Leading America

CHAPTER ONE

2020: THE BATTLE FOR THE SOUL OF AMERICA

Every four years voters are told the upcoming election is the most important election of their lifetime. The 2020 presidential election is the election that will not only define the next four years but I believe the direction of our nation for years to come. There is no doubt in my mind that the principles that our nation was founded on are at stake.

Only by looking past President Trump’s tweets and the media’s never-ending critique of him can you stop and appreciate all that he has accomplished in just four years. Whether it’s strengthening our economy through a pro-growth agenda of deregulation, tax cuts, and revising trade agreements, rebuilding our military, enacting criminal justice reform, defending religious liberty, protecting the unborn, or appointing two hundred federal judges—which will undoubtedly leave a multigenerational impact on the landscape of our judicial branch—or ensuring our veterans get the services they have earned, President Trump is leading America and has a tremendous record of accomplishments.

For as much as the left likes to talk about justice and compassion, you would think they would be overjoyed to hear that under Trump, Hispanic-Americans, Asian-Americans, and African-Americans have achieved the lowest unemployment rate ever recorded, while veterans’ unemployment reached a twenty-year low, women’s unemployment reached a sixty-five-year low, 4 million Americans have been lifted off food stamps, nearly 9,000 Opportunity Zones have been built to invest in minority communities, and the FIRST STEP ACT was passed in what was a historic achievement that ended decades of establishment complacency on criminal justice reform. The act addressed the problems of over-incarceration, racially biased sentencing laws, and recidivism that undermined public trust in the justice system—things that the left claims to champion but were largely silent about when Trump got it done. This should tell you a thing or two about the left’s obsession with identity politics when politically advantageous.

President Trump continues to lead the country forward through action and legislation. The progress of the past four years can all be undone in one election.

Four years ago, Senator Bernie Sanders’s socialist policies were still on the fringe of the Democratic Party. Capitalism was still largely embraced as the backbone of our country. Today Sanders’s ideas are mainstream as the Democratic Party is increasingly embracing the tenets of socialism. Democrats who were once considered moderate now face primaries from the far left. They either adapt and embrace the far left or face defeat. Presumptive Democratic nominee for president Joe Biden is no exception.

These are not vague statements about the left. They are quite literally pledges from the party leaders. This past summer, Biden released a 110-page manifesto of platform proposals penned by none other than himself and Bernie Sanders. Ironically dubbed the “Unity Task Force,” the list is riddled with radical policies that will undoubtedly fuel disunity and division. The two not only vow to erase the monumental progress that President Trump has made on tax reform, immigration, criminal justice reform, and the military, but they also promise to replace it with an agenda that embraces job-killing tax increases, costly and burdensome environmental regulations, government-run health care, open borders, and even an effort to “reimagine policing” by adhering to the radical demands of the “defund the police” movement. At its core, the plan seeks to redefine our great nation as a mere tool of oppression—one that rightfully succumbs to “abolish” culture and, in the words of Biden, needs “revolutionary institutional changes.”

It’s not only capitalism that’s at stake, it is also our constitution. For as long as I can remember, I was taught that the guiding principle of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was based on the concept of allowing for the free expression—and exchange—of ideas. While I might not like or agree with what someone said, I would fight for their right to express it no matter how much I may disagree with it. Unfortunately, this understanding is fading quickly. More and more, our society has delved into a mob mentality that believes that if you don’t share the prevailing leftist view, then you need to be canceled and pushed out to the margins of society.

In July 2020, 153 prominent writers, artists, and thought leaders signed their names to an opinion piece in Harper’s Magazine titled “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate.” They wrote that “the free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted.” They further noted that “an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty” was becoming an increasing problem in society. The piece ran in the wake of racial unrest stemming from the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer and noted: “we refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other… as writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes.”

It wasn’t long before backlash and even retractions from some of the signers ensued. Something that appeared to be uncontroversial and unifying resulted in liberals having to apologize for briefly making so much sense. Welcome to the current state of American society—one in which all politics is personal and all persons are forced to be political.

As White House press secretary, I said, “Democrats are using every tool at their disposal to get in the way of President Trump’s attempt at making America great again.” At the time, I was talking about the obstruction and boycotts of hearings for President Trump’s cabinet members and judicial appointments, but since then, I have seen it not only in the obstruction to the entire Trump agenda, but also within every aspect of life and in every sector of society. I’ve started to realize just how pervasive and cynical their efforts are. If you’re not actively looking for them, much of it can be easily missed. In fact, there are so many things that we see in our day-to-day lives that we don’t realize.

When you send your kids off to school, you’re probably not wondering whether the teachers are instilling in them values that run contrary to your own. I can guarantee you’re not wondering if the lesson plans include the act of stomping on the American flag or if the teachers are instructed to “explicitly reject and resist” your role as a parent. Those ideas certainly never crossed my mind.

Likewise, your college student could probably graduate with honors and go on to earn a PhD without realizing how indoctrinated they are. It happens all the time—and quite frankly, it explains why we’re seeing so many of today’s thought leaders and academic elites lead the liberal agenda at the local level and on the national stage.

You could binge-watch an entire Netflix series without noticing the underlying political agenda that it’s planting into your subconscious. For many folks, tuning into a late-night show or going to see a movie is a way to unwind. But if you pay close attention, you’ll see that Hollywood is one of the left’s most effective tools when it comes to seeding a political narrative or influencing culture.

