O'REILLY You're the advance team for Elvis. 

CROWLEY Don't give him any ideas, Bill. 

O'REILLY I don't know how many people he killed that day. 

CROWLEY I meet a lot of killers in this job. I'm here to smash all of that and restore the power back to the people. 

O'REILLY Hey, Bill O'Reilly here with another edition of We'll Do It Live. So I don't like to put people on the air for 45 minutes who I don't have any interest in. Even if you might, I have to be honest here. I mean, I've got to talk to these people. You don't. You can sit back and switch in and out and do whatever you want. And it's not that easy to get people who engage at that level for that period of time, but we have one today, and her name is Ambassador Monica Crowley. Her name used to be Monica Crowley, all right, when she worked at Fox with me, and I've known her forever, but now it's Ms. Ambassador. So your official title, Monica, is the 35th chief of protocol of the United States with ambassadorial rank. Wow, how do you get that on a business card? How do you do that? 

CROWLEY Well, it's great to be with you, Bill. And you're exactly right. You and I have been friends for a very long time, and we've been on the air and off the air together for many, many decades. So I always love joining you. Thank you so much for having me. You know, when the president called me and offered me this position, I knew exactly what it was, but a lot of people don't. So if you give me a moment, I'm happy to explain what the Chief of Protocol does. And you know what? This position has actually been held by some pretty legendary people over the decades. And I've gotten to know a number of them, Bill. Many of them are still alive from the Lyndon Johnson presidency. There are two or three chiefs of protocol from Lyndon Johnston's era, who are still with us in their late 90s. Lucky Roosevelt served seven years as Reagan's chief of protocol. She's a legendary figure. So I'm very honored to be in this long line of people who have held this position. And what the Chief of Protocol does... 

O'REILLY Who was the ambassadorial person on Trump's first term? 

CROWLEY He had a mixed group of people. There was a man named Sean, and his last name is escaping me, but he had a couple of people, one of whom I believe was Senate-confirmed, as I am. And then he had a number of acting chiefs of protocol who were not Senate-confirmed, including my now deputy, Abigail Jones. She is phenomenal, as is my entire team. And he had a few other people who served at the time. They all served in a different kind of capacity because the president also gave me a different portfolio of helping to represent his administration for all major U.S. hosted events, and we can talk about that as well. 

O'REILLY Okay, so you're attached to the State Department, Secretary Rubio, that's where your base is, correct? 

CROWLEY Yes, so we are White House protocol, but we are based in the State Department, and I've got an extraordinary team of about 80 people. I oversee seven different divisions, which we can also talk about as well. But we're based at the State Department because you have to be based in an institution where you can park money. So we oversee a pretty significant budget, Bill, and we pay through protocol. We pay for state dinners. We pay for all kinds of big events that the President and First Lady host. And so you need an institution where you can put the money and base your operations. So for us, it's more of a technical matter to be based at the State Department, and that's where our main offices are. But that's also where our budget is. But we are White House protocol. And as Chief of Protocol, I manage all of the diplomatic engagements for the President, the Vice President, and the Secretary of State. Along with my incredible team. 

O'REILLY Okay, so if an ambassador in Nepal wants to get in touch with President Trump, they go through you. 

CROWLEY That is correct. Yes. Yes, and if a world leader wants to come and see the president, it all goes through me and my office, as well as the National Security Council. 

O'REILLY Okay, and then Trump runs it by his advisors in the White House. You know, I've gotten invited to the White House a few times, and it comes from the White—it comes from Trump. I mean, he says, get O'Reilly in, or, you know, I don't want to speak to O' Reilly for two years, whatever it may be. I never call him. I never do that. It's always, if he... He's got my number. I got his private number, but I never call it. I think that'd be an intrusion because you guys are so busy, and that includes running around the world. So you go to Ireland in what, a week or so, right? Going to Doonbeg. Correct? 

