Producers’ Pick | Jared Kushner: The media weaponized itself against Trump

This episode is brought to you by Samsung. Unfold the all-new Galaxy Z Fold 4 and expand your world. With Flex Mode, it stands on its own so you're hands-free to get more done during calls. And with multi-window view, you can use up to three apps at the same time. Plus, the edge-to-edge screen allows you to fully immerse yourself in your favorite games and shows.

Visit Samsung.com to learn more about Galaxy Z Fold 4. And now, your host, and you're the guy that's always at the nexus of power. You were very hard to interview, impossible to interview for the last four years. That was intentional, right?

It wasn't intentional. I just felt like there were people who were better at communicating than me. My job was to help the president execute the different priorities he gave me.

And so, again, it takes a lot of work to come on and to make sure you're always doing this the right way. I have a lot of respect for the people who were communicators, but my job was to be an executor. You didn't intend to really join the president when he was a candidate. But then you started seeing what was going on, and you saw some places where you could help. And gradually, it seemed like you got more and more involved. It didn't seem like there was one day where you said, I want to do it. Can you describe that process?

Sure. So I write about this in the book, but I was seeing what was happening with Donald when he announced. And obviously, it became a very hot topic.

I saw somebody say recently the last slow news day we've had in this country was June 15, 2015. And he announced, and it became a whole thing. And obviously, the first month was really helping my wife deal with all the fallout that happened to the business because of his announcement. Ivanka.

Ivanka and Don Jr. and Eric. And they were dealing with incoming everywhere. They had restaurants canceling leases. They had a corporation severing ties because Trump was saying things about illegal immigration that were becoming controversial.

And so I think he lost about 30 million dollars of income in the first week or two. And he basically said, I don't care. I'm doing this for the country.

This isn't about me. I have enough money and I'm going to do what it takes. And so I kind of watched him do that. And then all my friends in the Upper East Side in Manhattan were saying, this is a disaster. This is going to end. I think the New York Post ran Don Voyage.

He's out. And every time they predicted he was going to fall, he kept rising. And I was saying, well, this is just counterintuitive. And so after a couple of months, Donald said to me, said, Jared, why do you come join me for a rally?

And I said, you know, it'd be interesting to do. And we didn't know how much longer it would last at that point. So I went with him. We flew to Springfield, Illinois. I write about this in the book, how we get to the we're on the plane.

We're talking about, you know, the grandkids and football. He writes a couple of things down. It wasn't like he was preparing a detailed speech or anything like that. And we get to the convention center in Springfield and the person greets him and says, congratulations, sir. You just broke the 36 year record of this convention center. He says, well, who had it 36 years ago? And they said Elton John. And he turns to me and says, Jared, imagine how much better I do if I had a guitar. Right. And so we go in there and he speaks for about an hour.

No notes contemporaneous. And just and he he basically was saying things on policies that I'd never really gone too deep on. But he spoke about Common Core, which was interesting.

So he says, we're going to end Common Core and we're going to send it to the states. And the people there were going crazy. They were supporting that. And it surprised you because Jeb Bush was pushing Common Core. That would seem to be a Republican tenant at the time.

Well, it wasn't just Jeb Bush. I mean, it was, you know, again, on the Upper East Side, I felt like I was in a very worldly, diverse place. Right. Be with the heads of the banks, the heads of the fashion industry, the heads of the technology, the heads of the media. And I was at a big charity gala a couple weeks earlier where the leaders, a very successful businessman gets up there and says, we are going to save children in this country. We are going to create equality. We're going to save our education system. We have to all support Common Core.

Call your senators, call your congressmen. This is a very influential group of people. And I said, why do they think one thing when Trump is saying the other thing? And I was walking around the rally. There was about 20,000, who you are at that time.

Nobody knew me. So I was talking to people getting to know it was people. They were old. They were young. They were male. They were female. They were white.

They were they were black. And it was it was a diverse group of Americans who and I kind of said, these people feel like Trump is talking for them. And he was talking about trade, saying, I'm not going to send your jobs overseas.

