The Interview - James Lankford, The Man Who Tried to Solve Immigration for the GOP

Episode Date: August 10, 2024

The senator discusses how political calculations killed his border bill, the evangelical Christian vote and preparing for life after Trump.

From The New York Times, this is The Interview. I'm Lulu Garcia Navarro. At a campaign rally in Georgia late last month, Vice President Kamala Harris spoke to supporters about one of the biggest issues in this election, immigration. She talked up her record as the former attorney general of a border state, and she made a promise. As president, I will bring back the border security bill that Donald Trump killed, and I will sign it into law and show Donald Trump what real leadership looks like.

That bill she was talking about was negotiated starting late last year by a bipartisan trio of senators. The Republican in that group was Senator James Lankford, a former Baptist youth minister from Oklahoma. Lankford clearly has big ambitions in the party. He's currently running for Senate leadership. And for months, he worked on that immigration bill with Kyrsten Sinema, the independent from Arizona, and Chris Murphy, the Democrat from Connecticut. It was a rare show of bipartisanship. And after sign-off from both Senate party leaders and an endorsement from the White House, the bill looked like it was going to become law. It would have been the first major piece of bipartisan legislation on immigration in decades.

But then Donald Trump came out against it, saying he didn't want to give Democrats a political win on such a sensitive issue during an election year. And even though the bill contained most of the hardline policies the right had wanted, it became toxic in the GOP. In the end, only four Republican senators voted for it. The bill tanked and Lankford was left holding the bag. I've covered the immigration system since the beginning of my career. So I really wanted to talk to Lankford about his experience working so hard on this bill, only to see it fall apart. And what that failed attempt at bipartisanship shows

about the possibility of getting anything done by a Republican Party that is so beholden to Trump. Here's my conversation with Senator James Lankford. Senator Lankford, before you were in politics, you ran the largest Baptist youth camp in the country, Falls Creek. You know, a friend of mine from Oklahoma basically said it's the place everyone goes when they're young. I think when you were elected, something like 40% of Republican primary voters in Oklahoma either went to Falls Creek or knew someone who did. What role did that organization play in your life?

Wow, that's a huge question. Let's spend about six hours talking this through to be able to catch up on it real quick. I would say a couple of things. One is I served 22 years in ministry working with students in those families. So when you work with middle school and high school students, you're engaging in ministry and life, and you're dealing with all kinds of trauma that happens in those families. That's what I did and what my wife and I did for 22 years to be able to just love on families and to encourage them. I didn't do anything in politics other than vote. And in 2008 and 2009, we really felt a calling

to be able to run for Congress in the Central District. And I had to go to our state Republican leaders and introduce myself and say, hi, my name's James. I'm filing to run for Congress. And they basically pat me on the head and said, that's nice. Most of my friends said, is this a joke? And I would just say, it's actually not. This is something I feel strongly to be able to do. But saying all that, my faith is important to me, and it's not something I take off and put on. I tell people all the time, your faith should affect everything about you. It's how I treat my wife. It's how I treat total strangers. It affect everything about you. It's how I treat my wife. It's how I treat total strangers.

It's how I drive. It's how I interact with my staff. It's how I take on issues. I believe every person is created in the image of God. They have value and worth. Even if I disagree with them, that person has value and worth. And so my faith affects how I see people and how I interact on areas of disagreement, because I see them as people that we may disagree with. And as I joke with some of my Democrat colleagues, we're friends, but they're

wrong all the time. They just vote wrong all the time. But we can still be friends in our conversation and relationship and try to be able to engage in that ideas. That's something deeply held in my own personal faith because of what I've been forgiven of and what I've seen God do in my own life. Why wouldn't I allow other people the mercy and grace to have that happen in their own life as well? So you arrived in the House as part of the Tea Party movement in 2011. I did. Then you were elected to the Senate in 2014. I remember that you worked with Kamala Harris, the vice president, quite closely in the Senate in 2017 when you crafted an election security bill around Russian election interference. What was that work like and what was your relationship with her like back then?

