The Ben Shapiro Show


Newt Gingrich | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 52


Summary

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich joins me to discuss his new novel, Collusion, and his new podcast, Newt's World, where he talks about politics, the economy, and why you should have life insurance in case something happens to you or your family. We also talk about the 2020 Democratic presidential field, and whether or not he thinks Joe Biden is actually running for president in 2020. Thanks to our sponsor, PolicyGenius, for sponsoring the Sunday Special with special guest Newt Gingrich. The Sunday Special is a production of Gimlet Media and produced by Tall Tales and edited by Annie-Rose Strasser. Our theme song is Come Alone by Suneaters, courtesy of Lotuspool Records. Our ad music is by Haley Shaw. Additional music is courtesy of Epitaph Records, and tyops by Zapsplat Records, recorded live at WFMU in St. Louis, Missouri on May 1st, 2020. Please consider pledging a small monthly support of $1 or more than $10,000 by clicking the link below to get 20% off your first month's mail-in rate and receive a free copy of his new book, Collusion Subscribe to his newest novel, Conspiracy Theories, Conspiracy Theory, out now! which is out on Amazon Prime and Podchaser! Learn more about your ad choices. Subscribe, rate and review our new ad-free version of the show on Audible, wherever you get your ad is available. Become a supporter, and get 10% off of his book recommendation, too! Subscribe for a chance to win a copy of the book and receive $5 or more, and receive an ad discount, plus a discount of $5 more, plus he'll get a FREE shipping throughout the next month, and he'll also get an ad on his next month gets a VIP membership offer, and a FREE VIP membership, too get VIP access to the show starts starting at $10/month, starting only $19/place they get $4/place gets $5, VIP access gets $4 VIP access startship, and they'll get $5/mikeredistractors get $1,000, MBRUNION PROMOTION AND VIP access, and VIP access becomes $4, MBPROMO, and $4MBPRIVA, and I'll get his ad starts starts starts only $25,000 PROMO??


Transcript

00:00:00.000 We are imperfect.
00:00:02.000 But compared to any other society I'm aware of, we have a stronger system of freedom, a greater capacity for people to rise, and a greater awareness that anybody can come from anywhere and become an American.
00:00:17.000 Hey, hey, and welcome to the Sunday special.
00:00:26.000 I'm excited to welcome to the set former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, former 2012 presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, author of the brand new novel Collusion, as well as host of Newt's World podcast.
00:00:36.000 We'll get to all of the questions for him in just one second.
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00:01:40.000 Speaker Gingrich, thanks so much for coming to the show.
00:01:42.000 I'm delighted to be with you.
00:01:42.000 Really appreciate it.
00:01:43.000 You've had a remarkable run and are having a huge impact.
00:01:47.000 Well, thank you.
00:01:47.000 That means a lot to me.
00:01:48.000 So let's start with where you think we are politically, obviously, where everybody's looking forward to 2020.
00:01:53.000 So I'm gonna ask for a little bit of rank political analysis here.
00:01:56.000 Looking forward to 2020, where do you think that President Trump stands in terms of re-election odds at this point?
00:02:02.000 Well, I think if the economy continues, the odds are better than even he'll win.
00:02:06.000 I think his ability as a campaigner is something that the left keeps forgetting.
00:02:11.000 I think that the minister guy has had 90 or 92 percent negative coverage for three straight years and is still standing.
00:02:18.000 And a normal politician would have crumbled by now and gone to the New York Times, promised to be a liberal and done whatever they had to to try to not beat him up.
00:02:28.000 So I think Trump probably can win.
00:02:31.000 I think he is not quite as disciplined as he ought to be.
00:02:35.000 I think if he were a little more disciplined, I would think he could win a crushing victory.
00:02:40.000 But every once in a while, just as he starts to build momentum, he decides to tweet something or do something to sort of undercut his own momentum.
00:02:47.000 And I think the Democrats, my reading, which is different than I would have thought if we'd done this show two months ago, I think Biden is the probable nominee just by name, ID, and momentum, although Hillary was 30 points ahead of Obama just before the Iowa caucus in 2008.
00:03:06.000 But if Biden doesn't get it, I think there's now a wide open field because part of what's happening is you have so many candidates that no one of them is able to grow very much.
00:03:18.000 And so you have this sort of collection of—I'm not sure pygmy is a politically correct term—very, very small people, and no ability to climb the ladder at this point.
00:03:29.000 You have Sanders, who I think is decaying.
00:03:32.000 The more we get to know about him, the more we see his honeymoon pictures in Moscow and his love fest with Cuba, the more we begin to realize this guy really is a nutcake.
00:03:42.000 And I think that when you drop below those two, Almost anybody could emerge in a way that we can't anticipate.
00:03:52.000 Do you see Biden collapsing at all?
00:03:54.000 I mean, I agree with you that right now he's, I mean, the polls say he's the most formidable candidate.
00:03:58.000 He's got 100% nay recognition.
00:04:00.000 He seems unthreatening generally to a huge bulk of the American public.
00:04:04.000 Do you see circumstances under which he could crumble?
00:04:07.000 I mean, he was a bad presidential candidate a couple of other times, but now he's got the VP hallmark on his resume.
00:04:14.000 Well, it's a little bit, you talk in one of the things I saw, a poster of yours, you talk about the facts.
00:04:20.000 And Biden represents the feeling wing of America.
00:04:25.000 So the facts don't matter.
00:04:26.000 I mean, a little bit like AOC.
00:04:28.000 I mean, she represents the hysterically filling wing of America, and among their people, facts don't matter.
00:04:36.000 People forget the first time Biden collapsed, he ran and he had this wonderful emotional speech about his childhood and growing up in a small town.
00:04:46.000 It turned out it was Neal Kinnock's speech as a labor leader about whales.
00:04:52.000 Now, a guy who's from Scranton, representing Delaware, describing himself in terms of a Welsh village was so—this is back when the news media still had some sense of covering fact.
00:05:03.000 I mean, the news media destroyed him.
00:05:04.000 They just said, this is crazy.
00:05:06.000 But one of the failures of my career, I'm watching the Palin-Biden debate, which is available online.
00:05:13.000 People can check the transcript.
00:05:15.000 And Biden says at one point, If you really want to understand the middle class, I want you to come to Katie's restaurant on Saturday morning where I go all the time.
00:05:25.000 Well, in the back of my head that didn't ring right, so I called a friend in Wilmington and said, when did Katie's close?
00:05:30.000 Well, Katie's closed 13 years before he said that.
00:05:34.000 So I called the McCain campaign, and this tells you a lot about why Republicans lose and why Trump's different than normal Republicans.
00:05:42.000 I called the McCain campaign.
00:05:43.000 I said, put her on an airplane tonight.
00:05:47.000 Fly into Wilmington with the National Press Corps.
00:05:49.000 Go looking for Katie's.
00:05:52.000 And he'll tell you this guy's a doofus.
00:05:54.000 And that's the danger that he would have as president.
00:05:56.000 This is a man so shallow and so lacking in seriousness.
00:06:00.000 You know, Bob Gates, the Secretary of Defense for both Obama and Bush, wrote in his memoir that for four decades, Biden has been consistently wrong on every major national security issue.
00:06:10.000 Now, I mean, Gates is sort of a bureaucrat.
00:06:12.000 He's not an ideologue.
00:06:15.000 But that should sober people.
00:06:16.000 Do you really want a guy as president who has been wrong for four decades on every major national security issue?
00:06:22.000 Now when you talk about his sort of feelings of appeal, it's pretty obvious that basically he's running a 1920 Warren G. Harding back to normalcy campaign, that effectively what he's saying is, Donald Trump, forget about the policy, Donald Trump is too crazy, he's too out there, he's too volatile, I'm the solid guy you remember from the Obama administration, and you remember things weren't so bad then, things are much worse now in terms of sort of the American political sphere.
00:06:45.000 I don't think that rings true, but it seems to be effective in a lot of polls, particularly with suburban women.
00:06:50.000 If you're President Trump, how do you counter that?