I'm not going to send your children to these endless wars. And I saw that there was a big disconnect. And I'd read actually Charles Murray's book coming apart a couple months earlier. And that gave me kind of the intellectual framework to see what was happening.

So on the plane ride back. So that inspired me. I realized that Donald was speaking for people who felt like they didn't have a voice. It wasn't about right versus left.

It was about outside versus in. And also in you chronicling this, it's so clear and everybody being that I know more people around the organization than just you. There was no collaboration with the Russians. There's no way that. But yet it almost it absolutely would have paralyzed me knowing that you're you had experience in jail. Your dad went to jail. You know, that's like they were lining up.

The Washington Post was writing. They were taking you to jail for collaborating with the Russians. You thought you cooperated with them.

It never happened. Having said that, you still four straight ahead and had great accomplishments. But the one other conflict you talked about it was how traumatic it was to have your dad go to jail.

And what it did, it actually ended up bringing your family, in my opinion, closer than it actually was. And one of the people that was involved in the campaign was the one who put your dad in jail. Governor Chris Christie. Here's what he said in 2019 to Axios about why he wasn't chief of staff cut 28. Well, the longer term consequences for the president and for the country was that he didn't have the very best people in front of him to be able to make a full and fair decision about. And then he paid the price for that later on with people like Scott Pruitt, with people like Mike Flynn.

I mean, we can go on and on. So in the end, this is a monumental staff failure that failed the president. And as a result, failed the country. And he was talking about he did the he did the pregame case they win.

These are the people you should hire. You looked at the you looked at Chris Christie's book and he was the prosecutor to put your dad in jail. He said, I don't want any of these guys. Was it personal or was there something about what was in that binder? Yeah, nothing personal at all. You know, during before Donald accepted Chris's endorsement, he basically called my father and said, you know, what do you think?

If you don't want me to do it, I shouldn't I won't take it. My relationship with you is a lot of respect. And he felt like Christie was a total political animal. He got involved in a family dispute and really put a ton of pressure on my father. And I saw firsthand what it's like when somebody is under investigation and when you have a prosecutor with endless resources and endless ambition, really trying to apply pressure, subpoenaing everyone in your company, putting pressure.

And ultimately, my father made a mistake and paid a big price for it. But Donald was very gracious to call and say, are you OK with it? And I said, no, I'm OK with it. I'm OK with it. I'm OK with it. I'm OK with it. And I said, no, I'm OK with it. I'm OK with it. So my father said, he called your father, Donald Trump called your dad before taking Christie's endorsement.

And what my father said to him was he said, look, this is much bigger than me. I'm very at peace with where my life is. You know, I learned a lot from my experience. My life is amazing. I have my family. It's given me a real sense of prioritization. Do whatever's best for you.

And I encourage you to do it. And so I started asking the question, I said, look, I'm OK with this and I'll support it fully. And just, you know, let's put our personal issues to the side, let's focus on it. When Trump won, the book was opened by Steve Mnuchin, who was a very competent person. Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions, Mike Pence, and everyone looked at it and said, these are all of the people from the swamp who basically we're saying we wanted to get rid of. And Christie, you have to keep in mind at the time he was finishing his term in New Jersey.

I think in the single digits, he was maybe nine, maybe eight, maybe it was like the low teens. So it wasn't like he was the world's most accomplished governor, but he's a very good talker. And so he goes on for for a long time, always explaining why things that didn't happen, if only you would have listened to him, everything would have been perfect.

So I just think it's a very self-serving narrative and I don't buy it at all. And I do think, again, Trump made some right decisions. He made some wrong decisions.

But he's an adjuster. His first night that he ever slept in Washington was in the White House. And he was not a mayor.

He was not a governor. And I think a lot of it was him figuring out what he wanted, what kind of people he wanted around it. But he also brought a lot of outsiders to Washington. One of the best decisions I believe he made, which was very frustrating to us in the first year, was he basically said anyone who signed one of these letters against him, he was not going to allow to work in the administration. And if you think about it, to be to work in an administration, you had to be qualified.

