Verdict with Ted Cruz - Behind the Gates with White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows

00:00:00.000 This is an iHeart Podcast.

00:00:02.540 Guaranteed human.

00:00:04.440 The White House Chief of Staff has traditionally been known as the gatekeeper.

00:00:09.580 Well, we have gone behind the gates with Mark Meadows, live from the White House.

00:00:15.100 This is Verdict with Ted Cruz.

00:00:21.800 Welcome back to Verdict with Ted Cruz.

00:00:23.780 I'm Michael Knowles.

00:00:25.040 Little change of scenery today, joined as always by the Senator and Mark Meadows.

00:00:29.520 Great to be with you.

00:00:30.580 Mr. Meadows, I'm noticing now it is 7 o'clock here.

00:00:33.620 This is probably the earliest you have gotten off work since you've taken on this job.

00:00:38.240 Well, as soon as we get off work, I'll let you know whether that's the case or not.

00:00:42.440 It's fair enough.

00:00:43.160 Obviously, it's a 24-7 kind of job, but our nation is in a critical time where we've got to actually make sure that people like Ted and I work together

00:00:55.660 on behalf of all the freedom-loving forgotten men and women in this country.

00:01:01.820 And really, the impact is well beyond this, as Ted and I have articulated a number of times.

00:01:08.680 Well, because I know, Senator, you and Mr. Meadows go back a lot farther than just you taking this job as the White House Chief of Staff.

00:01:16.080 Yeah, he actually would talk to me before I actually was the Chief of Staff, you know, so I could count him on one hand.

00:01:24.380 Well, Mark and I go back a long time.

00:01:26.340 We were actually both elected to Congress on the same day, November 2012.

00:01:29.540 We showed up here January 2013, looked around and said, what the hell are we doing here?

00:01:34.080 And it was, Barack Obama had just been reelected.

00:01:38.820 It was a messed up time.

00:01:41.240 But one of the things we found were both brand new is there were really only a handful of people willing to stand up and fight for anything.

00:01:50.200 And so we became fast friends. 0.99

00:01:52.760 We became fast friends fighting against Obamacare, where we're standing up going, wait a second, we got elected to fight this damn thing. 0.99

00:01:59.500 And too many Republicans just wanted to give in. 0.97

00:02:03.100 And it's interesting.

00:02:06.040 In Washington, like anywhere else, courage is contagious.

00:02:09.560 So before he was Chief of Staff, Mark led the Freedom Caucus of the House.

00:02:14.700 And Mark, you know, it may be helpful.

00:02:16.580 Look, the folks that watch and listen to this podcast are a savvy, educated group.

00:02:21.760 But explain to folks what the Freedom Caucus is and why it matters.

00:02:26.740 Well, I can tell you, you're right.

00:02:28.860 We came in together.

00:02:29.840 And what I found, Michael, was is that most members of Congress on both the Senate side and the House side actually had the backbone of a banana.

00:02:38.340 You know, it had great shape until it was peeled back and it got real mushy.

00:02:42.980 Ted Cruz was not one of those.

00:02:44.860 And immediately we formed this friendship.

00:02:48.700 But what I found was, is unlike Ted, who was willing to stand on courage and I might add a great personal cost where, you know, if you stand for the people back home, you don't get invited to dinners in Washington, D.C.

00:03:03.920 And it's a real cost.

00:03:05.960 There's not a benefit package of being a real true conservative.

00:03:09.680 But that being said, I think what I saw was what Ted was able to do in the Senate.

00:03:15.000 I said, well, we've got to create that same kind of leverage over in the House.

00:03:18.560 And the problem is the key number in the House was 218.

00:03:22.320 Yeah.

00:03:22.560 We had the majority.

00:03:24.220 And I said, well, gosh, you know, if a few of the conservatives would stay together, we could actually make some policy differences because they would need our vote to be able to do it.

00:03:34.720 And Obamacare was the first fight.

00:03:36.800 We made Ted an honorary member of the Freedom Caucus.

00:03:39.800 He was welcome in our meeting any time.

00:03:41.780 But it was all about leverage.

00:03:43.460 And for us, it was about making sure that we didn't just go along to get along, but we actually stood for something.

00:03:51.140 And one of the amendments on the Obamacare was what I call the Cruz Freedom Amendment.

00:03:57.160 It was all about making sure that people had choices.

00:04:00.500 Because I think this is actually pretty important.

00:04:02.820 The House Freedom Caucus, especially when it first came around, was the real deal.

00:04:07.640 You know, these are the real conservatives.

00:04:09.080 Some people are a little bit less conservative.

00:04:11.180 They talk a good game.

00:04:12.320 Maybe they don't vote that way.

00:04:13.480 And the Freedom Caucus really stood for something.

00:04:15.580 So the very fact that the White House chief of staff is a Freedom Caucus guy, I mean, that does tell you something.

