Aug. 9, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| I think it's been remarkable to have this level of panic. | ||
| Governor Newsom, for example, closed the zoos again. | ||
| Now, if you're going to lock up every poor child in Los Angeles or San Diego or San Francisco so that they're in a little apartment, they have no space, and then you're going to close all the public parks, what are these little kids supposed to do? | ||
| And it strikes me What you end up with is a public health dictatorship, which is very singular in how it measures things. | ||
| I had a university president say to me the other day that he will lose more young people to suicide and drunk driving than he will lose to COVID. | ||
| And he said, they're reopening. | ||
| He cannot understand why people have any doubt at all about reopening. | ||
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[MUSIC] | |
| I'm Dave Rubin and this is the Rubin Report. | ||
| Reminder, everybody, to subscribe to our YouTube channel and click that pesky notification bell. | ||
| And joining me today is the former Speaker of the House, the author of over 40 books, and the Chairman of Gingrich 360 Consulting. | ||
| Newt Gingrich, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| It's good to be with you. | ||
| Exciting. | ||
| I'm glad to have you. | ||
| You are in Rome at the moment. | ||
| What's going on in Rome these days? | ||
| Well, as you know, my wife, Callista, Ambassador to the Vatican. | ||
| So that's why we're here. | ||
| Rome actually has had a huge comeback. | ||
| They got in big trouble back in February because there are about 100,000 Chinese workers in northern Italy. | ||
| And they were allowing the flights to continue. | ||
| So they were literally flying in from Wuhan, bringing the disease right here. | ||
| And it got so out of control that their hospital system was breaking down. | ||
| And they were starting to triage people, and if you were over 80, they basically said, you're not getting, we're not going to take care of you. | ||
| In fact, Callista helped Samaritan's Purse, Franklin Graham's operation. | ||
| They flew in an entire hospital, 68 beds, 60 doctors and nurses into the worst hit part of Northern Italy. | ||
| So the Italian government closed everything down. | ||
| We had grocery stores, pharmacies, gas stations, That's it. | ||
| If you were in the street, you had to have a good excuse in writing or you could be fined $3,200. | ||
| So for 10 weeks, Cluster ran the embassy from our house virtually. | ||
| We did an amazing amount of Zoom and GoToMeeting and what have you. | ||
| And for 10 weeks, they basically starved the virus and gradually got it under control. | ||
| It's now sufficiently under control that they've reopened the restaurants, the museums, public parks, stores, and you see people walking around. | ||
| Now, the problem for Italy is about 14% of their economy, one out of every $7, is tourism. | ||
| And they don't have any tourism yet. | ||
| So places like the Colosseum, last year got 23,000 people a day. | ||
| They may have 500 or 1,000 a day. | ||
| That's a real economic crisis for them. | ||
| But in terms of the pandemic, they are in dramatically, dramatically better shape today. | ||
| Yeah, so we're holding this interview for a couple of days, so I don't wanna ask you anything about specifically what's happening today, but generally speaking, the way you see the lockdown now in America, and I'm here in Los Angeles, and literally just yesterday, Newsom put us in another lockdown, and that these things seem to keep continually happening. | ||
| We're watching some spikes. | ||
| It just seems that no one knows who to trust at the moment. | ||
| What's your take about how the states have done it, where Trump fits into this, and is there something that you would have been doing differently as Speaker of the House to push your guys to push certain things differently? | ||
| Well, I think it's been remarkable to have this level of panic. | ||
| Governor Newsom, for example, closed the zoos again. | ||
| Now, if you're gonna lock up every poor child in Los Angeles, Or San Diego or San Francisco so that they're in a little apartment. | ||
| They have no space. | ||
| And then you're going to close all the public parks. | ||
| What are these little kids supposed to do? | ||
| And it strikes me that what you end up with is a public health dictatorship, which is very singular in how it measures things. | ||
| I had a university president say to me the other day that he will lose more young people to suicide and drunk driving, then he will lose to COVID. | ||
| And he said, they're reopening. | ||
| He cannot understand why people have any doubt at all about reopening. | ||
| And so I would start from there. | ||
| The people you need to worry about, half of all the deaths are people who are over 70 years of age. | ||
| And in particular, the more you go up at 80 years, it's more dangerous. | ||
| At 90, it's even more dangerous. | ||
| So you know that You want to really work to protect people who are over 70. | ||
| But you don't need to really work to protect people who are 13. | ||
| And the idea that we're, we've gone from a country that used to know how to open one house school rooms and have seven classes in one room. | ||
| And people actually learned how to read to an extraordinarily expensive union dominated bureaucracy that doesn't want to teach. | ||
| And you're going to have this in Los Angeles. | ||
| They've got it in New York. | ||
| I mean, They have in Fairfax County, Virginia, one of the biggest and richest school districts in the country. | ||
| Why would we pay people to not teach? | ||
| Why would we have all these big fancy buildings nobody can go to? | ||
| And I think it really raises very profound questions about the whole system. | ||
| Yeah, well that actually is perfect segue because I was gonna say as someone that's a true lover of American history and has written about it and you talk about American history all the time, are you sort of shocked the way the average American person just sort of takes orders and doesn't necessarily ask why are these things happening? | ||
| You know, at one time it was flatten the curve. | ||
