's funny.

Okay.

So.

Number one, I start laughing.

And I'm like, okay.

Number two, in my head, I'm going, holy smokes, probably like you did, I'm now

going from part of like this iconic show that I grew up on reciting skits and, you know, recalling Eddie Murphy and Belushi and Murray.

And I like, this is weird.

Like, this is not, I'm a staffer.

Yeah.

I'm not a TV host, even like you were.

I'm not a radio.

This is not who I was a behind-the-scenes staffer.

So I'm like, this is surreal.

The third thing was, holy smokes, this is not going to help me professionally because now I am becoming the story.

But

as the weeks wore on, to your question, it went from funny to mean.

And I can take a joke.

I mean, like, I, especially in where I laugh, I, I mean, I'm, you know, I've been kind of

her on the segue.

Right.

Was that funny?

That was funny.

Okay, I get it.

But there was a difference.

So it was always like this line between, okay, funny, funny, funny, okay, mean and inappropriate.

And I think that's the difference is that where I was like, okay, I can laugh at myself.

I can go, okay, it's a, I mean, you know, the super soaker thing was hysterical and she's shooting folks in the thing.

And I thought, okay, maybe I should do that.

But there's an element where I was like, okay, they're, they're kind of now making it personal.

And

you could almost tell that there was this arc where they were like, you know, instead of continuing to be funny, let's find a way to really needle and be mean about it.

And I think that's where they've, where I draw the line, which is like, look, if you're going to be in the business, or even if you're not, I I think just as a good person, you should be able to take a laugh.

And, you know, someone gets up there and does it.

If Donald Trump

embraced the mocking of him, a lot of it, I think, would stop.

I think part of it is that's why they do it, is to figure out how far can they go.

And I think you're right.

It would be funny for him to say, okay, he's a guy that's done Saturday Night Live.

He gets it.

If he would mock himself, it would just.

Right.

It would be really good.

I've heard him do it recently.

No, I was going to say, he can, he, he is, um, people ask me, what's, what,

what's something that I don't know about the president?

And I say, one, he can be funny.

I mean, like, hysterical.

Two is that he can be unbelievably empathetic.

And I've seen it in my own personal case.

I've seen it with complete strangers.

And I agree with you.

If people could see those two elements beyond the other pieces that we've talked about, then

it would go a ton, a long way.

And I think it's a dual-edged sword, double-edged sword.

Meaning, some of it, I think, is he likes the tough negotiator businessman exterior that he has portrayed and built up over time.

And second is, I don't think that the media actually wants to show that.

So it's a, you know, there's two pieces of it.

Was

was

the line for you that they were getting mean,

or were you

starting to realize

I'm a person

and I'm

no longer a person.

So the rest of the world, this is making me into this cartoon.

And

that's more real to people than me.

Yeah, well, look, like I said at the outset,

I know who I am.

And I think what upset me was

if you asked my family or friends,

you know, two years ago or two days ago, they would probably come up with hopefully a similar set of adjectives.

adjectives But for most of the rest of the world, I'm not sure any of those would be ones that they would choose

and What's difficult is and part of the reason I wrote a book was because I wanted to say like I'll be candid about who I am and what I believe

and I want people to understand you still don't need to like me, but at least understand

And to be honest and say, yeah, you know what, in this situation, I screwed up.

Here it is.

You want me to say it?

I screwed up.

I could have done better.

But it wasn't like I was intentionally going out there saying I'm going to be a jerk or I'm going to mislead somebody.

It was, so I part of it was because I wanted people to say, like, look, I'm not one of these guys that say, hey, I did nothing wrong.

I have no faults.

And I would do it all over again the same way.

And I know there are several people.

I talked to a politician a couple days ago

in this forum and I said, do you have any regrets in your political career?

They said, no.

I said, nothing.

Nope.

I stand by everything I've said and done.

And I thought to myself, really?

Because I do.

And I haven't been in office, you know, for a fraction of what you had.

And part of what I wanted people to see is that,

and to the point of our dialogue, is to say, it's okay to say, I screwed up.

