The Signal Sitdown

If you ever plan on climbing Mount Everest, you’ll need what they call a sherpa. Named after the small Nepalese ethnic group that populate the Himalayas, sherpas are mountain guides to help climbers navigate the brutal and unpredictable conditions of Everest. It’s no surprise, then, that Washington has adopted the term “sherpa” for counselors to presidential cabinet nominees during the confirmation process. If you think climbing Everest is hard, just try climbing Capitol Hill.

Clint Brown, now the president of American Path, was the sherpa for one of the Trump administration’s toughest nominee battles: the confirmation of FBI Director Kash Patel. Brown takes viewers inside this uphill battle, which ended with a 51-49 vote to confirm Patel, in this week’s episode of "The Signal Sitdown."

With over a decade of Senate experience, Brown helped Patel understand Senate dynamics and procedure so Patel could sell the vision he and Trump had for the FBI.

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It's been 15 days since "Liberation Day," the day President Donald Trump announced a slew of tariffs on foreign goods.

After unexpected movement in the bond market—bond yields rose rather than fell—Trump announced a 90 day pause on many of his April 2 tariffs. Since "Liberation Day," however, the administration claims more than 130 countries have come to the negotiating table. Both proponents and critics of Trump's tariffs can agree that the ongoing trade negotiations are a testament to the monumental undertaking the American people elected Trump to accomplish: A reordering of the global exchange of labor, goods, and services.

Daniel McCarthy, editor of Modern Age, joined "The Signal Sitdown" this week to break down the Trump administration's strategy to effectuate an overhaul of the American system and the challenges the administration could face along the way.

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was arrested on Feb. 12, 1974, for speaking out about the evils of Soviet communism. The next day, he was exiled to the West and would not touch Russian soil again for more than 15 years.

On the day of his arrest, Solzhenitsyn published an essay titled “Live Not by Lies.” The four-page essay was a call for civic courage: The end of Soviet totalitarianism would begin only when the Russian people refused to accept the regime’s lies.

Solzhenitsyn’s essay inspired the title of Rod Dreher’s 2020 book “Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents.” Almost five years later, Angel Studios has turned Dreher’s book into a four-part documentary series focusing on the stories of the brave souls that stood up to communist regimes. Dreher joined “The Signal Sitdown” to give a behind the scenes look at the Angel Studios project.

Dreher started working on “Live Not by Lies” when he received a shocking phone call.

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Rep. Eli Crane, R-Ariz., is a fighter. The week after 9/11, he dropped out of the University of Arizona to join the Navy and accomplished his goal of becoming a Navy SEAL. In 2023, he brought that fighting spirit to Congress, where he’s been proven prescient on major issues such as America’s actual role in the Ukraine war and the need to reign in out-of-control government spending from agencies like USAID.

Crane joined this week’s episode of "The Signal Sitdown" on the heels of a bombshell report from The New York Times about the extent of U.S. involvement in Ukraine and in the midst of major negotiations between Republicans in the House and Senate on cuts to government spending.

The Arizona congressman was onto the U.S. Agency for International Development before DOGE drew attention to it this year.

“I tried to defund USAID last Congress by 50%,” Crane told "The Signal Sitdown."

After Crane co-sponsored a piece of legislation from former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz in August 2023 to abolish USAID, he brought an amendment to the House floor to slash USAID funding in half. 

“Democrats stopped it and Republicans stopped it,” Crane recalled. The amendment failed, with 102 in favor to 326 opposed. A majority of House Republicans—114 of them to be exact—voted against Crane’s amendment.

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President Donald Trump has made massive inroads with Gen Z voters through an alternative media strategy that took the president’s message directly to the digital town square.

As a deputy assistant to the president and White House deputy communications director, Kaelan Dorr is a key player in executing Trump's digital media strategy. He joined a special episode of The Signal Sitdown to discuss how Trump became “the Memer-in-Chief.”

Over the course of the 2024 campaign, Trump eschewed traditional media, opting for a media strategy that met voters where they were consuming content. The Trump team brought the president’s message to podcasts and social media platforms instead of op-eds and primetime cable news. The big secret, however, is that this strategy is actually “very simple,” Dorr said. “I think that's what makes it very effective at the end of the day.”