| We don't hear the phrase flatten the curve anymore. | ||
| We haven't heard it, excuse me, for about six weeks. | ||
| Now it seems to be something else or they just give us an order And they don't really tell you why. | ||
| Well, I mean, part of it has been, I think, the evolution from a news media to a propaganda media, so that you have these waves of coverage. | ||
| I compared it to watching the flagellante in the Middle Ages. | ||
| This was a group that would go from city to city beating themselves. | ||
| So you have all of these people out here who, they panic. | ||
| The truth is, if you look at the death rate, There's no reason to panic. | ||
| This is not the bubonic plague. | ||
| It's not Ebola. | ||
| Most people who get, first of all, an amazing percentage who get the Chinese virus, which is what it is, most of them don't even know they have it. | ||
| When you're told somebody tested positive who was, quote, asymptomatic, that means Whatever symptoms they had were so mild that it didn't affect them. | ||
| So you have to then stop and say, wait a second, why are we panicking over people? | ||
| You know, the numbers go up, but the numbers go up with people under 35 who aren't totally healthy. | ||
| And I think I have been truly appalled. | ||
| My younger daughter, Jacqueline Bushman, is a certified financial analyst and used to run a very large budget, billion dollar plus budget. | ||
| And she said to me the other night and just sheer disgust. | ||
| She said, I have never seen statistics put together so badly that it is impossible to know what's actually happening. | ||
| And she's just literally fed up. | ||
| Just thinks whether it's because the government statistics are so incompetent or whether it's because the news media is deliberately, you know, they're going, they're going from worst case to worst case to worst case. | ||
| So they don't tell you that, for example, uh, Georgia has about 10% of the fatality rate of New York. | ||
| They praise Cuomo, who is the worst governor in the country, but has been praised so much by the news media that he now has a very high popularity rating in New York while he killed people. | ||
| I mean, at least 6,000 to 8,000 senior citizens died because of Governor Cuomo and decisions he made. | ||
| But that somehow gets brushed over because, you know, he's liberal and therefore it's okay. | ||
| Yeah, so let's sit with that for a little bit because, you know, I think a lot of people think that Trump was sort of the first guy, the first mainstream politician in a modern sense to really go after the media. | ||
| But I remember your campaign in 2012 really well, and you were capturing that populist sentiment. | ||
| And during the debates, You know, you won a couple debates in a row and you had the crowds cheering and screaming to the point that the networks were asking crowds not to make sounds during the debates, which in many ways sort of deflated your candidacy because you were using their energy. | ||
| That's sort of relevant to what you just said there about Cuomo because Democrats seem to be able to get away with virtually anything and then blaming it on the other guy because they know the media runs cover for them. | ||
| You guys don't get that luxury. | ||
| Well, look, I mean, you could tell that Romney was the media choice because they rigged—towards the end, they just rigged the debate. | ||
| I mean, it was amazing. | ||
| I got up on stage and I said, nobody gets to applaud, nobody gets to do this, nobody gets to do that. | ||
| And I looked at it and it was truly anti-popular. | ||
| I mean, it was as elitist as you could possibly be. | ||
| And I frankly watched- When you say they, do you mean that's coming from the networks or coming from the RNC? | ||
| No, no, coming from the network. | ||
| From the networks, okay. | ||
| The networks had decided that Romney was the low-risk, moderate candidate that they could survive with, and that I really was their mortal enemy, which is true. | ||
| I mean, if you're gonna destroy the New York Times and turn it into a propaganda machine, Then as somebody who grew up when there really was a news media, I am deeply opposed to you. | ||
| And I don't mind going head to head with all these people. | ||
| I really admire Trump in that sense, because I thought in 15 and 16, he did the best job I've ever seen. | ||
| I mean, better than Reagan, better than me at taking on the media and winning. | ||
| I mean, it's just straight knock down, drag out fight. | ||
| And then he's had to do that because They are a propaganda system. | ||
| They're not a news media. | ||
| They are about 93% against Trump. | ||
| They lie about him when he gave this terrific speech at Mount Rushmore, which was a great redefinition of American exceptionalism and why we matter. | ||
| When they couldn't find anything in the speech, they just lied about it. | ||
| The most amazing thing, in fact, Michael Barone is a very common sense practical guy, wrote a column saying this is the most dishonest news media of his lifetime. | ||
| And that he thinks it will come back to haunt the news media for having betrayed the trust of the American people. | ||
| Are you worried that as those institutions crumble, we're gonna lose some sort of national cohesion? | ||
| This has come up with almost all of my guests because everyone at this point basically agrees that the media is crumbling. | ||
| They've done this to themselves. | ||
| They seem to double down every time instead of having a moment of self-reflection. | ||
| But are you worried that if the New York Times fails, if CNN, if just the media and then the rest of the institutions, because that then spreads to academia and everywhere else, that if these institutions all crumble, you know, you know, we almost have no way of having a national ethos at some level. | ||
| Well, look, I think there are other institutions that emerge. | ||
| I think there's an amazing amount of information now on the Internet through Facebook and YouTube and a bright Twitter, although Twitter is very There's a lot of hostility in it. | ||
| But, you know, and you have places like C-SPAN, which really are remarkably neutral. | ||