00:04:21.680 And I know that this Obamacare fight, it didn't just end in 2009 or 2013.

00:04:27.720 It kept going on and on.

00:04:29.280 And I know you two worked on that together.

00:04:31.220 Well, and it was interesting.

00:04:32.500 You fast forward to 2017.

00:04:34.480 President Trump's been elected.

00:04:35.940 And there's an energy, a real passion to take on the Washington swamp.

00:04:41.580 And you remember the first thing that came up with it was Obamacare repeal.

00:04:45.760 And first White House chief of staff was Reince Priebus.

00:04:49.100 Reince is a good guy.

00:04:50.360 But Reince was very, very close with Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House.

00:04:55.800 They're both from Wisconsin.

00:04:56.820 And if you remember, the first draft of Obamacare repeal in the House was terrible.

00:05:02.760 It was drafted by insurance company lobbyists. 1.00

00:05:04.880 It was garbage. 0.98

00:05:06.380 But when it was drafted, you remember early on, the House leadership was trying to really weaponize the president to attack the Freedom Caucus, to attack conservatives. 0.99

00:05:19.940 And, you know, you go back to the first few months where the president was blasting them.

00:05:23.160 And I still remember spring of 2017, Mark is in the House.

00:05:26.760 He's leading the Freedom Caucus.

00:05:27.760 I'm in the Senate.

00:05:28.840 And we both go to Mar-a-Lago.

00:05:31.500 That's right.

00:05:32.220 And basically just drop in on the president unannounced.

00:05:35.380 We basically called over and said, Mr. President, we need to see you.

00:05:38.360 That's exactly right.

00:05:39.340 You're saying that's how urgent this was.

00:05:41.080 This wasn't some pre-scheduled White House meeting.

00:05:42.960 You go down to the president's beach resort in Florida.

00:05:45.720 And we sat there and said, listen, if you go down the road of this House bill, insurance premiums will go up.

00:05:51.660 Yeah, did you hear what he just said?

00:05:54.560 Insurance premiums go up.

00:05:56.620 I mean, that's not, I mean, yeah, it just.

00:05:59.000 It was crazy.

00:06:00.640 Now, the insurance lobbyists loved it.

00:06:02.080 They want premiums to go up.

00:06:03.720 But we're both saying, listen, the people who elected you, who elected us, they don't want us jacking up premiums.

00:06:09.440 And it was a really important, it started to shift that bill away from that first version.

00:06:15.540 And it ended up getting significantly better.

00:06:17.480 You know, I've never heard that story before.

00:06:20.460 But something I've noticed just on these shows is you hear so much about how personal relationships and these sort of unplanned moments can really shift the path of policy in the country.

00:06:31.360 Well, it does.

00:06:32.240 But I think the other thing is the interesting thing.

00:06:34.320 So Ted goes, come on, I'm going over to see the president.

00:06:37.860 You need to come with me.

00:06:38.800 We need to talk to him about Obamacare.

00:06:40.920 And I'm going, OK, well, you got an appointment.

00:06:42.600 No, no, we're just going.

00:06:43.920 I mean, and so you get this and you go, OK, we're going to drop in on the president of the United States and talk policy on a Saturday, by the way.

00:06:51.380 We literally Ubered over.

00:06:52.740 I mean, it was kind of, and you're sitting there going, it's a miracle Secret Service didn't shoot us.

00:06:57.360 And we're like, no, we're actually in Congress.

00:06:59.220 They're like, I don't know about that.

00:07:00.560 It's a likely story.

00:07:01.860 But it's all about, one, relationships.

00:07:04.700 You're exactly right, Michael.

00:07:05.820 But the other part of that is about tenacity.

00:07:08.760 It's making sure you're tenacious about what you know is good for the American people and you're willing to fight that fight.

00:07:16.780 And Ted obviously has not only a career of doing that, but when you look for profiles and courage, it's got his picture right there.

00:07:26.440 And so for us in the Freedom Caucus, we just said, we want to give you a partner in the House.

00:07:32.220 And it came, you know, at great personal costs.

00:07:35.420 I mean, there were times when, well, we missed a few dinners as well.

00:07:40.680 Let's put it that way.

00:07:41.260 A few cocktail party invitations did not come in.

00:07:43.500 That's right.

00:07:43.920 You know, something that I notice, you obviously had this very public role before in Congress running the Freedom Caucus.

00:07:49.180 Senator, you still have a very public role.

00:07:50.960 But your job now, Mr. Meadows, is a little bit more of a behind-the-scenes job.

00:07:56.680 Could you maybe take us behind the scenes a little bit into what that day looks like?

00:08:00.120 Well, obviously, they've got cameras rolling here, so I don't know that it'll be too much behind the scenes.

00:08:04.460 But I will say this, you know, since I've come over and we're almost at day 85 on this job, I've done no press.

00:08:14.520 So it is a behind-the-scenes.

