00:00:00.000Today in the Charlie Kirk Show, my conversation with former chief of staff Mark Meadows, close friend of the president, we talk about how are we going to take back the house?
00:00:07.000How are we going to take back the Senate?
00:00:09.000How do we get better elected officials?
00:00:10.000Is President Trump going to run in 2024?
00:00:12.000What can we do about election integrity?
00:00:14.000This conversation is very political in nature.
00:00:17.000For those of you that care about that, I think you're going to love this podcast.
00:00:20.000Email us your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.
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00:02:08.000Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:02:10.000With us today is a friend of mine, an American patriot, one of the good guys.
00:02:15.000He loves his country, and he did a great job in Congress and also serving the wonderful President of the United States, Donald Trump, and has a book about it.
00:02:23.000The Chief's Chief with us is Mark Meadows.
00:02:25.000Mark, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:02:27.000Hey, Charlie, it's great to be with you.
00:03:41.000Tell us about your time in the White House, what you're talking about in this book, and kind of some of the detail and the insight that you think more Americans need to know about exactly what happened in the White House.
00:03:53.000Well, Charlie, this book is really the truthful account of what actually happened.
00:03:59.000We've had so many of these different authors that have come up and they supposedly were in the room where it happened.
00:04:06.000You and I both know, based on our relationship with President Trump, our personal relationship, not just professional, that he is all about America and willing to do that.
00:04:17.000So I bring to life a number of stories, some that have been reported on in a non-factual way by people that have worked with him.
00:04:29.000Certainly the fight that he had, even against people that were in his own administration, we see some of these people, whether it's Secretary Esper or General Milley, Dr. Fauci, they all make appearances in this book, but we also give some stories that are not out there.
00:04:48.000And I'll give you a prime example of one.
00:04:50.000Dr. Fauci literally was trying to advocate so strongly for the funding for the Wuhan Lab.
00:05:19.000Not some from Alex Cesar, but certainly a lot from NIH.
00:05:24.000And that's a story that's appropriate for the day, Charlie, because we got Dr. Fauci now with NIH, Francis Collins, Dr. Fauci, all of a sudden saying, well, there was gain of function research being done, and the American taxpayer was funding it.
00:05:41.000And the testimony that we gave before Congress may not have been factual.
00:05:49.000I believe that Dr. Fauci knew all too well that his testimony was in fact erroneous based on emails, if the Biden administration is willing to look for them, emails that he actually was part of back in February and March of 2020.
00:06:07.000I mean, and that would be lying under oath and a variety of different crimes.
00:06:11.000And so what you're saying is that Fauci was intimately aware and then lied about it in front of testimony in many of these hearings.
00:06:20.000Well, I mean, the emails would seem to suggest that it was brought to his attention that they were doing gain of function actual research in Wuhan.
00:06:32.000Dr. Fauci was well aware that the American taxpayer dollars was going to China, and he continued to advocate for it after President Trump said, we're not going to do this anymore.
00:06:43.000And it's just one of the many flip-flops that we see, but we tell that story.
00:06:48.000The other is we tell how President Trump actually makes decisions quickly.
00:06:53.000You and I have seen this on behalf of the American people.
00:06:56.000He'll get what I call creative chaos, where back and forth he'll, you know, in the Oval Office, there will almost be certainly verbal fights, but sometimes it made me so uncomfortable.
00:07:08.000You know, you just see different cabinet members going back and forth.
00:07:18.000We missed that with Joe Biden being at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
00:07:23.000Yeah, it's just hard to even process what we have.
00:07:26.000So can you talk a little bit about just, you know, I want to hone in on this, how President Trump was running the government with your help and others, but he was being undermined by people within the administrative state and that apparatus.
00:07:41.000We call this the deep state, but to what extent did that really exist, Mark?
00:07:53.000Well, you don't take over the whole government.
00:07:55.000And honestly, even with some of the very people that the president put in place, people that were, they were supposedly MAGA people that were coming in to work for him.