How are you qualified? You worked in a previous administration. So what the voters hated was that by signing letters. So there were all these letters that were signed by defense people or former secretaries basically saying that Donald Trump was not qualified to be in office and Hillary Clinton would hold them up as campaign tools.

But what that basically did was it showed that these were the people from the swamp. These were the people who were part of the career political class. And it excluded a lot of people who were qualified on paper because they'd served before. But these people were either part of the Bush dynasty or the Clinton dynasty.

So Trump brought a whole new era of people to Washington who were from the business sector, who had, you know, created jobs, who had gotten things done. Some of them worked out. Some of them, you know, who we thought... Well, Tillerson was a disaster. You described Tillerson was absolutely terrible. And he had a problem with you, correct?

Yeah, I think it was misguided. We got along very, very well in the beginning because I recognized that he had a very big deficiency and that he didn't understand the president. And he, I think coming as a CEO of a major corporation, he had a couple of things that were just working against him. One is he was a very isolating person. He had a chief of staff that basically did. He hollowed out the State Department, lost the building. He didn't work hard.

I don't know. I'm sure he put a lot of hours in. I think he didn't work efficiently. But, you know, when you run a big oil company, it's different. I think that he didn't accept the fact that his job... He was a secretary. We don't call them ministers in America.

We call them secretaries because it's a delegated authority from the president. But he thought that his job was to create the foreign policy and he disagreed with what President Trump wanted to do. And he didn't love the fact that you were doing the Abraham Accords and working with Middle East peace and he thought it was a folly, correct? And the trade deals that you were working out, he seemed to be doubting you every step of the way. So I was given two files by the president. One was to work on the U.S.-Mexico relationship, which you remember in the 2016 campaign.

I orchestrated President Trump's secret trip to Mexico, which turned out to be a massive success for the campaign and it surprised everybody. Then the second one, which he volunteered before, was Middle East peace. And I don't know why he did that.

I could only assume he figured it can't get any worse because it was a mess at the time. ISIS had to caliphate the sides of Ohio. Iran was enriched with cash. All of our allies were betrayed.

And everyone who'd worked on it in the past 25 years... I write a funny story. I meet with the head of the Council on Foreign Relations and I lay out my approach to him on the Middle East. And I said, well, what do you think?

Do I have a chance? And he says, absolutely not. I said, why are you so negative? He says, Jared, nobody's made any money betting on success in the Middle East in the last 25 years.

And I said, okay, that's a good point. How many peace agreements you work out with? Six peace agreements. Six peace agreements.

I think you got it. And unfortunately, this administration is on the cusp of undoing some of it by going back to the Iran deal. We're going to be more back in a moment with Jared Kushner. The name of the book is Breaking History, a White House memoir.

Don't move. Learning something new every day on The Brian Kilmeade Show. From the Fox News Podcast Network. I'm Janestine, Fox News senior meteorologist. Be sure to subscribe to the Janestine Podcast at foxnewspodcast.com or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

And don't forget to spread the sunshine. Information you want. Truth you demand.

This is The Brian Kilmeade Show. So this deal, which is supposed to stop nuclear weapon weapons in the Middle East and the proliferation of weapons of mass death in this neighborhood and beyond, it will actually cause the proliferation of nuclear weapons. And the Middle East will be crisscrossed by nuclear tripwires. It will make the Middle East a powder keg, a nuclear powder keg. This is what shall I tell you?

Use a clinical term from psychiatry. This is madness. This is the height of folly. And that was Benjamin Netanyahu on Fox and Friends one hour ago. Jared Kushner here. Jared, one of the first things the administration did, yours that you were a senior advisor to, was to rip up this deal. They were using their money that they were making from oil. We have to sell it to fund Hezbollah, Hamas, ISIS, chaos in the Middle East.

Prop up Assad. And you guys tore it up and isolated them. The result, I probably if you didn't do that, you probably wouldn't have had any of the Abraham Accords. Is that correct?

No, 100 percent. So President Trump had a fully different approach from not just the previous administration, but from the previous two administrations. So it really was a more of a rebuke of the establishment than it was the Democrats.