She was a brand new senator coming in in 2017. We actually traveled to Afghanistan together, and so we did have the opportunity to be able to spend some time. Obviously, we have wide policy disagreements on things, but we were able to sit down and to be able to talk frankly, to be able to work through things and always had a cordial conversation where I could say, this is my boundaries of where I think we need to work on. And she would say the same, and we'd figure out how to be able to hit some common ground on it. Obviously, that was challenging for us and for her. She's very progressive. I'm very conservative. When I talk to people in Oklahoma, they'll say, I couldn't work with the people that you work with. They would drive me crazy. I see them on TV, and I just can't believe

some of the things they say. And I always remind people, I don't pick the people I work with. Other people pick the people I work with. I just have to work with them. And we've got to be able to figure out how to do this because there's more to get done. Speaking of working across the aisle, I want to talk to you about immigration, which is one of the top issues of this election. Why would you talk to me about immigration? What would I know about it? At the end of last year, you raised your national profile when you were tapped by Mitch McConnell to negotiate a bipartisan border bill. You worked for four months with Kyrsten Sinema, the independent senator from Arizona, and Chris Murphy, the Democrat from Connecticut. Can you tell me a bit about how you all moved through that process?

So Kyrsten Sinema is an immigration attorney in her past, and so she's extremely knowledgeable about this. Obviously, Arizona is one of the epicenters of illegal immigration. And so she was very engaged, very knowledgeable of the issues. And every time we talked about it, she could give a personal story of this is what it actually looks like on the ground. This is why this is important to be able to resolve. And again, she grew up in Southern Arizona, so she grew up with people crossing the border. But she could also say how different this is now than what it was 20 years ago, 30 years ago, who's coming, where they're coming from, and the threats that are there. So working with Kirsten was a lot of conversation about practical things, trying to be able to give context to it.

Senator Murphy, he's a progressive from Connecticut, extremely smart. But it's a different perspective when you're from New England on dealing with immigration. He was keenly aware of the criminal aspects of some folks that are coming across that are real threats to national security. He wanted to be able to resolve a lot of bigger issues that had been there, which we weren't going to be able to make any progress on at this point. And so there was a lot of dialogue back and forth about how do we actually find the areas of agreement that we can on the national security issues and not continue to make this so big that it falls under its own weight. Ultimately, at the end of the day, we weren't

able to find a bill that was actually, I could get enough Republicans on board on to be able to move on it, but he was very successful moving Democrats to be able to say, let's work on national security. We'll come back and work on other areas later. Hmm. You know, this was a very tough border bill.

There was no legal pathway to citizenship, for example, as you mentioned, for DREAMers. Why wasn't that included? Did you think it was going to be basically a bill killer for the Republican side of things? Yes, quite frankly, I did believe that would be a bill killer, that it would not move through the House or through the Senate if that was included. When you have two and a half million people a year that are crossing the border illegally, when you've got millions of people in the backlog, the energy and the focus was let's first stop the bleeding and then let's figure out how to be able to take care of everything else. There will be moments to be able to deal

with DACA and other issues. It's not like that's not going to come up, but we've got to figure out a way to be able to make this stop right now. And you felt the Democrats understood that. Eventually. And the administration understood that. Eventually. That was a long conversation. I would tell you that was one of the most contentious areas of the debate all along that Chris Murphy never let go of. He was very faithful to his perspective on that one to say this is really important. And I hear him that it's really important, but I also understood there was absolutely no way he would have a chance with the number of people that we're dealing with right now

that are illegally crossing in the country that the overwhelming sense is, and I hear from Republicans and Democrats alike in my state in Oklahoma, how does this stop? How does this get better? You seem to have won every concession from Democrats that Republicans wanted. And I'm curious now, in hindsight, why you think that's true. Do you think Democrats and the Biden administration in particular realized that they had a problem on their hands at the southern border? So, yes, I believe that the administration came to the table because they understood this is spiraling out of control. And quite frankly, I think they perceived they could say, OK, those crazy Republicans, they forced us to be able to pass this bill. So we're going to implement

this when they actually quietly wanted to say, OK, we got to make this stop. What can be done to be able to get control of the border? Before we get to what ended up happening, while you were working on this, were you optimistic that it could succeed? I was. I was. It needed to. And the comments that all three of us made was, we have to keep working, even when it got really hard and we wanted to walk away from the table. We didn't walk away from the table, even when we looked like we were in an impasse because we had to get something done. And all signs indicated that your optimism was actually founded and that the bill was going to pass until Trump came out forcefully against it.