“The beauty of the digital strategy and of the movement we've kind of curated over the last decade is that anybody can do it,” Dorr told me. “It's truly valuable because it doesn't require an ad executive on Madison Avenue… to talk about ‘what's our message progression on this issue’ and ‘how do we do videos that tell a story over time?’” 

“I like to tell everybody this is the easiest job I've ever had because the American people gave us a honey-do list and we're just checking things off.”

Trump’s infamous use of social media serves as the foundation for the rest of the administration’s digital strategy.

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President Donald Trump’s pace since returning to the White House has surprised the president’s friends, perhaps even more than his enemies.

On the 66th day of his administration, Trump signed the 100th executive order of his second term, breaking FDR’s record of 99 executive orders in the first 100 days. While Trump plows ahead, the leftist lawfare complex that once sought to imprison the president is attempting to handcuff his second term by filing more than 130 lawsuits against the administration.

As a deputy assistant to the president and Trump senior policy strategist, May Mailman is one of those administration staffers tasked with executing President Trump’s game plan. She sat down for a special episode of "The Signal Sitdown" filmed at the White House.

“I think actually the president's speed has always been this fast,” Mailman said of the offensive posture of the administration. It has always been, ‘I need this, I need this, let's go, let's go, let's go.’”

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Karoline Leavitt made history when she became the youngest person ever to hold the title White House press secretary.

In a special episode of "The Signal Sitdown" filmed at the White House, Leavitt opens up about her relationship with President Donald Trump, her political upbringing, and how the president is garnering record support with young voters.

At just 27 years old, Leavitt is tasked with communicating Trump’s priorities to the American people, oftentimes through testy exchanges with the adversarial corporate media in the White House briefing room.

"I don't think anyone could anticipate having this job," Leavitt told The Daily Signal. "Certainly, one may hope for it, but you never really know if it will happen."

These days, Leavitt makes headlines sparring with journalists, but once upon a time, she thought she might become one. "I always was enthralled with the media and news growing up," Leavitt said. "Always thought I wanted to be a reporter, actually on your side of the table, and covering the news."

That started to change, however, when Trump burst on to the political scene. "2016 was the first election I was actually eligible to vote in, and I cast my ballot in the New Hampshire primary for Donald Trump," Leavitt recalled.

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When Rep. Tom Emmer became the House GOP whip in 2023, Republicans' mission was simple: Limit the damage President Joe Biden did before President Donald Trump returned to the White House.

Emmer, a Republican from Minnesota, shared his party's struggles in an interview on "The Signal Sitdown." While coordinated opposition to a forceful administration is no easy chore (just ask former Speaker Kevin McCarthy or Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer), governing, even with a trifecta, is even harder. But that’s precisely the task Emmer and his colleagues face.

The House majority whip peeled back the curtain on the dynamics inside the House Republican Conference as budget negotiations and bringing rogue federal judges to heel dominate conversations on Capitol Hill.

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On the heels of a Tuesday phone call between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, Curt Mills, executive director of The American Conservative, joined “The Signal Sitdown” this week to discuss the latest on the push for peace.

Mills said the three-hour call between Trump and Putin “threw a little bit of cold water” on the prospects for a rapid peace. “The Russians don’t have the most incentive right now for the war to end,” he noted.

What we know of the call offers some evidence to Mills’ claim: While both leaders signaled they want the war to end, the only deliverable from the call was that Putin agreed on a 30-day halt on attacking Ukrainian energy infrastructure. 

Mills continued explaining why Russia lacks incentives to come to the table: Ukraine is only getting weaker.

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"Everything's computer!" President Donald Trump said on Tuesday while checking out a Tesla. The president might be right about that, not only regarding the Tesla, but for the future of the American economy: The Trump administration is attempting to usher in the AI economy while bringing the tech giants working on this technology to heel.

Its no small task, and two massive stories from the tech world that corporate media outlets swiftly swept under the rug this week are illustrative. Thus far, however, “it is a loud silence on the part of the media,” Wes Hodges, acting director of the Tech Policy Center at The Heritage Foundation, told me on this week's episode of ”The Signal Sitdown.”