And he just saw everything for what it was, which was that the Iran deal was an awful deal. It gave them a glide path to a nuclear weapon and then it gave them all this money. Why would they go back into it? I think it's a religious issue. Maybe it's a pride issue. It makes absolutely no sense from a tactical point of view. But again, keep in mind, these are the same people who did the deal the first time who are in power now.

And I think maybe it's hard for them to see that they're wrong. I mean, when we came in, when they were coming in, I sat and I gave them briefings. And I said, guys, the Middle East has changed fundamentally in the last four years. When we came in, we had ISIS had to caliphate the size of Ohio. Syria was in a civil war.

Five hundred thousand people were dead. Right now we have in the last six months, six peace deals. Maybe the way to make peace is to keep doing what's happening.

Our vision was to create an arc of stability from Haifa to Muscat and Oman and figure out how do you create economic interactivity between them, flights, security. And then by doing that, you can draw Iraq into that sphere. And then over time, keep Iran isolated.

We had them basically broke at the time. We took their oil down from two point six million barrels a day to about one hundred thousand barrels a day. And let them come to you and hold out the terms that make sense where they're not going to have a nuclear weapon and they're not going to cause problem.

If they want to join the club of respectable nations trying to make their citizens better, then make that available. You also hit it off with MBS, who has since with Khashoggi and everything like that, been, to say the least, a controversial figure. Is he somebody you're doing business with now as in the private sector? So right now, obviously, being successful in that region was because I was able to work with all the great leaders. You just had Bibi Netanyahu on. Bibi is an absolute historic figure.

He stayed in your bedroom when you were a kid. But even more than that, look, what he's done for Israel with regards to creating economic stability and economic thriving there when he was the economy minister, what he's done as as prime minister to make it a powerhouse. You had him, you had Mohammed bin Zayed, you had MBS, who's changing Saudi Arabia. The way we got these deals done is we had all of the right people in the right places at the right time working together to do the right things. And I think that the momentum we did was incredible. When I left government, obviously, I was a businessman before and I'm a businessman now. I couldn't be doing the diplomatic work anymore, even though there was so much momentum.

And so I was very fortunate that PIF, which is their sovereign fund, which is one of the top tier investors in the world, was willing to invest with me and were investing in Israeli companies, American companies. And we're trying to use economics to bring people closer together, because when people have ties, they're less likely to go to war. And so that's that's been a lot of what we've been working on.

That's true. When you look right now, why do you think President Trump lost and do you think he lost the election? So I think that what he accomplished over four years was extraordinary.

And that was one of the primary reasons why I write the book. I think that the media for four years was focused on chasing fire engines and trying to drive sensationalism. And it got to the point where it really wasn't real news. And what President Trump did was not an accident.

Right. We had the wealth gap was shrinking. Wages were rising, especially for the middle class. Inflation was low. Gas prices were low. The world was peaceful. You had no wars in Europe.

China was under control. And so for me, a big part of it was to say these policies worked and its governance worked. I think that what happened when we had covid was they the Democrats basically used that as a as a as an excuse to change a lot of the voting rules. I did notice after January, even before after the election, you just said this is it was a weird election. No doubt about a lot of mail in votes.

But I never heard from you after. And I assume because I think the president lost the election. Do you feel as though he lost the election? Look, Joe Biden is the president today and he is an absolutely awful president. It is it is it has been terrible for the country. I mean, again, like I see all of the policies we implemented that they reversed, like at the border, you know, and down south. I mean, they ripped everything up day one because it was Trump policies.

And now of a sudden today, it's the worst ever. And I'm reading today in the paper, you have two young children who die drowning and they're saying this is a humane policy. You have, you know, human traffickers, human smugglers.

You know, that's on the rise. You're putting billions of dollars into the pockets of the cartels. Does it make you want to go back again? So I believe very firmly that people are supposed to I do. Four years in and I know you said I believe that people should should should come in and serve and then go back to private sector. And like I said to you, if you read the book, you see it. And by the way, writing it brought back a lot of memories that I'd kind of suppressed as well. Right. To the degree that the first year was so vicious, so hard, you know, with the investigations and some of the what I'd call subpar people.