00:08:16.620 So to bring everybody behind the scenes, I think that the real key is I see the job is to serve the President of the United States who serves the American people.

00:08:26.260 But it's also to make sure that every good idea that is in the Senate gets the visibility with the President of the United States in a nanosecond.

00:08:36.420 And so one of the things that people don't realize is that I can get a phone call from Senator Cruz or Senator Blunt or Lindsey Graham,

00:08:44.680 and they're saying, you know, listen, we've got this issue, we need you to take care of it.

00:08:50.360 Sometimes it's just as simple as we've got some constituents that have raised this concern.

00:08:56.400 We want to make sure the President of the United States knows about it.

00:08:59.160 And Ted can vouch for this.

00:09:01.280 It's a phone call, and within minutes, the President of the United States is weighing in on that particular issue.

00:09:08.440 It's nothing like anything I've ever seen, and it's trying to be the gatekeeper behind the scenes that maybe is not as much of a gatekeeper as their megaphone within the West Wing.

00:09:22.080 And so senators have better access, I think, to this President than historically has been the case.

00:09:29.280 I think that's a good thing.

00:09:30.700 The closer the President is to the American people, the more he hears from the people of Texas through Ted or the people of South Carolina through Tim Scott or Lindsey Graham or whichever senator it might be, the better off it is.

00:09:46.880 And so, but it's also the power of the executive branch.

00:09:51.540 You know, when I was in Congress, I was saying, boy, all I wanted to do is make sure that Congress was empowered.

00:09:58.020 But it's a little bit different role now, but if we work hand in glove, I think what we can do, this President is willing to do things that most Presidents are not willing to do and take political risk.

00:10:10.500 You know, we have an embassy that in Jerusalem is something that Ted and I share passionately together.

00:10:17.780 That would, it's been promised before, you know, and it never happened.

00:10:22.920 Both Republican and Democratic Presidents have broken that promise.

00:10:25.800 They have.

00:10:26.080 And Trump is the first one to follow through.

00:10:28.160 I have to make a confession.

00:10:29.700 When President Trump, when he was running and he said, I'm going to move the embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, I just didn't believe him.

00:10:35.880 I said, that's the sort of thing people say, but then they don't actually do it.

00:10:39.060 And I think a lot of people in Washington thought that.

00:10:41.040 And then when it actually happened, everybody was so surprised.

00:10:43.280 One thing that's really unusual in this administration is the kind of lead person on Israel policy has been the U.S. ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, who's a great guy.

00:10:53.640 He's become a close friend.

00:10:54.980 And it's unusual.

00:10:56.440 I don't know of any instance where an ambassador has had that kind of influence.

00:10:59.640 And it's because the president knows and trusts him.

00:11:02.540 And David is passionately committed to strengthening the U.S.-Israel relationship.

00:11:07.440 But I worked very closely with David after the president made the announcement.

00:11:10.920 Because, look, the nature of Washington, the swamp, the State Department, foggy bottom did not want this to happen.

00:11:17.400 So here's how they would normally kill it.

00:11:19.600 They would just slow roll it.

00:11:20.860 We need to study for a year the feasibility.

00:11:23.180 We need to do a security assessment.

00:11:24.580 We need to do this and that.

00:11:26.580 And their plan, it was clear what their plan was going to be, delay it four years.

00:11:30.980 They were hoping Trump loses re-election.

00:11:33.300 And then the next, the Democrat who comes in will cancel the announcement. 0.99

00:11:37.080 And what the Trump administration did, and David was the point person, I said, David, the only way this happens is if you open the damn embassy. 0.98

00:11:44.260 You don't announce it. 0.98

00:11:45.260 You open it.

00:11:46.720 And they found a facility that was a consular facility in Jerusalem. 1.00

00:11:51.200 And within a year, open the damn thing. 0.99

00:11:53.960 I've never seen anything like it. 0.99

00:11:55.640 And it was tenacity.

00:11:58.160 And the bureaucracy at State was shocked.

00:12:01.080 Yeah.

00:12:01.500 But that behind the scenes, like the urgency of understanding.

00:12:06.700 Oh, and so true.

00:12:08.080 And you talk about behind the scenes.

00:12:09.560 So one story that I don't think is out there is, so the State Department pushing back, you know, continuing to push back.

00:12:16.100 I think they gave a list of the pros and cons.

00:12:18.800 And so there were a whole long list of all these cons.

00:12:23.020 Yeah.

00:12:23.300 Zero pros for moving.

00:12:24.680 You're kidding me.

00:12:25.100 Yeah.

00:12:25.380 No, no.

00:12:25.960 I'm telling you.

00:12:26.640 It's not that subtle.

00:12:27.520 No.

00:12:28.000 And so that's something that doesn't get reported.

00:12:30.520 So it literally was, you got all these reasons not to do it and no reasons to do it.

00:12:35.740 And yet this president stayed true to his campaign promise.

