Newt Gingrich joins me to talk about why this is one of the craziest, wildest elections you ve ever seen in your lifetime, and why it s both remarkably different and extraordinarily important at the same time. And who's done the best adjusting to today's game being played?
00:00:56.000If you're on the left, you can do anything you want to and they'll protect you.
00:00:59.040If you're on the right, they can smear you and claim that it's good journalism.
00:01:02.240Do you think we're going to find out next week or do you think it's going to be delayed?
00:01:05.200Oh no, I think the marginally big enough will now.
00:01:11.360My guest today is Newt Gingrich, the 50th Speaker of the House and a former 1995 Time Magazine Man of the Year.
00:01:18.400Newt, thank you so much for being a guest on Valuetainment today.
00:01:21.840Well, I'm delighted to be with you. It should be very interesting.
00:01:24.240Yes, I've been looking forward to this.
00:01:26.320Newt, would you agree this is one of the craziest, wildest elections you've ever seen in your lifetime?
00:01:33.360Oh, I think it's certainly the most unusual in my lifetime and probably the most consequential since Abraham Lincoln's re-election in 1864.
00:01:43.440So it's both remarkably different and extraordinarily important at the same time.
00:01:50.160Now, you know, for me, just for somebody that's been following politics for now, I don't know, less than two decades,
00:01:56.000is it seems like every time you hear that word, it's the most consequential, it's the most consequential.
00:02:01.440And it's a form of creating urgency for a lot of the voters to get out there and want to vote.
00:02:06.720But there seems to be a real feeling or energy of this being the most consequential.
00:02:14.880Well, you have a genuine populist outsider who has shaken the whole system up for four solid years.
00:02:22.040And you have a national establishment, which is going all out at every level, from Twitter and Facebook to corporate leadership to the news media,
00:02:32.700which a report came out yesterday that 92 percent of the Trump coverage of the campaign is negative.
00:03:44.980He had he owned at one point the Miss Universe contest.
00:03:49.500He was very used to reaching a mass market.
00:03:52.620He really understood very quickly the power of Facebook and Twitter and so developed the largest following in both of anybody.
00:04:02.040And as a result, he's been able to take on the entire national news media and basically fight him to to a standstill because his his reach has been as great as the collective reach of every single major elite news media.
00:04:19.660So I would say he really understands it.
00:04:21.920You know, Biden is in a totally different position.
00:04:24.260Biden basically is hoping that covid will win the election for him.
00:04:28.620I noticed that you and I are talking on a day when Biden once again has no schedule, zero hiding in the basement in Wilmington.
00:04:37.760And, you know, but but it's not irrational.
00:04:39.960I mean, his strategy is that if he stays out of the way and allows the country to be mad at Trump, that he'll get elected because they'll be Trump.
00:04:48.560It's not it's not a pro Biden strategy.
00:04:53.600I mean, it's possible partly because, you know, if your opponent has 92 percent negative press coverage, you don't have to do a whole lot to communicate what's wrong.
00:05:03.780And because the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC and the rest of them, they'll all go do your job for you.
00:07:15.720He didn't run for president, you know, just to be in the Oval Office or to have Air Force One.
00:07:21.040He ran for president to make profound changes.
00:07:23.940And certainly, if you look, for example, at the federal judges, where we've just had the most extraordinary example of appointing the third justice of the Supreme Court, that's a pretty amazing achievement.
00:07:38.280I was actually in the meeting with him in the spring of 15, when a number of people said to him, why don't you come up with a list of 10 conservative just judges that you would consider so people could understand that you're really seriously committed to changing the judiciary?
00:08:13.820And he was fortunate because the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, understood the long-term historic implications of getting judges approved.
00:08:26.080And as a result, focused the Senate Republicans on confirmation of judges as their number one goal and has had extraordinary impact.
00:08:36.260I mean, I think there are 340 or 350 federal judges that have been approved, not counting the sort of secondary judges, but the actual, the main district judges, appeals court and Supreme Court.
00:08:48.960And the Trump legacy in the courts will be there for two generations.
00:08:54.820If you look at it, Justice Barrett is, I think, 48 years old.
00:09:35.820Would you put that as his top accomplishment?
00:09:37.700Would you put that at the top, or would you put Israel, would you put a couple things above that?