And I have been blessed with a ton of forgiveness of people, of people who have said, hey, I know you didn't mean that.

And I hope that people can see that sometimes if you screw up and you do say,

I think I hurt you or I made a mistake.

I hope you can accept my apology or understood that there was no intention of ill will or malice, that that might be a better way to exist amongst each other in this society.

Studies show 68%

of people

will

immediately begin to listen to somebody who, just the sentence before, they were convinced and they would not listen to them at all.

If the person says,

first of all, i have to say this

i've made a bad mistake and here it is and

we are by nature a forgiving people right

because deep down we all know we make mistakes

and the one thing i can tell you that i love more than anything else is when somebody says i forgive you it just there's this sense that you know that when it's real when it's real i mean

I'm a big believer in that the fake and phony apologies

are even worse when someone says to those who may have been offended if I did the following.

It's like either you're sorry or not.

And I've tried when I screw up or when I miss things.

I'm just say,

I apologize for the following because I did this and own it.

I think when it's genuine and real, and people can, I think people know that too.

It's like a BS meter.

They go, either you can tell, you know, it's sort of like, sometimes when you see a kid and say, okay, tell your grandmother you love her, and they go, love you.

But when someone says it with emotion and feeling, then you can tell it's a real and genuine act.

And for me, I think that part of what I want to do to the extent that I can is say, here's a way that we can, I can, be better.

Watching the Kavanaugh hearings.

I couldn't get past.

I was so

because I've experienced it with my family and my children.

And I have also experienced the thought that I will forever be remembered by those who write history as X, Y, and Z.

And it's nothing like what Kavanaugh is going to be written.

For generations, that will be in history books.

Correct.

And when they had to take his children out because it became violent and frightening, and you could see the fear on their faces.

And then weeks go by, and you see him back, and he is, he has righteous indignation.

What were you feeling during all that?

It's interesting the context in which you point that out.

Because when you have been wrongly accused of anything,

as I have in the especially in the last year,

you have a degree of understanding that I don't think many people do.

And so when I saw both the attack on him and his response, I said, that's what I would have done.

If I had been falsely accused, I would have come out and not done this gingerly well, Senator, you know, respectfully.

You're going to attack me, my character in front of my family and the world, and not expect me to come back.

To your point, I don't know,

One, I thought to have his wife, Ashley, sit there and listen to this has got to be unbelievably painful.

But then to have the kids.

And his parents.

And his parents.

I mean, it's

someone's worst nightmare times 10.

And I feel for that.

I don't, and this is what made it so difficult: is that I don't know exactly what happened to her.

I think something probably did.

I feel bad.

And I think we should treat women who have had

a lot of people.

I know that, but

the hard part about this was that I looked at this and said, and just objectively and said, okay,

if there is evidence, if another person comes forward, if there's a pattern or whatever, but yet,

you know, there didn't.

And I go, okay, so this, this, we are going after this man.

And to your point, for the rest, it doesn't matter what decisions he casts on the Supreme Court for the rest of his life, that will be the first line in his bio.

And I guess the difference between me and it sounds like you and others who've been in this where you've been accused of things or called names

in a very public way is that there's a degree of going, I know what that's like.

I know what it's like to sit there.

And to some degree, feel somewhat defenseless.

Because until that hearing and until he wrote the op-ed, which is, but you can't, you're being told by everyone, and I talked about this a moment ago, let it go, let it roll off your shoulder, don't respond, don't make it worse.

And you're going, this is my name.

And you want me to sit back and not amplify and make it bad?

Like,

how many people only heard the one accusation and not the response?

How many people are going to have that indelible mark in their head and says, every time I hear that name, this is what I think of that person?

And yet, in most cases, especially that one, you're being told, don't respond, don't do anything, we'll take care of it.

We just need to get over this hurdle, we need to get over that vote.

I can't possibly fathom.

I thought I had it bad at times.

What he and his family have gone through,

you know, I truly pray for them.

So, was his response

when it connected with America?

Because it did.

Yep.

Parts of America.

Let me ask this question because you're exactly right.

And I think we're on the same page.

I think it connected on a personal level.

