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00:02:47.000Joining us now is a good friend and great American patriot, author of the new book, The Darkness Has Not Overcome: Lessons on Faith and Politics from Inside the Halls of Power by Cliff Sims.
00:03:06.000Man, so I set out after I left the Office of the Director of National Intelligence after working in the White House, and I realized there were a lot of lessons that I had learned.
00:03:15.000Some of them I was trying to come to terms with myself, but also things that I realized that could apply to a lot of people's lives.
00:03:23.000And I kind of combined that with this sense in my own life where I've really struggled over the years to frankly do a daily devotional, to be in the Bible every day, like I know that I'm supposed to be.
00:03:37.000And so I basically wrote the political junkies dream devotional book.
00:03:42.000So like if you want to know what it's like inside the government's doomsday bunker or what it's like inside, you know, what's inside the president's nuclear football, what's going on on Air Force One or inside the halls of the CIA, I tell all of those stories, take you behind the curtain there.
00:03:57.000But also then each of those stories jumps into a faith lesson, something straight out of the Bible, some wisdom that could apply to anybody's life, no matter what you're going through, whether you're trying to deal with anxiety or depression or with the attraction of power or trying to make sense of this moment in American politics and culture, whatever it may be, I've packed all of that into the darkness is overcome.
00:04:21.000And I'm excited to see it hit the stores this week.
00:04:24.000Yeah, it is the darkness has not overcome.
00:04:26.000So tell our audience about the work you did with Trump and some of the lessons alongside of it.
00:04:34.000500 days in the White House helping run messaging and communications there.
00:04:38.000And then later came back in the administration as deputy director of national intelligence.
00:04:42.000And so, I mean, there's a million lessons that I can learn that I could, you know, communicate to people.
00:04:48.000So picking one is tough, but I tell you, one that is particularly relevant right now is a story that I tell from when Trump moved the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
00:04:59.000And this was a moment, a decision that presidents going back to Reagan had promised to do it and just always back down.
00:05:07.000And Trump said, no, I'm going to actually follow through and do this.
00:05:11.000And Joe Biden at the time said that this was going to set the world on fire, that the Middle East was going to descend into chaos and basically the arguments that people have been making for decades about why you shouldn't do this.
00:05:22.000And Trump just stuck to his word and he did it.
00:05:25.000And the day after he made that decision, we were standing in the outer oval looking at the TV there kind of in between meetings.
00:05:32.000And it was, you know, there were protests that looked a lot like what we're seeing on college campuses now.
00:05:37.000You know, they were chanting Trump, Trump, you will see Palestine will be free, you know, things like that.
00:05:43.000And they're hanging him in effigy and burning American flags.
00:05:46.000And I had a sense of, I don't know how to describe it other than if you were to see somebody trip on the sidewalk and you didn't want them to see that you had seen that.
00:05:57.000You don't want the like secondhand embarrassment that goes along with that.
00:06:00.000And not that the president had done anything wrong, but I just felt this strange sense standing next to someone who is, you know, witnessing themselves endure the most visceral criticism you possibly could imagine.
00:06:12.000And I didn't know how to feel about that.
00:06:14.000And Trump looked at me after watching it for a minute and he said, all right, what's next?
00:06:20.000As in, what's next on our schedule today?
00:06:25.000And I gained an appreciation, one, for the courage that Trump had to do the right thing, even in the face of intense criticism, but also in a lesson that we can apply to all of our lives, which is our willingness to endure or our criticism to achieve truly great things is going to be directly proportionate to our willingness to endure criticism or our intentions being misunderstood.
00:06:48.000Like Trump had made peace with being misunderstood and being criticized in a way that has allowed him to achieve like truly remarkable things.
00:06:56.000So that's a lesson that I've tried to make a core operating principle of my life and one of dozens and dozens of lessons that I talk about in the book.
00:07:05.000The book is The Darkness Has Not Overcome.
00:07:09.000So Cliff, spending a lot of time with President Trump, what do you wish people knew most about him?
00:07:17.000And what are some of the misrepresentations that he has to navigate in public opinion that you know are not true?
00:07:24.000Well, there's a lot, but one of them is you know this as well as anybody.
00:07:30.000You cannot be in a room with Donald Trump, spend any amount of time with him and walk out not liking him.
00:07:38.000No matter what your preconceived notions were before you came into that room.
