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May 26, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:01:36
Newt Gingrich | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 52
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Time Text
We are imperfect.
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.
Hey, hey, and welcome to the Sunday special.
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.
We'll get to all of the questions for him in just one second.
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Speaker Gingrich, thanks so much for coming to the show.
Really appreciate it.
I'm delighted to be with you.
You've had a remarkable run and are having a huge impact.
Well, thank you.
That means a lot to me.
So let's start with where you think we are politically, obviously, where everybody's looking forward to 2020.
So I'm gonna ask for a little bit of rank political analysis here.
Looking forward to 2020, where do you think that President Trump stands in terms of re-election odds at this point?
Well, I think if the economy continues, the odds are better than even he'll win.
I think his ability as a campaigner is something that the left keeps forgetting.
I think that the minister guy has had 90 or 92 percent negative coverage for three straight years and is still standing.
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.
So I think Trump probably can win.
I think he is not quite as disciplined as he ought to be.
I think if he were a little more disciplined, I would think he could win a crushing victory.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You have Sanders, who I think is decaying.
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.
And I think that when you drop below those two, Almost anybody could emerge in a way that we can't anticipate.
Do you see Biden collapsing at all?
I mean, I agree with you that right now he's, I mean, the polls say he's the most formidable candidate.
He's got 100% nay recognition.
He seems unthreatening generally to a huge bulk of the American public.
Do you see circumstances under which he could crumble?
I mean, he was a bad presidential candidate a couple of other times, but now he's got the VP hallmark on his resume.
Well, it's a little bit, you talk in one of the things I saw, a poster of yours, you talk about the facts.
And Biden represents the feeling wing of America.
So the facts don't matter.
I mean, a little bit like AOC.
I mean, she represents the hysterically filling wing of America, and among their people, facts don't matter.
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.
It turned out it was Neal Kinnock's speech as a labor leader about whales.
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.
I mean, the news media destroyed him.
They just said, this is crazy.
But one of the failures of my career, I'm watching the Palin-Biden debate, which is available online.
People can check the transcript.
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.
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?
Well, Katie's closed 13 years before he said that.
So I called the McCain campaign, and this tells you a lot about why Republicans lose and why Trump's different than normal Republicans.
I called the McCain campaign.
I said, put her on an airplane tonight.
Fly into Wilmington with the National Press Corps.
Go looking for Katie's.
And he'll tell you this guy's a doofus.
And that's the danger that he would have as president.
This is a man so shallow and so lacking in seriousness.
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.
Now, I mean, Gates is sort of a bureaucrat.
He's not an ideologue.
But that should sober people.
Do you really want a guy as president who has been wrong for four decades on every major national security issue?
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.
I don't think that rings true, but it seems to be effective in a lot of polls, particularly with suburban women.
If you're President Trump, how do you counter that?
Well, I mean, first of all, this is one of the great challenges Trump has, because suburban women react negatively to Trump's style.
I mean, the very toughness and aggressiveness and risk-taking which makes Trump so popular with blue-collar workers jars suburban women.
I mean, he's got to think through to what degree he—there are two ways to become more acceptable.
One is to change, which I think is unlikely.
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.
And so I think Trump probably has to go to the second model, which is Nixon in 72 rather than Reagan in 84.
But Nixon won the largest popular vote in modern American history.
I mean, bigger than FDR, bigger than anybody.
He got a bigger popular vote margin.
Because in the end, people said, yeah, I can't be for McGovern.
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.
There are winners and there are whiners.
Biden represents the whining wing of American politics right now.
Trump represents the winning wing.
So if you're a conservative and you like conservative judges, Trump is the biggest winner in your lifetime.
If you like going to work and think it's nice to have a job, Trump is the biggest winner in modern times.
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.
So I think, you know, but that rate leads to a real gap psychologically.
The second is, I think, the gap between fact and emotion, which is why I found the slogan you used so fascinating.
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.
And you try to give them facts, but you don't understand.
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.
So the fact that all those facts are wrong is irrelevant because you're in two different psychological arenas.
And that's part of our challenge.
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.
So let's talk a little bit about President Trump's policy, because you've written now a couple of books.
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.
Let's talk about President Trump's foreign policy, because that's obviously coming to a head right now, particularly with regard to China.
One of the great dangers to his re-elect effort is the possibility of an economic downturn.