It was a very hard experience to have. Look, you know, being called to serve your country is a great honor. And it's a it's a it's a great opportunity to do good. I'm so proud of the work we did. But right now, I really am loving the time being a father. I'm loving the time in the private sector. And I think that, you know, being in Miami is incredible.

And so for me, that that really is something where I'm very excited about. Breaking history. The end of the book.

Jared Kushner. Thanks so much. I'll talk to you this week on One Nation. Perfect. I'm looking forward.

Thank you so much. Jared Kushner. I write about it in my book. It boiled over in this. Oh, in this meeting in Jared's office in the summer of twenty nineteen. And I walked in. It was he called the meeting was Jared Brad Parscale, Ronna McDaniel, the head of the RNC, still is.

And Mick Mulvaney, then chief of staff. And it boiled over where Jared said, oh, I had no idea how much you hated me, Kelly. And I said, Jared, I don't hate you. Don't flatter yourself. I don't understand you.

We're three plus years into this. The president wants us to work together. And all you do is try to get get in my way. You roll your eyes. You roll me. The president says, work together on this.

The two of you. And you give him a very flippant sure. And then you tell people I'm a leaker. Of course, he had people on the government payroll who were leaking left and right.

So that's just some of the sparring back and forth that you write about in your book. Jared Kushner. I have negotiated with him successfully with former senior adviser to President Trump.

His book Breaking History is there. So, of course, Kellyanne came out with a book last month. So you guys didn't didn't see eye to eye on a few things. Do you remember the situation?

Yes. So we really didn't work that closely together. You know, we she was on the campaign for the last couple of months and she did a very good job with the communication. She was on television all the time and did really, really strong. She was jumping ship.

She's she stayed. Well, she was a little shaky during that time, but she she got to the right place. But but but again, she did a good job advocating for the president on television. And then we got to the White House was about getting things done. And I was more kind of working on policies and getting things done. And she was in the communication. So she really doesn't show up much in my book because, again, I was working on Middle East peace. I was working on securing the border, building the wall. I was working on, you know, Operation Warp Speed.

I was working on prison reform. And I think she was working on other things. So, again, I had no problems with her. I just tried to avoid a little bit because she did a lot of interacting with the media. And I think she had different things she was working on.

And I had my own things. I was working and a guy that you did not see eye to eye with who was an infighter is Steve Bannon, who didn't last long. And when he left the White House, he quickly combined with another book to really hit the president pretty hard when he left.

What was that like being that you left the business world and then you suddenly had to deal in the White House with Steve Bannon at that time? Reince Priebus, who seemed to combine against you. So Steve actually was a phenomenal ally on the campaign. He was very, very helpful with the campaign.

He's extremely smart. Yeah, he's a he was again, like I said, he was a great partner on the campaign. And then when we got to the White House, I don't know why he he he started going after me. I read a scene where I think I tried to mediate between him and Gary Cohn because there was leaking on each other.

And he basically said, I'm going to break you in half. And maybe he thought I was siding with them over him. But I think we agreed on a lot of the policies. We agreed on securing the border.

We agreed on more protectionist trade policy and we agreed on the deregulation. But all of a sudden, I felt like I was getting leaked on all over the place. And I was very out of my element. I'd never been in Washington.

I didn't talk to the press at all. And I basically had an inflection point. I write about this where I said, OK, you know, if I have to fight back and I can either try to leak back at him or I could do my game. And I kind of said, look, I can never out leak a leak or like if your heart's not in it and you're not good at it, you're never going to beat somebody who's good at it. And so I basically said, look, the only way that I can I can sustain is I have to get tighter, just focus on getting things done. And that's the best way to do it. So I played the long game. And ultimately, what I what I found with my my opponents that I write about in the book is that I actually never defeated them.

