Interview: Rep. Jack Bergman on making “MAGA mainstream” and how apathy is our greatest national security threat
Rep. Jack Bergman spent four decades in the Marine Corps before turning his attention to politics. He discusses the greatest threats facing America in 2025.
While Joe Biden was receiving multiple deferments during the Vietnam War, Jack Bergman was getting shot at in helicopters in Southeast Asia. The careers of both men started in the Vietnam era, and while Biden chose to spend decades in elected office, Bergman spent 40 years in the Marine Corps, retiring as a three-star general, before being elected to Congress in Michigan in 2016.
The parallels between America’s withdrawal from Vietnam and surrender in Afghanistan haunt veterans like Bergman. “It left a hole in my stomach,” he told the Washington Reporter in an interview. “We didn't have leadership in our country that was doing the right thing diplomatically for our men and women in uniform. And why would anybody want to join a unit and become part of the military if they knew that their leadership and the government didn't have their back, that it was going to just haphazardly put them in here, pull them out there, with no plan? What we saw in Afghanistan was a failure of leadership from the Biden administration. It sent a signal to the world that America's weak, and it also sent a signal to the young men and women, or the influencers of those young men and women, who would have considered joining the military. What am I going to go there for?”
After the recent Islamic terror attack on New Years Day, during which a veteran plowed a truck into a New Orleans crowd, murdering 15 innocent bystanders, Bergman said that the internet is the “the single biggest challenge or opportunity that is provided to us.” He added that “we use it for good. The bad guys use it to recruit. [The New Orleans suspect] was recruited on the internet. He was trained on the internet. He was seduced, if you will, on the internet, and we still have not grasped the need that government has to grasp the fact that the internet can be a force for good, but it can all be also be a tool for evil, and we're a little bit behind, and it's on us to to catch up.”
Bergman has long believed that “apathy” is “the single biggest threat to our country.”
“The bottom line is,” he said, “if you're apathetic, things are going to be allowed to happen that get you into the war, so step up. Don't be the entertained generation. Don't be the internet expert a mile wide and an eighth of an inch deep on things.” Americans tend to make three mistakes based on a combination of apathy and indifference.
“Number one is when it comes to international relations: we believe that other countries have the same goal as we do,” he said. “Number two, we believe other countries have the same values as we do. And number three, most important, we think as Americans, that the world loves us. Three big three mistakes, and the department that is in the most need of recalculation, when it comes to the positive projection of what America really is, is the State Department; if we can turn the rudder in that State Department ship back towards the Jeffersonian view of what it what meant to be Secretary of State in the early 1800s before he got elected, that would be significant.”
Thanks to electoral successes in states such as Bergman’s, President Donald Trump will soon be in position to reform agencies like the State Department, and Bergman is eager to see the “capable group” Trump is assembling take over; the Michigan lawmaker served in Congress with several of Trump’s highest-profile picks. “When you look at the people in his that he's chosen, I think he's chosen wisely when it comes to people who are knowledgeable, curious, experienced, and are willing to, in their own way, tell Trump what he needs to hear, not what he wants to hear.”
“Let's start with Tulsi Gabbard,” he said. She's an Army reservist. She's a former member of Congress. She’s got a broad space and she's intellectually curious, not a ‘this is the way we've always done it’ mentality, and she's looked at some things differently, but that doesn't bother me in the least, because she's a member of a team, a senior team, that President Trump has chosen and will work and figure out how he wants to meld them and get the information he wants and the decision making he wants.”
Kristi Noem, Trump’s pick to run the Department of Homeland Security, has been in Congress and serves as a governor. “She's got governing experience,” he said. “She knows how to run a big organization.” Mike Waltz, Trump’s incoming National Security Advisor, has a “spectacular background…[and] is very thoughtful and experienced.”
As a member of the Veterans Affairs Committee, Bergman is particularly interested in Doug Collins, Trump’s pick to run the Department of Veterans Affairs; the department is currently embroiled in a nationwide sexual harassment scandal that Bergman and his colleagues on the committee exposed. “I am hopeful that he gets the people underneath him on the appointee side to help him navigate through because I'm not so sure how up to date he is with the issues in the VA as far as how fucked up the electronic health records are…Doug's a smart guy. He's an energetic guy.”
Bergman doesn’t expect Michigan’s Democratic senators to vote for many — or any — of Trump’s nominees. “Both [Sens. Gary Peters and Elissa Slotkin] now have achieved their lifelong goal, one who's been there a couple of terms, one who just got there.” Nevertheless, he is hoping that the “Senate will feel that sense of urgency” to confirm Trump’s picks amid the recent uptick in Islamic extremism.