I mean, he was basically whipping against it from Mar-a-Lago. Did he call you personally? And if so, what did he say? We did not talk during that time period, actually. On my part, that was intentional, quite frankly, because of that exact question. I didn't want this to be perceived as a, this is President Trump actually trying to be able to run this bill. That would be toxic to my Democrat colleagues. And this needed to be something that we do as a party to be able to run this bill. That would be toxic to my Democrat colleagues, and this needed to be something that we do as a party to be able to resolve right now. I honestly believe that exact bill would have passed in December, but by the time it got into February and we were in the heart of the presidential primary election, it became

immediately the major focus in the election because the republican primary suddenly got resolved it looked very obvious that president trump was going to be there and everything collapsed at that point if that bill would have would have gone in december i think it would have passed i mean you've said before that a right-wing commentator threatened you over this bill radio host jesse Kelly took credit. Was it him? I would only say when he took credit for that, my first response was, who is that? So no, it wasn't. I would only say, and I've never identified who it is, and I won't. But I did have several folks, one just more blunt than others, saying, I'll destroy you if you do

this. Because though I like you, I like President Trump better, and he's got to be elected for the future of the country, and you can't take this issue off the table. My response was, he has a job that's running for office right now, but I'm in office. I've got to do my job. My job is national security. I serve on the Intelligence Committee. I serve on Homeland Security. I have access to a lot of classified information. Starting the last year, we saw the shift that happened on who was crossing the border. It was more and more people from outside the Western Hemisphere. It was a very different group that was coming across, and it was criminal organizations that were becoming travel agents to be able to move people. And then they were moving people that wanted to be able to work here and then facilitating people that were becoming travel agents to be able to move people. And then they were moving people that wanted to be able to work here and then facilitating people that were within their

organization. That's why we had a couple of months ago, eight folks that were picked up in the United States that were ISIS affiliated. They were moving through those networks that I was aware of before. And what was one of the many reasons I was so passionate to say, we can't ignore this moment. We see the national security threats that we're facing. We cannot allow people into our country through these illegal networks that can come in and request asylum, that we can't tell the difference at the border between those who mean to do us harm and those who are coming to reconnect with family. We cannot tell the difference. The frustration that I have is that it's become more of a political issue than a national security issue when it is really a national security issue. When did you get a sense that this was not going to happen? There were always people that are opposed to it. We knew from the beginning this is hard. There's a reason this hasn't been done in decades.

There were political commentators on television that came out immediately and online saying that we can't solve the border issue right now. This is the single biggest issue. We don't want President Trump to lose that issue. Or they would say President Biden created this chaos. We don't want to give him the appearance right before the election that he then solved the crisis that he created. And I would tell you, not just as a conservative,

as an American, this is a crisis that the administration did botch. For President Biden and Vice President Harris, who talked a lot about immigration in the earliest days, I said to their team over and over and over again, if you would enforce the border the same way President Obama did, I know you don't want to do it the same way President Trump did, but if you do it the same way President Obama did, we would not have this problem that we have today. Under President Obama, we had half a million people illegally crossing a year. Now we have two and a half million people illegally crossing. So I would bring all those things up to be able to talk about it on both sides, understanding it's going to be hard, but then just the noise continued to build.

And we reached a fever there in that first week of February. I think within the last 48 hours, I really realized this is not going to work. This is not going to happen. And indeed, you were unable to persuade your party. And what happened next is truly crazy. Can you tell me what it was like to vote against your own bill that you'd worked so hard on? I voted for my bill when it came to the floor and as an actual vote. Now, two months later, Senator Schumer brought it back up as a political exercise to try to poke Republicans in the eye. And I said, no, this was never designed to be a political exercise of what I'm doing. And so at that point, I vote against it. Kyrsten Sinema voted against it. But when it was an actual live round, I was eager to come to the floor and say, it's not everything I would want, but it's also not nothing. It does make progress.