CROWLEY That's right. So our next international trip with the president will be this coming weekend, and we will make a stop in Dublin, where the president will see the heads of state of Ireland, and he will meet with them. And then there is a new opening of part of our embassy there. So the president will oversee that opening ceremony. And then he's off to Doonbeg to preside over the final two days of the Irish Open, which is being played at his golf course there. And so that'll be the final day, and then we'll come home. So it'll be quick, back and forth with a lot of official work there on behalf of the president and by the president. And then, of course, we'll come back to the United States at the conclusion of the Irish Open. 

O'REILLY That is, if we don't co-opt Ireland into the 51st state, which anything can happen. But I've been to Doonbeg. 

CROWLEY Don't give him any ideas, Bill. 

O'REILLY He doesn't need my help, okay? I've been to Doonbeg before the president was elected, just because I know him and, you know, I was in Ireland, and he called me, and he goes, you've got to go to Doonbeg, a beautiful golf course, but it's windy there, so bundle up, you're not going into the tropics. So I remember, this is the first thing that I remember that really made it real as far as Monica Crowley, my friend, as opposed to Monica Crowley, a big shot in the government. You're standing there with Putin, I've got to ask you about this. So Putin, as you know, is on the cover of my book, Confronting Evil, and I think he's one of the most evil men to live in the modern age. When you have to deal with a guy like that, you have to remain totally neutral. You can't, no facial expressions, no editorial, nothing like that, right? you just have to make him feel at home. Is that your job? 

CROWLEY So yes, that's part of my job. It is so much more expansive than that. Like I said, I oversee seven different divisions, including diplomatic affairs, which is and diplomatic partnerships, which is all about the diplomatic core here in Washington, DC. So, the community of all of the foreign ambassadors to the United States, we oversee all of them and work with them and their embassies very closely. But when it comes to presidential-level meetings, my team and I coordinate directly with The president's immediate team on what that visit will look like, what that interaction is going to look like. And then my team and I execute on all of that to make sure that the other world leader has everything that he needs, including access and resources, as well as President Trump has everything he needs. We create the environment that makes the most robust and effective diplomacy possible. That's what we do. So when you talk about Putin... 

O'REILLY You're the advantage, the advance team for Elvis. So you come into the arena, make sure Elvis has gumdrops or whatever Elvis wants. 

CROWLEY Well, no, no. No. I have to correct you. The White House advanced team makes sure that Elvis has his gumdrops. That's not what we do. We handle all of the diplomatic negotiations with the embassy, and my counterpart is the foreign ambassador. We take care of all of the negotiations for the visit before the visit happens and then help to execute once both leaders are together on the ground. 

O'REILLY I'm sorry to interrupt, but you would say this is what President Trump would like to talk about, is that suitable, blah, blah. So Putin's out there with you, and Putin likes you, I mean, body language, facial expressions. Did he talk to you in English? 

CROWLEY Only a phrase or two. He claims, like most world leaders will claim if, if it's not obvious that they speak English, that they don't. In many cases they do, but they always have an interpreter, and they prefer to speak in their native language. So President Putin did speak to me mostly in Russian, in Russian. There may have been a phrase or two in English exchange, but the body of the conversation was, on his part, in Russian, and it was translated by his translator. 

O'REILLY So you're standing on the tarmac, and what are you guys talking about? 

CROWLEY Well, it's very interesting because I had more of an extended period of time with President Putin than I usually do with some of these world leaders. Some world leaders, I have more conversational opportunities than others. But in the case of the Alaska summit a year ago, last August, I did have the opportunity to spend more time with President Putin. And we did speak about my earliest part of my career when I worked with President Nixon, because Nixon made a trip to Russia in 1993 when I was working with him. And we made a tour to St. Petersburg, which at the time was where all of the Russian reformers were based. And Nixon always made a point of seeing not just the leadership, but also meeting with the opposition, particularly if they were democratic reformers. So we had about five days in Moscow with President Yeltsin at the time. And then we went on to St. Petersburg. And the head, really the ringleader of the Democratic reformers at the time was the mayor of St. Petersburg, a man named Anatoly Sobchak. So we went to the Winter Palace to meet with him. And it was just President Nixon. He had one other aid and he had me. And on the other side of the table, Mayor Sobczak also had two assistants with him one of whom was young Vladimir Putin. So I was able to share that story with President Putin. 