| In fact, I have watched several Trump speeches on C-SPAN. | ||
| You also have an ability to stream things. | ||
| The president streams a lot of his speeches, and Pustin and I watch his speeches as streamed from the White House. | ||
| We also, frankly, during the lockdown, got into watching both St. | ||
| Peter's and the Basilica in Washington, because they were streaming mass. | ||
| You're entering a world of dramatically more media, not less media, just as your show is another example of more media, not less media. | ||
| But we're going to have a really deep split because we're in the middle of a cultural civil war. | ||
| And there's just no question in my mind that this is the most divided we've been since the election of Lincoln in 1860 and his reelection in 1864. | ||
| And that part of the reason I wrote Trump and the American future is that I really do believe that what happens this fall may do more to shape America's future than any election since 1864. | ||
| And I say that because I think that the Biden-Pelosi-Schumer team will be so radical that we would not recognize the country within two or three years. | ||
| They would have moved us so far to the left. | ||
| Do you think that it's the Biden, Schumer, Pelosi team that are actually the true radicals? | ||
| Or do you think it's the Bernie crew and the AOC crew beneath them that's sort of just shifting them that way? | ||
| Or do you really feel like they are actually that radical? | ||
| It's a little hard to tell these days if they're a little more old school and that, you know, the tail is wagging the dog, basically. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's a little bit like saying when you got run over by the truck, you know, do you think the driver was deliberately trying to run over you or was it policy? | ||
| You gotta run over. | ||
| When Schumer the other day came out for the 10% cut in defense spending, which Sanders is offering as an amendment, and when Pelosi brought up a bill, which 207 Democrats voted for, that gives a $1,200 bonus to every illegal immigrant. | ||
| I want you to think about this. | ||
| 207 Democrats voted to give a $1,200 bonus check to every illegal immigrant. | ||
| I mean, you have to wonder, are these people just crazy? | ||
| Biden has said that he would sign the Pelosi bill, which is a $3 trillion, very radical bill. | ||
| He certainly didn't see Biden criticizing the looters and the violence. | ||
| In fact, 13 of Biden's staff actually helped bail out looters and violent people in Minneapolis. | ||
| So I just, you know, I think there's a pattern in Trump and the American future. | ||
| I put in A chapter that the Democrats love criminals and hate police. | ||
| And I think if you look at Seattle, Minneapolis, Chicago, New York, I think that that's the objective evidence. | ||
| So as we watch these progressive cities crumble, the several you just named there, and we can go on the list, all the cities with the worst violence and the worst gun violence and the highest rates of murders, they're all, I think 19 out of 20 or something like that are progressive run cities. | ||
| Do you sense that sort of what those mayors and the governors to another extent want is they want the chaos so that Trump has to bring in troops or the National Guard, like they're almost laying out a trap so that he looks like The authoritarian that they wish him to be? | ||
| No, I think... I mean, I don't think they mind that happening, but I don't think that's what they're doing. | ||
| I think that the left really has this fantasy image of how the world works. | ||
| And they really think that if only there were no policemen... It's sort of like the Democratic mayor of Seattle who said that we were going to have a summer of love when they created the Autonomous District. | ||
| Now, four people got killed and she gave up on that. | ||
| Although, ironically, she didn't really give up on it until the demonstrators came to her home one night. | ||
| Suddenly, when they were surrounding her house, yeah. | ||
| That's something that's real. | ||
| But I think part of it is that their radical left-wing ideology doesn't allow them to deal with reality. | ||
| So you end up with, let's cut the budget of the New York Police Department a billion dollars when there were, I think, 13 people shot on Monday. | ||
| Chicago has too few policemen, not too many, and they have a dozen or more people shot every weekend. | ||
| You know, after all the problems in Minneapolis, they're now moving to dissolve the police department. | ||
| And in my mind, you know, if you if you stop and say, I mean, walk me through this. | ||
| There's an armed gunman. | ||
| It's two o'clock in the morning. | ||
| You're going to send social workers to chat with the government. | ||
| I just need to understand how their worldview works. | ||
| But but I went back recently. | ||
| Rachel Peterson is our chief researcher, and she pulled up 35 pages of material on the actual Black Lives Matter organization. | ||
| And when you founded by three Marxists, and when you read about their real beliefs, you begin to understand They live in an alternative worldview. | ||
| They live in a world where the police are really very dangerous and they don't quite have an explanation for all the other people get killed because you're if you're an African American male, you're 300 times more likely to be shot by a criminal than by the police. | ||
| But that doesn't matter because, you know, the police are an extension of the authoritarian power of the white male dominated culture, which is what they're really mad about. | ||
| Whereas if you just happen to get killed by your neighbor, That doesn't really count. | ||
| So, you know, an eight-year-old girl gets killed in Atlanta. | ||
| Well, that's unfortunate, but it's not something that Black Lives Matter is going to do anything about. | ||
| But she wasn't killed by a policeman. | ||
| Seven-year-old gets killed in Chicago. | ||
| Well, that's really unfortunate, but it's not really a political event because she wasn't killed by a policeman. | ||
| So you really have this very weird period underway where the left has no model to explain how they would achieve peace, just as, by the way, They have no model to explain how they would educate Children. | ||