00:12:40.020 But it takes the encouragement.

00:12:43.620 Sometimes it's a phone call from Ted Cruz in the middle of the night saying, you know, golly, it's the right thing to do.

00:12:50.160 And that affirmation makes a big difference.

00:12:52.560 Well, what you said earlier is very interesting to me, this idea that the chief of staff is the gatekeeper.

00:12:58.060 But the flip side is, it means you're the megaphone for good ideas.

00:13:02.620 You're the megaphone for ideas that you're hearing from people like the senator.

00:13:05.080 Let me give a real-time example.

00:13:06.580 So Mark's been in office a couple of months.

00:13:08.960 Yeah.

00:13:11.660 You remember a couple of months ago, the president was meeting with CEOs of a bunch of big oil companies.

00:13:15.700 Yeah.

00:13:16.340 And I was really worried that at the time, when the meeting was initially announced, it was just the CEOs of the giant companies.

00:13:23.220 And so I called Mark and I said, look, this is a real problem because the way energy works, there are a bunch of small independent producers.

00:13:31.220 A lot of guys in Texas that aren't the, you know, giant super majors that have the GDP of a country, but they're the innovators.

00:13:38.280 They're the ones that drive the domestic production.

00:13:40.780 And early on, they were not on the meeting invite list.

00:13:43.540 And so I called Mark and said, look, this is a real problem.

00:13:46.200 We need to make sure we've got an independent producer there.

00:13:50.020 Mark not only got it done, but said, look, you need to be there.

00:13:53.500 And I got on a plane the next day.

00:13:54.940 In fact, it was funny.

00:13:55.480 When I walked in, there were a couple of other senators there.

00:13:57.220 They said, what the hell are you doing here?

00:13:58.780 And I said, well, you know, funny you should ask.

00:14:01.500 And it was because Mark said, come to the meeting.

00:14:05.360 And at that meeting, you want to talk about real action.

00:14:08.180 We pressed a couple of things.

00:14:09.340 Remember, price of oil was collapsing.

00:14:11.340 Millions of jobs were in jeopardy.

00:14:13.400 And two things came out of that meeting.

00:14:15.380 Number one, the president leaned in hard against the Saudis and the Russians and got them to back off their economic warfare against the U.S.

00:14:22.680 But number two, the president directed, I suggested to the president, there was a real problem of capital being cut off from energy.

00:14:30.000 And I suggested to the president, if you would instruct the secretary of energy, Dan Briette, who was there, the secretary of the treasury, Stephen Mnuchin, to make sure that Wall Street doesn't discriminate against energy and bankrupt every U.S. energy producer.

00:14:46.960 And the president right there said, do it.

00:14:49.980 He looked at Dan and said, make it happen.

00:14:52.380 And that made a real, real difference in terms of capital being available and literally saving millions of jobs in this country.

00:14:59.920 Yeah.

00:15:00.240 And so in less than 48 hours, a phone call from a senator to the chief of staff, and he's sitting in the cabinet room of the White House with another invited guest who was not on the list advocating for what is important to the people back home in Texas.

00:15:15.660 And so that happens a lot.

00:15:18.060 The other thing that I think that is critical is, you know, you've got this massive bureaucracy with agencies and you think, oh, there's a Republican administration.

00:15:26.120 So you, but there is the swamp that continues to go on, whether it's a Democrat or Republican in the Oval Office.

00:15:34.660 The elected people come and go.

00:15:36.000 Yeah, and they just kind of wait them out.

00:15:38.180 It's exactly what Ted was saying.

00:15:39.640 They wait them out.

00:15:40.220 And so one of the great things is that if Ted or one of his colleagues, they're getting, you know, the stiff arm, I call it the legislative Heisman, you know, if they're getting that, it's real easy for me to pick up and say, you know, why am I getting this phone call from this senator on you not responding to their phone call?

00:16:00.480 Oh, well, we were busy.

00:16:01.500 Well, I was busy, too, and I took his call.

00:16:04.740 I mean, why aren't you taking it?

00:16:05.960 And so sometimes it's just making them aware that there's somebody else willing to hold them accountable.

00:16:11.020 And two branches there.

00:16:12.200 I mean, this is actually something, Senator, I know you've talked a lot about is you've been talking now for years about social media censorship, censorship of conservatives.

00:16:20.080 Well, just recently we got out of the executive branch this executive order on social media censorship.

00:16:26.540 We still don't know a whole lot about that.

00:16:28.140 At least I don't know a lot about that.

00:16:29.480 Maybe could you tell us a little bit about how that came to be?

00:16:31.520 Well, I think Ted and I know that as conservatives, sometimes our conservative voice doesn't reach the audience as quickly or as effectively as it is normally intended.

00:16:42.760 It's a diplomatic way to put it.

00:16:44.020 Yeah, well, I can tell you I was one of the few members of Congress back when I was in Congress that was actually shadow banned by Twitter.