We should make progress in areas where we can make progress and then come back and do more. I mean, you've talked about this as a national security issue, but I am curious about how the work on immigration connects to your faith, because there is some daylight between the MAGA wing of the party and evangelical groups on this issue. Yes, there is actually. I think there's just an energy that people have to say, I want people to still be welcome in America. There are people that are asylees that are fleeing from injustice around the world. We don't want to ever lose an America that we're not a place for that. But we also know that right now we have two and a half million people a year that are legally crossing.

We also don't want that because when you create that kind of chaos, that's not just a faith issue to say we're going to welcome the stranger. That's also welcoming folks that are, again, not just pursuing a job and pursuing family, which is the vast majority of people that are coming, but it's also welcoming folks that are, again, not just pursuing a job and pursuing family, which is the vast majority of people that are coming, but it's also welcoming in people that are coming right now that are from Venezuelan gangs that are crossing in, requesting asylum, and then they're deliberately targeting Venezuelans that are here in America right now and then abusing them the same way they did back in Venezuela. That's also occurring right now.

And we do have human trafficking, and we can all say, well, that's not the majority, but there is human trafficking, there is violence, there is sex trafficking. All these things are also occurring as well. And it occurs because we have too many people to manage on a day-to-day basis at the border. I mean, speaking of the range of opinion in the GOP on this issue, there were signs at the RNC saying mass deportation now. I mean, that is one of the tenets of the Trump platform. Is that a position that you think is the right one? So, yeah, by the way, I think there will be mass deportations at some point. And people define

that differently. And they hear that. Some people will hear that as a Latina grandmother that's been here 30 years. And they're going to say, is she also the target? I think the first target that ends up coming are the folks that literally a court, and we have millions of people now, that a court has ruled on a final order of removal and no one's actually removing them. And I think that's where a lot of Americans are really frustrated to say, hold on, now we have people that are crossing, that are crossing illegally, that are going through the process, they're requesting asylum, that they know they don't qualify for, they finally get to the end of it,

and they find out, no, you don't qualify. But Senator Lankford, you know that a lot of people understand mass deportations as the rounding up of perhaps a Latina grandmother that's been here for a long time, communities that have settled and have been here for many, many years. And many supporters of your party do want there to be just a complete uprooting of people who are undocumented. Yeah, I actually don't see a future Trump administration just rounding up all 12 million, 15 million, whatever number that is, and removing the entire number. I just don't. I see them targeting the folks that have gone through the court proceedings, that have been ruled that they're not legally present, have a criminal record. We have a high number of those folks. For the folks that are going through the process, they legally cannot remove them. A court would stop that immediately. They know that. They've been through this for four years

before. They've seen how the court responds to it. But there are folks that a court has said, yes, you should be gone. And again, that's millions of people. That's a different issue for me. But the courts and the law is not going to allow someone to say they're just being taken out of the country. There's been discussion of large camps that these people will be put in and just raising the specter of things that, quite frankly, to many in immigrant communities are frightening. Yeah. We're back to the social media world and the things that get promoted and the things that get said there. The large camp, I don't know what that would look like other than a gathering spot that's very similar to what happens at the border right now when people illegally cross.

Even under this administration now, just in the last few months, they started actually putting up locations to say, we're going to detain you and to try to have all the hearings and to have your first appeals and evaluation at the border rather than just released into the country. That's the nature of actually trying to be able to manage that number of people. When you've got thousands of people that you're trying to manage, you do have to find opportunities and places to be able to do that. I say all those things to say, when you talk about mass deportations,

all things have to be done sound with the law and consistent with the law. So that's why I don't believe there's going to be just a mass roundup of 15 million people put into a camp and then shipped out because that wouldn't be consistent

with the way we handle it. I have a bigger question, which is about the actual appetite for legislating. In your speech when introducing the doomed bill, you noted that many of your colleagues hadn't read it and didn't want to read it because it was long and it was technical. It is. I'm just wondering what your takeaway was from your colleagues not wanting to legislate. I mean, what does it say to you that politics won out over policy here? Politics won out over policy. No doubt on that.