People saw this man and saw the injustice of,

you know,

we're a society that is, you know, guilty.

I mean, innocent until proven guilty, not innocent until someone accuses.

I mean, that's the lowest standard.

That's what we broke away from England for.

You can't just do that to people.

So there was that.

But what do you think of the connection with

the half of the country?

that has been called a bigot, a racist, a misogynist, all these names for so long.

He was almost speaking for half the country who had been called names for so long,

saying,

shut up and sit down.

That's not who I am, and that's wrong of you to even do this to me.

I'm this person, not that, and I'm not going to take it anymore.

It was almost a Howard Beale kind of connection where people were like, well, yeah, that's the way I feel

yeah and it was all out there for people to see you're not reading this right you were watching it you saw his face the emotion the

the rawness

of his defense of himself and I think for most people when they laid it out and said okay she's made these allegations

there she needs to be taken seriously incredibly but let's look at the facts like you know she doesn't know where it was when it was he's laying it all out there And now, here's the thing that I found fascinating.

This is a brilliant man, right?

No question about his intellectual prowess.

He knows if he had done something,

he could have easily just said, you know, you remember when George Bush had his DWI incident when I was young, I was young and irresponsible.

I was young and irresponsible.

Okay.

He could have said something to the extent of, you know, when I was young, I was immature.

I did some things that were complete.

And sort of, but he didn't.

He was indignant because he believes

that it never happened, that there was no incident.

And so for so many people, like you said, it wasn't like they saw this and said,

I know what it's like.

I've heard about this.

I have a son, a daughter.

I would not want to be wrongly accused or I have been wrongly accused or, and therefore, now I'm fired up.

And it brought out a sense of emotion.

I mean, there wasn't a person in this country that you could bump into.

No matter where you were, that hadn't picked a side.

I mean, there were people that picked Dr.

Ford's side.

There were people that have, but everybody picked a side.

And it was intense and raw.

And wrong

because none of us know.

Well, that's what I found fascinating.

Look,

we were asked to judge something where there is no, yes, or no.

Right.

And for so many people, what I thought was fascinating is what I just told you is how I approached this, which is, I said, okay, they're coming to this hearing.

Let's see what we've got to have an open mind about this.

She needs to be taken credibly and seriously.

Okay, that's how I approached it.

But for so many folks on the left, they said, She's made this.

The standard on the left was she accused him.

Right.

But and again, I'm not looking to get off of this, but I find it fascinating when you talk about all these other instances that have occurred.

I think there's something with Claire McCaskill's husband that's just come out.

There is something that occurred with Keith Ellison.

All of these other women, Clinton, you name it.

How come those women aren't believed first?

To me, I think the problem I have, and this gets into what we saw,

which was the problem the left had in this argument was the hypocrisy played into it.

Because as people said, okay, well, if you're going to believe this, if this is the standard, what about them?

What about all these other women that have made this?

And it was, oh, I don't want to talk about this.

When

from Minnesota.

Keith Ellison.

I'm trying to think of, Amy Clovertar was asked, will you campaign?

with him.

Not even will you denounce him.

Will you campaign with him?

She said, I'm going to campaign for for the ticket.

When Kamala Harris from California, this champion of women, was asked by the Washington Post what she thought about Keith Ellison, she said, I'm going to let the DNC investigation

go through the process.

Now, stop for a moment.

How insane is that?

The Democratic National Committee, a political entity that probably has five people in the HR department, is hardly an investigative body.

And suddenly this incident that allegedly happened in Minnesota, she's putting her faith and trust in the Democratic National Committee to confront.

And yet no one in the media asked to follow up.

No one.

And yet, that's how the left deals with their own.

And yet when it came to Kavanaugh and this accusation, well, we should believe first and ask later.

I just think that part of what happened, it wasn't just about Brett Kavanaugh.

It was about the hypocrisy, about this accuse first.

Convict later, you're guilty until proven innocent.

And I think for a lot of people, they just said, and this is the thing, even the media tried to make this out to women versus men.

It wasn't.