What happened was is I was able to kind of create a foundation for myself where I can focus on getting my things done. And often they blew themselves up, which is what happened with Steve. And so, look, I wish him well. He was I supported his pardon at the end. He was there for us in the first campaign when very few people were. And I wish him nothing but the best.

Right. And he's back with the president. He's back tight with the president, it seems. Again, I you never know what the perception is and what's actually happening, but he's definitely become a very strong voice for MAGA. But one thing I will say, too, like he's very big into the the R on R Republican and Republican civil war stuff.

And that was his thing at Breitbart. And and I think that fighting the establishment was a good thing. But when you're governing.

Right. What I saw is that the parties are not ubiquitous, right? They're basically collections of tribes. And if you want to pass legislation and get things done, you need to figure out how to unite the tribes and get people together.

And maybe that's why he wasn't the best influence when he was in the White House. And also some of the other battles. Mick Mulvaney had a rival and was Pat Cipollone. Correct. You had the referee between them.

I had no idea that they weren't getting along, but it was a pretty critical time because right after you get done with the Russia investigation, you got the impeachment and you realize these guys got to find a way and you had to get involved in that again. Yeah. So that was during what I call season three.

Right. My third year there, we had different staff. And I saw so many people come and go that, you know, I kept trying to like both. I actually got along very well with both.

I thought they both had their strengths. But I was in this like weird scene where Mick would come into my office and complain about Pat, how Pat was leaking on him. The Pat would come to my office and complain about how Mick was leaking on him. And I was like, guys, like the president has a pretty existential threat here, which is they're trying to impeach him. The good news is. And by the way, this this happened with Russia. This happened with the Ukraine is like the Democrats would constantly pick the worst things to go after. And I would always joke with Trump on the Russians. I'd say, look, the good news is, is they're going after you.

I'm probably the thing that you're most innocent of, of anything you've ever been accused of. Right. So the impeachment, they chose a stupid thing to try to impeach him on. And so we said, let's make him pay a political price. But you have to make sure you have the right legal strategy, the right communication strategy.

And it doesn't work when the chief of staff and the chief legal counsel are fighting with each other. And so for me, after my kind of first year, I tried to really stay in my lane a lot more and say, you know, everyone was criticizing me for getting involved. And by the way, probably rightly so. Right.

I viewed it as a business guy. There's a problem. You have to get involved and try to fix it. But the more I tried to fix other people's problems, the more they would start leaking on me and resenting I was involved. So I said it kind of got tighter.

And I saw here that this was an existential threat for the president with the impeachment. I had to get involved. I tried working with both.

It really wasn't working. So I created a separate comms team to come in. I read actually a bunch of books on it. And I saw how Panetta did it for Clinton. And Panetta was, I think, probably one of the top two chiefs of staff that I studied when I was in there. And he basically brought in a lawyer named Shelburne who reported directly. And they basically created a pod that was able to fight the impeachment. We brought in this guy, Tony Sege, who was phenomenal. You know, Hogan, you know, Gidley came in, was phenomenal.

Pam Bondi, the lawyers. And we just pummeled them. And from start of impeachment to end, President Trump's approval rating went up 10 points.

Right. And then you had the one at the end before you left. And now you have a mini one now with the raid with the January 6 investigation. And now you have the raid on Mar-a-Lago where it stands right now.

Have you thought about what more you could have got done had you not had the Ukrainian phone call, had you not had the phony Russia investigation? So I think the biggest impediment was Covid, right? By year three, we'd actually gotten pretty good at it. And we were used to operating in a very hostile, combative environment. And I think Trump had finally figured out how to move all the levers of power.

We had great people in all the different areas. The deregulation was happening amazingly. Again, the year before Trump was elected, there were six million man hours in America spent complying with new regulations. And then for four years, you had the first four years in our history where there was a net decrease in our country and the cost of regulations, which helps small businesses. It's all coming back.

Yeah. Which they're putting back, which is crazy. But bottom line is, I think Covid held us back. We were very close to the Middle East. I mean, we really had six peace deals. We had great momentum.

I think we could have gotten six more at least. And I think the other thing that I really wish we would have made more progress on was immigration. We developed a merit based immigration system. I got called in after year two again. I write about this in the book where Trump does the shutdown.