O'REILLY Did you have to remind him or did he remember that? 

CROWLEY Well, I did remind him, and I did not expect President Putin to remember me from that meeting, but I was hoping that he would remember meeting with President Nixon. And yes, in fact, he did remember that meeting in about February of 1993. He did recall being there. So we were able to share that interaction, and man, Bill, how life goes full circle, right? God has his hand on your life at all times. And I will share this with you. When President Trump nominated me for this position, you know, over the last years, I've really stayed very close to President Nixon's daughters, Julie Nixon Eisenhower and Trisha Nixon Cox. And when President Trump made the announcement of me that he was nominating me for his job as chief protocol, they both wrote to me these incredibly beautiful notes saying that my time with their father, President Nixon, during the last year of his life, prepared me for this job. And it really has, Bill. I mean, in absolutely incredible ways, because I was 21, 22, 23 years old, working for President Nixon during his last years, meeting with all of these heads of state, including future heads of State like President Putin. And here I am now in this position dealing with these world leaders almost on a daily or weekly basis. And that. That experience with President Nixon really prepared me and gave me an education unlike any other to get me ready for what I'm doing today for President Trump. 

O'REILLY Well, you know, life unfolds the way it should, and we don't have any power over that. And you're right where you should be, in my opinion. So now we've got Xi, who's probably the most remote world leader, he's not Mr. Happy out there. When I was in Beijing, he was watching me. I did almost what you did, but I was much more provocative with the Chinese Politburo. You remember my Trip over there in May of '25, but Xi wouldn't come down to the meeting. There were 13 Chinese pinheads in the meeting and me and my son, who thought he was going to get swept away into a gulag somewhere. But anyway, Xi was watching this, but from videotape. Because it would be beneath him, in his mind the way he's got that bureaucracy set up to sit in a group of 13. You never do that. All right? Xi is the guy, and this is what he wants, and they carry out his orders. He's coming to D.C. at the end of September, and you're deeply involved with that, right? 

CROWLEY Yes, absolutely. So my team and I are essentially working directly with the President's immediate team to execute this state visit. And it will be a full three-day state visit, will be a reciprocal state visit because, as you recall, President Trump went to Beijing in May for a full state visit there, and I was with him on that trip as well. So to reciprocate, we are doing this. President Xi Jinping arrives on September 23rd, the full day of conversations, bilateral meetings, a state dinner will happen on the 24th, and then there will be additional leader programming on Friday the 25th. And those conversations obviously will be substantial and substantive. There was a lot for the two leaders always to discuss. But you know, to your question, Bill, about my position and my role and my responsibilities. And a lot of people said this to me after I was photographed with President Putin and we're both smiling and engaged in conversation. My job as chief protocol is not to pass judgment on any of these leaders. Okay, and I meet a lot of killers in this job. My job is to create the kind of environment where the optimal diplomacy can take place. So I'm not making moral judgments on anybody. I'm welcoming them, I'm making them feel comfortable, I am allowing them to have, again, the access and resources that they all need to do their jobs when they come to meet the president or the president goes there, or as in a summit situation as well. When it comes to Xi Jinping, I first met him earlier this year when we were in South Korea, or late last year, maybe it was last fall. And I met him when he met President Trump in South Korea. And so I look forward to seeing him again. We saw him in May, and we will execute, my team and I will execute everything from the arrival ceremony to the White House component to the state dinner to the second full day of programming as well, with cultural events and different things that we are considering for the schedule. So again, it's all about the execution. And this job really is about precision. It's about detail because the old joke about protocol, Bill, is that when everything goes right and is seamless, nobody really sees the hand of protocol, but when something goes wrong, the entire world knows. 

O'REILLY Yeah, it's like TV news. Anyway... But Xi wasn't the kind of guy that said, hey Monica, how's it going? Did you have a good summer? You're not gonna get that, right? 