00:16:49.640 Yeah.

00:16:49.780 And so we ought to put that out on a tweet and see if they take that down.

00:16:53.480 They'll say it wasn't shadow banned, but it only happened to be four conservative members of Congress, myself, Matt Gaetz, Devin Nunes, and Jim Jordan.

00:17:02.800 So you're saying AOC didn't fall into that?

00:17:04.640 No, she didn't make it into that. 0.90

00:17:06.800 So one of the things that's important is that we need to make sure that the free press is really the free press and it's not censored.

00:17:16.380 And what Twitter has done, probably more so than some of the other social media platforms, but YouTube is doing it as well, is that they come in and they start to actually monitor content.

00:17:29.320 And so it's not this free, open, what I call the wild, wild west of social media.

00:17:34.880 That's the way.

00:17:35.620 And as freedom-loving individuals, we want the free market to work.

00:17:39.880 But when the free market starts to get monopolized by content police, then it's important for us to step in.

00:17:48.660 So we did an EO that actually has the potential of taking away their protection from litigation.

00:17:54.820 So if we can't fix it or if Congress can't fix it, let the trial attorneys fix it.

00:17:59.340 It'll happen real quick.

00:18:01.060 Unleashing the trial attorneys is a really powerful weapon.

00:18:04.720 And I've got to say, this is an issue where White House leadership was so needed and it's so important.

00:18:10.040 Because you and I have talked about this before.

00:18:11.940 One of the challenges on the issue of big tech censorship is all the federal agencies are siloed.

00:18:17.820 And it's a hard issue where the antitrust division at the Department of Justice doesn't quite fit into what they think they want to do.

00:18:24.240 The FTC, it doesn't quite fit in what they want to do.

00:18:26.600 The FCC, everyone is sort of looking at their own slice of the problem. 0.78

00:18:30.940 And the president's executive order on this was important to say, damn it, this matters.

00:18:35.940 I think it's the biggest threat to democracy in the whole country. 0.57

00:18:38.740 But we needed the president and the White House to lead to get the rest of the executive focused on protecting free speech altogether.

00:18:48.920 Right.

00:18:49.280 Well, the interesting thing, and so I always try to give you a little bit of a back story that no one else knows.

00:18:54.760 So that EO, as it relates to Section 230, we started putting it around for a little bit of comment on a very limited basis.

00:19:02.880 All of a sudden, this proposed EO shows up in the New York Times.

00:19:08.540 And it really was fed to the New York Times by a federal worker that didn't agree with this administration, or at least it appears that they didn't.

00:19:20.260 And they didn't agree with the EO.

00:19:22.620 And so they took it and fed it to outside sources.

00:19:27.900 And I'm glad to say that we were able to track that person down.

00:19:30.560 They no longer work for the federal government.

00:19:32.300 I'm glad to.

00:19:33.120 All right.

00:19:33.920 That's – let me ask a question here.

00:19:36.280 That's a great – I hadn't heard that story, and that's a great story.

00:19:38.980 Let me take it a slightly different direction.

00:19:41.940 So the job Mark has now, I think, may well be the hardest job in all of Washington.

00:19:47.440 So Mark is chief of staff as a cabinet member.

00:19:49.360 Yeah.

00:19:49.460 But he's charged with basically wrestling alligators all day long and trying to get some semblance of order and decision-making process in this.

00:20:02.080 And you look at some of the chiefs of staff that have come before.

00:20:04.700 They have been – you know, you've had Howard Baker, who was a Senate majority leader.

00:20:08.100 You've had John Sununu, who was a governor.

00:20:10.000 I mean, you've had major, major – and I think one of the greatest chiefs of staff ever was James Baker.

00:20:17.260 Right.

00:20:17.480 And there's a legendary discussion.

00:20:19.620 So Baker was Reagan's chief of staff, and the head of OMB was David Stockman.

00:20:25.400 And Stockman had done an interview in The Atlantic, crapping all over the president.

00:20:30.180 It was a terrible interview, basically saying the president's economics is all wrong.

00:20:34.340 It was a horrible interview.

00:20:35.500 And there's a great story of Baker calling Stockman in.

00:20:40.280 And Stockman was going to go to meet with Reagan.

00:20:41.660 And Baker's quoted – and I'm not – I'm going to keep this PG-rated, so I'm not going to quote what Baker said.

00:20:48.660 But you go look it up.

00:20:49.900 Baker said, David, you're having lunch with the president, and the menu is humble, blank, and pie.

00:20:57.740 And when you walk out of that room, you're sorry, blankety, blank, blank, better be dragging on the ground.

00:21:05.700 And look, Stockman was not, shall we say, timid or shy.

00:21:12.280 And you've got to be enough of a principal, enough of a leader, strong enough to stand up to cabinet members, to stand up to congressional leadership, to stand up to whoever.

00:21:24.580 And I've got to say, I'm thrilled Mark is in this job.

