Inside the Living Room Studio: Sue Gordon, Ex-Deputy of National Intelligence, Discusses Trump’s "Vice and Graft" on Her Podcast | Vanity Fair
“I don’t sleep a lot,” Sue Gordon admits over Zoom. Like most of us, the onslaught of headlines landing in our feeds at any given moment keeps the former principal deputy director of national intelligence—a Donald Trump appointee in 2017 who was famously forced to resign in 2019—up at night. Although, as a 29-year veteran of the CIA, Gordon has never been big on rest. Throughout her career, she has served as an analyst, helped build spacecraft, managed weapon systems, worked in combat support, and held leadership positions in the technology sector, supporting national security. “I became known as the person you called when you needed something done,” she says. As PDDNI, Gordon oversaw 17 agencies and organizations comprised of roughly 100,000 people and a budget of more than $80 billion. Most days, she was at the office by 5 a.m., worked until 7 p.m., headed home to have dinner with her husband, and then returned to the office for a few more hours before calling it a night.
Since March, Gordon, 67, has been battling an aggressive and fast-moving inflammatory breast cancer, her second bout with the disease. She found out she had uterine cancer on the day she learned Trump was going to nominate her as PDDNI, and she attended her first post-surgery radiation treatment on the morning of the day she was confirmed by the Senate.
When she got her most recent diagnosis, it was a shock on many levels: Gordon was already at stage four with the disease, which had infiltrated her lymph nodes. Her case was deemed triple negative—with no known mutations. (“My daughter jokes that I have good genes and bad luck,” says Gordon.) This meant the only course of action was immediate chemotherapy. Since then, Gordon has sustained 16 weeks of chemo, battled a near-death case of meningitis and another illness due to a dangerously low white blood count, and last month, she underwent a radical double mastectomy. Going forward, she will require alternating rounds of radiation and chemo. And yet the beauty of Sue Gordon—and this is apparent in her outlook on the United States as well—is that no matter how dire the circumstances, she remains incredibly optimistic. “Look, I can move my arm!” she says proudly post-op, while also acknowledging that “most people my age don’t make it to the surgery.” She credits her doctors for being “MacGyver-ish” in their ability to keep her alive.
While sequestered at home in Texas, close to her doctors, kids, and grandchildren, Gordon feels compelled to do something. (She jokes that she would have attended the No Kings rally had it not been the day after surgery.) Since her most recent diagnosis, she has refashioned her living room into Central Command, drawing on her years of experience and knowledge to take positive action. From the quietude of her home, the national security expert’s digital footprint looms large: She attends meetings for the multiple boards on which she serves, and sits for interviews with friends such as Nicolle Wallace and Miles Taylor. This past July, she launched her own weekly podcast, Understandable Insights: Information to Intelligence with Sue Gordon, in between rounds of chemo.
She cohosts the podcast with former Marine Eric Koepp, who also happens to be Gordon’s son-in-law. Together, the two tackle the week’s headlines with Gordon trying to demystify just what the hell is happening while assessing the ramifications. The pod has been downloaded thousands of times from 19 countries with little to no organic promotion. “I’m never going to be incendiary because that’s not the way I am, but I am getting much bolder about this moment,” says Gordon, who has tackled topical issues like the government’s approach to decommissioned nuclear warheads, the assessment of Trump’s trip to Asia, the embarrassment of the shutdown, and even the passing of Dick Cheney. (Ever the loquacious speaker, Gordon has occasionally posted bonus episodes if she can’t get all of her thoughts out in the roughly 50-minute timeframe.)
During her time as PDNNI and in the CIA, Gordon was beloved for her bipartisanship. At this stage of life, with her experience and health issues, she is more compelled to speak her mind—one of the few women of her stature to do so. “It’s all tied to vice and graft,” she says bluntly about this administration. “The problem is you have a president who’s a narcissist. He doesn’t believe in anything except making money and having power.” When it comes to autocrats, despots, and oligarchs, she says, “These people are terrible at this. There’s a reason you don’t want to live in any of those countries. There’s nothing good about the society that they’re creating.”
Congress, she states, needs to step up. “I blame them the most,” says Gordon. “They could end this tomorrow, and they know better. I know those guys. They’re doing a worse version of what the rich guys are doing. But the fact that Congress has abrogated its responsibility has now left us in a place that we never were before; there is no check and balance.”
As a true constitutionalist and proud daughter of a Naval officer, when Gordon says that “we are past the point of an easy return,” one can tell that it physically pains her to make such a declaration. Our forefathers “did not imagine that all three branches would capitulate to a unitary executive. They just didn’t foresee it,” she says. “One of the things we have to be relentless on is Congress, and that couples with voting.”
Gordon questions the effectiveness of the GOP’s ongoing gerrymandering tactics, for no other reason than it presumes that voters will continue to back Republican candidates in 2026 even after they start to feel the long-term effects of Trump’s fiscal policies. (As the recent round of elections proved, voters are engaged more than ever before.) With Affordable Care Act subsidies set to expire, a contentious issue that led to the government shutdown, those enrolled in the plan could reportedly see their health insurance premiums as much as quadruple if Congress doesn’t renew the tax credits. “Four times your health insurance—that you can’t afford, so you’re not insured, with hospitals closing down? That could create real economic hardship and pain for the people who vote for him. In my mind, Trump has got to capitulate, but he won’t. And so even with redistricting, that still doesn’t tell you who people actually vote for. It’s redistricting based on your assessment of how people will vote. It isn’t taking away votes.”
The private sector’s overreach with the media certainly isn’t helping. “I don’t think anyone thought the media itself had an agenda,” says Gordon. “With the explosion of who can be publishers, simultaneous with this administration that first pushed on free speech and said anyone can do anything. Now there is almost no way to control it, and all the money is in the disaggregation and in the mistruth.”
The same alarm bells ring true for the advancement of AI. Under the Barack Obama and Joe Biden administrations, the government was actively involved in investing in, developing, and regulating technology. “Now, it’s the private sector controlling every facet of society, but they don’t take an oath to the Constitution. They don’t feel the weight of responsibility. That, really, is one of the scarier outcomes of all of this.” She compares the rise of AI to that of atomic power. “That was something we understood early on, what its potential was, and there was a combination of science and national security that could actually address the risk as you went along. We don’t have that.”
Most notably, through her podcast and her interviews, Gordon is trying to propel people to act. “Why are fewer people up in arms over what the president is doing? We’re living in this glow of an empire that’s fallen, but we’re sitting at Starbucks thinking that we’re just fine.”
What gives her hope is the power of mobilization. Banding together locally is more important than ever as federal services are being stripped away. “We are fundamentally revolutionary people,” says Gordon. “You are seeing things like the No Kings rally, and people like J.B. Pritzker and Gavin Newsom standing up. Whether you agree with those actions unilaterally, I think the cracks are undeniable.”
She doubles down on the notion that this government isn’t just missing the mark, they’re intentionally leading the American people astray. “They are so bad at it. There’s nothing real about what they’re doing. There are no 90 deals in 90 days. There is no $18 trillion. There’s no anything. If we go to war now, if one of our adversaries attacks us, the Pentagon is wholly unprepared. We have decimated our institutions, but one of the upsides of that is there’s nothing behind the words of these bullies. So you can mount sustained pressure, and we can get communities and organizing groups to recognize that they have the power.”
Listen to Gordon’s podcast—she started taping again a mere 10 days after surgery—to find a way forward. She’s got things to say, and the stamina to do it. “I can cover a lot of ground,” she says with a laugh. “I’m rangey.”