00:06:52.000 Well, I mean, first of all, this is one of the great challenges Trump has, because suburban women react negatively to Trump's style.
00:06:59.000 I mean, the very toughness and aggressiveness and risk-taking which makes Trump so popular with blue-collar workers jars suburban women.
00:07:08.000 I mean, he's got to think through to what degree he—there are two ways to become more acceptable.
00:07:13.000 One is to change, which I think is unlikely.
00:07:16.000 The other is to draw an issue contrast so compelling that in the end they decide, for example, that as mothers they don't want their children growing up in that kind of world.
00:07:25.000 And so I think Trump probably has to go to the second model, which is Nixon in 72 rather than Reagan in 84.
00:07:32.000 But Nixon won the largest popular vote in modern American history.
00:07:36.000 I mean, bigger than FDR, bigger than anybody.
00:07:38.000 He got a bigger popular vote margin.
00:07:40.000 Because in the end, people said, yeah, I can't be for McGovern.
00:07:45.000 I think the challenge that Biden has, and the reason that I think it's a difficulty, I think there are two simple language sets.
00:07:53.000 There are winners and there are whiners.
00:07:55.000 Biden represents the whining wing of American politics right now.
00:07:59.000 Trump represents the winning wing.
00:08:00.000 So if you're a conservative and you like conservative judges, Trump is the biggest winner in your lifetime.
00:08:07.000 If you like going to work and think it's nice to have a job, Trump is the biggest winner in modern times.
00:08:12.000 I mean, if you're African American and think the unemployment rate matters or think it's great that wages are going up, Trump is a big winner.
00:08:19.000 So I think, you know, but that rate leads to a real gap psychologically.
00:08:24.000 The second is, I think, the gap between fact and emotion, which is why I found the slogan you used so fascinating.
00:08:31.000 The reason our arguments don't work on the left is the left gets up in the morning and says, but I feel this way.
00:08:39.000 And you try to give them facts, but you don't understand.
00:08:41.000 In fact, there's an interview that AOC had where the reporter demolished facts and she finally stopped him and said, look, I'm morally correct.
00:08:50.000 So the fact that all those facts are wrong is irrelevant because you're in two different psychological arenas.
00:08:56.000 And that's part of our challenge.
00:08:58.000 And a lot of the younger voters who have been in left-wing colleges and left-wing high schools have been trained to think only emotionally and have been trained to believe that facts aren't really relevant.
00:09:09.000 So let's talk a little bit about President Trump's policy, because you've written now a couple of books.
00:09:13.000 You're in the process of writing one about China, and you've written this one, Collusion, which has to deal with American foreign policy with regard to Russia.
00:09:20.000 Let's talk about President Trump's foreign policy, because that's obviously coming to a head right now, particularly with regard to China.
00:09:25.000 One of the great dangers to his re-elect effort is the possibility of an economic downturn.
00:09:29.000 A lot of folks are concerned that his posturing or that his position with regard to China insofar as trade is concerned could theoretically lead to an economic downturn.
00:09:39.000 Where do you stand on President Trump's trade policies with regard to China?
00:09:43.000 And how much of a threat should we consider China at this point?
00:09:45.000 Well, I have a book that will come out in October on China.
00:09:48.000 And I think, and I've done several years now researching it, and I've been looking at China since 1960 or 1959.
00:09:55.000 I think that China is the most formidable competitor we've ever seen.
00:10:01.000 Vastly more difficult than the Soviet Union.
00:10:04.000 I think that their stock and trade is to cheat and to be deceptive.
00:10:09.000 I think that it's good to finally have a president who's figured out the way to take him on.
00:10:14.000 I always tell people, think about this, you never pick a fight with your biggest customer.
00:10:19.000 We're their biggest customer.
00:10:20.000 They're not our biggest customer.
00:10:22.000 We're not going to get into a recession because of a fight with China.
00:10:25.000 They may get into a depression because if people suddenly say, as has happened the last few days, where you have Google saying they're not going to have any Android updates available for Huawei.
00:10:38.000 Well, I mean, if we start going into that kind of that level of toughness, the Chinese are going to face huge economic problems.
00:10:45.000 And as Trump has said publicly, you know, we can buy from Vietnam, from the Philippines, from Thailand, from India, I mean, from Nigeria.
00:10:53.000 We have lots of sources for things.
00:10:55.000 The Chinese have only one gigantic customer.
00:10:57.000 It's us.
00:10:58.000 If they lose that customer, the transition costs for them will be enormous.
00:11:02.000 I mean, is there the possibility, just to argue the counter, isn't it possible that China says, OK, we're willing to take some temporary pain just to get Trump out of office, meaning we'll sell American bonds on the open market.
00:11:12.000 We'll take the hit.
00:11:13.000 We'll raise our own tariffs on American products.
00:11:16.000 There's a surplus of cash on the planet.
00:11:18.000 I mean, that's one of the problems the Chinese have.
00:11:20.000 Sell the American bonds.
00:11:22.000 We can find 65 African billionaires who want to buy them.
00:11:25.000 I mean, there's no evidence right now that bonds are going to go up, and I don't think the Chinese can sell enough.
00:11:30.000 Furthermore, they destabilize their own banking system.
00:11:34.000 I mean, the Chinese, I really do think that 30 years from now, this might not be true, particularly if we were to remain stupid and slow.
00:11:42.000 But if we are prepared to take them head, for example, we just get them to cut off intellectual property theft, which the Obama director of national security and national intelligence said was $460 billion a year.
00:11:57.000 That means they steal more annually than our total sale to China.
00:12:01.000 And by the way, this is not six high school kids hacking in Shanghai.
00:12:06.000 This is the People Liberation Army units that are methodical.
00:12:10.000 They have thousands of people who get up every morning to hack into the United States.
00:12:15.000 And I think closing those things down will change the whole trajectory of the Chinese system.
00:12:20.000 So, as a historian, I've often wondered, now I look back and I say, was it actually a good idea for Nixon to open China in the first place, given how antagonistic they've been, given the fact that they were a lot weaker in 1972 than they are right now, given the fact that us taking a very strong stance with regard to the Soviet Union on economics led to the collapse of that system?
00:12:39.000 If you could go back in time, do you think it's a good idea or a bad idea to open China?
00:12:42.000 I actually think it was a brilliant idea because, first of all, the Chinese had fought a skirmish with the Soviets, and the Soviets were building up their military forces in Siberia.
00:12:51.000 And Nixon and Kissinger came up with a model that they were, in effect, increasing the relationship with China to balance off the Soviet Union.
00:13:01.000 And at the time, I think that was right.
00:13:03.000 I think where it began to change, look, I was one of the people who was wrong.
00:13:07.000 I mean, I thought in 1992, when Deng Xiaoping went south and gave what's called the Southern Tour, which is where he said, we have to have open markets, and I don't care whether a cat is a black cat or a white cat, I care if it catches mice.
00:13:21.000 And I've actually been in a city where they actually have two giant black and white cats at the bridge, like 20 feet tall.
00:13:28.000 But I thought, oh yeah, as most of us did, oh yeah, that's the first step towards opening up the country.
00:13:33.000 Well, that's not true.
00:13:34.000 Deng Xiaoping was a Leninist.
00:13:36.000 What he was saying was, if the dictatorship is going to survive, we have to have prosperity.
00:13:42.000 So they actually did something that people would have thought was impossible.
00:13:45.000 They have an authoritarian political system with 90 million members in the Communist Party, and they have a relatively open market.
00:13:55.000 Again, it's government-controlled, and I wouldn't exaggerate how open it is, but it's very productive, and it's raised probably 350 million people in the middle-class status.
00:14:05.000 It's an enormous achievement, but it's an achievement financing a dictatorship, and I think sometime in the 90s we probably should have shifted.
00:14:15.000 And realize that once the Soviets collapsed, we should have looked much more critically at our relationship with China.
00:14:21.000 And once Tiananmen occurred, and it was obvious that Deng Xiaoping himself ordered the tanks to go in and crush the students, this should have been a signal to us, maybe our understanding of openness in China is a little bit wrong.
00:14:33.000 What do you think America's end goal should be in China?