I had colleagues that said, hey, this is very technical and I'm going to need a week to be able to read this and review it before I can vote on it. And I said, I totally understand that. We'll give you the time to do that. But within 30 minutes of the bill being released, they were putting out statements saying, I'm opposed to it. It's terrible. So a couple of things I would say on that. One is we needed more cooks in the kitchen. The process of actually everybody picking a champion on each of the party areas and put them all together to resolve it for something this complicated and for something this controversial, we needed more people that were actually engaged, that were invested in it early on.

I tried to keep my conference as informed as I could without it all leaking out to the media where we were because for Chris Murphy and Kirsten Sinema and I, we were very committed to protecting each other in this process and protecting the negotiation to be able to move forward, which we did. But we needed more people that were personally invested, and I think that was a mistake of the negotiation. It would be great if our committees worked and actually pushed out a lot of very hard things like this, but they've not been successful of late of actually getting negotiations and getting commitment on that. I hope that we can get back to that. We do have some big bills like the FAA bill.

They got to a resolution that they agreed on unanimously, moved it, came to the floor, passed it. It's law now. So it can be done. I guess the question is, though, can it be done when Trump doesn't want it to be done? Everybody's got to come on board on this. You've got to have House, Senate, and White House all come to agreement on that. And obviously, during this time period

on this particular issue, we didn't get it. There's a stack of issues that are harder than others. But Senator Lankford, what I'm asking is, how much independence does your body of legislators have from what Trump does or doesn't want for the party? I mean, you are for the people of Oklahoma. That's who I work for. And I have a different responsibility to be able to take on. I think we do have to protect that constitutional integrity of government and how things are set up. President Trump obviously has influence because there are millions and millions of Americans that also believe in him, many from my state as well, that would say, that's the opinion that I have. That's the

expression that I have. And so it's not just that President Trump thinks it, it's that there are millions of Americans that also think that as well, and they want to get things resolved. What is your relationship with former President Trump now, briefly? Actually, good still. I mean, I reached out to him after the assassination attempt and said, hey, Cindy and I are praying for you. You've had a very good

response in the statement that he made the very next day on it. He was obviously protected by God for a reason. He needs to live that out. I said, I personally believe that, that that was a semi-miraculous event in a million ways of things that could have gone even worse than they were. And so, reached out. He reached right back to be able to say thank you. So we continue to stay engaged in ways where we agree, where we agree, where we disagree, we disagree. And even the statement that he made at lunch about a month and a half ago now when he met with the Republican senators, even in that statement, he said, let's find areas where we can agree. Let's work on those. And areas where we don't agree, let's keep talking about it. That's a different attitude than I think a lot of people

have about President Trump, that they don't see that part of him, but he is still ultimately a negotiator. And he feels like he has greatest negotiating power when he states a really strong opinion up front and say, this is what we have to do, and kind of punch in the face and then to say this is what we're going to do, but then come in the face and then say, this is what we're going to do, but then come back and to be able to negotiate the rest. That is really how he functions on a day-to-day basis. Sometimes that works, and sometimes it does not. Do you consider yourself MAGA? Am I passionate about making America great? Yes, I am. And so people try to identify and try to project whatever they want to project on people that say, you're passionate about making America great again. If you want to project everything that is President Trump on me, and he had invited me to be able to travel on Air Force One, and we

were flying over to the game, and we're sitting right next to each other on the plane and just chatting. And at one point, he's working on a tweet. Back in the old days when we used to call them tweets, he leans over and he goes, you wouldn't tweet this. And I laughed and I said, well, you probably shouldn't either. And he laughed. He said, I'm going to because I think it's funny. And then he finished it and he showed it to me and I said, you're right, sir. I wouldn't have tweeted that. He and I can agree on some policy areas and some policy areas we disagree. We have different methods. We have different perspectives. That's okay. I try to stay who I am. He solves problems in a different way than I do. We'll see which one works and they'll work for different issues in different ways.

But I don't have the same swagger and attitude, but I do have a very conservative perspective. And I'm going to try to persuade. I've never had anyone ever persuade me of something by yelling at me and cussing me out. Your former colleague, Senator J.D. Vance, is now the Republican VP. Do you have any thoughts on him and his very brief record in the Senate? Yeah, that's actually my challenge is that he's been there 18 months. We really haven't got to know each other very well. We don't serve on any committees together.

