Those of us in the Alabama political media world who long have interacted with Cliff Sims are far from surprised that the former aide to President Trump is now roiling the waters, earning Trump’s ire, and drawing threats of a lawsuit because of his “tell all” book on the Trump White House. We also don’t expect Sims ever to lose his public equanimity, or to become easily fazed, much less back down.
Sims’ new book, Team of Vipers: My 500 Extraordinary Days in the Trump White House, professes continued admiration for Trump himself. But it trashes numerous Trump aides while describing seriously dysfunctional White House operations. Lawyers for Trump say Sims’ book violates a nondisclosure agreement he signed when he first began working for the orange-tinted billionaire. Most lawyers whose comments I’ve seen say the suit likely puts Sims at little risk because NDAs are largely unenforceable when they involve nonclassified information related to public service.
When Trump Tweeted out Tuesday morning an attack on Sims while calling his former aide a mere “gofer,” Sims cheekily tweeted out a promo for the book in which he boasted that it was “written by the most famous ‘gofer’ in the world!”
This is all par for the Sims course, as I can attest firsthand. I’m an Alabama-based journalist; Sims was the founder and editor of Yellowhammer News, a successful conservative site covering Alabama politics. (I even worked for Yellowhammer directly for a few months, but that was after Sims sold it so he could take the job with Trump.) For six years Sims and I have traded intermittent friendly notes and pointed barbs (depending on the situation), both public and private. I’ve found he quite clearly likes to “stick the knife in,” but he always keeps a sense of humor.
For example, I wrote, very much in passing, that he had used Yellowhammer’s platform to become a “personal hit man” (politically speaking) for U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., by making outlandish attacks against a young primary challenger whose campaign Shelby already was handily defeating. Sims considerably upped the ante a few months later with a large headline saying I had become “unglued” because, in the midst of my 18 years of favorable coverage of then-U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions, I had posted two tweets (yes, two whole tweets!) taking issue with Sessions’ support for Trump.
Yet in phone conversations and email exchanges surrounding those issues, Sims usually remained not just polite but almost jovial. Indeed, at the end of the lengthy email to me in which he was otherwise the most contentious, he signed off in this friendly manner: “Feel free to email me directly any time you take issue with anything I write. Hope your summer is going well! This election cycle is insane! — Cliff.”
My takeaway from all this is that Cliff Sims gets a charge out of playing (or writing about) politics as if it is a referee-less hockey game, but that he takes almost none of it personally. From what I’ve seen of him, I also trust the basic facts of what he reports, even if I might not trust his slant thereon.
Sims won’t be frightened by Trump or by his lawyers, and he’ll have fun in the spotlight. In the meantime, his book surely provides valuable insights into the most bizarre presidency of our lifetimes. If Trump were at all self-reflective, the book might convince the president to clean out his stables and organize a West Wing operation that better serves the American people.