The first story came from a Facebook whistleblower’s allegations that the tech giant was willing to bend over backward to appease the Chinese Communist Party, even sharing critical technological developments in AI and then “lying about it” to U.S. officials.

The second came from Elon Musk’s X. After X suffered a series of outages on Monday, Musk said the social media platform was the victim of “a massive cyberattack to try to bring down the X system, with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area.” Corporate media outlets swiftly trotted out experts to claim Musk’s claims were “garbage,” even though U.S. officials claim they have not yet been able to identify who was behind the cyberattack.

Though the corporate media wants the public to pay no mind to these stories, each provides essential insights into the fight for the future of the American economy, a fight President Donald Trump is fighting on two fronts. The first is with China; the second is with American elites.

“There is a lot of truth to being able to deflect and hide your source of attack with enough time and resources,” he said of those questioning whether the attack actually came from the Ukraine area. Nevertheless, “Musk's accusation that it came from Ukraine isn't something that we should rule out,” because of the enemies Musk has made since entering the political arena.

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“America is back,” President Donald Trump declared in his Tuesday address to Congress, making no bones about connecting what he sees as the imminent American revival to his electoral victory in November and the accomplishments of his first six weeks in office.

The president’s triumphant tone, and Democrats’ reactions to it, made Democrats look “like absolute clowns,” Daily Caller Senior Editor Amber Duke told me in this week’s episode of “The Signal Sitdown.”

Since their loss in November, Democrats claim to be doing a lot of soul searching, but apparently without much success, given that Democrats in Congress refused to even stand for the possibility of an American “golden age” under Trump, much less stand for families of migrant crime victims or a child on his way to beating brain cancer.

Democrats are adrift: The American people see it, and the president seems to delight in it. For Duke, “there were two things that Trump did that I thought were incredibly effective.”

“The first,” Duke said, “was listing specific accomplishments from the administration” just six weeks into Trump’s second term. “Typically, the president comes in the first year, they give this address, they're talking about the things that are wrong with the country, and what they're going to do throughout their administration to fix it.

“Well, Trump's already been fixing it. He's already accomplished a lot in his first six weeks, so it sounded like the type of speech that you would hear in year two, year three, even year four,” Duke explained.

Trump brought the receipts, too. Trump “back[ed] it up with data,” Duke said, particularly when it came to “examples of government waste, fraud, and abuse that DOGE has uncovered,” and issues of border security.

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Jim Justice’s life feels like an American folktale.

Standing at 6’7”, the Republican senator from West Virginia is built like Paul Bunyan. He, like Bunyan, has an animal sidekick in Babydog, his English bulldog. He sounds like a character written by Mark Twain.

Justice was born and raised in Raleigh County, West Virginia, where he’d ride his bike to school, play Little League baseball, and romp through the woods. He went to college on an athletic scholarship and became captain of the Marshall University golf team.

He then joined the family agriculture business, and became an eight-time national corn-growing champion. He’s headed too many businesses to count, but decided to run for public office. He served two terms as governor of West Virginia and is now the junior senator from West Virginia.

Justice and Babydog joined me this week on “The Signal Sitdown” to talk about his journey from West Virginia to Washington, D.C.

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On this week’s edition of “The Signal Sitdown,” Bradley Devlin speaks with Max Primorac, former acting chief operating officer at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), under the first Trump administration. As chief operating officer, Primorac saw firsthand how U.S. taxpayers unwittingly fund a litany of leftwing causes at home and abroad.

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Recovery and rebuilding efforts continue across the southeastern United States in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene’s devastation last September. In the break-neck pace of the newscycle since the general election campaigns, one of the most under-covered stories from 2024 is how the Biden administration withheld desperately needed hurricane aid from conservative citizens impacted by the hurricane. Freshman Rep. Mark Harris, R-N.C., has been deeply involved in recovery efforts and recently visited impacted North Carolina communities with President Donald Trump. Harris joined The Signal Sitdown this week to provide an update on how Trump and Republicans are trying to rectify the wrongs done to hurricane victims by the Biden administration.