00:14:36.000 Is it to contain them?
00:14:37.000 Is it to eventually create the possibility of regime change?
00:14:40.000 Well, I think our goal should be to contain the Chinese and minimize their worldwide influence until they're able to transition to a free society.
00:14:50.000 I mean, if China were as free as India or as free as Great Britain, I don't think we'd be particularly threatened.
00:14:57.000 But you have a billion, 400 million people.
00:14:59.000 So let's be fair.
00:15:00.000 They're going to be important.
00:15:01.000 They're going to be big.
00:15:03.000 They're going to be much bigger than Russia.
00:15:05.000 And that's just, I mean, if you believe humans matter, a billion, 400 million people ought to be pretty big.
00:15:11.000 But they have to become not just less communist, they have to become less Chinese.
00:15:17.000 And the Chinese system has at least 3,000 years of authoritarianism.
00:15:23.000 It has a very closed society in many ways.
00:15:27.000 It has a very deep belief going back thousands of years that it is the central kingdom.
00:15:32.000 And that therefore everybody else should be paying tribute to them.
00:15:35.000 So you both want to get them to peel away from a communist, centralized, Leninist dictatorship, and you want to get them to decide that they're part of the human race, they're not just a uniquely Chinese hegemon that the rest of the human race should pay tribute to.
00:15:52.000 Those are huge changes and they may take a long time and we have to have a strategy that says we're going to continue until that happens.
00:15:59.000 We don't have that strategy today.
00:16:01.000 We're in grave danger of losing to them just by the sheer momentum of their technology and their economy.
00:16:08.000 So you have a new book, Collusion, which is all about the foreign influence of Russia.
00:16:13.000 Where do you see Russia in the world?
00:16:14.000 In 2012, Mitt Romney famously declared that they were the chief geopolitical threat to the United States.
00:16:19.000 You said that China is significantly more dangerous than Russia.
00:16:22.000 Yeah.
00:16:22.000 Where do you think Russia sort of ranks here and how should the United States be treating them?
00:16:26.000 I mean, I think, first of all, Romney was not totally wrong.
00:16:30.000 I think China is a bigger long-term challenge.
00:16:32.000 But you have a country with about 5,000 nuclear weapons, whose leader was a trained KGB professional, who spent a large part of his career trying to keep the East Germans in a slave state, who has said—we open our book with a There's a quote from Putin that the Cold War never ended, and we close our book with seven pages, single lines, of all the people we've been able to find so far that Putin has killed.
00:16:58.000 I mean, you go through seven pages being able to realize, I mean, I talked to someone the other day who knows Garry Kasparov, the great chess player, who said that there were six pro-freedom dignitaries of which Kasparov is the only one still alive.
00:17:11.000 And so, yeah, the Russians are very dangerous.
00:17:14.000 The Russians have a long history of penetrating the United States.
00:17:18.000 We had one of the top people, Robert Hansen at the FBI, who was actually charged at one point with finding Russian spies, was a Russian spy for 25 years.
00:17:28.000 We had Ames in the CIA, who was a spy for at least 15 years.
00:17:33.000 Alger Hiss in World War II, the number three guy in the State Department.
00:17:37.000 He was such an effective agent for the Soviets that at Yalta he met secretly with Stalin at three in the morning and was given the highest civilian award you can get in the Soviet Union because he'd done such a great job representing the Soviet Union inside the U.S.
00:17:50.000 government.
00:17:51.000 So we know that collusion is real.
00:17:56.000 We also know that the Russians have this weird fascination with poison.
00:18:01.000 Just last year, they tried to poison a defector in Britain.
00:18:05.000 And they like for you to know that they're doing it, so they tend to use poisons that you can track back to the Russians and say, nobody else on the planet makes this.
00:18:14.000 And I think they do that because Putin wants to say to potential defectors, If you defect, we're going to kill you.
00:18:22.000 So understand, this could happen to you.
00:18:24.000 This could be your fate.
00:18:25.000 So we took that concept of poison.
00:18:29.000 We took the fact that they like to penetrate our society.
00:18:32.000 We looked at Antifa, which is a left-wing fascist organization, and said, could you have an alliance between the extreme wing of Antifa and the Russians and an effort to actually poison the entire U.S.
00:18:46.000 Senate?
00:18:47.000 And that's when the novel really starts to build.
00:18:50.000 And then we decided to make it very modern by having our central figure, Brett Garrett, is a Navy SEAL who was hurt severely in a helicopter crash during an operation in Nigeria and was treated for pain with opioids and became an opioid addict.
00:19:05.000 And so we have a central figure who is wrestling with his own addiction.
00:19:09.000 Well, he's serving the country.
00:19:11.000 And in my podcast, you mentioned, at Newt's World, we now do podcasts.
00:19:15.000 We did one podcast with a 30-year CIA veteran on how do you get people out of Moscow when the Russians are trying to kill them.
00:19:22.000 And then we did a podcast a week later with two Army combat doctors who are specifically assigned to develop non-addictive painkillers.
00:19:32.000 And what they're doing and how they're doing it.
00:19:34.000 And some of it was fascinating.
00:19:35.000 I mean, they have an ability now to, let's say your hand has been burned.
00:19:40.000 They have an ability to have an injection right here that simply cuts the nerves temporarily from your hand so you don't actually feel it.
00:19:49.000 And it doesn't addict you and it doesn't affect the rest of your body.
00:19:52.000 And they said, they put out, if you're in combat and I can get you to stay awake so you can get yourself on the helicopter.
00:20:00.000 I just saved an enormous amount of effort versus putting you to sleep for the pain, and now four other people have to get you on the helicopter.
00:20:07.000 And stuff like that is a fascinating interview.
00:20:09.000 So the book is great.
00:20:10.000 I had a chance to read it over the weekend.
00:20:12.000 It's really enjoyable and really informative as well.
00:20:14.000 When people see the title, Collusion, obviously the first thing they think of is the Mueller Report.
00:20:18.000 So have you had a chance to read it?
00:20:20.000 By the way, it was pure luck that they came out at the same time.
00:20:24.000 Although the concept grew out of all this talk about, could you have collusion?
00:20:29.000 But as you know, books take a while.
00:20:31.000 Right, exactly.
00:20:32.000 So we started this a year and a half ago.
00:20:33.000 Well, it worked out well in terms of marketing.
00:20:35.000 That's right.
00:20:35.000 So given the fact that collusion is sort of the tip of everybody's tongue, particularly in the media, I don't know if you've had a chance to read or digest the Mueller report.
00:20:42.000 What was your take on the Mueller report, the kind of final result?
00:20:46.000 The president obviously has declared that it was a witch hunt from the very beginning.
00:20:49.000 Do you believe that it was a witch hunt from the very beginning?
00:20:51.000 Do you believe that it sort of went wrong in the middle?
00:20:54.000 Do you believe that the president was guilty in any way of anything approaching obstruction of justice, which seems like the more meaty part of the report?
00:21:01.000 Well, I have a larger historic view of the Mueller report.
00:21:06.000 I believe that there was a serious effort at a coup d'etat by the deep state that included certainly the Attorney General, the head of the FBI, a series of lies told to federal judges, an extraordinary effort To cripple or destroy the nominee of a major party.
00:21:26.000 And at the same time, a remarkable effort, which people still haven't dug into, to protect the Democratic nominee.
00:21:32.000 I mean, people want to talk about obstruction of justice.
00:21:35.000 And I said, well, great.
00:21:36.000 Let's talk about 33,000 emails that are deleted.
00:21:39.000 Let's talk about cell phones that are beaten up with a hammer.
00:21:42.000 Let's talk about bleach bit for your computer hardware.
00:21:46.000 If Trump had done that, would you have thought that was obstruction?
00:21:50.000 I mean, if you look at it, the one-sidedness of our standard here, that if Trump has a conversation in the Oval Office about a totally legitimate constitutional right, which anybody in the executive branch can be fired, and that's part of the president's constitutional authority as the chief executive, suddenly we're worried about whether or not he's obstructing justice.