| You look at Baltimore, which has the fourth most expensive school system in the country and has entire buildings in which not a single child could pass the exam. | ||
| Not one. | ||
| To which Biden's comments this week were maybe we need to quit testing because after all, it probably makes them feel bad that they didn't pass the test. | ||
| Right, and then at the same time, they don't seem to want school choice or charter schools to allow for more ability to get a plurality of education out there and help these kids. | ||
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It's quite bizarre to say the least. | |
| It can't be because the Democratic Party is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Teachers Union. | ||
| I think at one of the recent conventions, half the delegates were from the Teachers Union. | ||
| The teachers union is essentially a machine to get paid. | ||
| There's nothing to do with teaching. | ||
| You can tell that by the fact they don't want to go back to school. | ||
| And it has nothing to do with effective teaching. | ||
| You can tell that because look at Baltimore. | ||
| When you think of Baltimore as a machine for the payment of union members, it is a remarkably system. | ||
| If you think of it as an educational system, it is an unbelievably terrible system. | ||
| And the Democrats cannot, they have no capacity to take on the teachers union anywhere in the country. | ||
| So they basically say, yeah, you might be destroying the children, but at least the union will help you get reelected. | ||
| So with all this in mind, what do you think the Republicans, if anything, could be doing better as we're watching monuments being taken down and we're watching the mob just run across cities? | ||
| You know, I see the Republicans are sort of talking a tough game and Trump's talking a tough game, but are they not doing something that they actually should be doing? | ||
| Because this stuff isn't stopping. | ||
| Well, I think there are a couple of things they should be doing. | ||
| First of all, in the long run, they should, the Republican National Committee, should go into every major city and create a jobs, prosperity and safety chapter and start to organize everybody in the city to win municipal elections and state legislative elections who are second tariff and people killed. | ||
| And then they ought to plant a flag in every one of these cities and say, We're going to reach out to everybody who's secondary to having no jobs, no schools that work and having your relative shot. | ||
| And if that fits you, let's sit down and talk about how you can be a candidate. | ||
| We're not going to ask you to vote for some traditional Republican, but we're going to try to help you take back your city. | ||
| Second, I think that the president has to look at the example that Bobby Kennedy set in the early 60s. | ||
| When young Volunteers were being killed in Mississippi during the Civil Rights Movement. | ||
| And it was clear that the local sheriff who may have been doing the killing and the state police were not going to defend these people. | ||
| And what they did is they said, look, these are American citizens, and if you're not going to defend them, we are. | ||
| And they sent in the FBI. | ||
| And I think in a number of these places that the young woman in Indianapolis, the mother of a three year old who was apparently shot over the weekend for saying all lives matter. | ||
| You know, that's a perfect example where she lost all of her civil rights because she's dead. | ||
| I think they ought to say, you know, we are now going to create strike forces that are going to be prepared to go into the south side of Chicago, prepared to go into New York. | ||
| Any place which has, is clearly spinning out of control. | ||
| If you, if you won't protect your own citizens, we will, because they're American citizens. | ||
| And I think we have to be prepared to be much more aggressive and much tougher about taking this on. | ||
| And then, lastly, we ought to create much bigger and more attractive opportunity zones with benefits so great and with education opportunities so great that we can actually begin to create jobs in the inner city everywhere in the country. | ||
| Are you worried with all that in mind that this mix between COVID and riots and protests is going to do sort of irreparable damage to small business across the board no matter what at this point? | ||
| Because if you weren't taken out by COVID, and now again with the lockdowns, if you somehow survived, I have a friend who called me yesterday who's a, she's a masseuse. | ||
| She usually goes to people's homes. | ||
| She can't go to people's homes anymore. | ||
| She got a little shop over the last couple of weeks, just a little one-room place. | ||
| Now they closed her down, and she's thinking of leaving California now, and she's not even sure what she's gonna do for a living anymore. | ||
| That the average person, you know, the corporations can basically deal with these big blows, but the average person just can't, you know, figure out a way to live if every month something crazy's gonna happen. | ||
| Look, I mean, even big corporations, Brooks Brothers, for example, which is a, you know, almost 200 year old company, may actually be 200 years old, has filed for bankruptcy. | ||
| United Airlines. | ||
| I mean, even really big places can get in trouble. | ||
| But the point you make is important at a couple of levels. | ||
| I work very closely with Alfredo Ortiz and the Job Creators Network, and they do terrific work. | ||
| Helping small businesses. | ||
| And we have been much more proactive than the Europeans at trying to help small businesses. | ||
| But I think one of the things you're going to see is people are going to leave California. | ||
| People are going to leave big cities. | ||
| I mean, I would not be at all surprised to see New York lose virtually everybody who has any resources just because the taxes are too high. | ||
| The streets are going to be unsafe again. | ||
| You know, people don't want to be in a place that's out of control. | ||