As for, “where do things stand now, they've got a long ways to go,” Harris told me. But “?the American people have been doing a great job, I feel like, of stepping up and helping. People literally came in from all over the country, offering aid, offering help.”

Without the generous aid and hard work from private citizens, Harris suggested things in western North Carolina would be much worse because of the “nightmare” response from FEMA and the Biden administration.

“[?The] corruption that was uncovered and was exposed really began to bring things to light,” Harris said. “For the federal government, through FEMA in this particular case, to have been so corrupted to avoid helping those who were perceived to have conservative values or even to support President Trump in the upcoming election—that's almost criminal.”

Other reports have uncovered that FEMA, under the Biden administration, had spent millions on housing migrants in hotels throughout the country, rather than having that money ready for natural disaster aid.

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The full account of events that culminated in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy has been kept hidden from the American public for over 60 years. Now, however, President Donald Trump is on the verge of declassifying what other administrations—even his own previous administration—refused or declined to make public. Not only has Trump promised to declassify documents pertaining to the JFK assassination, but also the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. 

Craig Iffland is an independent researcher with a Ph.D. in Moral Theology from Notre Dame. He is more knowledgeable about the JFK assassination, what we know and what we don’t yet know, than anyone I’ve ever met. Daily Signal readers may have become acquainted with Iffland by reading a recently-published Daily Signal article titled, “Here’s How We Find Out Who Killed JFK.” This week, he joins me on The Signal Sitdown to not only discuss Trump’s effort to bring transparency to the assassination attempts but also revisit what happened on Nov. 22, 1963 and the years leading up to that fateful day.

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The budget reconciliation process stands as President Donald Trump's and congressional Republicans’ best—and likely only—hope to pass their agenda through Congress.

While this policymaking mechanism has become more well-known in recent years because recent presidents have used it to get their policies through Congress, the budget reconciliation process is difficult to untangle—even for the seasoned Washington insider.

Budget reconciliation, however, does not evade the understanding of Richard Stern, the director of the Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget at The Heritage Foundation. Stern joined me this week on “The Signal Sitdown” to discuss the players, procedures, and policy options on the table as Republicans consider their legislative path forward.

Reconciliation, “is the one shot we have to really get all these things done,” Stern told me. “Really, almost all of the agenda can and should be in this bill.”

“That's both border security, its interior immigration enforcement, deportations, but it's also permitting reform, regulatory reform, deregulation, unleashing our energy resources. We could go after the deep state. We could dismantle the deep state if we really wanted to,” Stern said of what could be accomplished in budget reconciliation.

Though there are limitations imposed on what can be done through budget reconciliation, Stern suggested Republicans can go big on it because the Senate can make changes to the rules that govern the reconciliation process—and some of those rules are in dire need of reform.

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“Energy security is national security.”

If you spend enough time with Rep. August Pfluger, you might get tired of hearing him repeat those words.

The Texas congressman and new Republican Study Committee chairman would be the first to say that if you aren’t tired of hearing it, Republicans haven’t been saying it enough. 

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Rep. Ralph Norman was on the House floor Jan. 3 when Rep. Nancy Mace, a fellow South Carolina Republican, phone in hand, told him that President-elect Donald Trump wanted to speak with him. Norman had just voted for Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, to become speaker of the House, rather than Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La.

For this week’s episode of “The Signal Sitdown,” Norman joins Daily Signal Politics Editor Bradley Devlin to explain why he initially voted against giving Johnson a second term as speaker, to share the inside story on how he went from a “no” to a “yes” on Johnson, and to pull back the curtain on an exclusive meeting Trump held with House conservatives at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, on Jan. 11.

“I had one chance when we voted for the speaker to use my one vote out of 435 the way I thought it should be used, and I voted against [Johnson]. I voted for Jim Jordan,” Norman said.

“Nancy Mace handed me the phone,” Norman recalled. “She said, ‘the president wants to talk to you.’”

The first thing Trump told Norman? “‘You're interrupting my golf game,’” the South Carolina lawmaker said with a smile. “I said, ‘Well, Mr. President, I hate to be doing that.'”

“‘Mike's the only one that can win it. Jordan can't win it,’” Trump said in Norman’s retelling, “‘I love Jim Jordan more than you do.’”

