Weekdays at 12 noon and coanchor state of the union with jake tapper on the networks sunday new sunday morning newsmaker show. She played a key role in cnns 2016 president ial primary debates, serving as a questionnaire in six of the networks seven primetime primary debates on both sides of the aisle. Also, as coproducer on the set of cnn Election Center for all Election Night specials and importantly, from our perspective, graduated cum loud with a bachelors degree in political communication from the George Washington university and also has an honorary doctorate from gw, which is interestingly not on your cnn bio. I couldnt help noticing you. Yes, we updated the other. One of the other things we do in the school of meaning Public Affairs is have a handful of fellows, distinguished leaders in journalism, politics and communication who join us. Join our faculty or staff and our students. One of those fellows is named by is the tucker fellowship, endowed by bruce tucker and cindy tucker, the parents of 2013 smp graduate jennifer tucker, the turk. Her fellows are leaders in communication and journalism who come guest lecturing classes, hold informal conversations with students, hold brown bag lunches and various occasionally write bestselling books and are interviewed on on our stage about those books. We happen to have one of those people with us this evening. Were very honored to be joined tonight by Jonathan Karl, chief, washington correspondent for abc news coanchor of this week. His broad experience covering u. S. Politics, foreign policy, the military hes reported on and reported from more than 30 countries. The reporter from the white house under four president s and 14 press secretaries, which is an impressive survival record. I have to say, when several of the most prestigious awards in journalism, including the Walter Cronkite award, the National Individual achievement and the National Press foundations Everett Mckinley dirksen award, the highest honor for congressional reporting. And hes the author of a bestselling new book, tired of winning donald trump and the end of the grand old party, which is getting a lot of press for a lot of good reasons and some pretty interesting and disturbing stories. So heres whats going to happen this evening. Im going to stop talking and invite dan and jonathan up to the stage to join us where they will talk for just about an hour. At some point, someones going to wave at me. I will come back up and say thank you all very much for joining us this evening and invite you to to join us in the lobby. Well be selling copies of jonathans new book and hell be happily signing them until his hand cramps or theyre all gone. Whichever comes first, is my understanding. Please help me. Welcome dana bash and Jonathan Karl. Right. Excellent. Its like a living room. I know. It is like living room. High, everybody. Okay, so heres a fun fact before we start. Back in the day when frank sesno was the cnn bureau chief in d. C. , Jonathan Karl was the cnn capitol hill correspondent. And i was the capitol hill producer. I was his producer. Yeah, the best producer i ever had. Okay. He says, i mean. We we had a lot of fun. Seriously, this is if i if im sorry to already started interrupting. No, but i have to say massively awesome to be here with you, because you and i Work Together through a very intense time in American History. And included an impeachment of a president. Could you imagine a. September 11 terrorist attacks and all the aftermath of the anthrax attacks on the us capitol . And seriously, i its great to be with you again. Its been a while and its really, really good. No, its true. Its true. And by the way, do you know that back then there i was thinking about this and we were kind of barely had cell phones. Yes. There was no there were no blackberries. There were no clearly no iphones. Yeah. Like, how do we beepers . We had beepers on on september 11 and we were communicating back and forth the beepers. And i had a really high tech advanced beeper id just been given where you could actually tap out like morse code. You could tap out little short messages. Yeah, but yeah, sorry. Anybody even born then youre probably not. Okay, so lets talk about this amazing book, tired of winning. Jon karl is a great not only is he a great reporter author, hes a great writer. And, you know, one of the things i remember and i always thought i need to do this and i literally havent done it once is hes to watch you. You had one of those stand up books. Do you still do this . Yeah. I love the black and white and new edition book. Yeah. And you would take notes on things, so you didnt forget it . Yeah. Yeah. Thats like, oh, thats such a good idea. And a few times in this book, you refer back to your notes. Yeah, i. Including on 911. Yeah. Yeah, i. And thank god i did that. I havent done enough of it. My advice for any of you, you know, aspiring to do any of this type of stuff is just keep a regular journal. And i have not done it regularly enough. But but those notebooks were the raw material for all three of of the books. Ive written. And, and i looked back at what i wrote on september 11th, because this book kind of concludes with a look back to being on the capital that night. And i hadnt gone back to read what i wrote, you know, in all those years. And, i mean, it was just because you cant, you know, you you think you may remember, but what youre what you were thinking through such a huge moment. And i so, yes, no, its great stuff. Okay. So lets talk about this this book, which has i mean, it tired of winning. It speaks for itself. The title. But you really go through some of the the moments that we heard about through the january six committee, some of the things that we didnt hear about. And then the moments that you were while the interviews that you did with the former president. Yeah. After that, in march of 2021 and beyond, the one thing i just want to start with is just to kind of since we are in the News Business is to start kind