| If you look at Seattle, they have the most radical member of the city council talks about getting visas. | ||
| Now, visas is the richest guy in the world, so he's an obvious target if you're a socialist. | ||
| But if you want to drive Amazon out of King County and Seattle, you want to look at the, you know, this is what AOC did when she blocked them from going into her congressional district and cost that part of New York City 25,000 jobs. | ||
| And I don't think this will not surprise me one morning. | ||
| Bezos announced that Amazon was moving everything out of Seattle and the cost of the tax both directly from Amazon and indirectly from all the workers who would then leave would be just staggering. | ||
| I mean, it would turn that would turn Seattle into Detroit. | ||
| All right, so let's back up a little bit, because I know we can sort of focus on this for the entire hour, but I think your career sort of... Well, we could do several hours on this easily, but I think your career and some of the things that you have done might help sort of light a way that we can get out of some of this stuff. | ||
| So when you were Speaker of the House, Can you just talk a little bit about how Democrats and Republicans could or could not work together and what you think has happened that has led us to just, I mean, there's virtually none of it now, how you were able to make some of those fights and build some of those bridges or have some of those bridges burned? | ||
| Well, I would point out that in fact, when the crisis really hit this spring, the House and Senate did manage, and I give Steve Mnuchin Secretary of Treasury, some real credit. | ||
| But the House and Senate actually worked together and produced trillions of dollars in spending. | ||
| I mean, that was they did it pretty fast. | ||
| They did it pretty cleanly. | ||
| There also has been a steady stream of small bills that people can get together and agree on. | ||
| Lamar Alexander, the senator from Tennessee, is probably the best example that he's a genius at figuring out what they can do rather than what what they can't do. | ||
| But the key What we did was very explicit, and people who want to know about it can read a very simple small book by Tom Evans called The Education of Ronald Reagan. | ||
| Reagan had, after his movie career and his TV career, he ended up spending eight years working for General Electric. | ||
| And it was a really interesting story because he went around the country as a spokesperson. | ||
| He talked, he had about 375 speeches to factories. | ||
| So he had a lot of practice talking to blue collar workers, taking questions, being a celebrity, which was great preparation for running for governor. | ||
| And in the process, Reagan was in a period where he wouldn't fly an airplane. | ||
| He did a really bouncy flight in, I think, late 45. | ||
| So he did not fly an airplane again until 1965. | ||
| And so he went everywhere by train. | ||
| And the guy he worked for was a very conservative intellectual, the head of human relations and Union Relations at General Electric. | ||
| And so this guy would give Reagan conservative economic books. | ||
| So here you have Reagan driving, you know, riding across the country in a train, reading conservative economics, preparing his speeches. | ||
| Well, Reagan came up with a model, which he really got from this particular guy, which Reagan summarized in everyday language by saying, my job is to shine the light on the American people, so they will turn up the heat on Congress. | ||
| Well, what that meant was you had to have a program like three-year tax cuts that was popular enough that the American people would say to their congressmen, I really want you to pass this. | ||
| And I've been arguing, for example, that the administration should come out for a one-year holiday in the payroll tax because it would be enormously helpful. | ||
| You got me. | ||
| And the self-employed, and it would be more money in the pocket of every single working American. | ||
| And that would be the kind of popular proposal that you could then build heat on Pelosi, not because you're in the room negotiating with her, but because you're talking to the whole country and the country is telling her members, I really want you to vote for this. | ||
| So I really think that when, for example, when we finally passed, uh, welfare reform, uh, there was a time there was a poll, 92% of the country thought we should reform welfare. | ||
| Including 88% of people who are on welfare. | ||
| Well, at that point, half the Democrats voted with us. | ||
| It was 101 to 101 among Democrats because you went back home and people said, you are going to vote for this, aren't you? | ||
| And I think that's, that's the real keys is pick fights that are so popular that the American people will pressure the Congress into being for it. | ||
| Do you think that's a little more complex now because of the cult of personality around Trump or just the way the media talks about Trump or what people think about Trump or what they say about half the country, that getting anything that he wants done is gonna inherently be more difficult? | ||
| Well, I think to some extent it's more difficult, but on the other hand, they did a great job of focusing on their tax cuts. | ||
| They got them through, they got them approved, Those are certainly not things that the Democrats wanted to do. | ||
| He did a very good. | ||
| He's done a very good job building up the defense system and communicating why that's really important. | ||
| McConnell's done an amazing job getting in the Senate, getting conservative judges approved the most successful first term, I think, in American history. | ||
| So it's a mixed bag. | ||
| I think I think Trump finds it. | ||
| I think at times his Personal aggressiveness gets in the way of his effectiveness. | ||
| And I think that sometimes it's a little bit like the Green Bay Packers at their peak had a great running back named Jimmy Taylor who'd come from LSU. | ||
| And Taylor was an enormously strong guy. | ||
| And somebody made the comment one time that about the fifth year in the NFL, Taylor finally realized it was OK to go slow enough that the pulling guard could get ahead of you. | ||
