Cliff Sims

And so what I wanted to do was give a firsthand account, this honest look of what the first year and a half of the Trump administration, what the White House was all about.

And my intention was not to attack Trump.

And in fact, my view was if people know what it's really like in there, they're actually gonna have a more favorable view of the president when they get the real inside scoop on it than they do from what they're getting through the filter of the media.

But one of the variables was,

the staff in the White House was not a cohesive unit.

And part of that came from when the president wins, number one, at the time, he's not a DC person.

He doesn't know anybody in DC.

All he knows is, well, I've got this campaign team who's been with me, and now I've got the RNC, kind of more establishment Republicans, the kind of DC people,

I only have a handful of people on my campaign team.

It's not that many people.

I'm gonna have to staff a full government.

I need to bring these people in, and we're gonna try to build a government with these kind of different factions, so to speak.

And what happened very quickly was,

instead of coming together and uniting and being able to kind of work together, there was these factions that broke off that were all kind of self-serving.

And you had a dynamic where the establishment folks come in and they're trying the best they can to get rid of the campaign people who they look down on because a lot of them were like me.

I never worked in the government before.

I never worked in the White House before.

I was an entrepreneur.

I was doing things in the private sector.

I was from some other part of the country.