Cliff Sims

So if you've lived your whole life and you never had any power, so to speak of, how are you gonna respond when that ultimate test comes?

Because power is the ultimate test.

Somebody wrote about Lincoln's legacy.

He said, any man can endure hard times.

You wanna know what a man's really made of.

give him power.

And so what I learned in the White House was I was much more susceptible to the allure of power than I thought.

And what does that look like?

Well, in the White House, there's an org chart, just like any other organization.

The chief of staff, you know, president, chief of staff, everything kind of flows down from there.

In the Trump White House,

That org chart existed, but the real org chart was Donald Trump in the middle, and anyone that he knows is a spoke off of him.

He's like the hub of activity.

And most of us would do anything that it took to be and remain one of those spokes.

And I was the same way.

If I saw an opportunity to stab my colleague in the back because they were encroaching on my lane a little bit,

I'd do it if that's what it took to make sure to get them out so that I'm gonna maintain my proximity, my access, those kinds of things.

So it's not that I was witness to things that were oh so horrible that I couldn't believe were happening.

It was that my own character was being revealed

in these situations that I'd never been confronted with before.