I'm John Baxter.

This is the new John Bachelter show, continuing with Josh Rogan, the author of the new book,

Chaos Under Heaven, Trump, She, and the Battle for the 21st Century.

2017 sets the scale of the operation for the Trump administration.

We have competing factions within large personalities.

2017 ends with Donald Trump traveling to Asia, the APEC meeting,

acknowledging that Xi is president for life of the People's Republic

of China, and also mixing in the fact that Wall Street has ambitions to continue to invest

and profit in China. It's a giant market. However, now we have to introduce something I

learned about for the first time in Josh's book,

The Bingo Club.

Josh, what is the Bingo Club?

The Bingo Club was a group of government officials, congressional staffers, experts,

and even a couple of journalists who met secretly in Washington, beginning in 2017 and 2018,

to discuss Chinese malign foreign influence

and interference in American politics and an American society. And this is an issue that

in 2021 we talk about quite openly, but in that time and space, it was something that no part

of the U.S. government was pointed at and that nobody was really

discussing in public. And because of that, this group had a huge influence on not only how

the U.S. government operated when looking for and then dealing with instances of Chinese

Communist Party interference and influence operations, but it also had a big sort of, you know, impact on sort of

how those issues eventually spilled out into various parts of our policy, especially in Congress.

...