00:22:13.000 If Hillary Clinton goes through everything I just said to you, it's a non-event.
00:22:18.000 And that's part of the corruption of the system.
00:22:20.000 These guys thought that Hillary was going to win.
00:22:23.000 And they thought they could get away with anything.
00:22:27.000 And frankly, if she'd won, I think it's very sobering how corrupt the system would have gotten under her.
00:22:33.000 One of the things that was obviously very telling was the fact that James Comey, in effectively exonerating her, wrote intent into a law that does not have a component of intent.
00:22:41.000 And then when they talk about obstruction of justice, suddenly they are reading intent out of the law.
00:22:44.000 It requires intent to obstruct justice.
00:22:46.000 That was one of the things that struck me about the Mueller report.
00:22:49.000 On the other hand, you look at the president's behavior and the president effectively allegedly telling Don McGahn to lie to the press.
00:22:56.000 The president creating statements on behalf of Donald Trump Jr.
00:23:00.000 This sort of stuff is not criminal, but it is bad.
00:23:03.000 I think that was not a great report for the president.
00:23:05.000 No, I mean, look, a friend of mine sent me this internet story about a guy who had raccoons in his basement.
00:23:17.000 And he said, this really nice guy showed up in a really nice suit, and he went down, and when he left, there were still raccoons.
00:23:23.000 And this other guy showed up, and he really had a degree from Harvard, and when he went down, there were still raccoons.
00:23:28.000 And then this really rough-and-tumble guy, who's a little bit obnoxious, showed up, and there are no more raccoons.
00:23:35.000 Which one would you hire?
00:23:37.000 But on the left, the hatred of Trump is so deep that people at the New York Times and Washington Post and CNN get up in the morning and they go, I know Trump did something terrible.
00:23:47.000 I wonder what it is.
00:23:49.000 And then they go looking for something terrible, which has to be something terrible because they have a daily terrible requirement.
00:23:55.000 It's like a feeding schedule.
00:23:58.000 Donald Trump, and nobody gives him any slack, but I'm going to describe what slack will look like to historians.
00:24:05.000 Donald Trump is a billionaire construction, real estate, finance guy who was clever enough to have a successful reality show for 14 years, which for four years was the number one TV show, who then had the most successful tie in America.
00:24:24.000 Who runs, I think, 18 golf courses and a whole bunch of other buildings and hotels, who is shameless at self-propagandizing.
00:24:36.000 The YouTube, there are a series of pizza ads, I think from the early 90s, in which this kid shows up and knocks on the door for Domino's and Trump answers.
00:24:48.000 And the kid says, oh, Mr. Trump, here are your three pizzas for $15.
00:24:51.000 He goes, wait a second, kid.
00:24:54.000 I've got to negotiate.
00:24:55.000 Tell you what, I'll give you $5 a piece.
00:24:59.000 The kid says, okay, looking totally mystified, hands him the pizzas, and they close in on Trump's face and he goes, Donald, you still got it.
00:25:08.000 Now, his willingness to make fun of himself while Domino's paid for ads to make him more famous.
00:25:15.000 We know what it looked like.
00:25:16.000 So you take that personality, no government experience, no sophisticated sense of what you can and can't do.
00:25:25.000 And he claws his way to the presidency, beating 15 other Republicans, the news media, and Hillary Clinton.
00:25:32.000 And he turns around and he's pissed off.
00:25:34.000 And he acts like the CEO he is, which is not appropriate for the President of the United States.
00:25:40.000 So if you want to say that he has to go through a learning curve, I think that's totally fair.
00:25:45.000 If you want to say, was it malicious or designed to in some way undermine the Constitution, I think that's an absurdity.
00:25:51.000 So let's talk about that for a second, because a lot of Democrats are, of course, pushing toward impeachment.
00:25:55.000 Not Nancy Pelosi, who knows better, but a lot of the other Democrats at this point are pushing impeachment.
00:26:00.000 Obviously, you were involved in an impeachment effort against President Clinton.
00:26:02.000 I wonder if you could distinguish the two.
00:26:04.000 What were the grounds that you think were appropriate to impeach President Clinton, as opposed to the attempts to impeach President Trump?
00:26:10.000 Well, I always tell people, if you go back and you look at Ken Starr's report, which I did, I went back and pulled it up, because I had that exact, I was trying to think, it was a long time ago.
00:26:18.000 Well, Ken Starr issues a report.
00:26:21.000 Which has 11 counts in which he says he is guilty.
00:26:26.000 Okay, five of them are obstruction.
00:26:28.000 Discount.
00:26:29.000 Guilty.
00:26:30.000 Discount.
00:26:31.000 Guilty.
00:26:32.000 If Mueller had issued a report that said Donald Trump is guilty on 11 counts, there would be an impeachment effort.
00:26:39.000 It would probably fail because the Republican Senate won't impeach, just as the House impeached, but the Senate refused to convict with Clinton.
00:26:49.000 Which might have been actually the right constitutional solution.
00:26:52.000 But in Clinton's case, remember, he was guilty enough.
00:26:54.000 He lost the license to practice law in Arkansas.
00:26:57.000 He had to pay a fine.
00:26:58.000 He was clearly guilty.
00:27:01.000 In Trump's case, Mueller comes back and says, there's nothing there that you could take him to court on.
00:27:07.000 There's a pretty big gap here.
00:27:09.000 So when you look at that impeachment effort and you look back historically, a lot of Republicans now who look at it and say, well, we never should have done that.
00:27:15.000 Do you have any regrets about the impeachment effort?
00:27:17.000 Do you think it was the right move?
00:27:18.000 I think I was too aggressive.
00:27:19.000 And I think that I think Pelosi's both Pelosi and Tip O'Neill have handled impeachment better than I did, because they they deliberately took a half step back and made the judiciary chairman more important.
00:27:30.000 And I've been such a large figure at that time.
00:27:33.000 The Republican Party was very hard to do.
00:27:34.000 But I think I would give myself bad marks.
00:27:37.000 I don't know how you get a report.
00:27:40.000 Remember, in Clinton's case, they're felonies.
00:27:43.000 I mean, it always strikes me, the feminists who worry about this, you know, Clinton was convicting a felony of perjury in a sexual harassment lawsuit, alleging, this goes back to the whole current, you know, issue about harassment in workplaces.
00:28:01.000 So he's being sued by an Arkansas state employee because as governor, he attempted to intimidate her.
00:28:08.000 Now you would think every feminist in the country would have been enraged.
00:28:11.000 Instead, they were so defensive of liberalism that they were enraged that we would take serious the degree to which Clinton was breaking the law.
00:28:19.000 So when he commits perjury, again, lying under oath, not just lying to the country, which he did in a TV speech, but lying under oath, that is a felony.
00:28:30.000 And the reason it's a felony is if people can get away with perjury, the entire structure of the rule of law collapses.
00:28:37.000 And so we're faced with, I mean, if you came back to me again today with the same facts, I'd handle them in a more subtle way, in a more sophisticated way.
00:28:44.000 But I would, in fact, have said, and I think Starr, frankly, also made a mistake because his report is too much about sex and not enough about the law.
00:28:52.000 I mean, I think if he had indicated the risk to women of allowing the employer to commit perjury without consequence, he would have had a much stronger case.
00:29:03.000 Well, talking about the role of Congress, obviously you're one of the most powerful speakers in the history of the country.
00:29:10.000 One of the things that has struck me, particularly since the rise of the Obama era, is the extent to which it seems like Congress has become a vestigial organ of government.
00:29:19.000 Everything seems to be done by the executive branch at this point.
00:29:22.000 It seems like Congress can't get anything done or won't get anything done.
00:29:25.000 It seems like the initial bargain, the founders were deeply worried about the ambition of folks.
00:29:31.000 And so they said, okay, well, ambition will check ambition.
00:29:32.000 It seems like to a certain extent, they never foresaw the rise of a group of unambitious legislators whose goal was going to be to kick as much power as possible to the executive branch and thus to avoid culpability.
00:29:43.000 Are you worried about the checks and balances in the system as we see, in my opinion, an ever more powerful executive branch and an ever less powerful legislative one?