00:07:42.000And a story that I tell about in the book that kind of illustrates just how nasty a place Washington, D.C. is, you know, the Congressional Black caucus, a group of Democrat lawmakers were coming in to meet with the president in the cabinet room.
00:07:57.000And they were really, really upset with him because during the campaign, he had said, basically, black voters have been historically supportive of the Democrat Party.
00:08:07.000And if you just look at what you have gotten for that support, it's really hard to make an argument that they've been good for your community.
00:08:18.000They were so mad about that walking into the room.
00:08:20.000But in the course of an hour, I watched them get won over by him as a personality, as a person, as a human, to the point that Cedric Richmond, who at the time was the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus and was later a senior aide to Joe Biden, looked across the table at Donald Trump and said, Mr. President, I don't agree with everything that you do or you say, but I truly believe that you have the chance to be a truly great president.
00:09:21.000Now, having seen what happened behind closed doors and the way that they acted toward him, I thought, man, this is going to be a real opportunity for there to be some reconciliation here and an opportunity to build some bridges if they just tell the truth about their firsthand experience with the president.
00:09:37.000And unfortunately, they wouldn't do it.
00:09:39.000They still alluded to him, you know, the possibility of him being a racist even after that.
00:09:46.000It just showed just how eaten up by politics a lot of these people are.
00:09:52.000But also, you know, it's one of the things that President Trump has to deal with.
00:09:55.000People don't get to see how he is behind closed doors that even his adversaries walk into the room and they walk out liking him on a personal level, whether they're willing to actually say that publicly or not.
00:10:06.000Yeah, some people say that he doesn't pay attention to detail, that he's what was your experience with that, Cliff, being there in those first, that first segment of the presidency.
00:10:18.000Is he someone that really understands the details, someone that understands what's happening around him?
00:10:25.000I mean, he's involved in like in every detail in some ways.
00:10:27.000I mean, when a new president, this may be a random example, but I'll just give it to you.
00:10:32.000Every new president comes into the White House gets to remodel the place.
00:10:35.000And they usually do it in conjunction with the first lady, redesign the Oval Office and that kind of thing.
00:10:40.000The president was intricately involved as a builder himself in the remodel of the West Wing and picking out, I want the rug from the Reagan administration.
00:10:50.000I want the couches from the Bush administration.
00:11:06.000Finally, get him back on the phone and said, no, this is the wallpaper that we want here for the Oval Office.
00:11:11.000And they freak out because they had stopped making that wallpaper three years before.
00:11:15.000So they drop everything, hand-mix the inks, make 96 panels of double-sided wallpaper and deliver it all to the Oval Office by dinner time that night.
00:11:26.000And so the president's definitely involved in the details, definitely attuned to what's going on around him.
00:11:31.000And I think the real opportunity he has in the next administration is he now understands the personalities and the people in Washington, D.C.
00:11:41.000And I think he's going to have a real chance to put some people in place and in these jobs around him who are going to execute on his vision.
00:11:54.000If you're an aide, you have to subordinate your wishes to the duly elected president of the United States.
00:12:00.000And I think the president's going to have an opportunity to put some people in place in the next administration who are going to execute on his vision for the country.
00:12:08.000And that's going to be the big difference, I think, in the next administration from the first one.
00:13:41.000And I did have to get it cleared through pre-publication review to make sure there was no classified information in there.
00:13:46.000But I was able to share some pretty cool things.
00:13:49.000And one was: you know, we worked at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, we would occasionally do continuity of government exercises.
00:13:58.000And basically, if you watch any of the doomsday movies that Hollywood puts out, you know, what happens if there's a nuclear war?
00:14:05.000What happens if there's some giant storm that knocks out power on the whole eastern seaboard?
00:14:10.000Whatever it may be, the government has a plan for all of those things.
00:14:14.000And some of that is ensuring that there are places outside of Washington, D.C., where the government could continue to function in those events.
00:14:23.000And so I was able to visit one of those top secret locations and do some exercises related to those things.
00:14:30.000And so you get to, you know, basically the side of this mountain and a giant metal blast door opens up and you go through in little golf carts and you're ushered into a giant underground city, which includes even like a made-to-order grill down there.
00:14:47.000And you see the living quarters and the, you know, I saw where my computer would be in that location.
00:14:53.000And then there's like the control room where you see all of these screens monitoring things all across the country.
00:15:01.000And so you get a sense of what it would be like to actually have to live and function in one of these top secret underground bunkers if there was a, you know, God forbid, some kind of disaster to that degree.