CROWLEY No, no. Absolutely not. He is serious business. President Putin is serious business. I mean, all these leaders have gravitas, but the two of them are probably the most serious in their approach.

O'REILLY Right. But the way they go about presenting themselves, I mean, to you, I mean, Putin showed a little bit of warmth. I don't know how many people he killed that day. Maybe it was more than he wanted. So he was happy. But he showed a bit of warmth toward you. What you're going to get from Xi is this, just a head bow. He's not gonna, you know, ask how you're doing or, did you like the latest movie? He's not going to do that. He's just not that kind of guy. He would be, if Richard Nixon were alive today, and Nixon was a very astute man when it came to evaluating foreign adversaries, whether you like Nixon or not, probably the best along with Kissinger, that we've had in quite some time, he would come back, as you know, because I read all your stuff, and he would gossip. Nixon would gossip about these guys and tell you, because you're sitting there, and Diane Sawyer before you, she worked for him, okay, you know exactly what he thought of these guys. True? 

CROWLEY Oh yes. Yes, indeed. And I will say, I will sit getting to Xi. I think I'm the only person on the face of the earth, maybe, to have extracted a smile from Xi Jinping when I first greeted him in South Korea last year. And then in May, when I greeted him again, I got another big smile. But I will say, you know, to your point, President Nixon, when he talked about the Russians and the Chinese, kind of collectively as a leadership. Two sets of leaders, regardless of who they were. He used to say that the Russians were easier to deal with because they were more emotional. So, you know, picture Khrushchev banging a shoe at the UN and a lot of kind of emotional outbursts. He would say the Russians were always lying to you, but you kind of knew that they were lying to you because they were so emotional, it became very obvious. He said, but dealing with the Chinese is something completely different. To your point, Bill, that they are absolutely inscrutable. They're inscrutable, like their faces betray nothing. And so it requires more work diplomatically to kind of figure out where they stand, if what they're telling you is true and so on. And the masters of dealing with the Chinese are Richard Nixon and Donald Trump. 

O'REILLY When I was over there speaking to the Politburo, they never commented on what I said except once when we got into the fentanyl business. And it's in my book, Confronting America. It was so surreal, I can't even imagine what you go through every day. But I'm sitting there with these 13 guys, and they're asking me about President Trump because I know Trump as well as anybody knows him. And I was answering honestly, and I write about the one time in the meeting with these guys, I said something so blunt that their heads snapped back because you don't do that in Chinese society. They never smile, they just go like this, like that. Whereas the Russians are hitting you with vodka bottles and stuff like that, so I know exactly what you mean. Now, let's shift over to the State Department. So I don't want you to give away any secrets and get you in any trouble. I would never do that. But I assume that Secretary of State Rubio asks your opinion on certain things. Am I wrong? 

CROWLEY No, you're not wrong. So when I'm asked, I will provide my opinion. I'll provide whatever insights I can bring. And I think because I have the historical background of having worked with President Nixon and the academic background of having two master's degrees and a PhD in national security and American foreign policy, when anybody, including the secretary, reaches out to me and asks me for my opinion, insights, advice, of course, I willingly provide it. 

O'REILLY And I'm assuming that he does that from time to time because he comes from the bureaucratic world of the Senate into a very powerful position where he's got to face the Iranians and the Cubans and the Venezuelans and everything. So I'm assuming that you're what they call a trusted advisor. 

CROWLEY Well, you know, I used to say about my time with President Nixon, and it holds true now for President Trump and Secretary Rubio and Vice President Vance, that they don't need any help from me. I mean, they are all incredibly brilliant, talented, seasoned people. But, you know, all of them are surrounded by people with expert insights and experience. At the State Department, I mean, every region and, in some cases, every country in the world has their own specific desk of policy experts. So Secretary Rubio certainly has all of that to draw upon. But obviously if one of these leaders does ask me for my opinion or advice or whether I agree or disagree, of course I will provide that. 

