Tim Murtaugh, communications director for Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign, went from hitting “rock bottom” with an alcohol addiction to overcoming it and flying on Air Force One four years later, Murtaugh said during an appearance on Breitbart News Saturday, detailing his new book .
Murtaugh briefly told his story, which is detailed at length in the book — a book that, he said, is “not like any political book that you or your listeners have ever read.”
“It’s about politics, yeah, there are a lot of stories from inside the Trump 2020 campaign — a lot of stories that have never been published. But it’s also about my decades-long battle with alcohol” and his story of redemption, he said.
“I go through it and how I began drinking and all of that and how it led up to the real rock bottom for me [which] was waking up in a jail cell in Fairfax County, Virginia, on May 16, 2015, and realizing that if I didn’t get myself straightened out, right that minute, I was gonna go to jail for an awfully long time,” Murtaugh said.
“I was facing real legal peril. … That’s the last day that I took a drink of alcohol on May 16, 2015, and less than four years later, I was flying on Air Force One with President Trump,” he said. “So from a jail cell to flying on Air Force One, I think is a pretty remarkable turnaround. That’s the way the way I looked at it,” he said, explaining that when he was in rehab several times, he loved to read books from people who have been through it. Those, he said, helped him when he was struggling, so he was inspired to write his own.
“They told their own stories, and a lot of them are so absurd that they’re funny, but then they tell you about how they came through the other end and made it through. And those books helped me so much when I was really, really struggling,” he said, expressing hope that his book can do the same for someone else.
Further, Murtaugh said he is “living proof” that those with the same struggles can overcome them.
“I know a lot of people — I count myself lucky because the way I was — I was really bad. I had two DUIs. One time, I spent five days in jail for the first time for the first one. I spent ten days in jail for the second one, and I had 80 days suspended. And those suspended 80 days were what I was worried about, when I woke up in jail that day, because I got arrested for drunk in public while I was on probation for my second DUI. And if I had been convicted of that, of that drunk in public charge, I would have violated probation. I would have had to go to jail for three months, it would have been the end of everything. I would have lost my job when I was working for Lou Barletta, who should have fired me many, many times,” he said, praising he people who stood by him and did not give up on him, including his wife and former Rep. Lou Barletta.
“I thank Secretary Sonny Perdue, who hired me at the beginning of the Trump administration to be his comms director. Before I went to the campaign, I told him — when I — at that point, this was all in my past, but I had to be honest and tell my view and my prospective employer what they will find when they do the background check, right? So I told him, I told President Trump when I went to the campaign and said, ‘If you’re gonna hire me, then this is what you’re going to find.’ And he said that he likes a good redemption story. He likes a good comeback story,'” he said.
“But — so I count myself lucky for having made it through. A lot of people who are in the situation that I was in don’t survive. They die. Literally a lot of people die. And you’re right. It is — it’s basically a universal problem from what I have found. So many people have come up to me and people that I’ve known for years who I didn’t know they themselves had an alcohol problem,” Murtaugh said, adding that he wrote the book because “I know that I really struggled and I needed the help of other people, and I needed just encouragement to believe, like you’re saying, that it is possible… that maybe it wasn’t too late for me, [and] it’s not too late for somebody else,” he said, emphasizing that the book is his story, providing a little background to the title of the book as well, noting it is a baseball reference.
“I do come from a baseball family. … And when I would leave the house every day to go to baseball practice my dad, thinking he was being funny, would yell at me, ‘Hey, swing hard in case you hit it.’ Right. He thought he was being funny. … but I took that — that phrase stuck with me throughout my whole life and to me, it’s a pretty good philosophy to use for anything that you encounter in life,” he said, as the book details his “surreal” experiences going from rock bottom to working on the Trump campaign.
“And I think people who like campaign politics will enjoy some of those stories,” he added.
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