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.
Where do you stand on President Trump's trade policies with regard to China?
And how much of a threat should we consider China at this point?
Well, I have a book that will come out in October on China.
And I think, and I've done several years now researching it, and I've been looking at China since 1960 or 1959.
I think that China is the most formidable competitor we've ever seen.
Vastly more difficult than the Soviet Union.
I think that their stock and trade is to cheat and to be deceptive.
I think that it's good to finally have a president who's figured out the way to take him on.
I always tell people, think about this, you never pick a fight with your biggest customer.
We're their biggest customer.
They're not our biggest customer.
We're not going to get into a recession because of a fight with China.
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.
Well, I mean, if we start going into that kind of that level of toughness, the Chinese are going to face huge economic problems.
And as Trump has said publicly, you know, we can buy from Vietnam, from the Philippines, from Thailand, from India, I mean, from Nigeria.
We have lots of sources for things.
The Chinese have only one gigantic customer.
It's us.
If they lose that customer, the transition costs for them will be enormous.
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.
We'll take the hit.
We'll raise our own tariffs on American products.
There's a surplus of cash on the planet.
I mean, that's one of the problems the Chinese have.
Sell the American bonds.
We can find 65 African billionaires who want to buy them.
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.
Furthermore, they destabilize their own banking system.
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.
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.
That means they steal more annually than our total sale to China.
And by the way, this is not six high school kids hacking in Shanghai.
This is the People Liberation Army units that are methodical.
They have thousands of people who get up every morning to hack into the United States.
And I think closing those things down will change the whole trajectory of the Chinese system.
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?
If you could go back in time, do you think it's a good idea or a bad idea to open China?
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.
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.
And at the time, I think that was right.
I think where it began to change, look, I was one of the people who was wrong.
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.
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.
But I thought, oh yeah, as most of us did, oh yeah, that's the first step towards opening up the country.
Well, that's not true.
Deng Xiaoping was a Leninist.
What he was saying was, if the dictatorship is going to survive, we have to have prosperity.
So they actually did something that people would have thought was impossible.
They have an authoritarian political system with 90 million members in the Communist Party, and they have a relatively open market.
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.
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.
And realize that once the Soviets collapsed, we should have looked much more critically at our relationship with China.
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.
What do you think America's end goal should be in China?
Is it to contain them?
Is it to eventually create the possibility of regime change?
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.
I mean, if China were as free as India or as free as Great Britain, I don't think we'd be particularly threatened.
But you have a billion, 400 million people.
So let's be fair.
They're going to be important.
They're going to be big.
They're going to be much bigger than Russia.
And that's just, I mean, if you believe humans matter, a billion, 400 million people ought to be pretty big.
But they have to become not just less communist, they have to become less Chinese.
And the Chinese system has at least 3,000 years of authoritarianism.
It has a very closed society in many ways.
It has a very deep belief going back thousands of years that it is the central kingdom.
And that therefore everybody else should be paying tribute to them.
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.
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.
We don't have that strategy today.
We're in grave danger of losing to them just by the sheer momentum of their technology and their economy.
So you have a new book, Collusion, which is all about the foreign influence of Russia.
Where do you see Russia in the world?
In 2012, Mitt Romney famously declared that they were the chief geopolitical threat to the United States.
You said that China is significantly more dangerous than Russia.
Yeah.
Where do you think Russia sort of ranks here and how should the United States be treating them?
I mean, I think, first of all, Romney was not totally wrong.
I think China is a bigger long-term challenge.
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.
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.
And so, yeah, the Russians are very dangerous.
The Russians have a long history of penetrating the United States.
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.
We had Ames in the CIA, who was a spy for at least 15 years.
Alger Hiss in World War II, the number three guy in the State Department.
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.
government.
So we know that collusion is real.
We also know that the Russians have this weird fascination with poison.
Just last year, they tried to poison a defector in Britain.
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.
And I think they do that because Putin wants to say to potential defectors, If you defect, we're going to kill you.
So understand, this could happen to you.
This could be your fate.
So we took that concept of poison.
We took the fact that they like to penetrate our society.
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.
Senate?
And that's when the novel really starts to build.
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.
And so we have a central figure who is wrestling with his own addiction.
Well, he's serving the country.
And in my podcast, you mentioned, at Newt's World, we now do podcasts.