Bergman, who wants Peters to be defeated in 2026, said that Republicans in Michigan need to “make MAGA mainstream, and knock off the fighting at the county level and all of this shit.”
While defeating Peters is important, Bergman said that “we need to get the mansion back in Lansing back.”
To build on these gains in 2026 and beyond, Bergman said that Republicans need to follow Trump’s urging to push “to get out the vote and to vote early, because people were only listening to Trump, and if he said it, they were going to do it.”
In 2024, Michigan saw dueling state Republican Parties lay claim to the mantle of being the true GOP for the state. Bergman’s solution was to “let it burn down, and we’re going to rebuild it from the ashes.”
Below is a transcript of our interview with Rep. Jack Bergman, lightly edited for clarity.
Washington Reporter:
You spent decades commanding in the Marine Corps. You're a three-star general. Are you overqualified to be in Congress?
Rep. Jack Bergman:
Yes and no. One of the challenges that I realized when I first got here, and to an extent that I anticipated, is that we have 435 elected members of the House of Representatives. All that really means is that they won an election to get here. Now, they're here, they're a member of Congress, and what they have is a vote. So while I might be, I would say rather than overqualified, I am probably in the top 5 percent of those who are, let’s say, over-experienced, or deeply experienced, in not only the military, because I came out of the private sector too. I understand what it means to work for a big company, to start a small company, to be an airline pilot. So I am not necessarily overqualified, because I could have been shitty. Of course, I probably wouldn't have been three stars if I had been shitty, but I'm over-experienced when it comes to sitting with one of my colleagues or a bunch, and saying, ‘well, we all have great ideas especially when we were elected to Congress. Now our idea counts because we're wearing this pin, and we have all these great ideas.’ And I can sit there and say to a lot of these folks, ‘that is great. In fact, we tried that in 1982, here's how it worked then. And by the way, we tried it again 20 years later in 2000 and here was the outcome.’ So what I bring to the table is a wealth of experience in two things: leadership and understanding of national security.
Washington Reporter:
You just went through another vote for Speaker of the House. You ran for speaker the last go around. What lessons did you learn from that experience that have informed how you've continued on?
Rep. Jack Bergman:
It's a continuation of what I was just telling you. When I ran, I saw this as I was standing in front of my peers and having my five minutes to present, ‘if you like me speaker, here's how I will lead this body.’ And I could see in the eyes of a significant number of my colleagues who didn't want to work hard, not that they weren't capable, but that they did not want to put in the effort that I proposed, that the priority of things I laid out, ‘here's what we need to get done. Here's how we're going to do it. We're going to be here. We're going to stay here. We're going to get things done,’ and that was a disappointment. Let me put it positively. We all have our strengths, we all have our weaknesses. Everyone. I will help anyone. I don't care who they are, work on those weaknesses that they perceive, to help them make better decisions, to bring them along, to help them rise. But what I will not tolerate is anyone who's lazy.
Washington Reporter:
Does that date back to your time in the military?
Rep. Jack Bergman:
Yes, because it's one thing to be lazy, and we have a way in the Marine Corps of helping folks who are lazy. We used to have, no bullshit, this was called the ‘motivation platoon,’ where people who had finished boot camp — but they were just underperforming because they were lazy — would go. We had this thing called the ‘motivation platoon’ for them that we would put them in for a while, and either they got motivated or they ended up getting out, because in our business, if we don't have everybody who's literally in a fight online, mentally, physically and doing it, other people get hurt. I accept the fact that different people have different intellectual capabilities and how they can rise in an organization to do the job and take on the next level at all there, and some people were more capable than others, and that's one of the challenges that we work very hard on in the Marine Corps is to make sure that we took the best team as possible in the fight. I’ll give you an example. Let's say we were going to take 1,000 people, activate a unit, do pre deployment training, and then go to Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam. So we're going to take 1,000 people to fight. We might put together 1,200 and we pared it down. So not everybody got to go, and those were tough choices, but as commanders, we had to make serious decisions on taking the best 1,000 people as we could best assess that we thought could be successful in the fight. And that's how I think about things.
Washington Reporter:
And how do you assess Mike Johnson's work as Speaker thus far?