00:29:51.000 Well, I worry about a very long range trend, which probably goes back to the 30s, which is to give power to the bureaucracy.
00:29:58.000 Not to the president, but to the bureaucracy.
00:30:01.000 So you have bureaucrats now making decisions that I think the founding fathers would have said should have been the legislative branch decisions.
00:30:08.000 And I think actually the appointment of the conservative judges is probably going to shrink the relative ability of the bureaucracy to do that.
00:30:16.000 I think that, in fact, the Congress is very powerful, but it's powerful in ways that don't fit the hunger of the modern news media.
00:30:26.000 I mean, if you were to say to Trump today, how powerful has the Democrats and Congress been at screwing up your border policy?
00:30:32.000 You'd say, well, pretty darn powerful.
00:30:35.000 If you look at how hard they're working to create a space force, and the degree to which they have to nickel and dime their way through the House and Senate, I think they'd tell you that there's an immense amount of institutional power that is there, that's real, that you can't get away from.
00:30:53.000 Now, I think on small things, I mean, Lamar Alexander and Fred Upton last year passed a 21st century cures bill.
00:30:59.000 It was bipartisan.
00:31:02.000 There are a lot of small ways that Congress works pretty well, but my view is that we're in the middle of a cultural civil war, and when you're in that kind of a death struggle, it's very hard to get things to work, because each side feels so passionately and so deeply about its version of the culture.
00:31:19.000 So I want to ask you, given the fact that we are in the middle of this culture war, the big issue that nobody likes to talk about, Paul Ryan liked to talk about it but then never could get anything done on it, is obviously the entitlements, the welfare state, the fact that 66% of our budget, two-thirds, is composed of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the fact that nobody seems to want to do anything about it, and the fact that Republicans are blowing out the spending themselves.
00:31:40.000 You know, a lot of folks like to talk about the 1990s and Bill Clinton being More fiscally responsible.
00:31:44.000 The fact is that you were running Congress at that time and that had something to do with it.
00:31:48.000 What do you think has changed inside the Republican Party?
00:31:50.000 Do you think that the future of the Republican Party is effectively a big-spending, European-style right party?
00:31:56.000 Well, I mean, first of all, I take some pride in being the only Speaker of the House in your lifetime who balanced the budget for four straight years.
00:32:04.000 So it is theoretically doable because we did it.
00:32:09.000 I think that actually there are steps that are beginning to be taken that are encouraging.
00:32:14.000 I think if I could divide what you describe as the welfare state into three very different components.
00:32:22.000 I mean, one is the work ethic.
00:32:25.000 Getting people Shifting from focus on disabilities to capabilities.
00:32:29.000 I mean, look what wounded warriors do.
00:32:32.000 And then look at 31-year-old truck drivers with a bad back who decide they can't be retrained.
00:32:36.000 And the whole model of disability has to be rethought and focused on capabilities that would change the trajectory of cost very dramatically.
00:32:44.000 I think second, social security, the answer in part is to dramatically increase private savings and to recognize that A system designed when people live to be 55 has to be rethought when people are going to live to be 90.
00:32:59.000 And in fact, you see at a practical level it's being rethought.
00:33:02.000 More and more people 65, 70, 75 are working, both because they want the money, but also because Three generations ago, you worked physically.
00:33:12.000 And if you were in a steel mill or you were out plowing behind a mule, you were physically broken by the time you were 55 or 60.
00:33:19.000 Nowadays, you tend to work with your brain.
00:33:21.000 It turns out your brain doesn't age very fast.
00:33:23.000 And so people want to stay active.
00:33:25.000 They actually live longer if they don't go to pure retirement.
00:33:30.000 And so you're going to see more and more people, I think, beginning to relieve the pressure in that sense.
00:33:36.000 The other part of that is a cultural problem across the board, and that is we went in the 50s from a country that said you really should save up and then do something to a country that said, oh, no, no, you ought to charge it on your credit card and pay it off later, whether that's the student loan program or anything else.
00:33:53.000 And so shifting back towards a more savings-oriented society, which is partly the tax code, making it very profitable and desirable to save.
00:34:03.000 The other zone is healthcare, and healthcare is very different.
00:34:07.000 I've spent much of my life since 1974 on healthcare.
00:34:10.000 I founded the Center for Health Transformation, wrote a book called Saving Lives and Saving Money.
00:34:16.000 The key to the health system, and then this is the whole key to the health insurance problem, is to dramatically reduce the cost.
00:34:23.000 We spend, I think, 40% more on healthcare than we should.
00:34:27.000 We would get a better system with better results, migrating and evolving faster.
00:34:33.000 And to their credit, Secretary Azar at Health and Human Services and the President and Vice President have really begun to move the system towards more knowledge.
00:34:44.000 For example, they think if you go in for a procedure, you ought to know what it's going to cost.
00:34:52.000 And of course, up to now, basically, the doctor in the hospital said, well, we don't really know what the complications are, et cetera, et cetera.
00:34:57.000 I said, no, no.
00:34:58.000 You have to take a sophisticated best judgment, tell the patient, and live with it.
00:35:03.000 Well, that's going to change.
00:35:04.000 People are going to start shopping a lot better.
00:35:06.000 I mean, today, it's almost impossible.
00:35:09.000 If you have three hospitals you could go to in your neighborhood, it's impossible to know which one will cost you more.
00:35:15.000 And so people often end up being very surprised.
00:35:18.000 I had a friend who thought everything was covered until they found out that the anesthesiologist was out of the system.
00:35:27.000 And so they had to pay an extra thousand dollars they hadn't counted on, you know, because the bill showed up six weeks later.
00:35:34.000 And that's the sort of, so there are a lot of things like that.
00:35:36.000 I think what they're doing on this whole issue of rebates, which is, if you think about it, it's an absurdity.
00:35:43.000 The big pharmacy benefit managers really have as their big sales pitch that I can give you a huge rebate.
00:35:51.000 Now, why can I give you a huge rebate?
00:35:53.000 Because the pharmaceutical company just charged me a lot extra to create the space for me to give you a large rebate.
00:36:01.000 So guess what the long-term pressure is?
00:36:03.000 I want them to charge me more so I can give you an even bigger rebate while I'm keeping the same number of dollars.
00:36:09.000 And the result has been a 20-year cycle of prices going up that are absurd.
00:36:14.000 I mean, isn't it also true that that cycle of prices rising across the board has a lot to do with the increase in government subsidies that's been driving the Medicare system up and up and up?
00:36:24.000 Well, actually, the Part B came in about 40% cheaper than anybody expected, because it has competition.
00:36:32.000 And I think that you're going to see more and more things like that.
00:36:34.000 Part of what we need to do is figure out, if you're going to have a high deductible, how do we create a tax basis for you to have enough money saved?
00:36:42.000 I mean, it doesn't do us any good to create a $7,000 deductible if you can't afford it.
00:36:46.000 Because what it then means is that you're going to end up back in debt and the hospital's either going to eat the debt or sue you.
00:36:52.000 I mean, it's a really bad way to think about health care.
00:36:55.000 So moving forward, you've talked about health care and you've talked about social security.
00:37:00.000 Do you think there's the will to do any of these things?
00:37:02.000 Because it seems like the political will is entirely in the other direction, meaning expanding benefits.
00:37:09.000 We've gradually achieved a little bit of it under Trump.
00:37:12.000 I think we'll achieve more.
00:37:15.000 If you're an Obama Democrat, or any of the current Democratic candidates, and I say to you, because the economy is growing, the number of people on food stamps has dropped by 12 million, do you think that's terrible?
00:37:29.000 If you're a conservative, you think that's wonderful.
00:37:31.000 They're back at work.
00:37:32.000 They're earning a living.
00:37:33.000 They don't need the subsidy.
00:37:35.000 But if you're a liberal, you think, oh my God, we can't have the welfare state shrink.
00:37:39.000 That's why two great examples.
00:37:41.000 When we passed welfare reform, we split the Democrats 50-50, literally 101 to 101.
00:37:48.000 Well, the 101 who were opposed thought this was the most horrible thing ever.