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.
And then we did a podcast a week later with two Army combat doctors who are specifically assigned to develop non-addictive painkillers.
And what they're doing and how they're doing it.
And some of it was fascinating.
I mean, they have an ability now to, let's say your hand has been burned.
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.
And it doesn't addict you and it doesn't affect the rest of your body.
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.
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.
And stuff like that is a fascinating interview.
So the book is great.
I had a chance to read it over the weekend.
It's really enjoyable and really informative as well.
When people see the title, Collusion, obviously the first thing they think of is the Mueller Report.
So have you had a chance to read it?
By the way, it was pure luck that they came out at the same time.
Although the concept grew out of all this talk about, could you have collusion?
But as you know, books take a while.
Right, exactly.
So we started this a year and a half ago.
Well, it worked out well in terms of marketing.
That's right.
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.
What was your take on the Mueller report, the kind of final result?
The president obviously has declared that it was a witch hunt from the very beginning.
Do you believe that it was a witch hunt from the very beginning?
Do you believe that it sort of went wrong in the middle?
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?
Well, I have a larger historic view of the Mueller report.
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.
And at the same time, a remarkable effort, which people still haven't dug into, to protect the Democratic nominee.
I mean, people want to talk about obstruction of justice.
And I said, well, great.
Let's talk about 33,000 emails that are deleted.
Let's talk about cell phones that are beaten up with a hammer.
Let's talk about bleach bit for your computer hardware.
If Trump had done that, would you have thought that was obstruction?
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.
If Hillary Clinton goes through everything I just said to you, it's a non-event.
And that's part of the corruption of the system.
These guys thought that Hillary was going to win.
And they thought they could get away with anything.
And frankly, if she'd won, I think it's very sobering how corrupt the system would have gotten under her.
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.
And then when they talk about obstruction of justice, suddenly they are reading intent out of the law.
It requires intent to obstruct justice.
That was one of the things that struck me about the Mueller report.
On the other hand, you look at the president's behavior and the president effectively allegedly telling Don McGahn to lie to the press.
The president creating statements on behalf of Donald Trump Jr.
This sort of stuff is not criminal, but it is bad.
I think that was not a great report for the president.
No, I mean, look, a friend of mine sent me this internet story about a guy who had raccoons in his basement.
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.
And this other guy showed up, and he really had a degree from Harvard, and when he went down, there were still raccoons.
And then this really rough-and-tumble guy, who's a little bit obnoxious, showed up, and there are no more raccoons.
Which one would you hire?
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.
I wonder what it is.
And then they go looking for something terrible, which has to be something terrible because they have a daily terrible requirement.
It's like a feeding schedule.
Donald Trump, and nobody gives him any slack, but I'm going to describe what slack will look like to historians.
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.
Who runs, I think, 18 golf courses and a whole bunch of other buildings and hotels, who is shameless at self-propagandizing.
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.
And the kid says, oh, Mr. Trump, here are your three pizzas for $15.
He goes, wait a second, kid.
I've got to negotiate.
Tell you what, I'll give you $5 a piece.
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.
Now, his willingness to make fun of himself while Domino's paid for ads to make him more famous.
We know what it looked like.
So you take that personality, no government experience, no sophisticated sense of what you can and can't do.
And he claws his way to the presidency, beating 15 other Republicans, the news media, and Hillary Clinton.
And he turns around and he's pissed off.
And he acts like the CEO he is, which is not appropriate for the President of the United States.
So if you want to say that he has to go through a learning curve, I think that's totally fair.
If you want to say, was it malicious or designed to in some way undermine the Constitution, I think that's an absurdity.
So let's talk about that for a second, because a lot of Democrats are, of course, pushing toward impeachment.
Not Nancy Pelosi, who knows better, but a lot of the other Democrats at this point are pushing impeachment.
Obviously, you were involved in an impeachment effort against President Clinton.
I wonder if you could distinguish the two.
What were the grounds that you think were appropriate to impeach President Clinton, as opposed to the attempts to impeach President Trump?
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.
Well, Ken Starr issues a report.
Which has 11 counts in which he says he is guilty.
Okay, five of them are obstruction.
Discount.
Guilty.
Discount.
Guilty.
If Mueller had issued a report that said Donald Trump is guilty on 11 counts, there would be an impeachment effort.
