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This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.
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Why should you listen to Armstrong and Getty on demand? We're not boring. A lot of news is boring and tedious and depressing. It makes you angry. You don't want to live your life like that. Hey, I'm Jack Armstrong. He's Joe Getty. We're Armstrong and Getty. We try to bring you the truth and help you figure out this crazy modern world.
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How about something about a comedic tone?
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We have a winner. Yes. Listen to Armstrong and Getty on Demand on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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What God started in my life, he's
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going to finish the Joel Osteen Daily Podcast.
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Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life. What was meant for my harm? Lord, I want to thank you. Right now, you're turning to my advantage.
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Your daily source of hope and encouragement.
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Your second wind is on its way. God is about to breathe on your life in a new way.
D
Listen to the Joel Osteen Daily podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your favorite podcast.
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Welcome to Newts World podcast on the iHeart podcast network. This past week, something happened that I've been thinking about since I was a young man studying history. We crossed a threshold that no other nation on earth has crossed in quite the same way. 250 years since a room of merchants, farmers, lawyers and revolutionaries in Philadelphia signed their names to a document that said, in effect, that people don't need a king to tell them who they are. I watched the coverage of the ceremony at Independence National Historic park, the bearing of the new time capsule alongside relics from 1976. And I found myself asking a question I think every American should be asking this week. What would we put in a time capsule today that tells the truth about who we are right now? Because here's the thing about this particular Fourth of July. It didn't unfold the way anyone planned it. A heat dome settled over more than half the country. 185 million Americans under heat alerts, fireworks shows cancelled from Alabama to Connecticut. And Tragically, at least 25 of our fellow citizens lost their lives to the heat. Meanwhile, halfway around the world, our fellow Americans in the northern Marian Islands were digging out from a Super Typhoon. The 250th birthday of America arrived in the middle of a genuine national stress test. Now, I want to be careful here because there's a tendency in our politics to turn every week into either a five alarm ideological argument or a greeting card. I don't want to do either. I want to do what I think this show has always tried to do. Look at what actually happened and ask what history teaches us about how a serious country responds. Here's what I keep coming back to. The founders didn't declare independence because they thought the future would be easy. They declared it because they believed self government, messy, difficult, occasionally overwhelmed by a heat wave or a hurricane, was still better than the alternative. They bet that free people, given the tools and the responsibility, would build the most resilient civilization in history. And by almost any measure, they were right. But resilience isn't automatic. It's a choice. We renew every generation when a heat dome kills 25Americans and forces cancellations across the dozen states. That's not just a weather story. It's a test of whether our power grids, our emergency systems, our local governments are actually built for the century we live in, not the one we remember. I've said for years that America's infrastructure, from the electrical grid to emergency response, has to be modernized with the same urgency we once put into the interstate highway system or the moon program. This week is exactly why. And there's a second lesson buried in this anniversary. 250 years is a long time. Most nations don't make it. Most systems of government collapse into tyranny, are dissolving the chaos. The reason America is still here, still arguing, still building, still, yes, bearing time capsules for the next generation, is that we build a system designed to survive bad leaders, bad weather and bad decades. That's not an accident. That's engineering, constitutional engineering by people who had read enough history to know that human nature doesn't change. So the system has to be strong enough to contain it. So my challenge to you this week as we come off this anniversary is simple. Don't just celebrate the 250 years that already happened. Ask what you're doing to make sure there's a 300th anniversary worth celebrating. That means showing up locally. It means demanding to people who run our power grids and our emergency management systems actually modernize instead of just issuing press releases. And it means remembering, especially when the temperature outside makes everyone irritable and short tempered, that the people who built the country did it without air conditioning, without emergency alerts in their phones. And they still bet everything on the idea that free people working together can solve harder problems than the ones we face today. That's the story I wanted to tell you this week. Coming up, historian and novelist Johanna Newman joins me to Discuss her new book in which six Founding Fathers and one Founding Mother return to Earth for America's 250th birthday and find themselves smack in the middle of 21st century Washington. That's next.
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Why should you listen to Armstrong and Getty on demand?
D
We're not boring.
B
A lot of news is boring and tedious and depressing and makes you angry. You don't want to live your life like that. Hey, I'm Jack Armstrong. He's Joe Getty. We're Armstrong and Getty. We try to bring you the truth and help you. You figure out this crazy modern world
A
about something about a comedic tone.
B
We have a winner. Yes. Listen to Armstrong. You get it on Demand on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
C
What God started in my life, he's
D
going to finish the Joel Osteen Daily Podcast.
C
Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life. What was meant for my harm? Lord, I want to thank you. Right now you're turning to my advantage.
D
Your daily source of hope and encouragement.
C
Your second wind is on its way. God is about to breathe on your life in a new way.