00:37:51.000 You're going to make people go to work.
00:37:54.000 You know, and they don't believe in making people go to work.
00:37:56.000 In fact, there are some of them who believe we ought to give you a check every month just for being around.
00:38:00.000 That's the kind of thing that you have to look at where you really see a dramatic difference in the two parties, and you see a dramatic difference in terms of what you're trying to accomplish.
00:38:11.000 I think some of that can be done.
00:38:13.000 I do think that if you look, for example, at what Mary Mayhew did in Maine, In the last governorship, they had done a study and figured out how many food stamps were being—main food stamps—were being cashed in Hawaii, how many were being cashed at Disneyland or Disney World, and so forth, how many were being cashed at local racetracks.
00:38:36.000 And they began to develop a pattern that said, no, you know, If you draw food stamps in Maine, you have to spend them in Maine because we're not going to subsidize you going to Disney World.
00:38:46.000 If you're in good enough shape to go to Disney World, why don't you have a job?
00:38:49.000 And that was a huge shock to people.
00:38:53.000 So I think we want to be the party of work.
00:38:56.000 Let the other people be the party of dependency.
00:38:59.000 And then the country's going to have to choose.
00:39:01.000 So, speaking of that choice, I mean, you talked about the culture war.
00:39:03.000 Obviously, you see, especially among young people, real ignorance as to what socialism is and also a certain love for countries in which they've never lived, places like Norway or Denmark.
00:39:13.000 This is the new pitch from democratic socialists.
00:39:15.000 Venezuela and Soviet Union are not good representatives of socialism anymore.
00:39:18.000 Now it's Norway and Denmark that are the best representatives of socialism.
00:39:23.000 How do you fight back against that argument best?
00:39:25.000 Because it seems like the argument being made is here are prosperous, wonderful countries with broad social safety nets and deep social safety nets.
00:39:31.000 What's so wrong with that here in the United States?
00:39:33.000 Well, first of all, you bring in Swedes and Danes and Norwegians who will tell them they're not socialist countries.
00:39:41.000 They're welfare state countries.
00:39:42.000 Big difference.
00:39:44.000 They actually have very, very robust capitalism.
00:39:48.000 In the case of Norway, for example, they have this huge offshore natural gas find, which has created, and they've shown huge discipline.
00:39:55.000 I think they have a trillion dollars sitting in the bank that they don't spend.
00:39:59.000 Now imagine an American politician who was running for re-election with a trillion dollars sitting in the bank.
00:40:05.000 And so they're very tough-minded.
00:40:07.000 And they think, yeah, the things we'll pay for through the government, but that's the welfare state side.
00:40:14.000 But in order to have a really dynamic economy, we want very bold capitalism.
00:40:19.000 And all those countries are much more capitalist than socialist.
00:40:23.000 Again, you get into this confusion.
00:40:25.000 This is why I think the distinction between facts and emotion is so important.
00:40:30.000 That you have over here liberals who believe in emoting.
00:40:35.000 These are the people who love Fidel.
00:40:37.000 These are the people who conspired to not tell the truth about Stalin killing people during the great famines when he was wiping out the kulaks.
00:40:45.000 These are the people who really think that, well, as one Democrat representative said the other day, the reason Venezuela is a mess is the U.S.
00:40:52.000 You know, because it's always, as Gene Kirkpatrick once said, it's always blame America first.
00:40:59.000 Some of those people you'll never get because they're crazy.
00:41:02.000 I'm pretty cheerful about saying that.
00:41:05.000 When you ask me about certain people, I go, yeah.
00:41:07.000 I mean, AOC is just crazy.
00:41:10.000 She has no connectivity with reality, has a great con job.
00:41:14.000 She won a very small turnout election in a district where nobody cared.
00:41:19.000 Whether or not she'll survive next time I think is a little less likely because of her opposition to the Amazon jobs coming into New York City and the fact that people suddenly figured out, wait a second, that was their potential job.
00:41:33.000 But I think that every two generations you have this fight.
00:41:39.000 In the 30s you had this fight over the nature of communism.
00:41:43.000 And then again, I think in the late 60s we had this fight.
00:41:46.000 You know, the golden era of Bernie Sanders going to the Soviet Union for his honeymoon was a huge question mark.
00:41:55.000 George McGovern ran as the candidate of rampant socialism and got crushed.
00:42:00.000 And for a generation, Democrats thought, well, that's not a very good idea.
00:42:04.000 Do you think we on the right have made a mistake as far as how we characterize socialism?
00:42:07.000 Meaning it's a label that we like to use a lot on the right, and maybe we've over applied it.
00:42:12.000 So when it comes to Barack Obama or Obamacare, the charge of socialism came up a lot.
00:42:16.000 It's very simple.
00:42:19.000 The reason Obamacare was so dangerous was it was designed to move towards total government control.
00:42:25.000 of your health system.
00:42:27.000 Now, I mean, the nice thing about the current cycle of Democrats, whether it's Kamala Harris, or it's the governor of California, Newsom, or it's Bernie Sanders, is they're pretty open about saying, yeah, I want the government to control your health.
00:42:40.000 Well, that is, I mean, somebody once said, socialism is communism without the secret police.
00:42:46.000 And you just need to understand that.
00:42:47.000 It's ultimately the interim step towards a totalitarian control of your life.
00:42:51.000 That's why, you know, the whole, the power of Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and his own coming to the conclusion that you could not have centralized planning without dictatorship, which I think is very central.
00:43:04.000 Otherwise, it's a great story.
00:43:06.000 Margaret Thatcher becomes the leader of the opposition party in 1978.
00:43:11.000 And she's at the big annual party rally, and she says, people ask me, what is our platform?
00:43:19.000 And she reaches into this giant purse she's carrying, and she pulls out Hayek's Constitution of Liberty, which is a very fat book, and she slams it.
00:43:29.000 Now, the idea of any American presidential candidate being so intellectual that they would put a 500-page Hayek book and say on a TV show, that's our platform.
00:43:46.000 It's almost unthinkable.
00:43:47.000 So how do we draw the line, when we're making the argument in favor of capitalism, how do we draw the line with regard to the welfare state?
00:43:53.000 So you say that a lot of these socialist-leaning countries, with capitalist roots, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, they're rooted in capitalism, they have a broad social safety net.
00:44:04.000 How do we draw the balance between an appropriate social safety net and now we're moving too far and we're sliding toward a socialist system?
00:44:10.000 I think the better argument is personal.
00:44:13.000 Do you want to be a client or a customer?
00:44:16.000 Do you want to define for the company what product you want to buy, or do you want the bureaucrat to define for you what you're allowed to buy?
00:44:23.000 Now, if you'd like to give up power and have a bureaucrat in Washington define your life, tell you what you can do, what you can't do, then fine.
00:44:33.000 Just understand, because this is always about freedom.
00:44:35.000 I mean, socialism is simply an excuse to coerce.
00:44:40.000 you through bureaucracy so that some group of people, usually college professors, can feel like they're really powerful.
00:44:47.000 It's their resentment of the entrepreneurial class creating wealth.
00:44:52.000 And so they want to somehow block all these people over here from creating wealth so that they can then distribute the wealth so they can be in charge.
00:45:00.000 So in 2012, you run for president and there is this moment where you take the lead and the lead was really, I cite it as a case in point of something the media don't understand.
00:45:11.000 They think that President Trump ripping on the media is what has led to their low approval ratings.
00:45:15.000 And I always point to the fact that you took the lead in the presidential race on the national level based on the fact that you savaged John Harwood on national television by going directly at the media.
00:45:26.000 What is it that folks do not understand about the nature of the media ecosystem?
00:45:30.000 Why do they get the impression that Trump is the one who suddenly discovered that the media were left-wing when, as long as I've been alive and in this business, and for me that's about 20 years, for you it's been longer, The media have always been an opponent of conservatism.
00:45:43.000 Well, I mean, first of all, you have two great sources of cultural knowledge, the media and college professors and high school teachers.
00:45:52.000 Both are left.
00:45:53.000 So both spend all day every day giving you baloney and dishonesty and disinformation that fits them.