It would probably fail because the Republican Senate won't impeach, just as the House impeached, but the Senate refused to convict with Clinton.
Which might have been actually the right constitutional solution.
But in Clinton's case, remember, he was guilty enough.
He lost the license to practice law in Arkansas.
He had to pay a fine.
He was clearly guilty.
In Trump's case, Mueller comes back and says, there's nothing there that you could take him to court on.
There's a pretty big gap here.
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.
Do you have any regrets about the impeachment effort?
Do you think it was the right move?
I think I was too aggressive.
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.
And I've been such a large figure at that time.
The Republican Party was very hard to do.
But I think I would give myself bad marks.
I don't know how you get a report.
Remember, in Clinton's case, they're felonies.
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.
So he's being sued by an Arkansas state employee because as governor, he attempted to intimidate her.
Now you would think every feminist in the country would have been enraged.
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.
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.
And the reason it's a felony is if people can get away with perjury, the entire structure of the rule of law collapses.
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.
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.
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.
Well, talking about the role of Congress, obviously you're one of the most powerful speakers in the history of the country.
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.
Everything seems to be done by the executive branch at this point.
It seems like Congress can't get anything done or won't get anything done.
It seems like the initial bargain, the founders were deeply worried about the ambition of folks.
And so they said, okay, well, ambition will check ambition.
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.
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?
Well, I worry about a very long range trend, which probably goes back to the 30s, which is to give power to the bureaucracy.
Not to the president, but to the bureaucracy.
So you have bureaucrats now making decisions that I think the founding fathers would have said should have been the legislative branch decisions.
And I think actually the appointment of the conservative judges is probably going to shrink the relative ability of the bureaucracy to do that.
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.
I mean, if you were to say to Trump today, how powerful has the Democrats and Congress been at screwing up your border policy?
You'd say, well, pretty darn powerful.
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.
Now, I think on small things, I mean, Lamar Alexander and Fred Upton last year passed a 21st century cures bill.
It was bipartisan.
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.
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.
You know, a lot of folks like to talk about the 1990s and Bill Clinton being More fiscally responsible.
The fact is that you were running Congress at that time and that had something to do with it.
What do you think has changed inside the Republican Party?
Do you think that the future of the Republican Party is effectively a big-spending, European-style right party?
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.
So it is theoretically doable because we did it.
I think that actually there are steps that are beginning to be taken that are encouraging.
I think if I could divide what you describe as the welfare state into three very different components.
I mean, one is the work ethic.
Getting people Shifting from focus on disabilities to capabilities.
I mean, look what wounded warriors do.
And then look at 31-year-old truck drivers with a bad back who decide they can't be retrained.
And the whole model of disability has to be rethought and focused on capabilities that would change the trajectory of cost very dramatically.
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.
And in fact, you see at a practical level it's being rethought.
More and more people 65, 70, 75 are working, both because they want the money, but also because Three generations ago, you worked physically.
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.
Nowadays, you tend to work with your brain.
It turns out your brain doesn't age very fast.
And so people want to stay active.
They actually live longer if they don't go to pure retirement.
And so you're going to see more and more people, I think, beginning to relieve the pressure in that sense.
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.
And so shifting back towards a more savings-oriented society, which is partly the tax code, making it very profitable and desirable to save.
The other zone is healthcare, and healthcare is very different.
I've spent much of my life since 1974 on healthcare.
I founded the Center for Health Transformation, wrote a book called Saving Lives and Saving Money.
The key to the health system, and then this is the whole key to the health insurance problem, is to dramatically reduce the cost.
We spend, I think, 40% more on healthcare than we should.
We would get a better system with better results, migrating and evolving faster.
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.
For example, they think if you go in for a procedure, you ought to know what it's going to cost.
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.
I said, no, no.
You have to take a sophisticated best judgment, tell the patient, and live with it.
Well, that's going to change.
People are going to start shopping a lot better.
I mean, today, it's almost impossible.
If you have three hospitals you could go to in your neighborhood, it's impossible to know which one will cost you more.
And so people often end up being very surprised.
I had a friend who thought everything was covered until they found out that the anesthesiologist was out of the system.
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.
And that's the sort of, so there are a lot of things like that.
I think what they're doing on this whole issue of rebates, which is, if you think about it, it's an absurdity.