00:08:07.000Really, what they were were swamp creatures.
00:08:29.000We asked them to use their talents in other places very quickly when we found out.
00:08:33.000But even within the West Wing, we found that there was a lot of people that, for their own personal advantage, they would talk to the press, they would leak out less than flattering stories, oftentimes, in fact, almost all of the time, with only partial truth.
00:08:50.000So I was chief of staff for maybe a week.
00:08:55.000We're going over a speech that the president is going to give later that evening.
00:09:01.000Literally, while I'm meeting with the president, while we're making changes to the speech, they're reporting on the news.
00:09:10.000Somebody had leaked a speech out, and that came from the West Wing and others.
00:09:16.000And so what we did was actually said, well, less people are going to get to see that speech.
00:09:21.000We had people pushing back like crazy.
00:09:23.000How are you taking me off the approval list?
00:09:26.000Well, it's amazing how many speeches didn't get broadcast before he gave them after that.
00:09:32.000You know, you got people that were weaponizing the Intel community.
00:09:36.000You've got the Department of Defense many times that had one agenda and they would strategically talk to reporters and these background sources.
00:09:50.000And for those that are tuned in right now, if you think it's a minor problem, it is a major problem.
00:09:56.000In fact, the president, when he was, you know, October of 2020, he said, Mark, I wish we knew then what we know now because we would have done it differently.
00:10:08.000And I can tell you, going forward, we're going to do it differently.
00:10:19.000Yeah, I tell you, if I were a betting guy, of course, you get to talk to President Trump on a regular basis.
00:10:28.000If you and I were betting, we would go all in on the fact that he's running.
00:10:33.000I can tell you this, and I talk about this in the Chief's Chief.
00:10:37.000You know, he's asked me to look at a number of things.
00:10:40.000And when you start looking at it, getting prepared and talking about who would be cabinet secretaries, where do you make sure from a personnel standpoint?
00:10:52.000Because what you have to do is have the right personnel to make sure that it's executed.
00:10:58.000And candidly, we want people that are all in for the America First Agenda.
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00:13:09.000Well, so talk, let's talk politically, though, because the Republican Party is he's very popular in the Republican Party, but amongst the donors and smart people, I think there's some hesitation, and I don't share that hesitation.
00:13:23.000Um, where they say, I don't know if I want him to run, I don't know if there's a path, I don't know if he can win.
00:13:39.000Now, perhaps not as zealously with knowing that my relationship with the president still is one that is very strong.
00:13:50.000And having served as his chief of staff, I may not get it quite as much.
00:13:54.000But yeah, we get that from the donors.
00:13:55.000Well, here's the interesting thing: nothing will make people see that Donald Trump actually acted in their best interest as much as Joe Biden doing as poorly as he's done.
00:14:21.000You know, it's hard to be below last on an expectation, but I had a very low bar for what they were going to do.
00:14:27.000Here's the other thing that I think we start to see: the left has lurched so much.
00:14:33.000You get to see this each and every day on college campuses and in the public square.
00:14:38.000They've lurched so far to the left that all of a sudden people want to fight her on their behalf.
00:14:45.000You know, when you look at CRT in the schools and telling parents they're domestic terrorists, I mean, at this point, you've got unaffiliated voters and what I would say, moderate to conservative Democrats, if there's such a thing as a conservative Democrat left, they are all of a sudden saying, you know what?
00:15:05.000At least Donald Trump was willing to fight for me, and I need somebody that's willing to fight.
00:15:11.000And the critical race theory is one key component.
00:15:14.000You know, we have got to, we've got to understand that you don't judge people by the color of their skin.
00:15:21.000It's by the content of their character to quote Martin Luther King Jr.
00:15:25.000Yeah, that used to be an American principle.
00:15:27.000So let's talk a little bit about kind of where the conservative movement is right now.
00:15:32.000And it seems that the conservative movement is growing.
00:15:41.000And I think that is confusing the Democrats in a variety of different ways.