More and more women that I talked to were like, this is, I don't want to be cat, like, you know, this undermines some of the serious allegations that people that I know have put forward.

And,

and I thought it's going to go down as a very defining moment, I think, in history.

I was really surprised when I

worked at Fox because I knew my job was to get eyeballs.

Right.

But I also believed in some things.

You know, everything I said, I believed in, unless it was a joke, but that joke was to get you to watch the point I was trying to make.

It doesn't mean that I was right on my theories, but I was accurate in the information that I presented.

And I thought,

if I can get enough eyeballs, There's got to be journalists out there who will say that guy's a nut job and is crazy

But that I mean he's showing the documents.

Hey, guys, come over here and look at this.

Can we just look at that and see if that's right?

Nobody ever went and looked at the facts of what I was laying out.

They would take my theories.

They would take my approach apart.

They wouldn't take the facts.

And I thought to myself, I was shocked, shocked, because I thought,

Somebody's intellectually honest and curious.

That was my lesson about the press.

What was your lesson with the press?

Oh,

I don't know that we have enough time.

I think the number one thing is how little

I always knew it was sensational.

Like it's, there's no question, take the bias aside.

The degree to which people will say or do anything to get a clip or a click blew my mind.

And I always knowingly.

Knowingly.

That it was, I'm going to be more outrageous.

I'm going.

going, I mean, I had countless instances where a journalist would walk back after a briefing and say, hey, man, sorry about that.

My editor, my boss really wanted me to make a big point today about this, whatever.

And it wasn't that it was, I mean, I'll give you an example.

There were times when they knew we couldn't answer a question.

Maybe it was a political question.

Okay.

Or I'll give you one.

Sarah asked, they asked Sarah one the other day.

They said, can you guarantee the president's, no, Sarah's, what, 30-something years old?

The president's 72.

Who in their right mind can guarantee anything unless you spend spend 24 hours, seven days a week, 365?

That's the dumbest question.

And then the headline afterwards on CNN was, White House cannot guarantee X.

Of course they can't.

No one can guarantee anything but themselves.

You know, I can guarantee I won't do this.

But if someone says, Sean, can you guarantee that Glenn won't do the following?

That's a stupid question.

But it's said for an intent, which is I need to be able to get up on the evening news and say, when asked today, the White House refused to guarantee the following.

And it makes it sound like you're being evasive or untruthful when the fact of the matter is, is you're being completely honest and saying, I can't be.

Or they would get up and say, Hey, are you going to win that race in Georgia 8?

And you'd say, unfortunately, as you know, because of the Hatch Act, I'm unable to think.

The White House today refused from the podium to comment on why they well, of course, because you know that you can't answer a political question from the podium.

And I was constantly amazed at the number of people who would ask a question purely for the goal of trying to get a clip or a click out of it when they knew the answer or they knew the reaction ahead of time.

The president says

the press is the enemy of the people.

I go back and forth.

I think, no, you have a right.

I mean, I read the arguments between the founders, you know, on the Sedition Act, and they went so far as saying, even if you knowingly lie, you knowingly lie, the press is protected to say that.

I mean, that's how far they went.

Right.

Okay, so,

however,

when you are feeding a patient and you know it is being fed this steady diet, and you really are the main nutrition that that body is getting, and you're filling it knowingly with untruths and poison,

aren't you an enemy of the patient?

So, here's here's the way I look at this.

I think that

as a conservative, as we talked about a moment ago, I hate when people make an assumption as to who I am or what I believe because I believe in the movie.

So I look at this and say, okay, to use a broad brush with any industry and say, okay, all lawyers are horrible, all doctors are good, all members of the press.

So here's the problem I have with that statement.

I look at The Blaze, The Daily Caller, Breitbart, Fox News, The Examiner, The Washington Times, and I'm probably missing 50 other people, plus columnists and whatever that I would call part of the press, the media.

I hardly think any of those people are bad or those institutions are.

I think that most of them are very good.

And so I think when you throw the baby out with the bathwater, then you get rid of all the good.

And one of the things that I did when I was press secretary is I started to call them.

I brought in local media.

I brought in talk radio for the first time via Skype.