Rep. Jack Bergman:
I came in with Mike. If you knock on this wall, you're knocking on his personal office. I got to know Mike during our freshman year, at our freshman retreat, I don't know if you know this, but Mike authored this. This was the commitment to civility of the 115th Congress. Mike authored that and put that together. These were the signers of it. These were all the Republicans who signed it, and then we got a bunch of the Democrats to sign it too. So my commitment to someone like Mike is, number one, he's got the intellectual capability I just referenced before. He's got the skill sets where I used to look at Marine Corps war fighters, who could fly the airplane, who could shoot the rifle, who could lead troops in an assault. What Mike has that is, in this day and age of lawfare, so underreported and undervalued, is that he's a constitutional lawyer, so he's not some ambulance chaser. Think about living in Louisiana, because if the trial lawyers don't support you, you're not getting elected. And he comes out of Louisiana. What Mike needs is like anything else, is a capable group of leaders around him, and in this case, committee chairman, because he's going to delegate. He's not trying to use his authority and make all the decisions now. He's a team builder, and he's going to look for input from Tom Cole on Appropriations. He's going to look for input from Mike Rogers on Armed Services. So to be able to try to lead in the world in which we're in here in 2025 now, when you have everybody, thanks to social media, think they have a, pardon my English, but a fucking say in the decision, I'm sorry. We're the House of Representatives. My constituents, as well as the 434 other officers, they sent their elected representative to represent them, not necessarily agree with them, but to represent them in the best way possible. Mike has a confidence in himself, I believe, that other former speakers recently, you could go back three or four, I don't think they had, and I think it's mainly driven by the depth of his faith. We're in a Bible study group together, that's been going on since I've been here in Congress. He's a constitutional lawyer, so a man of faith, man of the law, a family man. He is, if you will, what we need, who we need, as speaker in this very razor thin margin of time. He'll find the middle ground, because good decisions are usually somewhere around, as Ronald Reagan said, if get an 80 percent solution every day, run with it. Get the other 20 percent moving forward, and it may end up that you only get 10 percent of it. But the bottom line is, take the 80 percent and move forward, keep the ball moving forward, because life is dynamic, and life is even more dynamic now with the internet.
Washington Reporter:
What do you think are our biggest threats?
Rep. Jack Bergman:
When I get asked the question, whether I'm in a school or whether I'm in a public forum: what's the single biggest challenge or opportunity that is provided to us in the world today? The answer to that is the use of the internet and the capabilities of the internet. We use it for good. The bad guys use it to recruit. Going back to this guy in Houston, who carried out the attack in New Orleans, he was recruited on the internet. He was trained on the internet. He was seduced, if you will, on the internet, and we still have not grasped the need that government has to grasp the fact that the internet can be a force for good, but it can all be also be a tool for evil, and we're a little bit behind, and it's on us to to catch up. Now, we are coming into the Trump administration. It's time to clean house in these agencies. I mean truly clean house. What I'm hopeful for in the Trump administration is a return to a positive look at what security means in a 21st century environment with the complications of the internet, new weapon systems and a refocusing of our national efforts and international efforts when it comes to making sure that a 9/11-style attack can’t happen again. But they're going to do it in a different way. When I was in the military, we had red team and blue team exercises. We’ve got the blue team, who are the good guys, and then when we would do a joint exercise in the Marine Corps, and you’d have the blue team, who are the good guys. And then some of us would get tagged to play the bad guys to see if we can defeat them. If you're the bad guy, there are no rules, your goal is to win. There’s no saying ‘well that's not fair. You cheated in this game.’ Life is not a game. Life is real. And we in the military start with that recognition. There are good people doing this, but we need to take those good people in the military, and then advance it out into Homeland Security and other threat-based agencies that are checking for bad guys. The other night on Netflix, we watched Carry On. Have you seen it?
Washington Reporter:
I watched it. I didn’t think it was the best movie ever.
Rep. Jack Bergman:
It started out fine, but then it just got so nuts. Let's put it this way: it could qualify as fantasy. Think about this: why New Orleans over New Years?
Washington Reporter:
It's a softer target than D.C. or New York City. And you know there'll be a lot of drunk people.
Rep. Jack Bergman:
Fair enough. To your point, the bad guys don't go after hard targets. They go after soft targets. And when you think about New Orleans, you think about the Sugar Bowl that was next. You think about the Super Bowl that's coming up. If you want to instill fear into, let's say, a country or a society, you set it up where they don't know where you're coming from next. Our adversaries in this world, the violent extremist organizations, in the end, they don't care. All they want to do is create mayhem and destroy. They're not builders. They're destroyers.
