National security is a 24/7 hour job: Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg

Someone who knows that all too well is Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg, a former national security advisor to President Trump. And General Kellogg, I wanted to ask you this very specific question. You have worked in national security, the highest levels for the vice president. If, let's say, North Korea or Russia was to send a nuke to the United States, how much time would the president and his team have to respond? Yeah, Kaylee, thanks for having me. A very limited amount of time. In fact, we actually ran plans on that and rehearsals on that. You have about from the time that they launch when you're within just a few hours of response. And that means what kind of response are you going to have? What kind of defense you going to have? You know, when you look at national security, you ask a great question there because national security is a 24/7 job. And most of the bad events occur not at 3:00 in the afternoon. They occur at 3:00 in the morning. And that's when you've got to be prepared for them. You know, even Alexander Hamilton, one of the founding fathers, when he wrote in The Federalist Papers that one one, one of the most critical positions and jobs in background that a chief executive must have is actually understanding the power not only of personality, but of energy. And he wasn't talking physical energy. He was talking intellectual energy. And you see that going forward to today. And you were in the White House. We're both in there together. Most of the decisions are hard. They're never easy and they come at you very, very fast and you must respond rapidly. And I, and I've told you this before, you know, most of those things happen in the middle of the night. And I can tell you time and time again when we had to have our wake up criteria and it did with make sure that the president and vice president were up. General Kellogg, just to get to that specific point there. It did happen with Trump, I believe that there was some target on troops in Erbil and you were part of the team that had to call him in the morning. What happened? Yeah, it was actually on one January and when I got a call in the middle of the night and it was a situation room and they picked up and they had Robert O'Brien and President's national security advisor and I on the line who said our embassy in Baghdad is being attacked by pro Iranian Iraqi military and that the the the embassy is actually starting to burn documents that is code for mean you're getting ready to lose the embassy. And so we executed wake up criteria put us all over the line together, Robert, myself, the president, the vice president and the president started making decisions immediately. He said right away, we are no losing the embassy. Got it. Then he said, who is behind this? And we said it was Qasem Soleimani, the Kurds force commander in Iran. And this was on one January. He said, we're going to respond to that on three January, 48 hours later, Soleimani was dead. And that's how the president thought, and that's how we reacted on more than one occasion. He was very decisive. He was very fast. He knew how to make those calls. And he was always ready to go in the middle of the night if we called him. And we called him on more than one occasion. And President Trump answered the phone and not a single American soldier died on his watch in his final year. Meanwhile, every U.S. soldier in Afghanistan and Jordan outside of Biden's working hours from 3:50. It's amazing. General Kellogg, thank you very much for your wisdom and insight, as always.