Former Congressman Trey Gowdy has a new novel to promote, one that, like his last one, has nothing to do with politics. But politics keeps interfering.
Last week, for example, Gowdy was on a train from Washington, D.C., to New York City, watching the South Carolina primary votes come in, when his phone rang. It was the president of the United States, wanting to discuss Darline Graham’s win.
“Yesterday was among the more event-filled days of my life,” Gowdy told me the next day, adding, “I think I’m just a poor manager of my time. I’m not busier than anybody else. I’m probably just a little slower than most people.”
His résumé suggests otherwise.
At 62, Gowdy is on his fourth career. You might say he still hasn’t really left the first three. He started out as a state and federal prosecutor in South Carolina before being elected to Congress in 2010. After leaving office after eight years, famously saying that he prefers jobs “where facts matter,” he became host of “Sunday Night in America With Trey Gowdy” on Fox News and began to focus on writing and publishing books like “Unified: How Our Unlikely Friendship Gives Us Hope for a Divided Country” (co-authored with S.C. Sen. Tim Scott) and “Start, Stay, or Leave: The Art of Decision Making.”
Then last year, encouraged by Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott, he tried his hand at writing fiction.
Gowdy’s first novel, “The Color of Death,” helped by the muscular marketing of Fox News Books, made The New York Times bestseller list and led to a sequel, released last week.
Like his first novel, “The Sound of Regret” is informed by Gowdy’s real-life experiences as a prosecutor, many of which weigh heavily on him to this day. He speaks with emotion about a young man who had been working with Gowdy and his colleagues to build a case against drug dealers and was later killed for it. Gowdy had to tell the mother what happened to her son. It’s among the many gut-wrenching stories that Gowdy tells about his prosecutorial career and why he left it, although that experience still informs his work today — as does his stint in Congress.
In conversation with the Deseret News this week, Gowdy talked about the loss of his friend Lindsey Graham, President Donald Trump’s continued influence on elections, and what he finds strange about the prosecution and possible coming trial of the man accused of killing Charlie Kirk, Tyler Robinson. He also weighed in on the Lindsay Clancy trial in Massachusetts and shared what he finds more interesting than politics.
The conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Deseret News: Let’s start with the loss of your good friend Sen. Lindsey Graham, and his sister’s primary win Tuesday. A number of analysts had been predicting a loss for Darline Graham, and it was a close race (52%–48%). What made the difference?
Trey Gowdy: If you look at a map of what happened, it was imminently predictable to those of us who live in South Carolina. You will see Ralph Norman, in what is currently his congressional district, and what used to be mine, and you will see red, or (Darline) Graham throughout the rest of the state.
And I can’t really explain it, other than Greenville and Spartanburg are very conservative. There is a geographic divide (in the state) even though we are unified in many regards. I don’t think (Lindsey Graham) ever won a contested Republican primary in my old congressional district.
DN: So how did she pull it off as a newcomer?
TG: It’s one thing to endorse someone; it’s another to put your foot into it. And the president really put his foot in it. Part of that is that he genuinely likes (Darline Graham) as a person, and it’s hard not to. And part of it is, he genuinely had a much deeper, more personal friendship with Lindsey than probably most folks would have guessed, far beyond mere politics. And he got actively involved. He came to South Carolina, went to Horry County, and Darline got around 75% of the vote in that very big county.
Darline is her own person. Foreign policy will not be one of her external priorities. Lindsey traveled nonstop. But if he went into a Publix or another grocery store, it was by accident. Darline actually knows where the cheese is, where the milk section is.
DN: Besides his foreign-policy experience, what has Congress lost with Lindsey Graham no longer in the picture?
TG: He was a bridge. The president would tell you, if I needed to get a message communicated to the Democrats, Lindsey could do it. There’s less of an appetite for that now, and there’s less of a supply of that now.
Lindsey spent a lot of his political career explaining away his votes for (Sonia) Sotomayor and (Elena) Kagan. Brett Kavanaugh helped, but if you’re an aspiring young politician, you’re going to sit there and think, you know, I don’t want to spend 15 years explaining why I think a president is entitled to his or her pick. The easy thing is always to vote no. Lindsey caught a lot of flak for that, and younger politicians will say, you know, it’s not worth it.
Not a day has gone by since he passed away that I don’t think about him. I was a homicide prosecutor; it’s not like death is new to me. But this has felt different to me. I was talking to the president about it yesterday. This one has impacted both of us differently from how we thought it might. ... I miss that rascal. Some of my friends would say, ”I don’t like Lindsey Graham.” And I would say, play golf with us. You may not vote for him, but you will like him. To the person, they said, “You’re right, he’s really hard to not like.”
DN: Can we switch to another Lindsay, the Lindsay Clancy case in Massachusetts? You were a federal prosecutor in South Carolina at the time when Susan Smith was on trial for drowning her two young sons in a lake. I don’t remember anyone standing up for Susan Smith the way some people are standing up for Lindsay Clancy. Is that because of the difference in their circumstances, or something in our culture that has changed over the past three decades?