Washington Reporter:
On the national security note, you’ve served with a bunch of Trump's incoming national security team of both parties. Tulsi Gabbard is now Republican, but she was a Democrat when you were with her. Mike Waltz, Elise Stefanik at the UN. Trump’s taking almost too many House Republicans. What's your assessment of the ability for this crew as they come in to address the problems that you're talking about?
Rep. Jack Bergman:
I'm excited for them, because you have a capable group. Going back to what I said about experience, there is no substitute for experience, and you look across the spectrum, let's start with Tulsi Gabbard. She's an Army reservist. She's a former member of Congress. She’s got a broad space and she's intellectually curious, not a ‘this is the way we've always done it’ mentality, and she's looked at some things differently, but that doesn't bother me in the least, because she's a member of a team, a senior team, that President Trump has chosen and will work and figure out how he wants to meld them and get the information he wants and the decision making he wants. You’ve got Tulsi, you’ve got Kristi Noem, okay, been a governor. If anybody's gonna say, was that a good decision to talk about shooting her dog? I don't know, probably not. But those of us who have lived on farms understand that sometimes the animals just don't work out. Just put it that way, and that's neither here nor there, but she's got governing experience. She knows how to run a big organization. Mike Waltz, spectacular background, and he had been in the Bush administration as a security advisor in a kind of a lower level role. But Mike is very thoughtful and experienced. With Doug Collins at the VA, I’ve texted back and forth a little bit with him, congratulating him on the VA. I am hopeful that he gets the people underneath him on the appointee side to help him navigate through because I'm not so sure how up to date he is with the issues in the VA as far as how fucked up the electronic health records are, and some of the other things. But Doug's a smart guy. He's an energetic guy. I was just talking to Mike Bost about, what do we do to get Doug up to speed on some of the things we've been doing legislatively that are affecting the bureaucracies he's going to be leading? It’ll be important to see how each of these people build their team underneath them will be where the proof is in the pudding in how they serve in the Trump administration. Let's face it, the Donald Trump that got here eight years ago had never been in politics, and I sat there in that room as a freshman, going, ‘oh, this is gonna be interesting. You’ve got a very successful businessman, and you got these career politicians and others, who are going to tell him how to be president.’ You don't tell Donald Trump how to be you. He will listen to you. I've learned in my interactions with him. He's a man who is in the moment. If he's with you, he'll be with you for the moment. He will ask you questions about whatever it is. And I can tell you for a fact, this happened in the back of the Beast. He asked a couple of questions, I gave him a couple of notes, he wrote them down, and he put him into a speech 45 minutes later, impromptu. Perfect timing, perfect timing. And so I appreciate his intellect. Don't expect him to sit around for an hour and bullshit with you. When he's got it, he moves on. When you look at the people in his that he's chosen, I think he's chosen wisely when it comes to people who are knowledgeable, curious, experienced, and are willing to, in their own way, to tell Trump what he needs to hear, not what he wants to hear.
Washington Reporter:
Do you think that these terrorist attacks add urgency to the need for the Senate to confirm these national security picks?
Rep. Jack Bergman:
The short answer could be yes. Maybe it's a wake up call. Sometimes people ask me ‘are you ever going to run for the Senate? And why didn’t you run for the Senate?’ I said ‘number one, I'm not planning on checking into a senior’s home, I still eat solid food, and I don't take afternoon naps,’ so that immediately says no.
Washington Reporter:
You won't run for president either it sounds like.
Rep. Jack Bergman:
I'm happy in the House. It's more raucous, and it's more my way of thinking, but hopefully the Senate will feel that sense of urgency. My very first ever subcommittee hearing in Veterans Affairs in my first term, I had the gavel on oversight, and in my opening remarks in my first subcommittee hearing, I basically told all my members, Democrat, Republican, ‘this is not a cable show here. We're not performance artists, we're not going to waste the time of these folks who testify. We're not going to waste their time and all this theatrics that you see in all the too many committee hearings because they're on camera, so just want you all to know, those are the rules, and if I have to explain it to you in private, I will.’ These are my recorded remarks. You can probably go back and find them. And then I turned to the panelists, to VA bureaucrats, and I said, ‘don't try to bullshit us.’ I've said countless times to anybody at that testifying table with the VA especially is that we need a sense of urgency to actually get good things done. So take it back into what you just asked the question a couple minutes ago, will the terrorist attacks create a sense of urgency in the Senate to get through the confirmations? I hope so. Let's stop playing politics, and let's really look at the national security and how we need to get a new administration in place and function.