of towards the end of your book, because weve seen a lot in the last really 24, 48 hours. A lot of people writing about, what, a second trump term would look like. And you kind of end there in your book and you talk about the people who were left in his orbit. And we were just talking about this in the green room. And im not going in chronological order, but im just because i think this is really fascinating. One of the people who was one of the last man standing was a guy named johnny mcentee, who in. 2020 was 30 years old. Yeah, he just turned 20. I mean, just it just turned 30 when he took the job back as the President TrumpPersonnel Office director right before that he was the the bad carrier. I mean, he was really the guy that carried the president s bags. Yeah. Yeah, a little. He had a desk right outside the oval office. So you you go outside the oval office. Theres an area called the outer oval, and there are a bunch of different desks there. His desk was right up against the wall that separated the outer oval from from the oval office. So he could be called in by the president at any moment to grab something, take something you know, go with him. If he was going to be traveling. And then he left. And then he came back with a with a really big job, which is office of personnel. I know it doesnt sound very sexy or important, but it really is. I mean, its basically hiring and firing of every executive Branch Appointee from the director of the cia to the secretary of state down to, you know, any number of positions throughout the federal government. By the way, he didnt just leave. He was fired. Fired because of issues that came up with his fbi background check. So he was fired as the bagman and he came back as the head of the most important Human Resources department in the federal government. And so he and hes still in i mean, you know, he has a little has a business now, which we can talk about in a second. But hes still very much in trumps orbit. Yeah, hes part of project 2025. Hell be in there. Yes, therell be help. But hes very much in. Yes. Okay. So lets talk about him for a second, because i do want to start by looking ahead the there are two things. One is, i think one of the most important stories you tell here is at after the election. And as theyre getting ready to leave, he decides that its important to completely change the American Military posture globally. Yes. And takes it which he knows nothing about. And takes it upon himself with one other person inside the pentagon to do that. Yeah. Yeah. Tell the story. Well, first of all, when mcentee had been doing prior to the election was instituting an effort to ensure that everybody who worked for trump was thoroughly loyal. There were lots of concerns that to tell the taylor swift story. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, things like that that his team and he had a theres a team of like 30 people that work in the president ial Personnel Office. He basically got rid of everybody that was there before, brought in his friends. Most of these people in their twenties. And they set about trying to find this loyalists in the in the in the white house and in the agencies. And they discovered at one point that there was a young woman who worked in the office of ben carson. Remember dr. Penn garth, ben carson, who was the head of housing and urban development . Well, it turned out that this young woman had liked an Instagram Post of taylor swift, as maybe ever done, that. Yeah. Saying, okay, everybody. And theyd be on to you. But this wasnt just any Instagram Post. This was an Instagram Post that featured taylor swift holding a plate of cookies. And the cookies were emblazoned with the Bidenharris Campaign logo. So this was immediately brought to the attention of the chief of staff in the white house, who immediately reached out to the chief of staff at the department of housing and urban development to raise this very serious issue. And he did it on a postit note. Yes. And by the way, it was pointed out that she turns out she was actually a taylor swift fan. I guess they existed even back then. Oh, they definitely did. Now, the postit note was that was the was the military thing. Yeah. So. So, look, the. But but but seriously, what this was this was an effort to make sure that people were sufficiently loyal. And after the election, he did his first major move, which was to fire the entire top leadership, civilian leadership at the pentagon, on the top of which was the defense secretary, mark esper. If you remember, mark esper had refused to something a little more serious than an instagram like when trump wanted to invoke the insurrection act to send active duty u. S. Military troops into the streets of american cities, to put down unrest and riots. He wouldnt go along with it. And so mcentee had prepared a whole list. Mcadoo and his team, a whole list of the sins of this defense secretary, which included that refusal to use active duty u. S. Forces on the streets of american cities, but also included things like has vowed to keep the department of defense apolitical. This was how this was. So so these are all get fired replaced by people that mcentee and his team have chosen and their first order of business is what would have been the Biggest Movement of u. S. Military personnel around the world, probably since, you know, maybe, maybe the iraq war, maybe maybe in such a short period time, maybe even you have to go back further than that. And it was to take all u. S. Personnel immediately out of afghanistan, all u. S. Military personnel out of iraq and syria, and all u. S. Military personnel out of germany, where theres a long standing as a major natos presence in germany. And and mcentee basically sent this over. There was that order was that simple was also troops out of somali air and sent the order over with this new acting defense secretary that he had put in place. But it was pointed out that you needed to have an executive order to do such things. So he drafted the