00:21:27.120 So all of that is a setup to just ask a question.

00:21:30.540 What is a day in the life of a chief of staff?

00:21:34.220 Just a typical day.

00:21:35.880 Like, what do you do each day?

00:21:37.940 You know, that's interesting.

00:21:39.400 My wife asked me that question.

00:21:40.900 I said, nothing.

00:21:42.700 I met with nobody.

00:21:44.680 So she may tune in just to figure out exactly what – you know, it starts normally pretty early.

00:21:50.800 So I'll normally come in around 7.15.

00:21:55.060 I get my daily briefing, which is an intel briefing at 7.30 that will scare anybody of all the threats that we get.

00:22:04.300 You know, it goes from there.

00:22:05.260 We have a 15-minute meeting on what we call our senior meeting on the comms of the day.

00:22:11.580 So we'll look at what stories are out there.

00:22:14.400 We go from there to a number of policy meetings.

00:22:19.040 All of this is happening before 11 o'clock.

00:22:22.820 So you try to get in a full day's work before 11 o'clock.

00:22:27.320 And as we look at that, the big thing then becomes, all right, what are we going to do with the policy and the calendar?

00:22:36.420 Because all you have is a full day, and it is always full.

00:22:41.160 There's always more to do than what you could ever fit in.

00:22:44.840 And so are we advancing it?

00:22:47.420 And the big thing that you're saying, Ted, is we start to put timeframes on.

00:22:52.320 If we've got this policy, when is the president going to be able to make a decision on it?

00:22:57.160 Because he doesn't care about the rhetoric.

00:22:59.420 Now, he does like creative chaos.

00:23:01.280 So if you want to come in.

00:23:02.240 So normally, in the afternoon, you have at least one creative chaos moment where you have a whole bunch of people come in from the West Wing.

00:23:09.280 They're arguing back and forth.

00:23:11.140 And he will purposefully, you know, he would look at you, Michael, and say, well, what do you think?

00:23:15.360 Knowing that you have an opposing view from Ted.

00:23:17.980 And then he'll go, well, Ted, don't you disagree with that?

00:23:20.940 And then sit back and watch you fight.

00:23:22.540 Oh, yeah.

00:23:22.760 And watch you fight.

00:23:23.420 And you've been in those meetings.

00:23:25.220 Many times.

00:23:25.700 And so, you know, so a lot of times what will happen is those will continue on.

00:23:32.180 And then around 5 o'clock or so, you're normally getting back to some of the emails and so forth that you have trying to set up the follow-up.

00:23:41.300 Because I've got to – I try to make sure that I'm calling everybody back before I go to bed.

00:23:47.740 Now, sometimes that means that I'm calling them back at 1130 at night.

00:23:53.500 From bed.

00:23:54.520 Well, so I'll normally get home between 8 and 930.

00:23:59.400 And you're doing all your emails because a lot of times you have your phone and it goes in a secure setting because you're actually in a skiff.

00:24:09.220 So you're getting secure phone calls throughout the day.

00:24:12.180 You'll talk to cabinet members.

00:24:13.760 You mentioned cabinet members.

00:24:14.720 So you'll normally – I'll normally have four or five calls with different cabinet members every day.

00:24:20.820 Sometimes it's those candid conversations where you said, you said what?

00:24:25.500 And who thought that that was a good idea?

00:24:30.700 But in that, I think the real key, it's all about results.

00:24:34.880 And the key with results is that if you produce, you start to restore the confidence that comes back.

00:24:43.000 And it's why people hate politicians.

00:24:45.680 I used to say that members of Congress had an approval rating lower than a cockroach.

00:24:51.060 And that's saying something.

00:24:52.620 And I didn't know it was quite that high.

00:24:54.600 But as we look at this, it's about making sure that we work with the national security team, the Mike Pompeo's, and et cetera.

00:25:04.300 You know, I think probably the biggest thing is for Ted and I, fighting for freedom is a 24-7, 365-day-a-year job.

00:25:17.940 And it is calling.

00:25:19.700 It's a calling.

00:25:20.840 And, you know, whether I'm here tomorrow or gone tomorrow, you know, you've got to give it your utmost while you're there.

00:25:27.760 The president comes under unbelievable attacks.

00:25:32.120 And what it's doing is preparing him to make the best decisions.

00:25:37.000 He's a quick decision maker.

00:25:38.880 And just like when he called out to Ted, he says, Ted, I want to make sure that gets done.

00:25:43.480 That's a good idea.

00:25:44.400 And he expects it to get done.

00:25:46.600 And you think he will forget?

00:25:48.400 He never forgets.

00:25:49.700 He never forgets.

00:25:50.380 You know, it's very interesting.

00:25:51.480 On this point of the unexpected and chaos, I don't know if our microphones are able to pick it up.

00:25:57.340 But right now, we're here at the White House.

00:25:59.080 Outside, you can hear the protests that have been raging for weeks.