TG: I put the Lindsay Clancy case somewhere in between Susan Smith and Andrea Yates. Andrea Yates, not guilty by reason of insanity in Texas and you really don’t hear people quarrel with that adjudication. Susan Smith, there was no mental health defense presented; she said that she’d been sexually abused as a child; most of us don’t believe that. There was no public rallying around her, but there were family members rallying around her. It was a successful defense to save her life. The jury was unanimous in giving her life. It was 12-zip for life.
This one is in the middle. The prosecutor in me wonders where that voice (which Clancy said directed her to kill her children) was previously in life, why that voice took the time to remind you to invoke your Miranda rights. What I would argue to the jury is just how long it takes to strangle someone to death. It’s not a gun shot. It’s not a stab. You literally feel the life go out of the person. It requires commitment, time and dedication to strangle someone to death. And to do that systematically three times.
Normal people view that as such aberrant behavior that they think there must be something wrong with that person because normal people don’t do that. But that’s not the question. The question is whether you know right from wrong. We’re so obsessed with the why. But you don’t ever have to prove why. ...
I don’t know what’s wrong with our culture. I don’t know how you can summarily execute the one guy who never performed a back surgery on you. I don’t understand how you can write horrific killers. I don’t understand how a prison guard can have sex with Susan Smith. I don’t know if the culture has changed, or if the aberrant behavior is just more widely known.
DN: Switching gears to another case in the news: that of Tyler Robinson, accused of assassinating Charlie Kirk a year ago. Could you share your thoughts on how long it’s taken to bring the case to this point, and also the defense’s contention about how this should not be a death penalty case because other people were not at risk.
TG: This was a high-caliber projectile that went over the heads of lots of people and hit a guy on a stage. If that is not an act that endangers other people, then I don’t know what would be. But look, that’s up to a jury.
Utah has a very unusual criminal justice system. In most every other state I can think of, including the one I’m from, there is no hearing on probable cause. Utah is different. All of this pre-trial stuff — we basically litigate the matter to determine whether there’s probable cause, which takes forever — we would basically do that in about 45 seconds in most other states. I’m not knocking Utah; I love the state. And it’s great to be suspicious of the power of government. That’s why we have grand juries. … This mini-trial before the trial, and taking forever to get a trial? Nothing gets better in the criminal justice system with time. Nothing.
DN: Another thing still being debated in the Robinson case is whether cameras will be allowed in the courtroom.
TG: I have mixed feelings about it, because there are so many conspiracy theorists. And nothing destroys a conspiracy theory quite like cross-examination.
I was actually walking into my gym one night, and a guy stopped me and said, “Why are y’all ignoring the exploding microphone? We all know what killed him.” And I said, “You mean Kash Patel is part of some vast conspiracy to cover up? Do you think Mossad did it?”
Ordinarily, I would say cameras make people act differently and worse. Period. There’s a reason there are no cameras in federal court. People don’t act better. Having said that, if you’ve got the Candace Owens of the world out there spreading conspiracy theories, or Tucker Carlson, or fill in the blank, let them see how those conspiracies stack up in court.
All trials are public; you can go watch it. The question is, whether or not it is televised. Think back to O.J. (Simpson). That was an unmitigated disaster. Having said that, I think on balance, I’d rather the public see it, so they will see that, believe it or not, sometimes people just shoot other people with a gun. No conspiracy required.
DN: Let’s talk about your new novel, which is the second in what I think you have said will be a trilogy. The main character is a prosecutor in a small town in South Carolina who is trying to find the person who murdered an informant and a witness to a crime, while he himself is being hunted by a killer.
TG: My wife is reading the book right now, and she said “When I close my eyes, (the protagonist) is you.” And I said, “Honey, it is not me. He is tall and handsome.” But I do know what it’s like to be pursued by a psychotic person. (Prosecutors) have all had death threats. We all live with them. You just have to keep doing your job. But the point I want to make in this book is it’s rarely what you would expect it to be. The people you think are mad at you are not. They think you treated them fairly. You lost; you move on. It’s the people you never suspected.
DN: Most people don’t ever have personal experience with the criminal justice system and so they don’t really understand how it works.
TG: That’s one reason why I wrote this book. I get so frustrated watching miniseries and movies. It’s just not the way it happens. It may make for good television. But it’s just not real life.
The conversations between prosecutors and young men, laying out their choices for them: You can spend the next 20 years in prison, or you can put on this wire and go purchase an ounce of cocaine base for me. Those are animated, raw conversations, and there are consequences for both decisions. There is risk involved.
This book is dedicated to Ricky Tyrone Samuel, a young man who decided to help us, and it cost him his life.
Somebody asked me, how do you come up with the title, “The Sound of Regret”? It is what you hear when you’re about to walk into Ricky’s mama’s house, to explain to her how this happened. You want to know what regret sounds like? It is that pulsing sound in your head and in your heart when you’re getting ready to explain to a mom why you didn’t protect her son. Or failed to protect her son.
Ironically, she never blamed me. We were friends until the day she passed away. But she could have.
There’s no politics in this book. Because politics to me is not that interesting. This is interesting: why people do what they do, why some people choose to become witnesses, the impossible choices we put people in, what being a crime victim does to you — there is no closure. Yet this is real life.