executive, he was in his team, 20 somethings, drafted the executive order by going on google to find out what executive orders look like. He was told by a colonel at the pentagon to look in the file cabinet, youll find an old executive order. You can you can go on a copy of that. And they got trump to sign it and it caused chaos at the pentagon because there were no there was no preparation for any of this. Youre moving tens of thousands of u. S. Personnel on a moments notice. It takes a little bit of preparation of what youre doing, not to mention what the implication is are. And i describe in detail its all based on sworn testimony, how this one order written by a 30 year old, you know, guy who had been on the job, you know, the Personnel Office for just a matter of months, never had any military experience at all. And eventually it ended up getting rescinded because it was it was going to cause chaos, by the way, at the very time when trump was doing things like meeting with Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn about, you know, overturning the election and Michael Flynn is doing things like suggesting we should impose martial law in america to rerun the election. This is when thats all happening. So, yeah, quite a story. And so what is this . Tell us about. A second trump term from your from your reporting. I mean, you talk a little bit about it here, but what is your what is your sense of this . Because, i mean, one of the questions is how much trump has. Well, there are two things. One is the marc millers of the world, the mark esper of the world. I mean, the bill bars of the world. Theyre theyre not going to go anywhere near a second. Trump white house or a trump administration. So hes going to have the jonnie mac and cheese and people like that around him and he knows he understands more because hes been in the white house for four years. A little bit more about how it works. Look, i think that i firmly believe that we were on the precipice of a much greater disaster in the end of of of 2020. The beginning of 2021. And that trump had become so desperate to overturn that election, was willing to do anything, and he was stopped by good people that were around him, people who supported him, republicans, Trump Supporters within that administration, who are the kind of people that mcentee wanted to weed out. You mentioned a few of the names. There were others as the white house counsel, you know, pat cipollone, top lawyer in the white house, who felt it was his job to keep the president from breaking the law. Hes very high on the list of people. We dont want anybody like that again or people who wont. Does somebody like pat cipollone, who doesnt want to go anywhere near that point . Yes. There were there were people there was another guy named Chris Liddell that id written about in my previous book, betrayal, who had been like secretly, you know, secretly in terms not briefing the president about it, but running what i call the clandestine operation from the second floor of the west wing, where he was working with the incoming biden administration, because a president ial transition is complicated and, you know, it doesnt its not like one day you hand the keys over and there you are. So so you had people that were doing things to kind of stop or mitigate what the damage that trump was prepared to do. Those people are gone in a second trump term. So mcentee, isnt there with it, by the way, doesnt literally need to be mcentee, but its somebody to play that role. Hes already preparing to play that role. Hes working on this thing called project 2025, which is to set the terms for the personnel and the agenda of the next republic in president ial administration. But they arent going to be weeding out people that are insufficiently loyal. Theyre going to make sure that only people that are hired are those that are totally loyal to donald trump, as one of mcentee is lieutenants who i quote in the book said, you know, the funny thing is, loyalty is more important than policy. You can teach people policy, this guy said, but you cant teach loyalty. So the first criteria, if youre coming in for any job, whether its in the west wing of the white house or whether its in any of the cabinet agencies, is are you sufficiently loyal to donald trump . So that has tremendous implications for, what, a second trump term would look like. Yeah, huge implications. Okay. So lets talk about a few more of the scoops that you have in this book. Well, actually, you mentioned the transition. And i had heard ron klain tell this franklin was joe bidens first chief of staff. Tell the story of how he had like 5 minutes with mark meadows the day of the biden inauguration. I didnt know why until i read this. And its about a pardon for somebody related to a fox news host. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Tell that story. No, its its amazing. So by the by the time january 20th comes along, as you remember, trump left the white house at about and it was about 830 in the morning. So that he wouldnt, you know, he had already announced he wasnt going to the inauguration. I reported earlier that he was actually on the verge of being disinvited from the inauguration because Mitch Mcconnell was leading an effort to disinvite him, didnt want him there. But anyway, he decided on his own not to go. And he leaves and. Mark meadows, who had been communicating and a couple of phone calls with with clayton during this insane transition that we had all we were all witnessing from afar said, you know, come in in transition. You remember its 1201 is when the new president takes over. Come in at 10 00, well meet at the white house. Ill show you around, you know, and you can get a head start on the day. I mean, how generous is that . I mean, my god, this is amazing. So, so clean. Clean shows up at 10 00, you know, and they let him in because hes on the list. And he goes to the chief of staffs office. He knows this area because hes got about as much government experience. Eve