00:26:02.740 We know there have been riots around the country, cities burning down.

00:26:06.880 What is the opinion here in Washington and in the White House on these protests?

00:26:11.680 You can hear real time.

00:26:13.080 They're outside screaming.

00:26:14.180 We've obviously seen horrific violence.

00:26:16.340 We've seen rioting.

00:26:17.300 We've seen police officers murdered.

00:26:18.960 And it all started with a grotesque act of police brutality, of George Floyd.

00:26:26.680 What happened to him was wrong.

00:26:28.780 It is exactly the right thing that the officers who did that are being prosecuted.

00:26:34.700 And that's the way the system is supposed to operate.

00:26:38.600 But, you know, I got to tell you, Mark was talking about the challenges any president faces,

00:26:43.920 but in particular, this president faces in this very polarized and divided time.

00:26:47.680 Last week, last Thursday night, Heidi and I are doing date night in Houston.

00:26:51.860 We're heading home from the restaurant.

00:26:53.500 The president calls me on my cell phone, which happens regularly.

00:26:57.280 He does pretty regularly.

00:26:58.080 And we talked about a couple of things, but I told him, I said, Mr. President, Heidi's here.

00:27:02.820 You mind if I put you on speaker?

00:27:04.160 And so he chatted with Heidi.

00:27:06.260 But it was interesting.

00:27:06.960 Heidi said, she said, Mr. President, it is really, really important for you to speak out

00:27:14.660 to the racial injustice in this country and for you to speak for unity.

00:27:19.040 And she was really heartfelt and emotional about it, said she, you know, Heidi said, look,

00:27:24.180 I can't think of anything more important for you to do.

00:27:26.720 It was interesting afterwards.

00:27:27.860 I told her, I said, you know, Heidi, he actually has, and he has repeatedly.

00:27:32.800 And you haven't heard it because the media won't cover it.

00:27:36.340 So when he stands up and says, don't commit rioting and burn churches down and murder police

00:27:43.360 officers, they'll cover that sort of.

00:27:45.620 Yeah.

00:27:46.340 But when he speaks out and says what happened to George Floyd was wrong and racist and bigoted

00:27:50.920 and the officers who did that need to be prosecuted, they don't cover that part of it.

00:27:56.580 And that's got to be frustrating.

00:27:58.060 Well, it is frustrating.

00:27:59.020 He gave an unbelievable speech when we saw SpaceX, Elon Musk rocket go into orbit.

00:28:08.240 And he gave a great speech.

00:28:09.980 And the first part of that speech was literally about what you were talking about.

00:28:14.180 Didn't get covered.

00:28:15.560 I mean, in fact, you said, well, he gave a great speech and no one could find it.

00:28:19.400 They couldn't see it.

00:28:20.340 It wasn't, you know, CNN, MSNBC.

00:28:23.360 None of them covered it.

00:28:25.180 Even I, who I am living this stuff.

00:28:27.300 I'm a political junkie.

00:28:28.180 You didn't see it, didn't you?

00:28:28.460 I didn't see it.

00:28:28.940 Yeah.

00:28:29.260 And so you have all of that.

00:28:31.340 And throw social media censorship on top of that.

00:28:33.560 That's right.

00:28:33.980 Well, and that's the key.

00:28:35.380 That's why the EO on the social media platforms is so key, because it is the workaround.

00:28:41.860 And the very fact that people are viewing this right now or hearing this is a critical thing

00:28:47.100 that we have to preserve and protect.

00:28:49.100 But I'd say the other aspect of that is this.

00:28:52.220 When you look at what this president faces, it is the voice of millions of people across this country that actually get to him, that he sees it in real time.

00:29:06.240 He hears about it from senators who are constantly calling out.

00:29:10.340 Another story that no one knows about, you know, so we have a church that was burning.

00:29:15.560 Yeah.

00:29:16.000 I'm getting text messages and everybody's saying the president has got to do something.

00:29:21.020 Washington, D.C. literally was burning.

00:29:23.640 You know, Lafayette Park.

00:29:25.220 It was a Sunday night.

00:29:27.240 I'm on the phone with the president of the United States after midnight.

00:29:31.280 And he says, you know, Mark, we've got to get control of it.

00:29:34.540 So what happens is the next morning we put things in motion with Attorney General Barr and bring in National Guard troops and all of that to actually say that we're going to restore law and order.

00:29:48.620 And you know what happened?

00:29:49.620 We restored law and order.

00:29:50.880 Now, it's – but that wasn't the first midnight call.

00:29:55.700 The first midnight call was in Minneapolis where he calls the governor of Minnesota and says, governor – and I was on the phone with General Milley, with the president.

00:30:07.060 The president calls the governor of Minnesota and says, listen, I'm watching in real time what's happening in your cities there in Minnesota.

00:30:15.320 He says, yeah, the police have abandoned things.