00:15:45.000I think they thought that we would go away and all of a sudden say, you know what?
00:15:47.000Yeah, let's put Mitt Romney or Liz Cheney in charge of our party after everything that happened.
00:15:51.000And they're not really sure how to deal with that.
00:15:54.000So, but from a policy perspective, this is something you dealt with in the Trump administration.
00:16:00.000One of my fears, Mark, is that if Republicans take back the House, which I believe we will, and we could talk about that in the Senate, is that kind of the Chamber of Commerce agenda will kind of set in again.
00:16:10.000You were the head of the Freedom Caucus.
00:16:12.000You were the number one advocate for this sort of type of conservatism.
00:16:16.000What do we have to do to make sure that the Republican Party doesn't kind of get co-opted by all those sorts of interests if and when we take back chambers of power?
00:16:25.000Well, listen, it will get co-opted if we are not vigilant.
00:16:29.000And I appreciate you bringing this up because you have and those that support your movement have changed the demographics.
00:16:40.000Most of the Republicans have gray hair like me, and they've been around for a while.
00:16:46.000It's such a refreshing thing to a guy that's been in the fight that says, all right, I'm willing to pass the baton to a younger demographic that honestly is as conservative as I am and some of them more so.
00:17:01.000You got, I mean, listen, I was with you in Arizona when the president came in.
00:17:06.000I mean, you guys were rocking the roof off of that particular, I mean, it was incredible.
00:18:12.000But here's the bottom line is you can't let them go back and pretend like Donald Trump was never the president and that our party is not forever changed because that's what they want to do.
00:18:24.000There's this new movement, GOP.2.0, you know?
00:18:29.000And when you look at it, all they're really wanting is GOP 1.0, which is before Donald Trump.
00:18:37.000When he came down the escalator, everybody said that he couldn't win and he wasn't going to win.
00:19:40.000You know, I mean, if the thing that they wanted all their life was to be a member of Congress, then you don't want them in Washington, D.C. Other is, is they need to hold it very loosely.
00:19:52.000I was not a guy that ran on term limits, but now I'm all for term limits.
00:19:56.000Listen, get somebody in, let them do the very best they can because they stay connected to the people back home.
00:20:02.000And then the third thing that you want is someone who doesn't need to be accepted.
00:20:07.000You know, because what happens is all these members come up here.
00:20:10.000They're smarter than, you know, everybody tells them how smart they are, how funny they are.
00:20:14.000They get invited to all these dinners, you know, the honorable this, the congressman or congresswoman, this.
00:20:20.000And yet, what we see is a freshman class that has come in who's willing to be connected to the people back home.
00:20:27.000You want values from Main Street back home going to Washington, D.C., not D.C. values going that way.
00:20:34.000And so it really is hard because everybody preaches and they practice, try to practice a good game.
00:21:56.000Yeah, I think that's really good wisdom.
00:21:59.000We get that question a lot of Charlie, what should I look at in candidates and what can actually be done?
00:22:05.000And so now I kind of want to talk a little bit about this question of how are we going to kind of decouple our mess, the mess from Biden and what he's done.
00:22:18.000And what do you think are the issues, the actual issues you think that are the ones we should hone on and focus on?
00:22:24.000I think CRT, I think the educational issue, the Department of Justice with what Merrick Garland has done, which is an unthinkable attack on moms and dads across the country.
00:22:34.000What's your perspective from the political standpoint where we really need to focus our attention?
00:22:39.000Yeah, so if there is a silver lining to the COVID pandemic, it would be in two different places that we need to really focus on.
00:22:49.000One is holding China accountable, getting our supply chains away from the Chinese government.
00:22:55.000I can tell you, having served with the president, he saw this as a real threat and one that honestly has not gone away.
00:23:04.000If anything, it's gotten worse because what they're going to do is the supply chains, rare earth minerals, you name it, they're going to try to control everything that controls manufacturing.
00:23:29.000The second thing that is a silver lining of COVID is that we started to see what's happening in our schools, both in our universities and in K through 12.