D
Listen to the Joel Osteen Daily podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your favorite podcasts,
E
I am really pleased to welcome my guest, Johanna Newman. Johanna Newman is a writer, historian and political blogger at Substack's Make Orwell Fiction Again. A former Nieman Fellow at Harvard, she covered the White House, the State Department and Congress for USA Today and the Los Angeles Times. After earning her Ph.D. in history from American University, she wrote Gilded Suffragists, the New York Socialites who Fought for Women's right to Vote, which won an Independent Publisher's Book Award. And she's joining me to discuss her new historical novel, Trump's Superpower, a historical novel about the Founding Fathers and one Founding Mother, published by Post Hill Press, in which George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Mercy, Otis, Warren and their peers are summoned back to earth and thrust in today's culture war. Johanna, welcome and thank you for joining me on Newts World. I think you have a very creative mind.
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Well, thank you. I've been called worse.
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Look, before you got into history books, how did a kid from Los Angeles end up in political journalism?
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I suppose you could say I was raised on politics at the dinner table. My parents were very keenly political and deeply Democrat, but I also, I always had an affinity for writing. I was a shy child and I always Found that I could express myself better in words than I could in eye to eye contact. So it wasn't natural for me.
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So you went to Berkeley?
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Yeah, I went to Berkeley from the
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University of Southern California, Yeah.
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And when I was there, Newt, they were still teaching, and I remember it so clearly. They made it sound like a great concession. We no longer require you to be objective, but we are asking you to be fair. And I laugh about it now because I don't think they're even teaching that. I think they're teaching fidelity to your tribe or something.
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It's a different animal today, but nonetheless, when you got done, you started by covering City hall in Los Angeles and the State Capitol in Sacramento, which is, I think, must have been fascinating because both of them, in their own unique way, are snake pits. There's so much energy and personality in California that for a very long time it was the site of some of America's best detective writing. Did you find it fun covering City hall and covering the State Capitol?
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I did. You know, I was working for a legal trade paper and I had. We never had a high much of a presence at City hall, so I began by offering to do profiles of each council member in length. I took like a whole page, a copy, and they were sufficiently flattering with some barbs in between the lines, but they loved them. People couldn't wait for me to approach them. And I thought, oh, good, we're on the map. And then this veteran reporter from the LA Times took me aside one day and he said, I run this building, you better watch your step. So I was like, whoa, this is like the Mafia or something. And then pretty soon afterwards, they transferred me up to Sacramento, which Jerry Brown was governor. The corruption was. You could smell it.
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Jerry's first cycle as governor. He was both brilliant and I always thought he was deliberately eccentric. He would build a real head of steam and then punch himself in the face to slow things down and do something weird. But I'm intrigued with your career because you're basically a West coast girl and all of a sudden you're going to Mississippi.
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I had been three years as a journalist and I thought I was ready for the big time. So I wrote to the New York Times and they said, you know, we don't look at anyone before five years, so just keep working on your clips. So I didn't want to stay in California anymore, and I started asking around if people knew of anything. And I heard about this newspaper in Mississippi, Jackson, that was trying to turn itself around. It was owned by A family, the Hederman family. And they were known for real racist headlines and coverage. And they had turned it over to their son, Ray Hederman, who was starting to bring in kids from all over the country to this experiment of importing journalism to a paper that had been more propaganda. Of course, you have to remember this was at the time of Woodward and Bernstein, and every journalist in every kid in the country wanted to be like them. So there were a lot of applicants, a lot of craziness. But I went. They flew me in for an interview. And I remember I was scared to death because of the stereotypes, I suppose, and because I was a Berkeley grad. I arrived and I got in the cab and they asked to go to the Clarion Ledger. And the cabbie said, have you heard about the governor? And I said, well, no. What happened? And he said, well, they said that his wife's elder then shot on me. So by the time I got to the newspaper, I was sort of shocked. And I walked into Ray Hederman's office and I said, what's this I hear about the governor's wife shooting the governor? It was sort of like, you're hired. So he said, I've been trying to get to someone.
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So did you cover that story?
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Yeah, I covered everything. The governor was a real character. It was sort of a mystery how he got in, because he was not the candidate of the establishment. It was called the Redneck White Neck Coalition, but he was not an establishment person. And so there were all kinds of stories about corruption. And I covered one where his bank commissioner was going around the state telling banks that if they wanted that branch approved, they better pony up to the governor's campaign. They're just not legal. So we had some headlines. And then at some point, Ray Hederman, about two years in, he came up to me and he said, and you will appreciate this, he said, we will never have respect unless we have a Washington bureau. So I want you to get in your Dodson and drive up there and open a bureau. And Newt, it is the most, through this day, remains the most difficult thing I ever did. Because the Mississippi delegation, which featured, you know, Lott, Dennis, they were accustomed to getting their press releases as written into the Jackson newspapers. And then here I come along and I ask sort of rudimentary questions about campaign finance. And there was one guy in delegation who was number one or two in travel, in the House. Anyway, it was combustible. It was all combustible. And after about nine months, the delegation was protesting so loudly that Ray Hederman thought he should come up and calm them down. I remember once I was introducing him to all of these guys and we were walking away in the House office. I forget which house office building, but Rayburn, I think I'm 54 on a good day and Ray was 6 4. So I'm looking up at him and I thought, oh man, he's going to have to do something to slap me on the wrist or something to communicate to these powerful people that, you know, I work for him. And I looked up and he said, well, it seems like you've hit a sore spot. Now is the time to bore in. And I just thought, my God, I work for a publisher with a spine. This is a glorious, glorious day.