00:09:42.180Well, I think in terms of long-term history, you have to rate that as the top one, because when you move the courts back to a constitutional interpretation of the law, and you put judges in who think that they are not there to be independent interpreters of their own version,
00:10:01.720You know, the Supreme Court had slid to a point where it was a permanent constitutional convention, and if you could get five judges, you could rewrite anything you wanted to.
00:10:11.580Now you've got a group of judges who actually think that the Constitution is a living document created by the founders, agreed to by the people of the United States, and that you have to interpret within the framework of the Constitution.
00:10:25.800And I thought that Justice Barris' description at the White House when she was sworn in, and she described the difference between a politician who has a duty to think about policy and changing policy, and a judge who has a duty not to think about policy, but to think about interpreting the law that the politicians have written.
00:10:51.000And I thought she did a very eloquent job of distinguishing the two missions and the two roles, and so I can give her a lot of credit.
00:11:01.200Yeah, the way she handled herself those few days, I mean, it was Teflon. You couldn't get anything on her. It wasn't like Teflon, like she's good at being Teflon. She was just Teflon being herself. She wasn't trying to be Teflon.
00:11:12.100There's a great cartoon. Remember when she holds up her notepad and it's blank?
00:11:18.740Well, there's a cartoon where somebody wrote on the note card and has her holding a note card that says, I have seven children. I'm used to answering dumb questions.
00:11:28.920I saw a lot of memes, but I didn't see that one. That's hilarious. By the way, isn't she the first woman ever to have children that are still going to school that she's going to be sitting on the Supreme Court justice? I mean, she's the first one, I believe, that's doing that.
00:11:44.200She is the first one. Look, there are a lot of things that are interesting about Trump's decision. She is the only person on the court who didn't go to Harvard or Yale.
00:11:53.480She is clearly a representative of the Midwest. As she pointed out, as a Notre Dame graduate, she probably can educate the others a little bit about football.
00:12:04.300She has, I think, a background both in terms of her faith and the degree to which her life has been defined by family and faith in a way that I think for a lot of more traditional women makes her a role model that they can really look up to.
00:12:22.240She hasn't given up anything, unlike the liberal feminist version, you know, she's had a great career.
00:12:29.540She is a serious intellectual. She is now in the highest court in the land. She has a great family.
00:12:37.040They have shown great compassion. And there's just a lot to the Amy Coney Barrett story that I think speaks well.
00:12:45.420And it speaks well of Donald Trump. I think that the fact that he would pick this woman and he has several other choices and Mitch McConnell apparently went to him as a Midwesterner from Kentucky and said, you know, the easiest person for me to get to unify the Senate Republicans is Judge Barrett because she's very highly respected.
00:13:07.640She's very solid. And, you know, don't go picking somebody who's a bigger risk because I've got a narrow margin here.
00:13:15.560I think it turned out that it was a home run.
00:13:17.940It almost seemed like he chose the perfect candidate where they had nothing to come after her.
00:13:22.940I mean, Kavanaugh, you could have brought him from so many different angles.
00:13:25.740You couldn't say anything to her because of who she was.
00:13:27.840And by the way, she was number one in her class at Notre Dame.
00:13:30.500I mean, she was somebody that was top notch at what she was doing.
00:13:32.920But going back to this whole 6-3 score, you know, this is not good whether you're Republican or Democrat, whether the other side's got 6-3 or you got 6-3.
00:13:40.940The topic of court packing came up in the VP debate where Mike Pence cornered Kamala Harris.
00:13:46.420You probably saw this where he's like, so are you guys going to be packing the court?
00:13:49.700Are you guys going to be packing the court?
00:13:50.980And Kamala did her smile while she's looking at the moderator, hoping to change the topic.
00:13:54.780And then he finally says, I hope everybody realizes she did not answer the question.
00:13:58.480And then she said, you want me to answer the question?
00:14:22.420How do you go to your left-wing activists and say to them, yes, it's true, we have to put up with a Trump court for the next 30 or 40 years.
00:14:34.000Because the activists are going to say, no, no, there's an alternative game.
00:14:37.260Now, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried to do this in 1937, when he was very frustrated with the conservative court, the whole country rebelled.
00:14:50.080He had just gotten reelected, carrying all but two states, and it just crashed and burned.
00:14:55.500He was very shocked at how rapidly his popularity collapsed when people decided he was going to try to do something that they saw as a threat to the Constitution.
00:15:04.880So, you know, I think they will absolutely try to pack the court.