| And could actually block for you. | ||
| You didn't have to go knock everybody down by yourself. | ||
| I think Trump has never quite learned the Jimmy Taylor lesson that, you know, there are lots of people who want to help the president when he picks the right big issues. | ||
| He could have a huge army of people talking about it, helping the Congress, getting it through. | ||
| But that requires a more slower paced and more leadership style rather than I can do it all myself. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Are you shocked in all your years doing this and in government and now in consulting how often it seems that the average person sort of doesn't know what's in their best interest? | ||
| Like something like you just mentioned about the payroll tax cut or just generally tax cuts. | ||
| I'm always for tax cuts. | ||
| You cut taxes on business, now people are gonna have more money. | ||
| You cut personal income tax, people are gonna have more money. | ||
| I would much rather people decide what to do with their money than the government. | ||
| But yet a huge percentage of people seem to think, oh, we just have to keep throwing money at things, no matter what the evidence says. | ||
| Is that like just one of the ongoing battles that you have to have sort of intellectually? | ||
| Part of it, as part of, remember, some of it's self-serving. | ||
| I mean, if you're a, racial studies graduate from Harvard. | ||
| And you have this great new idea for a program where the federal government will hire 600 racial studies experts to brainwash the rest of us. | ||
| I mean, you just figured out a whole new career for yourself. | ||
| If you're the teachers union, you know, you'd love to have more money. | ||
| I mean, that's I understand. | ||
| The same thing's true for the police union. | ||
| But I mean, so there's a certain amount of self aggrandizement. | ||
| There's a certain look. | ||
| There's a fair amount of Not thinking about this stuff for the practical reason that in a free society, most of the time, you shouldn't have to. | ||
| And our education system right now is so totally screwed up. | ||
| As Reagan once said, it's not what they don't know that's scary. | ||
| It's what they know that isn't true. | ||
| Let me say one more thing about this stuff. | ||
| One of the great lessons I learned was from a book by Tony Schwartz called The Election Game and How to Win. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| And wouldn't get the name of the title right now. | ||
| It's going to give you the wrong title. | ||
| Anyway, Tony Schwartz was a great radio consultant who then went into politics. | ||
| He did. | ||
| He did lots of radio ads and he was very good at understanding the idea that it's called the responsive cord. | ||
| His theory was he wanted to talk about something that was already in your brain. | ||
| So all he's doing is triggering the response. | ||
| He's not filling it up, but he had a very good sound rule. | ||
| He said never Underestimate the intelligence of the American people, nor overestimate the amount of information they have. | ||
| Very often they won't have the right information, and so they'll look like they don't know it. | ||
| But if you'll make sure to get them the right information, they will then figure out the right solution. | ||
| And I found in my career that was almost always true. | ||
| And I'm trying to convince, frankly, the Republicans this year that if they'll calmly and methodically run a very fact-based campaign, That they'll be shocked at how well they'll do. | ||
| For example, in a Pew poll recently, three out of four Americans oppose defunding the police. | ||
| Now, and frankly, of the 25% who are in favor of defunding, about half of them don't want to do very much. | ||
| So the really hardcore left-wing radicals are about 12 or 13% of the country. | ||
| Well, I mean, Republicans ought to be able to win that fight. | ||
| You ought to be able to beat a whole bunch of House Democrats who are running around and Senate Democrats. | ||
| And frankly, since Biden, you know, Biden is in this wishy-washy, well, I'm really not for totally defunding, but I'm for a little bit defunding. | ||
| That ain't going to cut it. | ||
| Not when you say to him, so two weekends ago, there were 152 Americans shot in New York and Chicago combined. 152. | ||
| So Mr. Biden, what's your answer to 152 Americans being shot? | ||
| And the truth is he has no answer. | ||
| Are you shocked then that they ended up going with Biden? | ||
| I mean, he's been around forever. | ||
| I know you're no fan of Hillary Clinton, but at least there was some base that was seriously excited about her, that's undeniable. | ||
| But I don't see anyone that's excited about Biden. | ||
| And if anything, You know, he's obviously having some cognitive problems and the media seems to be running cover for it. | ||
| And it's, I don't mean that to be glib or funny or anything. | ||
| I mean, it's sad in a way, but that there's no excitement behind this thing. | ||
| Do you think they're gonna regret that this was the choice? | ||
| Well, you actually got me to think something I hadn't thought about. | ||
| There's a fascinating, almost 180 degree opposite between the Republican selection process of 16 and the Biden process. | ||
| In 16, Trump kept knocking people out. | ||
| I mean, you know, he started, I think, with Jeb Bush, and he just methodically went after people and just kept knocking them out. | ||
| Biden passively allowed everybody else to shoot themselves. | ||
| So they would, you know, I mean, everybody got a shot at it. | ||
| Everybody had their moment in the sun and then they failed. | ||
| And so people say, well, not him or not her. | ||
| And Biden ultimately was, I think, relying on two things. | ||
| He started the dance with very high name ID. | ||
| I think only Sanders had equal name ID. | ||
| And second, he had spent eight years standing next to Barack Obama. | ||
| And in South Carolina, if you can carry the black vote in the Democratic primary, you will win the primary. | ||
| And his entire Reason for being was to set up. | ||
