Following a sweeping executive order by President Donald Trump, White House Senior Advisor for Addiction Recovery Kathryn Burgum sat down exclusively with The Tennessee Star’s CEO and editor-in-chief, Michael Patrick Leahy, to discuss the deeply personal journey that led to the creation of the “Great American Recovery Initiative.”
The executive order, signed January 29, establishes a federal task force to coordinate addiction prevention, treatment, and recovery efforts across agencies, communities, and the private sector.
In an interview on Tuesday on The Michael Patrick Leahy Show, Burgum, who co-chairs the initiative alongside U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shared how her decades-long struggle with addiction ultimately shaped a national policy effort aimed at transforming how the nation approaches recovery.
During her conversation with Leahy, Burgum, who is married to U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, described the spiritual moment that changed her life.
“It took me over 20 years of struggling with [alcohol] addiction. I didn’t reach out for help, really, until the end when I was relapsing consistently over eight years. I was suicidal in the end. I was out walking one day…and I just said, ‘I don’t know if there’s anyone out there, but I need help’,” Burgum said.
“I haven’t had a drink since I said those words…The important thing for me is that was an intervention from God in my life,” she added.
She emphasized that addiction is isolating, but recovery becomes possible through connection.
“If you are with people that are like you, that understand what you’re going through…there’s a lot of different ways to do that. There’s a lot of paths to recovery,” she said.
Burgum, the former First Lady of North Dakota, explained that the initiative grew out of years of anti-stigma advocacy.
“For eight years, as First Lady, all I did was focus on eliminating stigma through storytelling… We reduced the stigma of addiction in our state by 20 percent through a grassroots movement. No taxpayer dollars,” she said.
What began as a personal mission eventually became a policy proposal she brought directly to the White House.
“I put together this initiative, I brought it to Susie Wiles…and the first thing she said was, I love this and the president’s gonna love it too,” Burgum said.
“[Wiles] knows how important it is to the president because of his brother who died of alcohol. The president and I have spoken about it and it has devastated his life and a lot of other people. It is a devastation to the family when somebody dies because of the disease of addiction,” she added.
Burgum further described the Trump administration as uniquely positioned to address addiction due to personal experiences among senior officials, including herself, Wiles’ late father, Pat Summerall, the mother of Vice President JD Vance, the president’s late brother, Fred Trump, Jr., and others.
“There’s never gonna be a point in time when we have people that are so directly impacted,” Burgum said. “There’s actually over 113 million people totally negatively impacted by the disease of addiction… it’s the collateral damage.”
As implementation begins, Burgum says the effort will focus on long-term, systemic change.
“It’s a chronic disease. We can no longer ignore that,” she said.
Tune in now to The Michael Patrick Leahy Show – your AMERICA FIRST news talk!
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