We've not traveled together on anything else. And so I really haven't had much of an opportunity to be able to get to know him personally and to be able to know perspectives on this. Obviously, we've had dialogues in a public setting in our lunch times, which are supposedly private that seem to get leaked out to the media every single lunch. But we've had some dialogues around there, but very little contact with it. This is my last question for now. As we're talking, I've been thinking a lot about Mike Pence because he was someone who was deeply conservative, deeply religious, and also deeply loyal to Trump until he took what he felt was a principled stand at the end. And looking at the immigration bill and how quickly the party moved against you,

do you think it's possible to stick with your principles in this GOP? Sure I do. You live your principles out, and the days you lose a vote or an issue that you feel is important, you back up and you keep going at it. In politics, most things don't happen the first time you try. Things that pass often have been ruminating for years to be able to actually get to passage on it. Immigration's been an issue that multiple Republicans over the past 35 years could say, tried it and it failed, tried it and it failed. But it's still an unresolved issue. So we're going to have to get to a point that we can actually get this resolved and get it done. But yes, if you sacrifice your basic

principles and your values, you've given away that what you actually brought to Washington, D.C., and that's the perspective of your state and your family. So, I'm not going to sacrifice those. So, again, this is going to sound from my ministry background on this. Nehemiah chapter one does a great story about Hanani, who's the brother of Nehemiah coming back from Jerusalem when they're both living as slaves in isolation and exile. And Nehemiah catches his brother Hanani and said, what's it like in Jerusalem now? And Hanani says, oh, it's awful. The people live in disgrace. The walls are down. The economy's collapsed. It's terrible. And Hanani walks off. And Nehemiah, who wasn't even there or didn't even see it, prays, it says, for some days and basically prays, God, this is terrible. What do I do about it?

There's two different perspectives that come out of that. There's a Hanani that sees the problem and says, stinks to be them and walks away. And there's a Nehemiah that says, that's terrible. God, what can I do to make that better? I have to make a decision every single day. Am I going to be Hanani or am I going to be a Nehemiah? I'm choosing to be a Nehemiah to say, God, what is it that you call me to do? How can I help the nation and other people?

What needs to be done and how can it be done? God, I need your favor to be able to get this done. Pray, go to work. Senator Lankford, thank you so much. And we will talk again. Look forward to it, actually. After the break, I call Senator Lankford back to talk some more about his faith, how he thinks it should affect his politics, and how it shouldn't. I am not a Christian nationalist. I'm a person who's very passionate about our First Amendment rights. We all have the right to have any faith of our choosing, to be able to change our faith, or to be able to have no faith. That is a protected right that we've had from the beginning. Senator Lankford, hello.

How are you today? I'm pretty good. Senator, I've really enjoyed hearing about your thinking on issues in the GOP. And listening to you talk, it is very clear that this all springs from the context of your faith. It brings me to this sort of question more broadly about how you think about your role as a representative for Oklahomans who don't share your faith. If your belief infuses your politics, but your constituents might be atheists or Muslims or other non-Christians, is there an argument to be made that there should be limits on how much one's religion should shape legislation? I don't know how you would do that, actually. I'm just trying to think pragmatically how you would say, I need you to separate your faith from your beliefs. Your faith affects everything. If your faith only affects, like we're at 10 church on a Sunday, if it only affects what I do on the weekend, that's not really a faith, that's a hobby.

My faith is the lens that I look through. And when people elect me, they understand full well, this is one of the lenses that I look through. Now saying that, I also have the responsibility to respect other people in my state and their worldview. I'm not trying to impose mine on them. So I think to me, the biggest issue is the balance and the respect that other individuals can have a respect for my faith and what I believe. I need to reciprocate that and have a respect for their faith and for what they believe. But then again, as I'm making decisions for legislation, I do have a lens that I look through and everyone's fully aware of what that is before debated hotly at this moment is the separation of church and state, which is this foundational principle of our country. You've had Senator Josh Hawley, your colleague, among others on the right, explicitly embrace Christian nationalism.