| Getting to South Carolina, so as long as he didn't knock himself out, none of the rest of them had the ability to knock him out. | ||
| And he just said to be standing there. | ||
| And then they did something very smart, which is I'm sure they work behind the scenes and they got three or four people to decide to endorse him as soon as he won South Carolina. | ||
| So you suddenly had this momentum of excitement that carries into Super Tuesday. | ||
| Think about it. | ||
| By Super Tuesday, you're down to Sanders, who, however far to the left Biden is, Sanders will always be 20 feet further to the left. | ||
| If Biden moves left, Sanders will move even further left. | ||
| So in the end, Sanders' base was probably 40 or 45% of the party. | ||
| Do you think we have to do anything? | ||
| I know you're not a Democrat, obviously, but on either side, as far as the primary process, you know, they run primaries very differently. | ||
| We saw the disaster in Iowa. | ||
| Do you think we just have to continue with this, or is there anything in modern times that we should do to change some of this? | ||
| I mean, look, I think the Democratic Party's incompetence in Iowa is just part of how badly structured their party is. | ||
| I mean, we had a very similar problem, by the way, in 12. | ||
| Because the truth was that Rick Santorum won Iowa. | ||
| The party chairman at that time called it for Romney. | ||
| It took six or seven days for it to be obvious that it was Santorum. | ||
| So Santorum lost all of the advantage he would have had going into New Hampshire. | ||
| Romney had a false advantage. | ||
| And the state chairman, I think, was in fact economically leaning towards Romney. | ||
| In ways that were totally inappropriate. | ||
| He had to resign. | ||
| So I mean, we've had some of our own problems with this stuff, but I think the primary process at one level is really a good thing. | ||
| Because it does allow you. | ||
| To go out and meet people now. | ||
| The challenge is going to be. | ||
| As we move into this age of social media on a giant scale. | ||
| Whether or not it makes sense just because. | ||
| You know, we've been in the middle of a full-blown presidential race, I would guess, for a year now. | ||
| And in that sense, it's not clear to me how things will evolve in the future. | ||
| But we also had absolute proof, for example, that Bloomberg spent a couple hundred million dollars and got nowhere. | ||
| Because in the end, when you watched him on a debate stage, you just knew, This guy was impossible. | ||
| So, you know, it's business how it shakes things out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When you were watching Bloomberg in those two or three debates, I mean, as a guy that was a great, and are, you are a great debater. | ||
| I mean, you knew how to use the crowd. | ||
| You knew how to use humor. | ||
| You knew how to, you know, directly go after opponent. | ||
| It must've been sort of painful for you to watch some of these guys that just have no idea how to debate. | ||
| Is it painful or is it shocking or do you feel good about yourself out there? | ||
| No, it's fun. | ||
| I mean, look, as long as it's the other side, I'm happy for them to be incompetent. | ||
| You know, I don't I don't feel like I have an obligation to say this is not like an ice skating competition where I'm going to give them a nine or an eight. | ||
| You know, so I watch some of it. | ||
| I don't actually watch probably as much as I should just because I think it's boring and I can only take so much of it. | ||
| But I'll tell you, in 16, And late 15, I guess I really started in the summer of 15. | ||
| I remember the first Fox debate, which was the first debate of the 2016 cycle. | ||
| And that's the one where Megyn Kelly and Donald Trump, you know, this knockdown dragout fight. | ||
| And I was sitting at home with Calista. | ||
| We were watching the debate, but I was also watching all the various online, you know, like Time Magazine and Vogue and a whole bunch of, there were all sorts of places you could go to register. | ||
| Who you thought won. | ||
| And about an hour and a half after the debate, and I watched once and what I thought was one of the most inaccurate focus groups he'd ever done. | ||
| I like Frank a lot, we're old friends. | ||
| But what happened was, you'd have to be very careful in things like focus groups, because a group mindset will set in. | ||
| And if people conclude, He must have done bad because she said he did bad, so he must have done bad. | ||
| I don't want to be the guy that said he did good. | ||
| So what was happening was all of the experts were trashing Trump. | ||
| Luntz's focus group was trashing Trump. | ||
| But in a field of 16 candidates, he was getting 60 to 70 percent of the vote in these online surveys. | ||
| And I remember turning to Calista about midnight, I guess, and saying, as a historian, there's an anomaly building here. | ||
| The gap between Lead opinion and the average American is getting so big that we should watch this carefully because something's going on we don't understand. | ||
| And that's really how I approach that. | ||
| I use a model of listen, learn, help, and lead. | ||
| And I really find that the world's so big and changes so constantly that I have to listen and learn all the time. | ||
| And so I approach every activity with a, I wonder what I'll learn from it. | ||
| Huh, you'll probably find this interesting, actually, when I had David Horowitz on, who I'm sure you either know or certainly know of his work. | ||
| I asked him when did he realize that Trump was the real deal, and he said it was the exact moment that Trump got into the fight with Megyn Kelly, because he realized nobody else would have ever done it, and that was it, and he fully went there. | ||
| Let's talk a little bit about history, though, because we seem to be in this time where we're erasing history. | ||
| Is there... | ||
| Is there something that, for my younger audience, some piece of American history that maybe isn't the most known piece that you think people should know more about that might help us get a lens on what's going on now? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I wrote three novels about the Revolutionary War and four novels about the, | ||