I just got my criminal justice reform done that I worked so hard on. I write about how that almost Jeff Sessions tried to stop you every step of the way. A lot of chess sessions, McConnell again. And by the way, the Democrats to John Lewis tried to stop it. I mean, we worked through and it was really like standing on a ball and navigating. We got it done.

Incredible. Eighty seven votes in the Senate with an asterisk because I think Burr voted against it. He was pissed at Tim Scott on something. And Lindsey Graham was in Afghanistan. We would had eighty nine, but I'm not bitter about that.

But but so we get that done. Trump calls me in a couple hours later and says, why aren't you working on immigration? I said, well, Kelly told me not to work. He said, well, look, I'm here for two years and I don't have a wall. You know, Kelly's failed me. Bannon's failed me. Nobody's got me the wall.

All right. Paul Ryan says congratulations. You're in charge of the wall.

I said, OK, so so I worked actually with with Mick did a great job and Cipollone did a great job. You repurpose defense spending if they wouldn't give you more point one point four one point eight. You repurpose defense spending in order to build the wall. Well, we used we found a lot of different change under couch cushions within the federal government.

And actually, Stephen Miller was very helpful. And we spent we got four hundred and seventy miles done by the end. And we had another three hundred miles, which would have really secured it that the Biden administration scrapped. So but we paid for already. We paid for everything. So it's paid for to rust in the desert right now.

I guess that's their policy. I don't understand it. And by the way, border when I'm coming from New York, people said the border is xenophobic.

It's racist is a very common sense thing. It's a physical barrier to protect your sovereignty and to allow Border Patrol agents to have more utilization. And but the one that I also regret was we developed an amazing merit based immigration system, which Trump referred to as the big beautiful door, where he wanted to welcome people to the country, but he wanted them to come legally. And you want people who are going to grow your GDP, grow your wages, not depress wages. And we really developed an amazing system that I think would have actually been phenomenal for for our country.

And I really hope one day it gets implemented. Yeah, so do I. Anthony Fauci said this yesterday on our channel about Cut 18. Do you regret the shutdown, the sweeping shutdown that some said made things worse?

No, I don't, Neil. And in fact, I think we need to make sure that your listeners understand I didn't shut down anything. I think that's a very important thing. And I think that's a very important thing. And I think that's a very important thing. And I think that's a very important thing. But I think that there was a lot of consideration among the White House task force that we were reaching a point where the hospitals, such as in New York City and other places, were being strained to the point of practically being overwhelmed.

You bring us inside those meetings. What was he pushing you guys to do? What was the plan that we did to stop the spread?

That made a very big difference, right? The rate of growth and spread of the virus was huge. The hospitals were running out of capacity and we did not have enough medical supplies in the country to deal with it. So by doing the first 15 days where we got people to kind of stay in place a little bit more, that enabled us to stimulate supplies.

And again, I go through this in the book how we did it. We were facing improbable challenges. We were facing terrible challenges. We were facing terrible challenges. We were facing terrible challenges. We were facing terrible challenges. We were taking bureaucrats out of the way and we brought private sector and the military in. And we just made miracle after miracle after miracle happened in order to get the supplies we needed to different places.

And I write about how we did it, but it was very, very improbable, those things. You had Governor Cuomo says, I was going, I was back dooring the administration with Fauci. He spent an awful lot of time talking with the media. Again, he was in my office once. His phone rings.

It shows up Jim Acosta. I wrote about this. And it's like, come on, man. Like we're supposed to all be on the same team. And this is a pandemic.

Let's put our jerseys aside and let's focus on going. And the thing that frustrated a lot of people, too, is that, you know, he was one of the nation's foremost experts. I use experts, you know, in quotes because I think you have a lot of experts in government who who, quite frankly, shouldn't be there. But he's an expert.

He's been in the task force. We're scaling the testing as quickly as possible. Right.

And I always say when you have a problem, there's three different things that can constrain you. It's either imagination, it's money or it's gravity. Here we had an amazing plan, which we developed very quickly.