00:15:59.000I've heard it kind of compared to like a Waffle House menu of nuclear strike options that the president would have before him to be able to make a decision on what he's going to do.
00:16:07.000But Charlie, one of the scariest things that I learned kind of through this process was one researcher estimated there would only be a six-minute window between the president learning about a nuclear attack coming on the United States and having to make a decision on what the response to that would be.
00:16:26.000And so it just gave you a really sobering sense of, man, how small the margin of error is and how blessed we have been to not have endured nuclear war, frankly, you know, since we dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
00:16:41.000There's tons of details like that in the book that I share of what it's really like inside those rooms and what's really inside some of these even very top secret and sensitive compartments.
00:16:51.000Yeah, I'm sure Joe Biden is equipped to respond in six minutes or less.
00:16:55.000Cliff, I want to just introduce this theme for you here, and then we'll dive deeper into it as we continue throughout the hour, which is assailing the deep state.
00:17:06.000Your first book talked a little bit about this.
00:17:08.000I want you to talk about it from a Christian perspective as well.
00:17:11.000Just describe to our audience, how powerful is the administrative state in our government.
00:17:18.000And frankly, you've got a lot of people there who, you know, we hear about all these threats to democracy that exist out there, but one of them is that there are a lot of unelected government bureaucrats who refuse to subordinate their wishes to that of the duly elected president of the United States.
00:17:34.000And that is a true threat to democracy.
00:17:38.000The other thing I noticed was the power of the DEI offices in a lot of these agencies.
00:17:45.000They are very oppressive, very powerful bullies, frankly, that have bullied a lot of believers into having to accept the mandates that the DEI mandates and pronoun mandates and all of these different things.
00:17:59.000I think one of the first things that needs to happen when President Trump comes in and puts new leadership in there is to abolish these DEI offices, which are not serving a legitimate national security purpose and reorient the priorities of the administrative state there toward executing on the president's wishes in American national security and not DEI.
00:19:15.000That is R-U-F-F-Greens.com slash Kirk.
00:19:18.000Go to RoughGreens.com slash Kirk to grab yours today, roughgreens.com slash Kirk.
00:19:25.000So Cliff, I want to get your thoughts here on how should Christians and people of faith engage in the political arena.
00:19:32.000Well, there's a couple of things I think are important, very foundational on this point.
00:19:36.000And the first thing is, and this like hit me like a ton of bricks in my own life.
00:19:42.000We need to put politics in its appropriate place in the hierarchy of priorities in our lives.
00:19:48.000One of the things that I say to kind of sum it up, and this is actually the last paragraph of the darkness is not overcome, is that the most important events in human history were Jesus' death and resurrection.
00:20:00.000Now, Tiberius was the emperor of Rome when that happened.
00:20:05.000Pontius Pilate was the governor of Judea when that happened.
00:20:08.000But they were not the main characters in the story.
00:20:13.000So why on earth would we make politicians the main characters in our story today?
00:20:19.000This is something I have to wrestle with.
00:20:21.000I've devoted my entire adult life basically to advancing conservative causes and electing conservative politicians and people that I believed in.
00:20:31.000We should be fighting tooth and nail to preserve the government we have in the country, in this country, or get a government that most closely aligns with God's vision for righteousness and justice here on earth.
00:20:45.000But we should not be consumed by politics in a way that I frankly struggle with myself.
00:20:52.000I also think there are a few kind of foundational principles about how we should think about voting.
00:20:56.000Number one is God is sovereign over everything.
00:21:01.000We are living under his sovereign will, everything that happens.
00:21:04.000He raises up kings, he tears them down.
00:21:07.000Everything that happens, he is sovereign.
00:21:09.000But he has under his divine authority given humans dominion over the earth to rule on his behalf.
00:21:19.000And so we're ultimately going to be held accountable for the decisions that we make in governing.
00:21:25.000Even David in the Bible, a man who God called a man after my own heart, suffered the consequences of his sin and lost a son because of his sin.
00:21:35.000So there is accountability for the decisions that we make.
00:21:37.000And now you may be saying, well, I'm not a king.
00:21:43.000But actually here in the United States, it applies to you even more directly because here under our system, ultimate power lies with the people.
00:21:52.000So you are both the governed and the governor.
00:21:55.000And so thinking about those principles as you go into the ballot box, I think that that is, it's a really important thing to realize the weight of responsibility that we have.
00:22:05.000I would never tell somebody how they should vote.