And the reason I did so, and by the way, the other thing is I stopped calling on the people in the front row first.

I made them listen to other people's questions because my view was that I wanted to, to some degree, allow other issues and questions to get heard by everybody so that the Washington Post, the New York Times, ABC, CNN didn't decide what the narrative was every day.

the issues that are going to drive the media.

So my belief is that the media has a right to say what they want.

And if you look at the ratings, take a look at CNN any given week, down further and further every week, right?

That we have, as a conservative, I believe in demand and supply and demand.

Look at what's going on.

The proliferation of these people online, podcasts, talk radio.

This is because people have said, I don't want to get my news from there anymore.

I don't believe it.

I don't find it credible.

They're not covering certain issues, whatever it is.

But all of these people are rising and these institutions, yours in particular, because people are saying, I trust these people more.

They're covering issues I care about.

And so, I believe that to some degree, they are going to be a victim of their own

narratives.

Because as you look at a lot of these folks, they, you know, they're losing market share.

There's a rise in alternative forms of media and other platforms.

Because I think more and more Americans are saying, I'm tired of hearing, I mean, if you turn on some of these cable news channels, all it is is one critique of the president after another, trying to figure out who can fumble further to the left.

I think my line recently was with Khashoggi

within two hours, within two hours, they were saying, you know, Donald Trump is very close to the Saudis.

And, you know, his son-in-law was just...

What are you kidding me?

How did Donald Trump even get into that story?

Well, you want to hear the best one?

There is a tweet that a White House reporter sent out the other day.

He was on the streets of New York.

He apparently has a small child.

The child was knocked down by some rude, inappropriate person.

In New York?

I

never decided.

Well, you know, in New York, actually.

And so the individual, the reporter went and went after this individual and said, you just knocked my child down.

And they said something, you know, I don't care or inappropriate or whatever.

And the reporter tweeted out, only in the era of Donald Trump would this occur.

Think about that.

And I was like, do you realize that people can see these tweets?

Like, you were tweeting out that, like, this

moron knocked your kid down, which is wrong, inappropriate,

disrespectful, whatever word you want.

But how is that Donald Trump's fault?

And there is no problem.

The head of Politico the other day tweets out after someone says something about a white supremacist says he wants wants to take over the GOP, the head of Politico tweets out, I thought that job was taken.

And there is no

condemnation, no problem.

Business as usual, keep going.

So for all these folks who talk about Trump's tweets, Trump's comments, no matter what they say, it's all excused.

That's my biggest problem with them is they don't, there is nothing that one of their own can't do.

As long as you work for one of them, you're fine.

You're protected.

which leads me to this

there we now are living in a world that is playing for keeps

it's it's

you know when the communist 10

went to prison all those communists from the mccarthy era they still worked They still wrote under pseudonyms.

They still could get jobs.

Not anymore.

Not anymore.

If you are not part of the protected class,

they can destroy you forever.

Yes.

You went out for the Emmys,

and I thought very brave,

foolish.

Well, I'm not.

Right, but, you know, you might have thought, hey,

we're all in this together.

And normally, that would have worked.

Yeah.

They were not going to let you in.

To be clear, I didn't want to be in.

I thought, look, I'm a working-class kid from Rhode Island.

The idea that I'd get invited to the Emmy is never meant to be on stage.

I thought, holy smokes, this is cool.

And the criteria that I gave when they approached me about this, I said, look, here's the thing.

If it's funny, if I can make fun of myself a little and be and show, hey, look, I'm a funny guy, blah, blah, blah.

And then it's fine.

If you make fun of the president or whatever, then like, that's not like, go on your merry way.

I thought it was funny.

I get it.

I got plenty of criticism from folks on the right that said, how dare you collude with them, whatever.

And I thought,

but the thing that I thought was so funny is for

eight hours,

I wasn't looking to be anyone's pal.

I get this.

This is, I know where they stand.

I think they know where I stand.

We're not going to agree on policy or politics.

But they were all like, hey, man, that was funny.

I'm glad you came out and showed that you could be a little self-deprecating and funny.