And so I'm wondering where you stand on that issue. I am not a Christian nationalist. I'm a person who's very passionate about our First Amendment rights. We all have the right to have any faith of our choosing, to be able to change our faith or to be able to have no faith. That is a protected right that we've had from the beginning. Where you have voluntary faith and you're allowed to be able to choose, you're more passionate about it. So to me, trying to be able to impose faith on someone not only doesn't work, as you can see in multiple different nations where that doesn't work, it often leads to oppression. And I can look at the Iranian regime and how they take their faith and try to impose it on their people

in that way and see what that actually leads to. Or I look at a place that actually is a vibrant faith where people have the opportunity to be able to choose and live that out. Well, that's interesting, the distinction there about voluntary participation. So how do you feel about the Oklahoma mandate to teach the Bible in public schools or Louisiana requiring schools to display the Ten Commandments? That goes back to Bible as literature. You're not going to understand Western culture without understanding something about scripture. I was raised in a setting where in literature class, we read some of the Psalms. You'll hear terms in culture where they talk about a tale of two cities. You should know what a tale of two cities is based on a basic idea that you also hear people

talking about somebody went Old Testament on somebody, but that's different than imposing a faith on someone. If I'm imposing a faith on them to say, this is the faith that the leader of the governor of the state has, or the president of the United States has, and so everyone has to have that, that's very different than what it is to say that this is literature. Now, I say that as a Christ follower personally, for me, I read scripture every day. I find great value in Christ follower personally. For me, I read Scripture every day. I find great value in understanding Scripture. And quite frankly, I would be ecstatic if the people around me came to know God the same way I am because I found such great joy and forgiveness in my own faith and relationship. So I speak openly about that.

But that's a personal issue for me. That's not a governmental issue for me. I mean, it's interesting because, like, in theory, I see your point perhaps on teaching the Bible in public schools. It is, you know, a seminal work that infuses, as you say, much of literature and culture and discourse. But isn't it government overreach to have Louisiana requiring schools to display the Ten Commandments? I mean, that's a different type of thing, isn't it? It is a different type of thing in the sense that it is a particular faith and a particular foundational teaching. But obviously putting up on a board that you shouldn't murder, you shouldn't steal, you know, that's not a negative thing.

Shouldn't covet someone else's wife. Right, shouldn't covet, yes, right. Not commit adultery. To 10-year-olds. These are things that are out there. But again, it is a religious practice. It is something that, again, that is common. I'll let the courts make all the decisions on this.

But for me, that doesn't offend me for that to be able to be there. And that is something that we as a culture and the individual states should have the right to be able to speak out on. We ended our last conversation with a question about dissent in the Republican Party and whether or not there could be. And we talked about that in the context of the immigration debate. But I am wondering what you think about Trump's views on abortion. You are to the right of him on this issue. I mean, one of the things that I found very interesting reading the platform put forward during the convention on abortion in particular is that it kind of felt like it was trying to do two things at once. It was saying it should be left up to the states, which is publicly what Trump has said, but it also invoked the 14th Amendment, which basically says that

if people interpret it in the way that some on the right would like it interpreted, that basically makes abortion illegal because it protects the unborn child. And so I'm just wondering how you think about that duality, those two tracks. Yeah, I was not in the platform committee debate, but you are correct. There's been a longstanding part of the Republican platform that recognizes, hey, that child is a child that's a person that's here and we can determine what's going to do. If there's significant birth defects, if it's rape or incest, if there is all these different challenges to the health and life of the mother. That's been separate. But barring all of those things, there's been this dialogue that's been among Republicans for

a long time to say, hey, we think that's a baby that's in there. And so what are we going to do about that? So the conversation has been at what point do we recognize that person and then what happens as a result of that? I think what President Trump has been is we don't have the votes for this. There's no way it's going to move in the next four years, maybe the next 40 years, while our nation continues to be able to debate this. And so his push is states that want to make this decision can make these decisions on it. Federally, we're not at a place where this decision is going to be made. And so let's not make this a massive issue when

it's not going to happen right now. Let's actually work on the things that we can work on. I mean, it's interesting because you've always talked about principles and how important that is for you. Do you think that that's the right choice for him to be pragmatic about it? He is being pragmatic on it. I'm a person that's going to continue to be able to speak out and say, yes, but we don't have the votes for it right now. But I also believe that's a child. And so let's at least talk about this. There's a difference between a legal issue and a hard issue. In Oklahoma right now, there are plenty of ladies that have an abortion that leave the state to go have an elective abortion in Colorado, for instance.