00:15:09.240But I believe the reason this is such a consequential election is that I really do think that Kamala Harris is a San Francisco radical.
00:15:17.300I think Nancy Pelosi is a San Francisco radical.
00:15:19.900I think that Schumer is going to run scared because AOC is potentially going to run against him in the primary in 2022.
00:15:28.560And I think Biden is so weak, so lacking in energy, and in some ways so much no longer in touch with reality, that I think he's clearly not going to be able to control his own administration.
00:15:41.460It's going to be dominated, I think, by Harris and Pelosi.
00:15:45.440Newt, your entire life they've been following politics.
00:15:47.720When did you start following politics?
00:15:48.980How old were you, what year was it when you started following politics?
00:15:52.580Well, I mean, I had an uncle who'd been very active as a Republican precinct worker in Pennsylvania.
00:15:57.700So my oldest memory is watching the convention on television in 1956 with Eisenhower.
00:16:04.620But I really got involved because my dad was a career soldier, and we were stationed in Orleans, France.
00:16:11.880And he took us in the spring of 1958 to the battlefield of Verdun, which is the largest battle in the Western Front in World War I.
00:16:21.360About 600,000 men, French and Germans, were killed in a nine-month period.
00:16:26.860And they have a huge building called the Ossuary that has the bones of about 100,000 of them that had been blown apart and couldn't be identified.
00:16:35.460We spent three days there touring the battlefield during the day and staying with a friend of my father's who had been drafted, sent to the Philippines, served on the Bataan Death March, and spent three and a half years in a Japanese prison camp, which ruined his health.
00:16:50.240So the army gave him a pretty soft job that he could work at until retirement.
00:16:54.660So we spent all that time looking at the cost of defeat and the cost of war.
00:16:58.680Then the French paratroopers came back from Algeria and killed, literally killed, the French Fourth Republic and brought General de Gaulle back.
00:17:08.300And he founded the Fifth Republic, which still exists today.
00:17:11.140It's the longest serving non-royalty government in the history of France.
00:17:16.200Then we moved in June, early July, to Stuttgart, which was the Seventh Army headquarters in Germany, and arrived the week that there was the first Berlin crisis, and the U.S. Army had gone into Lebanon with nuclear weapons offshore.
00:17:32.780So with all that stuff going on, I was going to be either a vertebrate paleontologist or a zoo director.
00:17:38.260And I spent all summer thinking and praying about it and decided that it was my job to basically do three things.
00:17:48.340Figure out what we have to do to survive, figure out how to explain it so the American people would give us permission, and then figure out how you would implement it once you had permission.
00:17:57.880And since August of 1958, that's what I've been doing.
00:18:07.740Who have been the worst presidential candidates, both on the left and the right?
00:18:13.480If you were to say the worst candidates that either party's put up as a frontrunner, who would you say those have been in the last 62 years?
00:18:21.120Well, I think the two who had the most impossible job were Barry Goldwater, who was both too far to the right and didn't understand how to try to bring his party together.
00:18:33.160And George McGovern, who really was the first modern radical nominee and who felt that he had to focus on the radical wing of his party.
00:20:04.660But at best, this is a very close race from the standpoint of the Democrats.
00:20:10.260And at worst, it's going to turn out to be a Republican sweep.
00:20:13.680And nobody's factoring that in because they don't know how to they don't know how to ask the right questions.
00:20:19.280And they have learned nothing from how wrong they were in 2016.
00:20:23.160Remember, on Election Day in 2016, the New York Times said there was an 85 percent likelihood that Hillary Clinton would win on Election Day.
00:21:35.060You know, if you'd had the scale of scandal that the Biden family has in the 1970s, imagine when when Woodward and Bernstein went to see Bradley, the managing editor, and said, you know, we want to dig into this Watergate thing.
00:21:56.320Yet we have all sorts of evidence, eyewitnesses, laptop computer data that the Biden family, not Hunter Biden, the Biden family has been engaged in absolute corruption.
00:22:08.720And the New York Times, the Washington Post, all these places, CNN, all of them have hidden it because they're trying to protect the bunny in the basement.
00:22:17.000And I think that, you know, it would be interesting.
00:22:20.960I'm very sad that Bezos has not insisted on some level of professionalism at the Washington Post.
00:22:28.360So then my question goes to Fox, because if I'll turn your attention to this one part of an interview you did on Fox a couple weeks ago, a few weeks ago, I think with Harrison, Harris Faulkner, I want to get your reaction on this.