The big pharmacy benefit managers really have as their big sales pitch that I can give you a huge rebate.
Now, why can I give you a huge rebate?
Because the pharmaceutical company just charged me a lot extra to create the space for me to give you a large rebate.
So guess what the long-term pressure is?
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.
And the result has been a 20-year cycle of prices going up that are absurd.
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?
Well, actually, the Part B came in about 40% cheaper than anybody expected, because it has competition.
And I think that you're going to see more and more things like that.
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?
I mean, it doesn't do us any good to create a $7,000 deductible if you can't afford it.
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.
I mean, it's a really bad way to think about health care.
So moving forward, you've talked about health care and you've talked about social security.
Do you think there's the will to do any of these things?
Because it seems like the political will is entirely in the other direction, meaning expanding benefits.
We've gradually achieved a little bit of it under Trump.
I think we'll achieve more.
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?
If you're a conservative, you think that's wonderful.
They're back at work.
They're earning a living.
They don't need the subsidy.
But if you're a liberal, you think, oh my God, we can't have the welfare state shrink.
That's why two great examples.
When we passed welfare reform, we split the Democrats 50-50, literally 101 to 101.
Well, the 101 who were opposed thought this was the most horrible thing ever.
You're going to make people go to work.
You know, and they don't believe in making people go to work.
In fact, there are some of them who believe we ought to give you a check every month just for being around.
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.
I think some of that can be done.
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.
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.
If you're in good enough shape to go to Disney World, why don't you have a job?
And that was a huge shock to people.
So I think we want to be the party of work.
Let the other people be the party of dependency.
And then the country's going to have to choose.
So, speaking of that choice, I mean, you talked about the culture war.
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.
This is the new pitch from democratic socialists.
Venezuela and Soviet Union are not good representatives of socialism anymore.
Now it's Norway and Denmark that are the best representatives of socialism.
How do you fight back against that argument best?
Because it seems like the argument being made is here are prosperous, wonderful countries with broad social safety nets and deep social safety nets.
What's so wrong with that here in the United States?
Well, first of all, you bring in Swedes and Danes and Norwegians who will tell them they're not socialist countries.
They're welfare state countries.
Big difference.
They actually have very, very robust capitalism.
In the case of Norway, for example, they have this huge offshore natural gas find, which has created, and they've shown huge discipline.
I think they have a trillion dollars sitting in the bank that they don't spend.
Now imagine an American politician who was running for re-election with a trillion dollars sitting in the bank.
And so they're very tough-minded.
And they think, yeah, the things we'll pay for through the government, but that's the welfare state side.
But in order to have a really dynamic economy, we want very bold capitalism.
And all those countries are much more capitalist than socialist.
Again, you get into this confusion.
This is why I think the distinction between facts and emotion is so important.
That you have over here liberals who believe in emoting.
These are the people who love Fidel.
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.
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.
You know, because it's always, as Gene Kirkpatrick once said, it's always blame America first.
Some of those people you'll never get because they're crazy.
I'm pretty cheerful about saying that.
When you ask me about certain people, I go, yeah.
I mean, AOC is just crazy.
She has no connectivity with reality, has a great con job.
She won a very small turnout election in a district where nobody cared.
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.
But I think that every two generations you have this fight.
In the 30s you had this fight over the nature of communism.
And then again, I think in the late 60s we had this fight.
You know, the golden era of Bernie Sanders going to the Soviet Union for his honeymoon was a huge question mark.
George McGovern ran as the candidate of rampant socialism and got crushed.
And for a generation, Democrats thought, well, that's not a very good idea.
Do you think we on the right have made a mistake as far as how we characterize socialism?
Meaning it's a label that we like to use a lot on the right, and maybe we've over applied it.
So when it comes to Barack Obama or Obamacare, the charge of socialism came up a lot.
It's very simple.
The reason Obamacare was so dangerous was it was designed to move towards total government control.
of your health system.
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.
Well, that is, I mean, somebody once said, socialism is communism without the secret police.
And you just need to understand that.
It's ultimately the interim step towards a totalitarian control of your life.
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.
Otherwise, it's a great story.
Margaret Thatcher becomes the leader of the opposition party in 1978.
And she's at the big annual party rally, and she says, people ask me, what is our platform?
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.
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.
It's almost unthinkable.
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?
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.
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?
I think the better argument is personal.