00:23:39.000We started to see that moms and dads, because we were teaching via Zoom, all of a sudden they're saying, I can't believe that's being taught in your classroom.
00:23:48.000Can't believe that there's a political agenda by your teacher because many of us grew up in the public school system and we remember our teachers as being that person that would instruct us and invest their time and yet do it without a political agenda.
00:26:08.000Are they willing to believe, once again, and one of the things that's changed is Donald Trump, I think, has changed the types of candidates that will run and ultimately get elected.
00:26:18.000We see that in Georgia with Herschel Walker.
00:26:23.000Listen, Herschel has a great life and he is willing to put that on hold and serve the American people.
00:26:32.000You know, obviously, you can't be a University of Georgia Bulldog fan without loving Herschel Walker, but you can't be a fan of the American dream and not be a fan of what Herschel has been able to accomplish.
00:26:46.000So I'm very bullish on the fact that Herschel will be able to do a good job in Georgia.
00:26:58.000There's rumors that Governor Sununu may jump into that race.
00:27:03.000That's a huge pickup opportunity in a market that honestly investors and donors will make a big difference there because you, other than that market that comes out of Boston that's so expensive, the rest of New Hampshire, you can normally make a real grassroots effort.
00:27:20.000They want a candidate that will show up.
00:27:22.000It's a different kind of politicking in New Hampshire.
00:28:39.000Because exactly like you talked about, he has the interests of the people of Wisconsin and he brings those to D.C. and he doesn't allow D.C. to infect him.
00:28:49.000And I use the word infect purposefully there.
00:28:54.000And so as we look at that, and then Pennsylvania is going to be the tough one.
00:28:58.000Bluntly, we should have not had a big problem there.
00:29:06.000I think that we have to make sure on election integrity issues that we continue to fight those issues, Pennsylvania being one of those where it's critical.
00:29:17.000And so it depends on who the candidate is there and how they win.
00:29:21.000And then in my old home state of North Carolina, Ted Budd, president's endorsed him.
00:29:27.000I think he will be the next senator from the Tar Heel State.
00:29:31.000But we've got to play defense and the map doesn't look good.
00:29:35.000But at the same time, I think that we could end up with a one-seat majority and take Chuck Schumer's voice away from it.
00:29:51.000I'm going to be out in Nevada here in a week or two because one of the great opportunities I think we have with Nevada is to actually turn the entire state from blue to red.
00:30:19.000And I, in my personal capacity, going to be working with some of the political operatives out there to make sure that we can plow the field and make it a little easier way.
00:30:30.000Yeah, there's some interesting races that the New Hampshire one opens the map.
00:30:34.000It'll force them to spend another $50 to $100 million.
00:30:37.000I think Marco Rubio will be fine in Florida, regardless of debtings, Val Demings, or whatever.
00:33:04.000And I hope you want to support our program.
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00:33:46.000I want to end our discussion here, Mark, with the time we have remaining with the issue that I get more questions about than any other issue.
00:33:53.000And it was kind of laced throughout your commentary around the country, which is voter fraud and election integrity.
00:34:00.000Talk about what the president's doing.
00:34:02.000Talk about where his head's at with this.
00:34:05.000It is the most frustrating issue for people.
00:34:07.000And it's honestly frustrating at times for me because I don't know how to properly answer some of these questions because I say, well, we have to wait for things to come out and we have to do this.
00:34:24.000We need to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat.
00:34:27.000But the only way that we do that is in some of our work here at the Conservative Partnership Institute is actually, we've got a huge election integrity initiative.
00:34:38.000Cleta Mitchell, who's been very quarterbacking that for us.
00:34:45.000We have to work with the state legislatures, but we also have to look at truly where were the problems in 2020.
00:34:53.000And a lot of people say, well, let's just win back the house and look at it going forward.
00:34:57.000And certainly we need to look at going forward.