The second that the left rose up, and it was about 12 hours from the time that it aired, and it was, everyone needed to condemn me.

James Corden had to apologize three times for giving me a kiss on the cheek.

You know, he did this funny, oh, that was hysterical.

Alec Baldwin, who had said something very, you know, nice, hey, that was great that you came out and did that.

Within 12 hours was saying, you know, although I don't agree with anything he did and he's a horrible person, it's like, wait a second.

There are plenty of times when I think folks on the left,

I don't agree with their policy, I don't agree with some of the things, but they may do something or have an experience.

I say, hey, congratulations, well done.

Or just being polite, being friendly, being hospitable, being welcoming.

I mean, having a, and yet for some reason, the way

that they are not chasing you out of the human race.

And this idea that somehow being polite,

kind, and respectful was apparently too much for the left.

And suddenly online and everywhere, it was, you must condemn him.

How dare you quote the phrase that came out was, how dare you normalize him?

He can't be normalized.

Which to me, I still don't understand that.

I think of myself as a fairly normal guy.

And this idea that I had to normalize, and I was like, wait, who are you to set the bar as to what is normal and fair?

And, you know, and I made it very clear to folks, like, I'm not looking to be normalized.

I'm proud of what I did.

I'm proud of who I am and I'm proud of what I stand for.

It's funny because when I

first sat down here before you walked on the stage,

I thought,

what am I going to start with this?

I thought, you know, I want to start with who he was before he became the cartoon character.

And the first thought was,

I'll see it now.

Glenn Bach normalizes Sean Spicer.

Because that's what they do.

That's what they say.

This is wrong

to take the cartoon character and break it apart and recognize, oh, wow, there's a human in there.

And the irony is, think about how many times

they've had, I mean,

you remember just since it's on topic, but Alec Baldwin had this outrageous fit with his daughter.

Yeah.

And how many of them have these breakdowns or instances in public and yet they go through whatever they have to Hollywood cleansing and they come out and suddenly it's okay well Well, we should give you a show now.

I'm not the one who publicly yelled at my daughter or family member or berated somebody.

You may not like my politics or my policies or what I've said.

And frankly, in some of the cases, I've said, hey, wow, I screwed up.

But in a lot of cases, I'm still proud of it.

What I stood for and what we fought for and what we accomplished, frankly.

But somehow they get a pass on everything that they do,

and yet I need to be normalized.

What is the future for you?

That's a great question.

You know, I've had fun the last year.

I've done cool, like, look,

like I just said, yeah, stand by.

I went out.

I had fun at the Emmys.

I've had some entertainment projects that have come my way.

I wrote a book.

I've traveled the country.

I've done a a ton of speeches and events.

I love interacting with folks.

And so part of it as I enter next year is to evaluate some of these opportunities and figure out what is the most sustainable thing for my family.

I've got a consulting group where we have a couple clients.

I've got to figure out whether I want to grow that.

I launched a website, SeanSpicer.com.

I've got a podcast of my own that just came out with Katie Pavlich called Everything's Going to Be All Right.

As we've got a limited engagement with Entercom for 12 episodes.

Let's see where it goes.

I'm not in any hurry.

For the first time in my life, I'm not staffing somebody else.

And I'm enjoying it.

I'm having fun.

And

I don't feel this sense of immediacy to determine what the path is for the next 10, 20 years.

But if I can have fun, make some money along the way, and provide for my family, that's the path I'm going to go down.

I just, part of it is to figure out which one of these routes has got the sustainability that I need in my life.

Would you do it all again?

Yes.

Would I do it differently?

Yes.

I'm proud of serving this country.

I'm proud of what I did.

But I would do it differently.

There are things that I did, there are things that I said, there are interactions that I had.

There are days when I look back and in the heat of the moment, even in a private setting in my office, there was a reporter who came in and did something and I'd say, you know what, just get out.

And I look back at myself, I go, who are you?

Why did you, you should have been a better person.

And so do I look back on small interactions like that?

Yeah.

Do I look back on press conferences?

Do I look back on advice that I gave the president or didn't give him?

Sure.