O'REILLY Okay, so when that happens, sometimes that alienates the other staff inside the bureaucracy in Washington. So you're a New Yorker, and you have to go into D.C., totally different culture as you know, and the competition for what they call airtime on television, but face time with the powerful people like President Trump and Secretary Rubio is very intense. And so you get a lot of this crosscurrent. But you seem to have risen above that. You did that at Fox News. I never saw you in any kind of brawl over there, where every day they had to lock me in my office. This is a big difference. So you have a talent, then, for putting people at ease. Would that be accurate? 

CROWLEY Well, I appreciate that compliment, Bill, thank you. And I will accept it and take it. You know, I think part of it is just who I am and how I was raised to treat everybody with grace and kindness, kindness costs zero. And I always was raised with a sense of merit, you know, that if you work hard, if you get the education, and if you're a decent person, that you will get to where you were supposed to be. And I have found that to be absolutely true in my career and in my life. And there were certain things, and I think everybody experiences those. Certain things that you want in your life, in your career that didn't materialize. I mean, everybody experiences that, but I really kind of fall back on my faith with that. And I think God always has a plan, and if things don't work out the way you want, you know, I always invoke Isaiah in scripture, and it's one of my favorite pieces of scripture, which says, my ways are not your ways, says the Lord. My plans are higher. My ways are higher than yours. So I kind of put it in God's hands, and if things didn't work out the way I had wanted them to, I put my faith in him and say, he's got a plan. He's got something better, and maybe he's protecting me from something that I shouldn't be involved in because it's going to blow up down the road or cause great grief and heartache and be terrible for me. And you know what? As I look back on my life and career, that's really, really been the case, and he has put me exactly where I need to be at exactly the right time. So putting people at ease is part of who I am which I think makes me very effective in this position, whether it's President Xi, President Putin, the NATO Secretary General, President Macron of France, whoever it might be, President Zelensky of Ukraine, that when I'm with them, I bring a sense of kindness and acceptance and grace because they're surrounded by pressure all the time and they're about to go into the ultimate pressure cooker of meeting with President Trump. So I try to do my job in that sense. And it's really not just for President Trump and his White House and his administration, but it's for the American people that I'm doing what I'm doing because I have great love for the American people. And of course, an extraordinary lifelong love of my country. And that's why I'm here. 

O'REILLY You're going to love Confronting America, because that's one of the themes about success in this country, is that you get pathways, but it might not be the pathway that you think is best, all right, but you do have an obligation to do certain things to solve the problems that we have. 

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O'REILLY President Trump is a turbulent man. Okay, and I'm not expecting you to comment on that. That would be disloyal. But I consider him a friend. He's done very kind things for my family. But he's turbulent. And you never know from one day to the next what you're going to get. All right, so now I guess we're going to take over Iceland and New Mexico. Or swap them, or New Mexico is going to become Iceland, and I don't know. And I don't pay attention to it because I know it's not happening. So in my world, if it's not happening, I'm not really going to pay a lot of attention to it. But you have to, okay, because you go to work every day and you have no blanking idea what's going to happen that day with a president as turbulent as Donald Trump. The only two presidents approaching President Trump's view of life and how to insert himself into life are Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt. And the similarities are remarkable, okay, about the personality types. Nobody ever knew what was coming next. What kind of a challenge does that present to you, who has to pivot real fast in a lot of different circumstances? 

