Dan Pfeiffer

Obama had just done a call with a world leader.

And all the goons are in there briefing him.

They got all these experts.

And he said to me as I walked in, he's like, well, we're about to find out if all of the prep...

And the policy really matters as much as these guys say it is.

And Trump navigated – he got very lucky in his first term and was able to half-ass a bunch of things.

And nothing bad happened until the pandemic.

Then something horrendous happened.

But from a foreign policy perspective, it was kind of a quiet time.

But here is the example.

This is the chickens coming home the roost of a president who doesn't pay any attention to policy, isn't interested in it, doesn't think seriously about these things, and is surrounded by people who don't think seriously about these things.

You end up here.

And that applies communications-wise too, which is when you're just talking about the economy or immigration, maybe you can just fly by the seat of your pants, say what you want here and there.

But when you're talking about a war,

What you say matters.

And if you're just talking out of your ass every time someone calls you on the phone, you're going to have like a domestic political and international public diplomacy disaster.

That's kind of what we see here.

I just remember how much time we spent thinking about the things that we said, not just Barack Obama, but the White House press secretary, anyone on TV, anyone who spoke on behalf of the president, anyone in the government, how those words would be interpreted by not just the American people, and that matters a lot, obviously, but...

The markets, like there were times during the financial crisis where things that people said could set the market reeling, how it would be viewed by other governments around the world, both friend and foe.

And then Tommy and I were talking about this the other day, but just like as we were engaged in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, one of the things we were thinking about a lot was how the rest of the Muslim world was seeing what the United States was doing.