Washington Reporter:
Do you think that your state's Democratic senators will support any of these Trump nominees? Has there been any indication that they plan on voting for a single one of them?
Rep. Jack Bergman:
Both of them now have achieved their lifelong goal, one who's been there a couple of terms, one who just got there.
Washington Reporter:
So not too optimistic here. When you look at these terrorist attacks, both were reportedly carried out by individuals who spent years in the military. The Biden administration has spent a lot of focus on white rage and understanding white rage. Is Islamic extremism seeping into either active duty or veterans?
Rep. Jack Bergman:
The short answer is no. These are two separate incidents. The radicalized terrorist in New Orleans, and the army special ops guy who first of all, blew his brains out just a few seconds before the bomb went off. When you look at him, what we don't know is, what's his record? His wife just told him, get out. We are all our own complex set of gray matter in our heads. We don't know how close he was to the edge before that, but here's the data point. This goes back to when I started talking to people in the early 1980s so 40 years ago, the Marine Corps started looking at basically gangs, Crips, Bloods, and cartels, and found that these organized crime syndicates, these gangs, especially the Sinaloa cartel, were getting their largely young men, at this point, into the United States and getting them to volunteer and become Marines, getting them the training, getting through boot camp and their enlistment honorably, and then leaving the Marine Corps and going back to work for the gang. So this has been going on for over 40 years, of bad guys, pick your bad guy, of trying to infiltrate our military because what a better training group? And think about it this way, it could be a man or a woman, it doesn’t make any difference. Part of what they were doing also and still are doing is they are sending some of their youngsters to medical school, to law school, because they're creating their own state, if you will. In another time when I was still in command of the Marine Corps Reserve, 2005-2009, I also wore a second hat as commander of the Marine Forces Reserve/Marine Forces North, all active and reserved forces, and that meant Northern Command in Colorado Springs, and I spent a lot of time south of the border, dealing with Mexican Marines and Navy. So some of what I tell you is back from that time, and the things that I was seeing within the cartels, within all the things going on, mainly on the southern border.
Washington Reporter:
You’re also on the House Armed Services Committee; when did you first notice DEI in the military, and how do you think that it can actually be gotten rid of?
Rep. Jack Bergman:
There was an organization that was basically the forerunner of DEI in the early 2000s where these DoD employees would come out, and they would go to the commands and give us the heavy handed sensitivity training. It's been a real agency within DoD for 25 years, easily, when you think about it started when Clinton was president and they negotiated the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy. When you’re in the military, you want the best people. I've never been as alive in my life with all my mental and physical capabilities online as when I was flying helicopters in Vietnam getting shot at, because I didn't have time to think about a lot of things, other than keep flying, get my troops to the mission, get out of there, and hopefully, don’t get shot up so bad that I have to crash land.
Washington Reporter:
So how do you get rid of DEI in the military?
Rep. Jack Bergman:
You need a total meritocracy. A few years ago, the Marine Corps was the last service to require a picture for a promotion board above a certain level. You had your promotion file and you went before the board, and there was a picture. And you know why we took the picture? We wanted to make sure you weren’t overweight. Because our mission is very physical in nature, and we can't have people who are out of shape in the Marine Corps. So if you're an out of shape Marine, you're going to do one of two things: get yourself in shape, or get the hell out, because I'm not going to take you on a deployment and I'm not going to promote you if you're overweight, if you don't look good in the uniform, if you cannot run the combat fitness test. I'm sorry, you're not going to get promoted.
Washington Reporter:
What do you think the significance of our failure in Afghanistan and how we withdrew was in terms of military recruitment, and in terms of national security? What is your perspective as a longtime Marine in August 2021 as you were watching all of this happen?
Rep. Jack Bergman:
I experienced something similar during my time in Vietnam as we made the decision to pull out of there. I can tell you what it felt to me at the age of 23 or 24 and what it felt to me at the age of 73 plus. It left a hole in my stomach that we didn't have leadership in our country that was doing the right thing diplomatically for our men and women in uniform. And why would anybody want to join a unit and become part of the military if they knew that their leadership and the government didn't have their back, that it was going to just haphazardly put them in here, pull them out there, with no plan? What we saw in Afghanistan was a failure of leadership from the Biden administration. It sent a signal to the world that America's weak, and it also sent a signal to the young men and women, or the influencers of those young men and women, who would have considered joining the military. What am I going to go there for?