Do you want to be a client or a customer?
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?
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.
Just understand, because this is always about freedom.
I mean, socialism is simply an excuse to coerce.
you through bureaucracy so that some group of people, usually college professors, can feel like they're really powerful.
It's their resentment of the entrepreneurial class creating wealth.
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.
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.
They think that President Trump ripping on the media is what has led to their low approval ratings.
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.
What is it that folks do not understand about the nature of the media ecosystem?
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.
Well, I mean, first of all, you have two great sources of cultural knowledge, the media and college professors and high school teachers.
Both are left.
So both spend all day every day giving you baloney and dishonesty and disinformation that fits them.
And I think you have to start with that.
And then they want the right to define what the issue is.
And, you know, I've been really working on this because I'm very troubled.
Reagan and Thatcher and I, all three failed to change the culture of our parties.
I mean, Reagan was a great communicator.
Thatcher was a remarkable communicator and educator.
I think I did pretty well in the contract period.
And yet none of us could get conservatives to understand The essential characteristics of how you have to win.
And the first step of that is to have the moral courage to refuse to let the other side define the issue.
And it actually started for me.
And Chris Wallace reminds me of this occasionally because it's seared into his brain.
And the first real breakpoint for me, I mean, I'd seen Reagan do it.
I'd done it a little bit.
But as a candidate, you're in a different environment.
And presidential candidates get a surprising amount of attention.
And we were doing the first Fox debate.
And at the very beginning of it, Brett Baer says, we're not gonna have any Mickey Mouse questions or any Mickey Mouse answers.
We're gonna stick to big things.
And I wrote it down, because I thought this will never, it won't last.
So we got to a particular point and I got to ask a question.
And Chris will tell you this, because Chris asked it.
And I stopped and I said, Chris, you know, I wrote down what Brett said.
And he said, no Mickey Mouse questions.
I think you just failed that.
Well, that would have been fun, but all of a sudden, spontaneously, 3,000 people in this auditorium are applauding.
All of me, by the way, got bad enough.
Part of my demise was Romney's money and dishonesty.
Part of my demise was the last two debates they refused to allow audience participation.
And I should have blown up at both of them.
I should have said, you don't have the right to dictate to the American people.
But I was in settings where Romney had intelligently packed the audience.
And they probably would have booed me for taking on the media, which is a real change.
So what happened was, after that first debate, I'm going back from Iowa through O'Hare.
And this pilot walks up to me, who I've never met.
He says, I loved last night.
I am so glad you stuck it to those people.
I am so sick of them lecturing us.
And I suddenly thought, there's something real happening here.
Now, let me give you a quick parallel.
1965, Ronald Reagan decides to run for governor.
Knows he doesn't know how to run for office.
Hires the best firm in California, the best Republican firm.
They create a whole box of issues for him to memorize, and as an actor, he can do it very fast.
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?
Because people back then thought, how can an actor be governor?
Go to the first town hall meeting.
First question, what are you gonna do about Berkeley?
What about those students?
Not in the box.
Comes back and he says, guys, we need an answer.
They say, no, no, it's not an issue.
Second town hall meeting.
First question on the box.
What are you going to do about Berkley?
He comes back.
He says, guys, if they think it's an issue, it's an issue.
Well, the same thing had happened to me.
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.
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.
And everybody in the elites, I watched it that night with Calista, everybody in the elites after the debate said Trump lost.
16 people, Trump lost.
The online polls averaged 70% said Trump won.
And I thought, wait a second.
And this was thousands and thousands of people, and not just conservative publications.
70% of people think he won out of 16 people.
And all of the elites are convinced he lost.
We're now looking at a gap about reality that is enormous.
And that's where we are today.
Because they're so caught up in their own culture and their own social status that they can't learn.
So the New York Times, I mean, I loved the other day, the New York Times does page one, Donald Trump was in debt.
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.
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.
So what do you think the future of the media are going to be?
Because you're right that they're stuck in a track that they can't seem to be.
Well, I appreciate that.
No, no.
I mean you generically.
The future of the media is a self-sorting mechanism in which the people who make sense over time Gain a huge advantage.
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.
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.
That's the media.
And tragically, I mean, I grew up when the news media, newspapers were real.
I mean, the New York Times for 100 years was an amazing newspaper.
Although, in the 30s, they had a reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for lying mendaciously, all the, constantly, about Stalin.