So that's a decision that they have made. So for me, I'm not flipping about this. Some people are flipping about those difficult situations. I'm not. In those very difficult moments that where she's making decisions to determine, do we have enough adoption facilities? Do we have enough provision? Are we taking care of all the things that can be so that she does not have to live in fear of those areas of what happens next while she's also having to make a decision about the future of her child? by asking you about this election season, because evangelicals and white evangelicals in particular are a huge part of Trump's base. I saw a statistic that a third of his votes came from white evangelical Protestants, which is just a huge number. And it's one of the reasons that I was curious to talk to you, because you are part of that community. You're a leader in that community. And I'm thinking back to your early days as a pastor shaping the minds and hearts of young people. And I do wonder if you think Donald Trump is a good role model for them.

Well, it's a fair question because I've actually made that public statement before on this. My preference is to be able to have leaders that are also role models. And I don't believe he's a role model in every area. But when evangelicals make decisions on voting, they'll often look at things like religious liberty or the pro-life positions to be able to talk about the protection of children. So evangelicals look for where can I land in a place that is closest to what I believe on some very core issues on that. And they make their decisions from there on voting. What would you make of the way that he addresses your community? Because, you know, he made some comments recently where he said, Christians, you won't have to vote again.

We'll have it fixed so good you're not going to have to vote. I have no idea what that means. Clearly, we're going to have another election four years from now. In fact, I've already had a conversation with folks to say, you know, as we're thinking about where we're headed for now for the past 12 years, there's been this conversation about President Trump before that, Canada Trump, then President Trump, and then the election, the next election. That's not going to be so four years from now. So we as a party have to think about what we're going to like and what our focus is going to be and what direction things are going to go. Those are pragmatic conversations, but we're certainly going to have elections. Nothing's going to break the Constitution. We've had almost 250 years now of normal, consistent elections because it's a core part of who we are as a republic.

And in those conversations where you're looking four years from now, if indeed former President Trump wins the election, to a post-Trump era, what are you telling your community about what that will mean? Well, I'm just getting people thinking about that. Who are we going to be? And what will be the things that will be most valuable to us? How are we going to resolve debt and deficit? How are we going to be able to balance the economy? If we mess this up, it doesn't just mess us up. It takes the entire world down.

The threat from China is very different than we faced from the Soviet Union back in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. So we've got to be able to figure out what does national security look like? And then all the social issues were very different than what we were in the 1980s. But when you have hard problems, you have to find a way to be able to solve hard problems. And that's usually not by ignoring them or saying that they will fix themselves. I go back to our earlier conversation on the issue of immigration. This doesn't just magically get better.

That involves sitting down, having dialogue, setting principles down, saying, all right, let's actually work through this to be able to make a decision. Because when that hard decision is done, there's another hard decision

coming right after it. That's Senator James Lankford. This conversation was produced by Wyatt Orme. It was edited by Annabelle Bacon. Mixing by Afim Shapiro. Original music by Dan Powell and Marian Lozano. Photography by Devin Yalkin. Our senior booker is Priya Matthew.

And our senior producer is Seth Kelly. Our executive producer is Alison Benedict. Special thanks to Jane Koston, Julie Hirshfield Davis, Rory Walsh, Renan Borelli, Jeffrey Miranda, Maddy Macielo, Jake Silverstein, Paula Schumann, and Sam Dolnick. If you like what you're hearing, follow or subscribe to The Interview wherever you get your podcasts. To read or listen to any of our conversations, you can always go to nytimes.com slash theinterview. And you can email us anytime at theinterview at nytimes.com. Next week, David talks with singer Jelly Roll about getting a rough start, turning his life around, and putting everything he's got into his music. What you see is what you get with me.

It's always kind of been that. You know what I mean? I think of everything as a going out of business sale, and I give everything I got, everything I do, every time I do it right now. I'm Lulu Garcia Navarro, and this is The Interview from The New York Times. Thank you.