| or no, four novels about the Civil War. | ||
| And I think the most amazing moment in the history of America is Christmas night, 1776. | ||
| 1776. | ||
| [BLANK_AUDIO] | ||
| We did it in a book called The Times that Try Men's Souls, which is the quote from Haynes' The Crisis. | ||
| Washington's army has shrunk from 30,000 in September to about 2,500. | ||
| And they have a council of war, and Washington says, Oh, most of these guys, uh, enlistments end and first or second week of January. | ||
| And if we don't do something with the army, we'll disappear. | ||
| And he says, none, all of us in this room have no risk because if the army disappears, we're all going to be hung. | ||
| So we can take really big risks because our life's already forfeit. | ||
| And so he came up with a plan. | ||
| It was too complicated. | ||
| To cross a icy river in the middle of a snowstorm at night in three different places, he would lead the main elements. | ||
| He had, as a sign of great leadership, he had taken Thomas Paine, who had written an amazing pamphlet called Common Sense, which explained the Revolutionary War to everyday people. | ||
| And Paine had enlisted as a rifleman. | ||
| And on the way through New Jersey, Washington took him aside and said, Go to Philadelphia and write a pamphlet that explains why, what do we do? | ||
| We all thought this was going to be easy. | ||
| Well, it's going to be hard and we need somebody to explain it to us. | ||
| So Paine literally had gone to Philadelphia and wrote The Crisis. | ||
| Washington had his officers read from the opening chapter of The Crisis as the men got in the boats to cross the river. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| When they finished crossing the river, They marched eight miles in a snowstorm at night. | ||
| One third of them did not have boots and had wrapped their feet in burlap bags. | ||
| The next morning they surprised the professional German soldiers, captured 800 of them, and ran like crazy and crossed the river before the British Army could get there. | ||
| The news of that victory brought 15,000 volunteers in two weeks. | ||
| It's the decisive moment of the war. | ||
| Now, I cite that for younger people because all of these totally uninformed idiots who downplay Washington have no idea what real life is. | ||
| You know, real life is not being coddled in some university, surrounded by people who make sure you have a safe space. | ||
| Real life is facing gigantic challenges and finding the character and the courage and the endurance to build something, to do something real. | ||
| And this country stands on George Washington's shoulders. | ||
| We would not have won the Revolutionary War without him. | ||
| We might not have gotten the Constitutional Convention without him. | ||
| And he served as our first president for eight years and established precedents, which to this day are the mark of freedom. | ||
| And I would just say it is tragic that we've allowed three generations of brainwashing to destroy the understanding of the real America for millions of young Americans. | ||
| Well, it's an inspirational story, but I can't end with that. | ||
| So we're going to have to end, I can't end with that sort of, I can't end with that sort of ending of what we've done to the three generations. | ||
| So let's, let's clean it up. | ||
| Let's clean it up in a way I know you, you will do well, which is for all of the people that are worried right now, they're worried about their jobs. | ||
| They're worried about the political polarization. | ||
| They're worried about lockdowns and COVID and everything else. | ||
| Can you paint a bit of a future that they can be hopeful for that can get us out of this? | ||
|
unidentified
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Sure. | |
| I mean, you see it beginning to happen all around you. | ||
| We're going to have an explosive increase in the ability to educate people. | ||
| The recent announcements by Amazon and Google and others and Apple, we're going to have remarkable capacity for people to go and get great jobs. | ||
| We're going to become, once again, the number one industrial country in the world. | ||
| We're going to remain the number one producer of energy in the world. | ||
| We're going to get to the moon by 2024. | ||
| We're going to be on Mars by 2033. | ||
| Our children and grandchildren are going to be literally mining asteroids and running commercial hotels in space. | ||
| We will have breakthroughs in medicine. | ||
| We're about to have, I think, a cure for sickle cell anemia, which will be of enormous importance to the black community. | ||
| When we get aging declared as a disease so that the NIH can actually focus on lengthening lives, I think the odds are very good that we are going to have something like the average person living very healthily to 110 or 120. | ||
| Not getting ancient, but literally being active and having a full life. | ||
| So, I think the long run trajectory of the human race is pretty good. | ||
| Do we have problems? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| We've always had problems. | ||
| It's the nature of life. | ||
| But I think that young people have every reason to believe that by the end of their lives, the world will be more interesting, more exciting, more prosperous, and the opportunity for adventure will be even greater. | ||
| I knew you could do it, Mr. Speaker. | ||
| How do we, where should I send people? | ||
| You've got like a thousand websites and a million projects. | ||
| Where can we send people to? | ||
| You're not retiring anytime soon, I know that. | ||
| My newsletters, my podcasts, my books, all those things are Gingrich360. | ||
| They can also of course get the books at either Barnes and Noble, Amazon, or any major bookstore. | ||
| And I'm very proud of Trump and the American future, because I think it captures some of this extraordinary gap between A bad future with the left and an amazingly good future if we win this election this fall. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
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