00:22:07.000I'm supporting President Trump in this election.
00:22:10.000I think that our country is in the toilet right now as a result of the policies of the Biden administration.
00:22:14.000And I'm going to be fighting like crazy the next few months to get President Trump reelected.
00:22:18.000But as important as that is, that is not the driving force in my life.
00:22:35.000You say, you know, you don't want people to make politics their master.
00:22:39.000What do you have to say for pastors that say you shouldn't vote at all or that it's not important to engage in government?
00:22:45.000Well, I think everything that I just said about the principles that the Bible lays out for God's vision for justice and righteousness is on this earth and the fact that he is intricately involved in the affairs of man and has put government in place so that it would be an authority.
00:23:03.000Governments are ordained on earth by God to be a reflection of his authority and hold people accountable for bad actions here on earth.
00:23:12.000So to suddenly dismiss government as unimportant and not something we should be engaged in, I think flies in the face of frankly what scripture says.
00:23:23.000And so it is my hope that pastors around the country would not necessarily stand in the pulpit and tell somebody how to vote, but they should also not be scared to speak into some of the political issues that we are facing today that may be divisive.
00:23:40.000They may be difficult to talk about, but scripture speaks into every single thing that we're dealing with as humans on this earth.
00:23:48.000And so to ignore the incredible power that scripture and the word of God could bring into these moments in American culture and American politics that are so difficult is a massive missed opportunity.
00:24:03.000There's two ends of this spectrum that we need to avoid, but to not be engaged in these political discussions, I think is an abdication of the moral responsibility that a lot of pastors and faith leaders have to speak truth, God's truth, not everybody's got their truth now.
00:24:33.000I have this book here called The False White Gospel, where they're trying to attack Christian nationalism, reclaiming true faith and refounding democracy.
00:24:45.000The left is making a big play for the Christian vote.
00:24:49.000I know you said you're not going to tell people how to vote, but how should they think about who to vote for from a biblical worldview standpoint?
00:24:56.000Well, who is what leader is going to implement the policies that are most in keeping with God's vision for justice and righteousness in this world?
00:25:06.000And the way that the left paints justice, so-called social justice, is not the vision that we see in the Bible, which is much more in keeping, frankly, with the American founding documents that we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they're endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among them are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
00:25:31.000And so electing government leaders who will defend life, who will promote human liberty and flourishing, and who will allow the pursuit of happiness.
00:25:40.000And now, what we know from the Bible is the true pursuit of happiness is not chasing wealth and finance and fame and fortune and power and whatever it may be, but being able to pursue true happiness, which starts with a relationship with the living God.
00:25:55.000And so I think if we look right now at the two parties, it's very clear which of those two is closer.
00:26:02.000No one's going to be perfect, but it's closer to what you see in scripture of God's vision for true justice and righteousness being governed on his behalf here on this earth.
00:26:13.000Yeah, and there's a fair amount of Christians.
00:26:16.000I mean, Donald Trump won 72% of the Christian vote in 2016.
00:26:42.000Well, one of the things that I didn't fully appreciate coming from, you know, an upbringing of no means, I was as far from the halls of power as you could possibly think.
00:26:53.000I did not know the allure of power and how it would have an effect on my life.
00:26:59.000And I realized in retrospect that it's something that we all have to deal with.
00:27:04.000And there are power dynamics, not just in government, but they're in our workplaces.
00:27:11.000I have a power dynamic with my wife when I'm trying to decide where we're going to, we're trying to decide where we're going to go to dinner tonight.
00:27:17.000Power dynamics are a part of our lives inextricably.
00:27:21.000And so putting that in the context that God's, any power that we have on earth, great or small, is not our own, but is entrusted to us by God.
00:27:34.000And that is something that I didn't do a great job of thinking about, but I tried to think about regularly in my government job that whatever power or influence that I may have has been entrusted to me by God.
00:27:45.000And when you think about that, I mean, you have this incredibly powerful megaphone here in your program.
00:27:50.000That's an incredible amount of power and influence that has been entrusted to you by God.
00:27:54.000And we're good enough friends that I know that's something that means something to you, that you wrestle with that and want to use that power and influence for good purposes.
00:28:04.000And so I think for all of us in ways big and small, wrestling with that daily and thinking about how we're using our power and influence, I think is something that would benefit everybody.
00:28:14.000The Darkness Has Not Overcome is the name of the book.
00:28:18.000You also have some stories here about Stephen Colbert, Tucker Carlson.