00:46:01.000 And I think you have to start with that.
00:46:03.000 And then they want the right to define what the issue is.
00:46:07.000 And, you know, I've been really working on this because I'm very troubled.
00:46:13.000 Reagan and Thatcher and I, all three failed to change the culture of our parties.
00:46:17.000 I mean, Reagan was a great communicator.
00:46:20.000 Thatcher was a remarkable communicator and educator.
00:46:23.000 I think I did pretty well in the contract period.
00:46:26.000 And yet none of us could get conservatives to understand The essential characteristics of how you have to win.
00:46:32.000 And the first step of that is to have the moral courage to refuse to let the other side define the issue.
00:46:39.000 And it actually started for me.
00:46:41.000 And Chris Wallace reminds me of this occasionally because it's seared into his brain.
00:46:47.000 And the first real breakpoint for me, I mean, I'd seen Reagan do it.
00:46:51.000 I'd done it a little bit.
00:46:52.000 But as a candidate, you're in a different environment.
00:46:54.000 And presidential candidates get a surprising amount of attention.
00:46:57.000 And we were doing the first Fox debate.
00:47:00.000 And at the very beginning of it, Brett Baer says, we're not gonna have any Mickey Mouse questions or any Mickey Mouse answers.
00:47:07.000 We're gonna stick to big things.
00:47:09.000 And I wrote it down, because I thought this will never, it won't last.
00:47:12.000 So we got to a particular point and I got to ask a question.
00:47:16.000 And Chris will tell you this, because Chris asked it.
00:47:19.000 And I stopped and I said, Chris, you know, I wrote down what Brett said.
00:47:23.000 And he said, no Mickey Mouse questions.
00:47:26.000 I think you just failed that.
00:47:28.000 Well, that would have been fun, but all of a sudden, spontaneously, 3,000 people in this auditorium are applauding.
00:47:37.000 All of me, by the way, got bad enough.
00:47:38.000 Part of my demise was Romney's money and dishonesty.
00:47:41.000 Part of my demise was the last two debates they refused to allow audience participation.
00:47:46.000 And I should have blown up at both of them.
00:47:47.000 I should have said, you don't have the right to dictate to the American people.
00:47:51.000 But I was in settings where Romney had intelligently packed the audience.
00:47:55.000 And they probably would have booed me for taking on the media, which is a real change.
00:47:59.000 So what happened was, after that first debate, I'm going back from Iowa through O'Hare.
00:48:05.000 And this pilot walks up to me, who I've never met.
00:48:08.000 He says, I loved last night.
00:48:10.000 I am so glad you stuck it to those people.
00:48:12.000 I am so sick of them lecturing us.
00:48:14.000 And I suddenly thought, there's something real happening here.
00:48:18.000 Now, let me give you a quick parallel.
00:48:22.000 1965, Ronald Reagan decides to run for governor.
00:48:25.000 Knows he doesn't know how to run for office.
00:48:28.000 Hires the best firm in California, the best Republican firm.
00:48:34.000 They create a whole box of issues for him to memorize, and as an actor, he can do it very fast.
00:48:40.000 And they're gonna do a series of town hall meetings where people ask him questions, and he proves he knows enough to be governor, okay?
00:48:45.000 Because people back then thought, how can an actor be governor?
00:48:49.000 Go to the first town hall meeting.
00:48:51.000 First question, what are you gonna do about Berkeley?
00:48:53.000 What about those students?
00:48:55.000 Not in the box.
00:48:56.000 Comes back and he says, guys, we need an answer.
00:48:59.000 They say, no, no, it's not an issue.
00:49:01.000 Second town hall meeting.
00:49:03.000 First question on the box.
00:49:04.000 What are you going to do about Berkley?
00:49:06.000 He comes back.
00:49:06.000 He says, guys, if they think it's an issue, it's an issue.
00:49:11.000 Well, the same thing had happened to me.
00:49:12.000 I suddenly realized that the hunger on our side for somebody to stand up to the media And say, no, I'm not going to let you do this.
00:49:21.000 And it showed up with Trump in the very first debate, which was also Fox, when he got in a brutal, nasty, and I think embarrassing fight with Megyn Kelly.
00:49:30.000 And everybody in the elites, I watched it that night with Calista, everybody in the elites after the debate said Trump lost.
00:49:37.000 16 people, Trump lost.
00:49:39.000 The online polls averaged 70% said Trump won.
00:49:45.000 And I thought, wait a second.
00:49:46.000 And this was thousands and thousands of people, and not just conservative publications.
00:49:51.000 70% of people think he won out of 16 people.
00:49:56.000 And all of the elites are convinced he lost.
00:49:58.000 We're now looking at a gap about reality that is enormous.
00:50:04.000 And that's where we are today.
00:50:05.000 Because they're so caught up in their own culture and their own social status that they can't learn.
00:50:12.000 So the New York Times, I mean, I loved the other day, the New York Times does page one, Donald Trump was in debt.
00:50:19.000 Well, if you've got The Art of the Comeback, the opening page says, I owed 923 million personally and several billion corporately and I was in big trouble.
00:50:28.000 The fact that the Times was suddenly shocked 25 years later by something he'd written about just tells you how out of touch they are and how sick they are.
00:50:37.000 So what do you think the future of the media are going to be?
00:50:39.000 Because you're right that they're stuck in a track that they can't seem to be.
00:50:42.000 Well, I appreciate that.
00:50:42.000 No, no.
00:50:43.000 I mean you generically.
00:50:45.000 The future of the media is a self-sorting mechanism in which the people who make sense over time Gain a huge advantage.
00:50:53.000 And the people who spend the time and the effort, and I suspect if you're like Sean Hannity for example, the number of hours you spend studying and getting ready, the stuff you do, the team you have around you.
00:51:03.000 If people can say, you know, I learned things I didn't know and I thought ideas I didn't have and I'm really glad I spent that hour.
00:51:12.000 That's the media.
00:51:14.000 And tragically, I mean, I grew up when the news media, newspapers were real.
00:51:18.000 I mean, the New York Times for 100 years was an amazing newspaper.
00:51:21.000 Although, in the 30s, they had a reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for lying mendaciously, all the, constantly, about Stalin.
00:51:29.000 To defend and protect Stalin.
00:51:31.000 And in the 50s, they had a reporter who got a Pulitzer for lying about Castro.
00:51:36.000 So the Times has always had a streak of anti-Semitism and a streak of pro-communism.
00:51:40.000 But other than that, it's been a fairly good newspaper.
00:51:44.000 But now, the whole culture of the newsroom is collapsing.
00:51:47.000 So when we see the extent to which the culture war is raging, and I mean to the point where people won't allow other people to eat in their restaurants, we have bans from certain government officials on officials traveling to other states, and I wonder if the, are you optimistic about the future of the country?
00:52:01.000 Do you think that we hold things in common anymore?
00:52:03.000 Or are the divides now so deep that we're moving toward the irreconcilable?
00:52:08.000 Years ago, I was in the green room with Charles Krauthammer, and he asked me that question.
00:52:13.000 And I said, oh, I'm pretty optimistic.
00:52:14.000 I said, you know, we're still a long way short of the Civil War.
00:52:18.000 And he looked at me and said, wait, the Civil War?
00:52:20.000 So I would say, I think this is going to be a, people say to me, when is it going to get better?
00:52:27.000 And I say, when one side wins.
00:52:28.000 I mean, whether the left wins or the right wins, sooner or later, one side will win.
00:52:34.000 And then the system will calm down for a while because the side that wins will have dominance.
00:52:38.000 The reason it's so brutal right now is that the relative balance of power, and this is a tribute to Trump, I mean, the left has all the instruments of higher education, all the instruments of K-12 and public schools, all the instruments of the news media, all the instruments of Hollywood, and Trump offsets them all.
00:52:58.000 Now, this is one of the great achievements in American history, and it's really worth a lot more study than people have given it.
00:53:05.000 Looking at President Trump, one of my main concerns in 2016 about President Trump, specifically with regard to this, was that while he satisfies a lot of folks in terms of him punching the other side, which is well-deserved.