“I said, ‘Mr. President, I get that, but you need to be calling Mike Johnson and going over where is he going to take a stand on [budget] offsets,” Norman claimed. “And that's why we've got the $38 trillion in debt.”

Trump agreed Johnson and his House objectors should meet. In a side room, Norman, Johnson, and others huddled around the phone with Trump on speaker.

“I said, ‘Mike, are you going to not put any more suspension votes up where more Democrats vote for it than Republicans?'” Norman recalled. “'Before you spend another dollar, are you going to have it offset with cuts?'”

“After we talked back and forth, he said, ‘Yes.’” Norman claimed. “He said, ‘I will do that, and if I don't, you can put me out,’” essentially promising to make good on his promises to conservatives or suffer going the way of his predecessor, former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif.

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The Republican-controlled Congress has a monumental task ahead of them: Passing the agenda that elected President-elect Donald Trump and gave Republicans control of both the House and Senate. It will be trial by fire for the newest members of the Republican House like Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas.

This week on The Signal Sitdown, politics editor Bradley Devlin interviews the newly-minted Congressman. Gill gives us an inside look into how new members of Congress go about setting up their office and getting up to speed on the legislature’s rules and procedures. All the while, these new members are posed to play important roles in the House Republican conference’s dynamics and passing the Trump agenda.

“Everybody recognizes President Trump's leadership, and he's got the ability to sort of bring people in line—to put it nicely—in a way that I don't think our party has had in decades, if ever,” Gill said of the Republican trifecta.

“I think we all recognize this is his mandate,” Gill continued. “We have a majority in the house because of President Trump, not because of anybody else. We have a majority in the Senate because of President Trump. So that is the vision that President Trump has cast for the party, which is an America first agenda. That’s what we're going to be focused on passing.”

With slim majorities, Republicans in Congress will have to pass large swaths of this agenda through a process called budget reconciliation. Reconciliation is exempt from the 60-vote cloture threshold in the Senate, but it also to a certain degree limits what can be included in the budget reconciliation legislation.

The razor-thin majority in the House makes the path to success even more narrow and marred with potential pitfalls. House Speaker Mike Johnson is meant to guide his energetic and rambunctious Republican conference down this path.

“There is no harder job in politics than being a Republican Speaker of the House,” Gill claimed.

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A sweeping election victory on Nov. 5 means Republicans will have control of the House, Senate, and the White House come January. Capturing this trifecta, however, was just the beginning of conservatives’ fight to save the country. 

Now comes the much harder task: conservatives actually have to govern. Republicans, animated by President-elect Donald Trump’s winning agenda, will have to work at record pace to get the changes the American people want through the slow-turning gears of Washington, D.C. 

To preview the incoming Congress, I spoke to Ryan Walker, executive vice president of Heritage Action for America, on this week’s episode of “The Signal Sitdown.” Walker has nearly a decade of experience working for the House of Representatives under his belt and is now tasked with ensuring conservative grassroots priorities are attended to on Capitol Hill.

While Republicans have a strong majority in the Senate, it is nowhere near the 60 votes needed to overcome the Senate filibuster. Nevertheless, there are some mechanisms that exist for the Senate to circumvent the filibuster and pass their agenda with a simple majority vote in the upper chamber. And Republicans are planning to put one of these mechanisms, budget reconciliation, to use to pass large portions of Trump’s agenda.

In this upcoming budget reconciliation process, Walker told me that “the American people have demanded that [Congress] go big.”

“[The American people] don't just want a bill dealing with tax reform,” Walker continued. “They want substantial change to the way the government functions. They want the border closed. They want inflation to come down. They want crime rates to drop. They want folks to start acting in a way that is not weaponizing government agencies against the people. They want spying on American citizens to stop. They want their votes to count and illegals to not be allowed to vote in federal elections or even state and local elections.”

To no surprise, the American people actually want the policies they voted for in November to be enacted, Walker suggested. “Regardless of which strategy,” Republicans in Congress go with, Walker said, “it needs to be a big and massive piece of policy change.”

#dailysignal #congress #democrats #Republicans #mikejohnson

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