00:28:22.000Tell us about what these people are up like up close and personal.
00:28:26.000Well, you know Tucker as well as I do.
00:28:27.000Tucker is probably one of the nicest guys that you'll ever meet.
00:28:40.000But then there's something that really surprised me.
00:28:42.000Stephen Colbert, when I went on the late show, I was kind of geared up to have my teeth kicked in when I got there.
00:28:47.000And I hadn't really talked to him before we went on air.
00:28:50.000And he came backstage right before we were about to go out.
00:28:53.000He gets up from the desk and runs backstage.
00:28:56.000And he said to me, I just want you to know if my audience booze you or heckles you, I'll stop the show and say that's not how we're going to treat our guests and we'll get them out of here.
00:29:04.000So even though I disagree with Stephen Colbert on basically everything politically, I gained a lot of respect for that, at least on a human level for him.
00:29:14.000But, you know, unfortunately, most people in the media, they're about as craven as you would anticipate that they would be.
00:29:22.000So the good guys are pretty few and far between.
00:29:26.000The world is in flames and biotinomics is a complete and total disaster, but it can't and won't ruin my day.
00:30:21.000His base or is this something he's hoping will have some kind of effect on the rest of the electorate?
00:30:27.000I mean, I don't think it's going to have an effect on the rest of the electorate.
00:30:30.000It looks maintains that energy and excitement among the base.
00:30:34.000Essie just laid out a litany of things about why this race is so close.
00:30:38.000This ultimately, Sarah, in my view, is going to come down to turnout.
00:30:42.000And I think a part of the problem for the Biden, a real-life campaign, is can you get all of those disparate groups to turn out and heighten numbers as you did in 2020?
00:30:50.000Cliff, your reaction to that clip and the state of the 2024 race.
00:30:57.000Turnout is going to be the whole ballgame.
00:30:59.000And one of the really encouraging things that I would say right now is it seems like that our side has gotten really, really serious about the turnout game and about playing by rules that, frankly, we may not love, but that exist right now in terms of early voting, mail-in voting, and those kinds of things.
00:31:17.000Organizations like your own and others that have really committed to coming in and making sure that we're going to get the level of turnout that we need to win this thing.
00:31:26.000And I think Trump's in a great position right now because for a few reasons.
00:31:31.000Number one, you look around the world right now, there's not a single region that is more peaceful, more prosperous than it was when Biden became president.
00:31:39.000Number two, our economy is still weak.
00:31:43.000Any growth that we're seeing right now is not happening in wages.
00:31:46.000We're not seeing working people across this country have a better life.
00:31:49.000Interest rates are still through the roof.
00:31:52.000It's making it harder for the people to get their first home and to rise up the economic ladder by any economic measure.
00:31:58.000President Trump had us going in a much better direction.
00:32:01.000And were it not for COVID, would have had maybe the best economic story in history to be able to tell in such a short window of time for what he was able to do there.
00:32:11.000And ultimately, I think a lot of the Democrats' messaging right now rings hollow.
00:32:15.000All we're hearing from them is democracy is on the line.
00:32:23.000And yet they are the ones who are engaged in political prosecution after political prosecution, a true threat to democracy.
00:32:32.000And so I think even their central messages are ringing hollow and they can't run on their record.
00:32:38.000And they got weekend at Bernie's going on in the West Wing right now.
00:32:41.000And meanwhile, even in a courtroom, even with President Trump unjustly having to spend his days in a courtroom fighting these unjust charges against him, he brings that same energy.
00:32:55.000From a messaging standpoint, he's been really, really disciplined.
00:32:59.000And I really like what we're seeing now going into the last six months of election here that gives us a real hope that we're going to be able to wrest control back of this government and get this country back on track.
00:33:11.000So I'm very optimistic about Trump's chances, right?
00:33:15.000How does Trump break the deep state if and when he's re-elected?
00:33:18.000It's going to come down to who he puts in those positions.
00:33:20.000I think there are people that need to be in CIA director, DNI, FBI directors, go down the list, putting the right people in those jobs who know what they're doing, who know how to wield the levers of power and know how to use the president's duly elected powers and authorities to break that and make sure that there's an expectation and a demand that people will abide by the lawful orders of the president of the United States.
00:33:45.000It's not unreasonable, but it's going to come down to putting those people in those positions to get the job done.
00:33:51.000Plug the book one last time, Cliff, for our audience that has just come in, just tuning in radio stations across the country.