00:30:17.480 He says, we're going to send the National Guard.

00:30:20.160 We'll help you.

00:30:21.260 And that was a president at almost 1 a.m. talking to a governor in Minnesota.

00:30:26.220 Nobody ever sees that.

00:30:27.480 Nobody even knows that that happened other than the three of us that were on the phone call.

00:30:31.180 Right.

00:30:31.480 Well, this – so we have to get to a couple mailbag questions.

00:30:34.500 Okay.

00:30:34.680 I think the audience will kill us if we don't do it.

00:30:37.760 The first question is directly about your job.

00:30:43.080 Mr. Meadows, what is the least expected thing that you found about your job when you started it?

00:30:49.520 You know, I thought I had it all figured out the minute I got here.

00:30:52.900 And it's kind of like a minor league player getting called up to the big leagues.

00:30:59.540 The pitches are faster.

00:31:01.080 They do brushback pitches.

00:31:02.840 I thought I had had everything said and done to me in Congress that could have been said or done.

00:31:08.360 Right.

00:31:08.500 And that was not the case.

00:31:09.980 And so I think probably the biggest thing was that.

00:31:14.540 The other big surprise is how much the president wants to hear from the American people.

00:31:21.400 I knew he wanted to hear from Ted and I.

00:31:23.540 Yeah.

00:31:23.700 But he really – he keeps saying, well, what are the American people saying?

00:31:27.200 What are they wanting?

00:31:28.180 And that was the – it was really eye-opening.

00:31:32.160 Well, the next question is for both of you.

00:31:34.340 This question came in.

00:31:35.760 We're in an election year.

00:31:36.840 If all the protests and all the craziness that we've been seeing didn't remind us of that.

00:31:41.100 We're in an election year.

00:31:42.180 Assuming everything goes well, what's priority number one looking ahead into 2020, 2021, 2022?

00:31:50.440 Restart the economy and bring back jobs.

00:31:53.100 Amen.

00:31:53.780 Three, four months ago, we had booming economic growth.

00:31:57.140 We had the lowest unemployment in 50 years.

00:31:59.400 And by the way, you want to talk racial equality?

00:32:02.120 We had the lowest African-American unemployment ever recorded.

00:32:05.660 Now, tragically, that got derailed by a global pandemic from Wuhan, China that ended up – we had a lockdown across the country and we destroyed 40 million jobs.

00:32:20.340 And coming out of that is not going to be easy.

00:32:22.600 But I'll tell you this, if, God forbid, we go down a socialist road of the far left, jacking up taxes, destroying small businesses, that's going to kill jobs.

00:32:35.900 And by the way, if they follow through on their promise to abolish police departments, a whole lot more people are going to die.

00:32:41.880 And so my top priority, and I think yours and the president's, is get this economy moving back and bring back jobs.

00:32:50.840 It has to be.

00:32:51.560 I mean, that's the number one priority.

00:32:53.260 It's also the thing that the president is best at.

00:32:55.600 He's already done it.

00:32:56.780 He can do it again.

00:32:57.940 He's already starting to do it again.

00:33:00.120 And then along with that is preserving freedoms.

00:33:02.840 I think we're getting to a place where we see defund the police.

00:33:06.080 We see abolish ICE.

00:33:08.540 We see what so many on the left are wanting to do is basically say we don't want any rules.

00:33:15.540 But more importantly, we don't want anybody to even enforce the rules that should be enforced.

00:33:21.020 And so we need to make sure that we preserve freedom but also understand that we need to uphold the rule of law.

00:33:27.100 But certainly the economy is number one.

00:33:28.860 Because we are a nation of law, not a nation of men, though there are men that need to help us maintain those laws and maintain those freedoms.

00:33:36.080 And women. 0.98

00:33:37.600 And women. 0.98

00:33:38.120 And women. 0.98

00:33:38.720 I know.

00:33:39.420 I know we're going to be canceled.

00:33:40.680 We are certainly going to be censored for that.

00:33:42.680 But we have taken enough of your time, Mr. Meadows.

00:33:44.900 I'm sure you've got another several hours of work to do.

00:33:47.540 So thank you so much for being here.

00:33:48.960 No, thank you. It's been great to be with you.

00:33:50.140 And Senator, we'll see you on the next episode.

00:33:52.400 I'm Michael Knowles.

00:33:53.140 This is Verdict with Ted Cruz.

00:33:54.480 Thank you.

00:34:06.080 This episode of Verdict with Ted Cruz is being brought to you by Jobs, Freedom, and Security Pack, a political action committee dedicated to supporting conservative causes, organizations, and candidates across the country.

00:34:18.460 In 2022, Jobs, Freedom, and Security Pack plans to donate to conservative candidates running for Congress and help the Republican Party across the nation.

00:34:28.400 This is an iHeart Podcast.

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Verdict with Ted Cruz - June 12, 2020

Behind the Gates with White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows

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