We had unlimited capital to spend to to to stimulate it. But we had to make Q-tips. Right. And basically we just didn't have enough Q-tips in this country. And I found that it was always the lowest cost item that becomes your biggest bottleneck. And so we did DPAs. We were working with American cotton. We were flying them in from all over the world. But everyone in the world is looking for the same product. So we're scaling as quickly as we can. You need to make the reagents.

You need to make the transfer media. And so we're scaling it all up. We figured out miracles to do it. And he goes on television and instead of saying, well, we're doing this is what we're doing. This is where we are today.

It's faster than anyone in the world. And he says, we're just not there yet. I'm saying, what is this guy, a sports canister? Like, you know, he's literally in the meeting. He's on the task force.

He was there even before me. I came in to try to clean up the problem that they left. And and it's just it would have been you need an analyst. You need an advocate that was telling the truth behind the scenes that could express to the American just to explain to them what the problem was, why we were where we were and what we were doing to fix it and why what people could do best to get there. So I think covid became very political, very emotional for a lot of people.

But again, I think that, you know, Operation Warp Speed that we didn't in this book, which, again, you know, he said couldn't be done in a year and a half. We ended up getting a vaccine, the fastest vaccine history, because President Trump came in and said, get it done. We hired the right people.

We cut all the bureaucracy out. And the Lancet just published a study that said that that saved 20 million lives. Well, look, I that's all true. And I know when the president says it, he gets when he goes brings up the vaccines, he says, why are people booing me at these events when I bring up the vaccine? And he says, you know, it's the mandate. It's the mandate. It's the mandate.

I know the answer. It's the mandate. So if you tell the people take the vaccine, it works. I'll show you the study.

It's still my decision. When you tell us take the vaccine, you're fired. Take the vaccine or you're not allowed in. That's when the American people just can't get their head around it. Some overreacting get to mass and five vaccines and six boosters and others don't.

So without it, the. I think you mentioned the fact that the vaccines are not the original individual vaccines that are used to impose mandates. But I do think that the vaccine was a miracle. I think it was. It was safe. At least the first iteration. I thought it was very effective.

Historically effective. But it should definitely be up to people whether they choose to use it. And you have these who admit to people that it's a variant. Now the vaccine is not gonna be affected is a variant.

So we're worried about. So the minute you start telling it's going to work anyway and they get it and they get it two like but at the right time it seemed like, yeah, the president or does the president feel that way as you sort of summarized- but obviously, uh, Thompson, basically. Jared in writing this book. What is the president saying the read all that he said the summarized forum we worried about him reading so so I didn't show it to him beforehand because I really wanted to be my But I do think that I was able to show people okay I love his policies but I wish he would be act like a normal person.

I always say if he acted like a normal person a he probably would have been president and I think that he probably would have been as successful as president if he was. So what I want people to do in this book is is read it and then really judge for themselves how Trump used his unique personality and his unique outsider approach to take on a Washington that was very hostile that I think our founding fathers designed a great system but it needed a shock to the system. He was that shock and I think he got better and better at it as he went and what he said to me when I gave it to him is he said look this is a very important book. I'm glad that somebody wrote a book that's really going to talk about what actually happened in the room and he says I'm going to read it. So and he started reading it he's given me some compliments on it so far and again I hope he's proud of it.

I don't know if he'll like anything. You guys couldn't be more different but you respect how different both of you are with each other and that comes across clearly how he feels about you and the job he gave you. Thank you and I always noticed that there was only one of us that was elected it was him and so if I disagreed I was grateful that he gave me the opportunity to do it but I was an advisor sometimes he listened sometimes he didn't but we had a lot of fun. Breaking history in the name of the book Jared Kushner thanks so much for the quality time. Great thank you so much Brian great to be with you. From the Fox News Podcasts Network subscribe and listen to the Trey Gowdy Podcast. Former federal prosecutor and four-term U.S. Congressman from South Carolina brings you a one-of-a-kind podcast. Subscribe and listen now by going to FoxNewsPodcasts.com