CROWLEY Well, I will tell you it is a challenge, but that's part of the great adventure of working with President Trump is you never know what the day is going to bring, right? And sometimes I think maybe he doesn't know what the day is gonna bring, whatever hits his fancy. There was one particular day, and I won't get into the specific instance, but I woke up, and I had a text message and a call from an ambassador of a foreign country who said, I need to talk to you immediately. And I looked at the news, and I said, oh, that's why that ambassador needs to talk to me right away. Look, I will say President Trump is, like, first of all, he's doing the brilliant madman strategy. And I wrote about this in my PhD dissertation. I studied it when I was at Columbia Graduate School. And I also spoke to President Nixon about this too. The madman's strategy is where you have a leader who's completely rational. It was exactly what he's doing. But will, on occasion, behave irrationally or look like he's behaving irrationally in order to keep both friends and allies, but primarily enemies, hostile actors, off balance because they're unpredictable. And I would say now, in retrospect, studying all of these presidents, knowing all of the living presidents, having met all of them and some dead ones too, that Donald Trump is by far the best practitioner of the madman theory. And I'll give you one quick example, which just happened last week or a week and a half ago. President Trump, you mentioned the Lake America thing. So he is brilliant at throwing out a shiny object like the Lake America, changing the name. And right on cue, everybody in the press, everybody starts screaming and yelling, chasing the shiny object over here. And while they're doing that, President Trump is doing something over here that is incredibly important. And in that case of the last like week and a half, he was closing the Venezuela oil deal for the United States. He is a master troller. He knows exactly what he's doing. Does it keep all of us off balance? Of course it does, but that's part of the fun of working for this man. 

O'REILLY I wouldn't call it fun, but I'm glad you are enjoying it. Now, when you get a call from an ambassador or a text or whatever, and that person wants to talk to you, you have to get permission to talk to that person, right? 

CROWLEY No, I do not, because as a Senate-confirmed ambassador, yes, I am a Senate-confirmed ambassador, essentially America's ambassador. So with that Senate confirmation comes with the authority to speak on behalf of the president, the vice president, and the secretary of state. So if I'm unclear on perhaps current policy with regard to that country or region, I may go get a briefing on it before I make the call. But I do not have to get permission to do it. 

O'REILLY Very interesting, I did not know that. From your perch in the Trump administration, and again I'm not a big fan of Washington D.C., and the way that a lot of people conduct themselves, you are, of course, an exception. And you know, if you were doing the wrong thing, there would be one six-foot-four-inch guy on the phone with you. 

CROWLEY Immediately. 

O'REILLY And I never have had to do that. You're in a position now where you see the whole landscape, and maybe I'm wrong, but you see what happens in the Oval Office all the way into what happens in the Senate, what happens in the House. You got it. You see it every day. It's eyewitness history. Do you believe that the American media, of which you were a part for years, you were a part of it. Is doing something disloyal by hammering the President of the United States, Trump, every single day. 

CROWLEY Yes, because I think what they are doing and what they have done for the last 11 years plus, since he came down that escalator and announced for president, has been... It has taken the bias that we've known, that the media has had for decades, is taken that bias and put it on steroids in a way where they are genuinely at war with this president and his policies and his administration. And the reason, Bill, is because unlike every other president that we've had, there have been exceptions, some of whom you've named, but the recent presidents have always kind of towed the establishment line, Republicans and Democrats alike. And they've put themselves, they've the establishment kind of protocol of policy and what they could get done and not done ahead of the American people. And I think Donald Trump is really the first one in a very long time, Andrew Jackson was one long ago, to put the American people first and say, I'm gonna restore power back to the American people where the founders intended, because we've gone so far astray. So by doing that, he represents an existential threat to the powers that be that for many decades have very carefully curated and built an apparatus that only suits them. It suits their power, and it suits their wealth, their personal wealth, the wealth of their institutions. It has become so incredibly corrupt. And Donald Trump came in, and he said, I'm gonna represent the American people. I'm not here to represent the establishment or this kind of corrupt system that they've built. I'm here to smash all of that. And restore the power back to the people. And because of that position, he has then made enemies of the deep state, the intelligence community, the media, of course, and they have worked in conjunction with each other for 11-plus years to undermine and ultimately destroy this man. It is a miracle he is still standing. I do believe he has the hand of God on him to bring this country back to its foundational principles. But what the press has done to him, and you know, President Nixon used to complain about this all the time. I mean, Nixon had a walk in the park compared to what President Trump has survived and lived through with these grotesque, unfair, corrupt attacks on him personally, his family, his policies, both administrations. He has achieved an incredible amount of good for this country in the first term against tremendous headwinds, and now in the second term they refuse to report any of it. They refuse to give him credit for any of it, much like Nixon, and the similarities there are pretty stunning as well. But they did everything they could to work in conjunction with the president's enemies for well over a decade to try to stop him and then try to destroy him. That they have not succeeded is a huge testament to the strength and character of President Trump to see this through not once, but twice, against all odds. 