I look back on a whole series of things and I think that,

but I have no regrets in the sense of what I've done and why I've done it.

It was an amazing opportunity.

I mean, Glenn,

I grew up in Rhode Island in a family that voted.

I didn't know the difference between Republican and Democrat to college.

And here I am standing in the press secretary's office, 20 feet from the Oval Office with walk-in privileges and whatever.

I mean, what an awesome, awesome privilege.

I don't care who you are.

The idea of this, I didn't think I could get a tour as a kid.

We stood outside.

I have pictures of me and my parents when I moved to D.C.

standing outside the gate right in front of Lafayette Park.

This is...

I cannot explain to people, like, I feel blessed for what I did.

Would I do it differently?

Absolutely.

But I don't know that there's an interaction that I've had over my adult life that I haven't looked back.

There's in a test that I wouldn't have said, gosh, I would have studied a little bit harder.

There isn't a thing that I've written.

I said, yeah, I should have included this.

If you're satisfied with everything, God, I'd love to meet you.

I don't.

But I think that, you know,

I live life not only, I don't look back on, here's all the regret.

I look back thinking, how can I be better?

What's going to make the next day better than the next?

What's going to make my interaction with you better than the one that I had an hour ago with somebody else?

Because I said, wow, you know what?

The next time I meet somebody, I should be a little bit more pleasant, or I should make sure I thank them for this opportunity, whatever it is.

But that's how I live life.

10 years from now, what's your life look like?

What does the country look like?

Mine,

I'd just be shy at 60.

I hope that I'm not working.

Like, in a a sense of working for money,

I'd like to do things.

I'd love to be doing stuff with my kids more.

Like, hey, I'm going to coach full-time.

I love that stuff.

And I don't know that it's possible, but if you ask me, what would I love to do to figure out a way between now and the time I'm 60 years old to be financially independent and

do things I like?

I'm passionate about veterans projects, about adoption, cancer research.

If I can go out and be supporting things that I love and interact with my kids, that's what I'd love to do.

There's a little financial hurdle.

Right, right.

Where the country is,

I hate to say this because I don't think if we don't have a course correction, we're in a bad place.

I don't like where we are.

I don't like where we're going.

I don't like

the amount of the discourse that we're having.

And

so.

I think at some point we have to have this sort of national come to Jesus.

You know, there was a similar but different experience after Vietnam in the 70s where people were at each other's throats and we were riding in the street and whatever.

And somehow we healed.

And I wasn't old enough to understand or appreciate how the country went through that.

But I think that, you know, when people ask me all the time at events, they say, how do we go from there?

I look at it the same way they look at a lot of problems in the country.

People who believe in turmoil.

It's like, why?

Because you don't get out and vote.

That's how I, and I believe that when people ask me, what do we need to do in this country?

My answer is then just look in the mirror.

Because if you expect every politician to fix your problem of every world leader, then you're mistaken.

And the point that I make to people is the next time that someone has a discussion and they say, well, here's what I believe, or I'm not sure, and everyone's going to jump down the throat, stand up and say, hey, excuse me, let's listen to them for a second.

Let them speak, let them hear,

let's make a point.

But we all have to be part of the solution.

That sounds very naive and very, you know, actually probably very progressive in a way.

But we cannot expect government and everyone else to solve our problem.

We have an issue as a society, and what troubles me most is as I still believe the greatest country on the face of this earth, if people keep seeing us devolve in the way that we are as a society, then they're going to look at it and say, hey, that's not a bad way.

Then we can do that too.

Or we can behave that way, or we can model our politics that way.

I think that's problematic.

And I think it's going to take a lot of leaders standing up and saying, we need to listen a little bit more.

We need to be a little bit more respectful and civil.

And that's what I think where what really scares me is where we are now, where it's almost like people are encouraging,

instigating, and allowing a lot of the discourse to go so far off, whether it's Senator Cruz,

Elaine Chow, and Mitch McConnell, all of these people who are being attacked, Senator Flake in an elevator, Sarah Sanders, Pam Bondi, you name it.

This idea that that's the new normal,

God help us.