00:53:16.000 I've described him as a hammer.
00:53:17.000 I say it's very satisfying when he hits a nail and it's not quite as satisfying when he hits a baby.
00:53:21.000 But with that said, the people who tend to be most offended are the people of my generation.
00:53:27.000 So people who are millennials and younger, he's very unpopular with.
00:53:30.000 People who are older than that seem to get President Trump on a different gut level.
00:53:35.000 Do you think that conservatism is penetrating or can penetrate to people who are younger via the Trump message?
00:53:41.000 Because there's no question that he's great at fighting back.
00:53:43.000 He's a great counterpuncher, as he himself has said.
00:53:46.000 But does that have the danger, carrying with it, of alienating people who are going to be the up and coming next generation?
00:53:51.000 Well, I think Trump in that sense is more like Thatcher and less like Reagan.
00:53:55.000 You And Reagan was very personable and very careful.
00:53:58.000 And Reagan had said to a friend of mine in 1980 that he couldn't do certain things because he wore the white hat.
00:54:05.000 And so he understood the limits of his personality and the limits of his appeal.
00:54:10.000 I think Trump's attitude is he's wearing a hard hat and he doesn't mind being in a brawl.
00:54:15.000 And I think he's going to make basically two arguments to young people.
00:54:19.000 The first argument is going to be that the other side represents the end of your world and is an enormous risk, which was in a sense the McGovern-Mondale argument, and both those were crushing defeats.
00:54:32.000 The other argument is going to be whether you like me as a person, your life is better.
00:54:39.000 With my presidency.
00:54:41.000 So if you like full employment, if you like rising wages, etc., then I represent a better future for you.
00:54:47.000 And if you would rather have unemployment, but you really feel good because Uncle Joe tells you how much he likes you on food stamps, or if you'd rather have full employment, but by the way, you got this boss who's slightly whacked.
00:55:02.000 It's your choice.
00:55:04.000 I mean, think about it.
00:55:05.000 This is a guy whose successful show, which is a remarkable achievement, people underestimate what a great achievement The Apprentice was.
00:55:13.000 This guy whose most famous line before he ran for president was, you're fired.
00:55:16.000 I mean, what kind of guy do you think he's?
00:55:20.000 So you spent your entire career not just in politics, but also studying and teaching history.
00:55:25.000 You've written a bunch of historical novels.
00:55:27.000 You've written a lot about history in the nonfiction sphere.
00:55:29.000 So when I look at people of my generation who don't tend to know very much about history at all, what is the period of history that you would recommend is the most important for them to read about given today's circumstances?
00:55:41.000 Two, I'd recommend deeply that they read about 1770 to 1790 and understand what it took to create a free country and why we are so different from Venezuela or China or Russia or Zimbabwe or Cuba.
00:55:58.000 And second, I would recommend they read the period 1850 to 1865.
00:56:02.000 I mean, we survived through a brutal war with an amazing president who understood what freedom was worth.
00:56:11.000 And who was prepared to fight as long as it took.
00:56:14.000 And I think that we have a very good friend who teaches at Gettysburg College, who called me at one point and said, the hatred of Trump on the left is comparable to the slave-owning newspapers against Lincoln.
00:56:32.000 He said you can almost see exactly verbatim the same personality attacks.
00:56:37.000 And I think we have to recognize this is a cultural civil war, and the best way you can understand it is to read the two great periods in which America defined itself.
00:56:46.000 Well, one of the fascinating things that I've noted, you know, I have a history of philosophy book that's out, and one of the things that I've noted is that the sort of conflict right now in the United States is effectively a conflict about visions of history.
00:56:57.000 That on the one hand you have one side of the American people, who I think represents the majority, that says American history was rooted in eternal, fundamentally good principles, and that We have not always lived up to those principles, but the story of America is the gradual attempt to live up to those principles, sometimes stumbling and falling, but always generally moving forward.
00:57:14.000 And then the other view of history is the sort of Charles Beard economic view of history, which is these are a bunch of self-interested actors, people who are racist, sexist, bigot, homophobes, who were creating these fake immutable principles in order to provide themselves with a good feeling as they move forward with economics.
00:57:30.000 What do you think is the best way to teach people about the shadings of American history?
00:57:35.000 Because I think one of the great rips on people on the right is that we are too sanguine in our view of American history.
00:57:41.000 We have too rosy a view of how American history has gone.
00:57:44.000 Well, I would actually say if there was one thing I could get every young person to read, this may surprise you, it would be A Man for All Seasons.
00:57:54.000 Either the movie or the play.
00:57:58.000 And the reason is, it explains exactly what's so dangerous about the modern left.
00:58:05.000 Because there's a moment where the son-in-law is explaining to the chancellor, The chancellor believes in the rule of law, believes that you have to be bounded.
00:58:16.000 And this young person is explaining, you know, that if I had to go after the devil, I would knock down the law.
00:58:21.000 And he said, and then what would you do?
00:58:22.000 And he says, okay, so you knock down every law until you finally corner him in Wales, and then he turns.
00:58:30.000 What now stands between you and the devil?
00:58:33.000 And I would say to young people, That without getting into an argument about the interpretation of American history, they've got to decide in their lives, do they want to live in a country which has for 200 and some years said that your rights come from your creator, and which has gradually extended that to every aspect of America?
00:58:56.000 Or do they want to live in a country where whatever this year's passion can be imposed on you by the state?
00:59:04.000 And they should look at things like in 1984, Orwell's great novel, as a real warning.
00:59:11.000 Orwell wrote in 1984 about Great Britain.
00:59:14.000 He did not write it about Russia.
00:59:18.000 And his warning was state tyrannies are real.
00:59:22.000 And so I would say to them, we are imperfect.
00:59:27.000 And if your yardstick is perfection, then short of the second coming, I'm not sure how you'd get it.
00:59:34.000 But compared to any other society I'm aware of, we have a stronger system of freedom, a greater capacity for people to rise, and a greater awareness that anybody can come from anywhere and become an American.
00:59:50.000 Now, we want you to do it legally, but I always tell people, go down to the national airport and stand at the cab stand and interview the people who are waiting in their cabs.
01:00:00.000 You'll find people from Pakistan, Ethiopia, Guatemala.
01:00:06.000 I mean, this is the most diverse society in the history of the human race, more diverse than Rome.
01:00:13.000 And we are amazingly open to talent.
01:00:16.000 Look at who founded Google.
01:00:18.000 So I think somehow we have to be prepared to say, again, when you're very young, you may not fully realize this, but if you have a boyfriend or girlfriend, the odds are that they have some flaws.
01:00:32.000 If you spend your entire life looking for perfection, the odds are you're going to be really lonely, except when you look in the mirror and admire yourself.
01:00:40.000 Well, I do have one final question for you, Speaker Gingrich.
01:00:43.000 I want to ask you, well actually I have two final questions for you.
01:00:46.000 I want to ask you, number one, for your generalized history reading list, and I also want to ask you about whether you think the future of conservatism is populism and where you think populism plays into conservatism given the Trump movement.
01:00:56.000 But first, if you want to hear Speaker Gingrich's answer, you have to be a Daily Wire subscriber.
01:00:59.000 To subscribe, head on over to dailywire.com and click subscribe.
01:01:02.000 You can hear the end of our conversation over there.
01:01:05.000 Well, Speaker Gingrich, thanks so much for stopping by.
01:01:07.000 Everybody should go pick up a copy of Collusion, his brand new book, and also give Newt's World a listen to his brand new podcast.
01:01:12.000 Thank you so much for your time.
01:01:12.000 Great to be with you.
01:01:13.000 Thanks.
01:01:13.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is produced by Jonathan Hay.
01:01:23.000 Executive producer Jeremy Boring.
01:01:24.000 Associate producer Mathis Glover.
01:01:26.000 Edited by Donovan Fowler.
01:01:28.000 Audio is mixed by Dylan Case.
01:01:29.000 Hair and makeup is by Jeswa Olvera.
01:01:31.000 Title graphics by Cynthia Angulo.
01:01:33.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.