To defend and protect Stalin.
And in the 50s, they had a reporter who got a Pulitzer for lying about Castro.
So the Times has always had a streak of anti-Semitism and a streak of pro-communism.
But other than that, it's been a fairly good newspaper.
But now, the whole culture of the newsroom is collapsing.
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?
Do you think that we hold things in common anymore?
Or are the divides now so deep that we're moving toward the irreconcilable?
Years ago, I was in the green room with Charles Krauthammer, and he asked me that question.
And I said, oh, I'm pretty optimistic.
I said, you know, we're still a long way short of the Civil War.
And he looked at me and said, wait, the Civil War?
So I would say, I think this is going to be a, people say to me, when is it going to get better?
And I say, when one side wins.
I mean, whether the left wins or the right wins, sooner or later, one side will win.
And then the system will calm down for a while because the side that wins will have dominance.
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.
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.
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.
I've described him as a hammer.
I say it's very satisfying when he hits a nail and it's not quite as satisfying when he hits a baby.
But with that said, the people who tend to be most offended are the people of my generation.
So people who are millennials and younger, he's very unpopular with.
People who are older than that seem to get President Trump on a different gut level.
Do you think that conservatism is penetrating or can penetrate to people who are younger via the Trump message?
Because there's no question that he's great at fighting back.
He's a great counterpuncher, as he himself has said.
But does that have the danger, carrying with it, of alienating people who are going to be the up and coming next generation?
Well, I think Trump in that sense is more like Thatcher and less like Reagan.
You And Reagan was very personable and very careful.
And Reagan had said to a friend of mine in 1980 that he couldn't do certain things because he wore the white hat.
And so he understood the limits of his personality and the limits of his appeal.
I think Trump's attitude is he's wearing a hard hat and he doesn't mind being in a brawl.
And I think he's going to make basically two arguments to young people.
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.
The other argument is going to be whether you like me as a person, your life is better.
With my presidency.
So if you like full employment, if you like rising wages, etc., then I represent a better future for you.
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.
It's your choice.
I mean, think about it.
This is a guy whose successful show, which is a remarkable achievement, people underestimate what a great achievement The Apprentice was.
This guy whose most famous line before he ran for president was, you're fired.
I mean, what kind of guy do you think he's?
So you spent your entire career not just in politics, but also studying and teaching history.
You've written a bunch of historical novels.
You've written a lot about history in the nonfiction sphere.
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?
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.
And second, I would recommend they read the period 1850 to 1865.
I mean, we survived through a brutal war with an amazing president who understood what freedom was worth.
And who was prepared to fight as long as it took.
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.
He said you can almost see exactly verbatim the same personality attacks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What do you think is the best way to teach people about the shadings of American history?
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.
We have too rosy a view of how American history has gone.
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.
Either the movie or the play.
And the reason is, it explains exactly what's so dangerous about the modern left.
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.
And this young person is explaining, you know, that if I had to go after the devil, I would knock down the law.
And he said, and then what would you do?
And he says, okay, so you knock down every law until you finally corner him in Wales, and then he turns.
What now stands between you and the devil?
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?
Or do they want to live in a country where whatever this year's passion can be imposed on you by the state?
And they should look at things like in 1984, Orwell's great novel, as a real warning.
Orwell wrote in 1984 about Great Britain.
He did not write it about Russia.
And his warning was state tyrannies are real.
And so I would say to them, we are imperfect.
And if your yardstick is perfection, then short of the second coming, I'm not sure how you'd get it.
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.
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.
You'll find people from Pakistan, Ethiopia, Guatemala.
I mean, this is the most diverse society in the history of the human race, more diverse than Rome.
And we are amazingly open to talent.
Look at who founded Google.
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.
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.
Well, I do have one final question for you, Speaker Gingrich.
I want to ask you, well actually I have two final questions for you.
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.
But first, if you want to hear Speaker Gingrich's answer, you have to be a Daily Wire subscriber.
To subscribe, head on over to dailywire.com and click subscribe.
You can hear the end of our conversation over there.
Well, Speaker Gingrich, thanks so much for stopping by.
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.
Thank you so much for your time.
Great to be with you.
Thanks.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is produced by Jonathan Hay.
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Associate producer Mathis Glover.
Edited by Donovan Fowler.
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