-How are you? Welcome back. -I'm great.
-Well, thanks for having me back.
-I want to get right into it.
You were an actual communications director
at a White House.
-Not a celebrated one at that. -No.
Well, we didn't realize at the time how important
it was to have communications directed.
-Yeah.
-But you worked in the Bush White House,
and now you are seeing this White House,
which is not -- I would say communications
is not its strength.
To be fair, they have very few strengths.
But what do you feel at a time like this,
when messaging is so important?
How do you perceive what's happening right now?
-So, this is one of those things that I wish we were wrong about,
people who are critical and who see the flaws.
This is one of those ones where when Donald Trump says,
"Oh, a miracle is going to take corona away,"
that's like the one-in-a-million things where I'm like,
"Ooh, I wish he were right."
-But the prob-- And, look, here's the other thing.
I mean, we have a global pandemic,
and he's "liar, liar, pants on fire" president
who saw this coming.
I mean, this was where it was always going to land.
-Right.
-We were always going to need him to have more credibility
on the world stage, to level with us,
and to be more competent than he is
when our health and our family's health was on the line.
And, sadly, it took something like this, I think,
to even shake the confidence of some members of his base.
A virus doesn't have a political affiliation.
-I guess time will tell if it actually
is shaking the confidence of his base,
because it is interesting.
Certainly, in the early stages, we are seeing
very smart people, very talented people
who are trying to deal with this crisis who are,
as we pointed out, also trying to do this sort of
triangulation of also figuring out how not to offend him.
Are you surprised when you see --
-Oh, the "dear leader" stuff? -Yeah.
When you see brilliant doctors who are making
the choice to say like, "And, also,
let me just say you are doing a really good job, too."
-Yeah, look, I don't know where that chip comes from.
I mean, I think it's part of the reward structure.
And he's very, you know, off with your head,
anyone that doesn't tell him he's brilliant.
But, I mean, you cover the same stories I do every day.
The things people say to him,
especially when the public safety is on the line,
are really, really troubling.
-You obviously went through some crises
in your time as a communications director.
Each is different.
How did you deal with the ones that you faced
in your time in The White House?
-We were ready for the bird flu.
That was the pandemic that we were prepared for.
And people like to joke that Bush wasn't steeped in history,
but he read every -- He was reading books about the plague.
We were all given sort of take-home reading
about how things spread.
We were drilling on Saturdays and Sundays,
red teams and blue teams, for how something would,
you know, go from city to city.
And you look at the way this White House communicates,
it's all about goosing the stock market.
I mean, no one even seems to have in mind --
I don't -- You know, if you've got kids in school
and you go to work, you rely on sort of
the infrastructure and the trustworthy flow of information
to make decisions about how to keep your family safe.
And that's where I think if this goes on, no one is --
Again, the coronavirus is not Donald Trump's fault,
but everything he's done in exaggerating about the status
of tests and lying about its severity
and saying it will just go away, that's all on him.
-Well, we talked about this, as well,
the idea that it's not
his fault -- right? -- that it started,
but if it had started under Obama,
Donald Trump would be the guy on "Fox & Friends"
saying it was his fault.
-He was. -It was Obama's fault.
-During Ebola, he was on Twitter every day,
saying, you know, "Keep them all out, lock the borders."
I mean, during Ebola, he did more fearmongering than anyone.
-I feel like somebody should go to him and say,
"Hey, you don't have to do this because you're Donald Trump,
And there's not another one like you out there right now."
-I feel like someone should go and say,
"Look, we've had to take down the comms.
The Wi-Fi is out
And you're going to have three weeks to golf, no Twitter."
And his approval rating would go up.
-Yeah. -We'd be safer.
-But he couldn't stay off -- -We'd be safer.
His approval rating would go up.
The doctors could function without, as you said,
the, you know, intermittent,
"Dear Leader, you're so good at science" baloney.
And we would have a direct line of communication
from real experts.