00:35:00.000But what we can't do is ignore the fact that there was legitimate fraud that has to be addressed to what levels we don't need to be making all kinds of claims on what it should be or shouldn't be.
00:35:15.000But here's what we do is audits are a great thing.
00:35:18.000I think audits should continue to be done.
00:35:21.000We're working not only in the states like in Arizona and Georgia and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where there's real work continuing on still, but we're working in states where President Trump was certified as the winner in states like Florida and North Carolina.
00:35:39.000Because what we see is if they've run one play and they're able to get away with fraud, one case, then what will they do next?
00:35:48.000I mean, in the state of California, they've passed statutes to allow for ballot harvesting and they've had that and it's legal there.
00:35:56.000And yet the chain of custody where it leaves from the voter's hand and goes to the ballot box is not sacred.
00:36:11.000I can tell you, it's even in Virginia.
00:36:14.000So there was a lawsuit just filed in Virginia.
00:36:17.000Fairfax County in the last week or so had been instructing people to not put the last four of a social security number on absentee ballots.
00:36:56.000We're working hand, but we just got to stay on the offense and make sure that it's easy to vote and hard to achieve.
00:37:03.000Well, so, yeah, and this is my fear, though, Mark, is that, and I said this to the president, how do we strike the balance, though, to make sure this doesn't suppress voter turnout?
00:37:13.000Because I don't want it to be where all of a sudden 15% of people don't show up in Herschel's race because they're like, oh, everything is broken.
00:37:35.000And as part of the nonprofit work that we're doing, we're actually saying, all right, here's how you can make sure that you know the laws and that you stay involved.
00:37:45.000I did this in North Carolina when my county, my original county was a Democrat county.
00:37:50.000I said, well, what we're going to do is we're going to train people to know the election laws.
00:38:30.000And so half of the battle is showing up.
00:38:32.000And so all those that are tuned in, I would ask if you are in a state where there's potential for it to be very close, we want you to engage.
00:38:44.000If it's a nonprofit activity, a conservative partnership will help you there.
00:38:49.000If it's political, we've got groups that we can refer you to to do that.
00:38:53.000And I would say for 2022, let's stay engaged and show up not only for Herschel, but for a lot of these other candidates you just mentioned.
00:39:02.000Yeah, I'm worried that there will be a suppression aspect if we don't strike that balance.
00:39:07.000And we also don't actually give people the confidence in their elections back.
00:39:12.000And it's a very serious issue, especially here in Arizona.
00:39:15.000It is the number one issue, which is how do we let what happen?
00:39:18.000And Mark, you were there in the White House watching the returns.
00:39:22.000And we saw the late night dumps and all of this.
00:39:27.000And also, what can we do to make sure we never get gamed like that again?
00:39:31.000I know it was an unprecedented thing, but the problem was we were all kind of taken by surprise, and we really shouldn't have been, right?
00:39:54.000So, to the person who's saying, why show up?
00:39:56.000Because we're actually working with state legislatures to pass laws to make sure that the ballot box is sacred and truly can be counted on.
00:40:06.000And that there is a way to audit it that will prove that if you have a fraudulent vote, there's an easy way to do that.
00:40:58.000For all those that have tuned in, thank you for partnering with Charlie and loving this country the way that President Trump loved this country.
00:41:06.000The book, The Chief's Chief, will tell a number of stories, some of which have never been reported.
00:41:12.000That you'll be able to, some of them humorous, some of them not so humorous, but all of them talk about America's greatness and the fact that he is a great president, willing to fight so hard on behalf of the forgotten man and woman.
00:41:27.000And I would say this: listen, we've faced difficult times throughout our history as a nation.
00:41:33.000And certainly this may be a difficult time, but it's not the most difficult time.
00:41:38.000And I am very optimistic if the forgotten men and women, the people that are truly tuning in right now, the people who I dedicated the book to, if they will stay engaged, we'll have a better Congress, we'll have a better Senate, and quite frankly, we'll turn our country back to its founding fathers' principles.