Donald Trump wasn’t just playing golf those four years out of office. In this segment from the latest episode of “Signal Sitdown,” former press secretary Sean Spicer goes into the “wilderness years” and his new book on President Donald Trump’s historic first year back in the White House.
Bradley Devlin: We’re here to talk about your new book, “Trump 2.0: The Revolution That Will Permanently Transform America.” I thought this book was great because it’s just a quick ledger of all the wins, all the points put up on the board. And it’s really easy to miss the forest for the trees. And this is the kind of look back at the first year of the Trump administration.
And so, explain to us why you felt this book was needed at this time.
Sean Spicer: That’s the key word, because it didn’t just happen by accident. And when you start in the introduction of the book, you’ll recognize something very familiar to this building and this institution, which is I talk about the role of The Heritage Foundation, Project 2025, the groups that it organized.
And I think the four years out of office is critical to understanding Trump 2.0. They didn’t just leave office when [Joe] Biden came in and say, “We’ll see you in a little bit.” There was a lot of plotting and planning, discussions, reviews, et cetera, that gave President [Donald] Trump the ability to come back into office and hit the ground running epically.
And you talk about it like, you think about just top of your head, right, like NATO, trade, DEI, border, tax policy, culture issues—go down the list, all in 14 months.
That’s not normal. And if President Trump—and this is the other key thing, Bradley—if he had just stayed in office and one day became the next and became the next, it would be the same people doing the same things just for a longer amount of time. But having that four years out of office allowed him to rethink everything and say, “Now that I know what I know, what will I do differently? How can I be more effective?” And frankly that’s the essence of Trump 2.0.
Bradley Devlin: So take us inside those wilderness years. Obviously, you served in the first Trump administration. You stayed a friend and in touch with the president. … but he spends those years in the wilderness, and I remember at the time thinking to myself, “Oh, like this is going to be a shadow government run out of Mar-a-Lago.” Right. It’s like basically what it turned into.
And I was actually surprised for, until he really starts the campaign, like in earnest, like I would have assumed that he would’ve been counter-signaling every single thing that the Biden administration did, but he didn’t.
He steps back from the public square. He’s a little quieter, and yet there’s still all sorts of maneuvering happening at Mar-a-Lago. So take us inside those wilderness years.
Sean Spicer: There’s two parts to this. There’s what he’s doing, and you’re right. He’s going back, and by the way, he’s not in the wilderness. He’s just, he’s at Mar-a-Lago.
Bradley Devlin: Right.
Sean Spicer: I had Jim McLaughlin, one of his pollsters, on my show, “The Sean Spicer Show.” And Jim was like—we were talking about the book because he was reading it—and he was just like, “We were meeting with the president, you know, every four to six weeks, going over polling, going over issues. No one paid attention, but he was doing it.”
He was taking meetings with policy experts, talking about certain key issues and what was going on. Yes, he wasn’t maybe tweeting every 10 seconds or truthing, but then it’s also what was the team doing, right?
Bradley Devlin: Right.
Sean Spicer: So there’s a whole part at the beginning of the book about all of the groups that Heritage organized, brought together, and said, “Let’s start building out a potential agenda and making sure …” And it, by the way, who are the people that we’re gonna have write these chapters? They were all part of Trump 1.0. So people on the America First team were very active. Newt Gingrich was doing a ton of polling, the America First Policy Institute. Everybody was out there, “OK, we got you.”
And then he himself was meeting with people, was talking to pollsters and political operatives, taking meetings, dissecting what had happened over the first four years. And it was almost like a sneak attack.
Bradley Devlin: Right.
Sean Spicer: If you were checking in with him, you knew what was going on, but for a lot of people, they were like, “Oh, he’s just hanging out playing golf.”
Bradley Devlin: Right.
It’s the blitzkrieg of the first 100 days. It really overwhelmed the deep state in the—
Sean Spicer: Of course, it did because they were like, “Oh, he’s been gone for four years. He’s going to be rusty.” Tom Homan comes in day one and is “We’re going to Boston. We’re going here. We’re going here.” He didn’t throw darts at a board.
Bradley Devlin: Right.
Sean Spicer: He knew exactly what to do and how to do it because they were ready. They had a plan. They knew what to do. They knew how to do it. They knew the people they needed. And if you don’t get what happened in those four years, then you don’t get Trump 2.0.
And frankly, that’s what I tell people all the time. I sat down with groups during the Biden years, and they were interviewing me like, “What would you do differently? What staff would you have rearranged? What resources would you …” And people were documenting it all. Karoline Leavitt had all of that research handed to her.
Now, did she take all of it? Probably not. I didn’t give her a quiz. But I know in the conversations that we had prior to her starting, she was very well-informed about some of the stuff that we did. I mean, when she asked me questions like, “I know that you would’ve done this differently,” she had read a lot of this stuff.
I didn’t have that. There was no guide for me to follow. There was … I talked to Josh Earnest, Obama’s guy, and I talked to Ari Fleischer and Dana Perino and … But there was no manual to look at or no research. It was like, “Good luck.” …
Bradley Devlin: Well, to bring this all back, though, I mean, I think that was part of the genius with Trump 2.0, the first 100 days being so aggressive, is that you can move so quickly that all these other forces, all these other players aren’t necessarily sure how to respond. They can’t anticipate what’s going to come next. And so you’ve got them on the back foot, and they have to kind of accept the terms of the debate or the status quo that you’ve changed.
Sean Spicer: Again, this is where the book—why part of the reason I wrote “Trump 2.0”. It’s not by accident.
During that time out of office, they thought about the right people to bring on board to execute change. They thought about what that policy looked like, and then they thought about the process. How do we do this? We know what forces are against us.
We know the courts are gonna be against us. We know that Democrats are gonna be against us. So how do we—
It’s almost like playing out a chess game. Where are they gonna move? What do we do to counter that move? It’s like a sports team that plays a team at the beginning of the season and one at the end of the season.
When you play them again for the second time, you realize, “OK, that guy can run really fast, and, you know, we gotta double-team that guy, and we gotta, you know, the goalie is really weak on the right side,” or something. You play that second game a lot smarter, and I think that’s the essence of Trump 2.0. They knew that, particularly with the border, how are these guys gonna come at us and how do we stop it.