You could spend hours browsing social media without knowing that your newsfeed is carefully crafted to present you with the information that Silicon Valley leftists want you to see.

You could spend thousands of dollars at your favorite retail chain, never knowing that your money might be funding a political cause that diametrically opposes your values.

We didn’t get here overnight. Each of these institutions in society has been subtly pushing an agenda for decades.

For the left, it’s all politics, all the time. Our country has become so divided that everything now devolves into politics and pits regular Americans against one another. Too often, politics is brought up and people are forced to choose a side.

Are you going to kneel or not?

Will they go to the White House or not?

Will they apologize?

Will they boycott this company?

I’m no stranger to politically charged questions. My job as White House press secretary was to answer them. But these are questions that reflect the partisan political lens that we’re conditioned to look at everything through, politically related or not.

Working in the Trump White House has given me great insight into the inner workings of one of the most out-of-the-box presidential communications operations in modern history. From the outside looking in, the media would have you believe that President Trump is some out-of-control madman because he doesn’t conform to their definition of what a “normal” president should be. They hate that he refuses to stay inside the lines they have drawn for him and instead prefers to circumvent their outdated legacy structures altogether to talk to the people directly.

Left-wing media figures seem to be in a constant state of manufactured outrage because President Trump doesn’t communicate the same way President Obama did. They would have you believe that their frustrations with President Trump stem from his “unpresidential” style of communication. Like most gripes from the mainstream media, this is far from the truth.

Does President Trump tell it like it is? Yes. Does he let the American people know his thoughts through Twitter? Of course. Has he been one of the most consequential presidents in modern American history? Yes.

The fact is the blue checkmark mafia is really just operating from a place of desperation. They have no option but to cling to their poor attempts at moral indignation to promote a clearly partisan agenda. They despise that President Trump understands that speeches don’t change lives—policies do. Where President Obama talked about relief for the poor and middle class, Trump actually cut taxes. Where Obama gave wonderful speeches about creating jobs, President Trump actually cut regulations and ignited an economic boom.

President Obama might have said the right things, but at the end of the day, President Trump is the one implementing the right policies. The left-dominated media can’t report that, though. If they did they would be betraying their true motivating force, the domination of a liberal agenda. The White House press corps is obsessed with tweets, not results. I have come to discover that the questions they don’t ask, the headlines they won’t write, and the stories they chose not to cover are more telling than what they do ask, write, and cover.

I’ve always known that the media and Hollywood tilted left, but over the last couple of years, I’ve experienced firsthand the tactics of the left to control the narrative and drown out voices on the right within every major American institution. From preschools to college campuses, from corporations to Hollywood, from Big Tech to the media, the left has long dominated the most powerful institutions in America. The mainstream media, while popular to blame, is not the cause; rather, it is a symptom of a much broader and multifaceted effort to dominate culture and derail the Trump agenda.

Working with the Republican National Committee (RNC) and the Trump campaign, transition team, and administration, serving as a Hollywood character cast member, being a target of Big Tech censorship, speaking on college campuses, and raising children in American schools, I have seen the left from many different angles over the past several years. I’ve been on both sides of the newsroom. I’ve been both the strategist and the interviewer. I’ve shaped the national media narrative and have been shaped by it. I’ve been boycotted, protested, banned, and smeared by the very people I had worked with for years. The boycotts didn’t end when I left the White House, though. As you’ll explore in the forthcoming chapters, I’ve been boycotted and protested everywhere from college campuses to bookstores, and maybe the most absurd, a reality dancing competition.

My experience with Dancing with the Stars is indicative of just that. When simply having a diverse group of people with different opinions on the same stage can no longer be tolerated by the left, you know there’s something much larger at stake. It was not the first time I sparked national outrage, and I’ll be lucky if it is the last. Like millions of Americans, I was guilty of the ultimate crime: being a conservative and supporting the Trump agenda.

Just as they’ve done with everything else, the left turned a dancing reality show into a political battleground. For the left, it wasn’t a dancing competition—it was a competition for everyone, that is, except for anyone who they might disagree with politically. They will stop at nothing in their attempt to turn capitalism into socialism, patriotism into globalism, and American values into progressive values. They’re willing to run small businesses into economic ruin, turn academic institutions into harmful social experiment centers, use children as political pawns, and ruin America’s favorite pastimes with political polarization—and they’re leaving a nearly unrecognizable country in their wake.

Democrats realized that attacking President Trump directly doesn’t get results and are instead directing their disdain at his supporters, so we can only expect my experience to become a reality for millions of more freedom-loving Americans who haven’t already experienced it. The subtle tactics are becoming less subtle by the day, and no American can afford to sit back and watch.

As we go through this book, I’ll be pointing out all of the major attacks on our country, from our history to our Constitution to our deeply held values and beliefs, but my hope is that if we stay the course, we can overcome these things. After reading this book, you will have a clear picture of what’s exactly at stake in the 2020 election and beyond. More important, you will become more intuitively aware of the multifaceted forces, both covert and overt, that are being used to sow division in our country and transform these core values established in the U.S. Constitution. The next time you turn on a TV show, send your kid to school, read your favorite newspaper, or browse the web, you will be equipped with the knowledge to understand the past, present, and future of the leftist movement and the wherewithal to uphold your own ideas and defend your own beliefs—which is exactly what our country’s founders meant when they drafted the First Amendment.