O'REILLY But the media is not gonna stop. 

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O'REILLY So that harkens me back to a personal situation with you. Most people that follow us, Monica Crowley and Bill O'Reilly, know that Monica's brother-in-law was Alan Combs, and an original on Fox News, Hannity and Combs was after my program. And I had a lot of interactions with Alan Combs. He was a left-wing guy. I was a more moderate, not conservative, but traditional guy. And that's how the book is written, by the way. It's not an ideological book, Confronting America. But anyway, in my discussions with Alan Combs on the air, and there were plenty of them, there was a civility. I mean, I would mock him. He'd mock me or try. But it wasn't a nasty we hate you stuff. How did that change? Because now, if you go into an interview, and I still do because I have to promote my programs and my books, and the interviewer disagrees with what you say, they try to hurt you. That is a completely different turnaround in 25 years. Now we're into warfare. Do you know when that changed, how that changed? 

CROWLEY Well, first of all, thank you for the very nice words about Alan, he was a very good man. And, you know, he had started his life as a stand-up comedian. So he brought that great sense of humor to his policy arguments and his TV appearances. And he just had a lovely way about him. So a lot of that was exclusive to him. But to your broader point, Bill, I think you're exactly right about this. Look, I remember being on your show on Fox and- for years trying to educate the American public about this century-old, now century- old plus, rolling Marxist revolution here in the United States and across the West to destroy the West and to destroy America from within. And the grotesque kind of infiltration that had really started well over a hundred years ago to chip away at all of our institutions. And the communists themselves admitted it, and they talked about the long march through the institutions. Communists are patient in their revolution until they're not. But this was an ongoing thing for decades. And so the chipping away at all of our institutions and the infiltration of government, academia, the media, the culture, Hollywood, movies, television, music, all infiltrated. And so over the years, it created a change in the culture. And by that, I mean the attitudinal approach that people had to politics. Remember growing up, Bill, politics was never the center of anybody's life. You kind of saw it on the news, Walter Cronkite or whatever, and then you went on with your life. But over time, because of the gains of these Marxists in all areas of life, politics then became so central to everything. You couldn't go to a movie, you couldn't watch an NFL game without politics hitting you in the face. Very unhealthy for the country. And that then fed into someone's political values then became their values. And so people got increasingly polarized, they got increasingly nasty about their positions and judging you for yours. And then when President Trump comes on the scene, it accelerates because he is an existential threat to that whole superstructure that we just talked about. And so people started to get more emotional about it, nastier about it, more judgmental about it. And people were not talking to their parents, and parents are not talking to their kids because they voted for Trump. It has become, I think, it has superseded politics and has now become almost like a collective mental illness on the part of many people where they can't get past where someone might stand on issue x or DonaldTtrump or whatever it might be. They can't see past it, and so the viciousness is certainly an extension of that, and you know the republic can't survive this, right? I mean, you have to be able to talk to your neighbor and your friends in a civilized way and agree to disagree, but I think we're really past that. And there have been presidents who have had the opportunity, like Barack Obama, you know, the first African-American president, really had an opportunity to try to bring the country together. And he chose not to. But there have been Republican presidents also with that opportunity who haven't. And I think now it's essentially up to us. It's up to the American people. It's up to shows like this to try and have these conversations. 

O'REILLY We're going to take a quick break now, and our Premium and Concierge Members will get more of Monica Crowley and less of Bill O'Reilly, which is always a good thing, in our final segment. For those of you who are watching us all over the world on YouTube, we really appreciate it. We hope you've enjoyed the interview with the ambassador, and we'll be back in a moment.