Washington Reporter:
We see right now that Biden is fighting in court to and successfully to stop Khalid Sheik Mohammed from getting the death penalty. What is your assessment of the Biden administration in the final days of his time in office?
Rep. Jack Bergman:
We have an interesting comparison in time between Jimmy Carter and Joe Biden. Jimmy Carter was a good Christian man who did not have the tools, personal tools, to be President of the United States. History has already shown that. We talked about that; he was a good human being. Joe Biden is not; he's corrupt. He's been corrupted by the system a long, long, long time ago, he grew up in the system and he suffered tragedy in his life when his first wife and child were killed in a car accident and all of that. Every parent's worst nightmare is to lose a child. But Joe Biden is a product of the system that those of us who still believe in our system are trying to eliminate or minimize the level of governmental corruption as it spread through. Joe Biden showed that while Jimmy Carter was incapable of doing it, Joe Biden was also incapable, but for different reasons, namely his corrupt ties. Carter's were just his inability to see the bigger picture of what you really needed to do. If you put solar panels on the White House, everything's going to be great. Joe Biden’s presidency showed enough of the American people what he was really lacking, and what the whole administration was, let's face it, Obama's third term. That's what it was.
Washington Reporter:
As you look at home and abroad, what are threats that we are not paying enough attention to?
Rep. Jack Bergman:
Dating back to long before I was in politics, back to when I was in uniform, and people asked ‘what's the single biggest threat to our country?’ I looked them straight in the eyes and said: apathy. What do you mean apathy? What's that got to do with war fighting? The bottom line is, if you're apathetic, things are going to be allowed to happen that get you into the war, so step up. Don't be the entertained generation. Don't be the internet expert a mile wide and an eighth of an inch deep on things. We are lucky and blessed as a country to have had the Founders do what they did 250 years ago, to have the folks who went through the most horrific thing a country could ever happen, other than being attacked from an outside, is a civil war on the inside. We survived that, and then the Greatest Generation who literally saved the world 80 some years ago. If you look at the cycles of time, the reality is that Americans make three mistakes. America makes three mistakes as a country. Number one is when it comes to international relations, we believe that other countries have the same goal as we do. Number two, we believe other countries have the same values as we do. And number three, most important, we think as Americans, that the world loves us. Three big three mistakes, and the department that is in the most need of recalculation, when it comes to the positive projection of what America really is, is the State Department; if we can turn the rudder in that State Department ship back towards the Jeffersonian view of what it what meant to be Secretary of State in the early 1800s before he got elected, that would be significant. The State Department singularly holds the key, I believe, to good diplomacy in a threat-based world where the threat is based on the lack of understanding, the apathy, the unfocused arrogance of us, and in some cases of others, but the State Department's person-to-person, group-to-group, interactions around the world and building the relationships and being an aggressive State Department of diplomacy and partnership, that's probably going to be the one thing that keeps us up.
Washington Reporter:
Look at the successes that Republicans had in Michigan: flipping it for Trump, almost winning the Senate seat, which was clearly spoiled by the Libertarian candidate, by design. Moving on to 2026 and maybe even 2028, what lessons can you learn? What can you focus on this term to make that less of a swing state and more reliably Republican?
Rep. Jack Bergman:
Great question. Credit to the Trump campaign for pushing to get out the vote and to vote early, because people were only listening to Trump, and if he said it, they were going to do it. So we worked with them and my staff and others pushing that, and I did enough rallies with them and worked the crowds, as well as speaking at the rallies, to see that he was turning the light on for Michiganders to get out and vote early, because it was the first year of doing this. So going forward, we need a Michigan GOP organization. The old one burned itself down. It literally doused itself with gas, lit its match and yelled ‘help.’ My colleagues in the Michigan delegation and I were talking about this when it happened. We discussed what to do. My words to them were: ‘we’re going to let it burn down, and we’re going to rebuild it from the ashes.’ Going forward over the next few months here, we have to elect the Michigan GOP organization and make MAGA mainstream, and knock off the fighting at the county level and all of this shit. If Michigan can do that, that will be a great, because our big race next cycle is the governor’s mansion. It would be nice to have a Republican senator, because Gary Peters is up. But we need the governor. That's where we need. We need to get the mansion back in Lansing back, and I don't know who’s going to do, but all I can say is I know who is not running for governor.
Washington Reporter:
Congressman Bergman, thanks so much for talking.