00:22:42.840This is you on Fox News on September 9th, I believe.
00:22:47.800Progressive district attorneys are anti-police, pro-criminal, and overwhelmingly elected with George Soros' money.
00:22:55.260And they're a major cause of the violence we're seeing because they keep putting the violent criminals back on the street.
00:23:01.600I'm not sure we need to bring George Soros into this.
00:23:07.740I was going to say you get the last word, speaker.
00:23:25.820I mean, that's got to be one of the most uncomfortable moments of TV, whether it's Fox or, and you're seeing Murdoch's sons recently giving money to the Democratic Party.
00:23:37.480So the reason why I'm saying this is, if Fox goes left and an interview like that happens, I want to get your reaction on that period.
00:23:44.400But if Fox goes left, what's the only media channel that's left for the right to, you know, give their own side of the argument?
00:23:50.020Well, I mean, first of all, what you saw was a mistake.
00:23:55.420And then Fox had no problem with talking about Soros.
00:23:58.980And in fact, the next day, she apologized for the way it was mishandled.
00:24:11.500Look, the other woman is a professional Democrat and was doing her job, which is to clutter it up and try to not let us score points against Democrats.
00:24:22.020Harris, I think, because we were separated, it was all virtual.
00:24:25.400I was, I think, actually in Rome at the time.
00:24:28.220And so Harris was a half step back in sort of sorting it out because it wasn't like we were on the same couch.
00:24:36.760The next day I did her show and she openly apologized and said, look, we would never cut you.
00:24:42.860You know, we love having you on, et cetera.
00:24:45.300So I think it was actually a technical mistake.
00:24:47.960Now, having said that, if at some point Fox decides to become a left-wing establishment channel, there will be three or four channels, probably starting with Newsmax.
00:25:01.480But there will be three or four different channels competing to replace Fox.
00:25:05.280I don't think the Fox audience is going to go with Fox if it becomes a left-wing channel, nor, by the way, when I look at their lineup, I don't think, you know, that Tucker or Sean or Laura are about to become moderates.
00:26:11.240And why is it that no one's covering it?
00:26:13.700It's like almost saying, I heard somebody say the other day, I think it was on 60 Minutes or one of the hosts said, well, we won't cover it because everything is speculation.
00:26:30.640They spent three and a half years covering a Russian story about Trump that turned out to be totally false.
00:26:36.700Both the New York Times and the Washington Post got Pulitzer Prizes for covering lies, which they never returned the prizes, but their entire prize is based on lies.
00:26:46.600So if you're on the left, you can do anything you want to and they'll protect you.
00:26:50.840If you're on the right, they can smear you and claim that it's good journalism.
00:27:44.580We have some mutual friends who think very highly of him.
00:27:47.280But again, what you have is the entire establishment, Twitter, Facebook, all the major media are like they're like a Greek phalanx.
00:28:02.240They're all lined up to protect Biden.
00:28:05.380And so they want to make sure that the bunny in the basement is safe while they go and attack the bear.
00:28:10.860And that's what this race is all about.
00:28:12.680Do you think the world's dangerous and we need a bear, in which case Donald Trump's a pretty good candidate?
00:28:18.000Or do you think that Donald Trump is the problem and we could really survive as a country with a bunny rabbit as our president, as our president, which I think is just laughable, impossible.
00:28:28.180And I'm very interested to see how people vote next week, because I think the more we watch Biden, you know, things like referring to Kamala Harris's wife, which he did yesterday, or the day before referring twice to George when he met Donald Trump, or announcing he was running for the Senate three or four days ago.
00:28:46.800I mean, the more you watch Biden, the more you know, this is not a guy who is really ready for prime time.
00:28:52.960Last question for you is with Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House.
00:31:41.100You said it's important you trust the right poll.
00:31:42.940The poll I trust the most is Trafalgar, which was the most accurate in 16 and most accurate in 18.
00:31:51.480And to give an example of how bad polls can be, Quinnipiac, which is a very respectable establishment poll, had both the Republican Senate and governor candidates in Florida losing by seven points the day before the election.
00:32:28.920And then if you watch this interview and you enjoyed it, there's another interview I did a few weeks ago with Dinesh D'Souza on his new documentary.
00:32:35.660If you've not watched it, click over here to watch that documentary interview that we did together.
00:32:40.320And if you've not subscribed to the channel, please do so.