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After You've been in D.C. for a couple years, you then end up at Harvard. How'd that happen?
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I was exhausted and I applied. This was a fellowship for sort of mid career journalists who need a year to recover and just to think and read. It's a glorious fellowship because you can audit all the classes you want without having to do any of the tests or finals or papers. You just absorb. And it was a gift. It was a real gift. But by the time I came back to Washington, the paper had been sold to Gannett. And so I became part of the Gannett News Bureau. And they asked me what I wanted to cover. And I said, what have you brought? And they said, agriculture, which I knew nothing about, but knew I did know a lot about politics and government. And so I started covering agriculture as a metaphor. I would track how the dairy people traded their vote for the soy people and how they all scratch each other's backs and why nothing ever happened on the farm bill. So after that they said, you did a good job. Would you like to come to the White House? And I always joke with young people that I doubt very much anyone else has gone straight from USDA to the White House, but there it is.
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Did you like covering the White House?
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Well, yes. I had Reagan and I loved it. I really loved it. And it changed me from a predictable liberal to a question mark. I thought he was so charming and I thought he was right on the matrix of right and wrong. You know, communism versus capitalism. I thought he was right and it affected me deeply.
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And then you got to cover Jim Baker, which I always thought was one of the keys to Reagan's effectiveness because Baker was such a remarkably competent person.
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He was unbelievable. He taught me an awful lot. You know, when you travel with the White House, as you know, there's Just a big charter that travels either ahead of the president or behind. And you're like, with over a hundred people and your access is quite limited. But with the State Department, there were only about 10 or 12 of us who regularly traveled with him. And we would travel on his plane and he would come back during the flights. And in those years, we were doing a lot of Middle east shuttling. I learned from watching him he was a man who came up out of politics, who understood local politics. So if we were in Israel, he knew just how far he could push Shamir before Shamir would have trouble on his right. And he knew this in all the worlds that we went to. And I just thought he was tremendous. My first book, which I don't think is very good, so I'm not recommending it, it's called Lights, Camera War. But it was sparked by my time covering Baker because I noticed that Real time television, which in those days was cnn, was sort of changing diplomacy. And Baker was the best example of that. I remember we were in a base, a US Base, I think, in Saudi, and he made a big speech about Saddam, you better do what we want. And it just occurred to me that it was better for him and faster to communicate that through the airwaves of CNN than it was through a diplomatic pouch. And that's the beginning of that book. I thought Baker was brilliant and also very noble because like George Washington, who gave his sword up at the end of the war, who declined to run for a third term, he knew how to make a graceful exit.
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I have enormous admiration for him. When we come back, we'll go back to Johanna's first book, Gilded Suffragists and the Fifth Avenue socialites who turned the women's vote into the most fashionable cause in America.
B
Why should you listen to Armstrong and Getty on demand? We're not boring. A lot of news is boring and tedious and depressing and makes you angry. You don't want to live your life like that. Hey, I'm Jack Armstrong. He's Joe Getty. We're Armstrong and Getty. We try to bring you the truth and help you figure out this crazy
A
modern world about something, about a comedic tone.
B
We have a winner. Yes, listen to Armstrong and Getty on Demand on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
C
What God started in my life, he's
D
going to finish the Joel Osteen Daily Podcast.
C
Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of what was meant for my harm Lord, I want to thank you. Right now, you're turning to my advantage.
D
Your daily source of hope and encouragement.
C
Your second wind is on its way. God is about to breathe on your life in a new way.
D
Listen to the Joel Osteen daily podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your favorite podcasts.
E
What led you to write that book? Gilded suffragists and the Fifth Avenue socialites who turned the women's vote into the most fashionable cause in America.
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Well, I was in history. I had gone back to school to get my PhD in history at American University. And just as an aside, I. Because this comes up in the second book, I noticed right away that the curriculum had no listing for a course on the American Revolution. And I remember I went up to a professor and I asked why? And she said, well, we don't consider it a revolution. We consider it sort of a course correction. That's when I knew that I was going to have to keep my critical thinking skills to myself to get through this passage. But this was my dissertation, and I was very interested always in how women got the right to vote. And I started by looking at the 19th century, the matriarchs, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. And they. At some point I thought, I'll just do something called frenemies, because they had all this tension between them, even though they were very tight. But I just decided at the end they were miserable. They were just not fine people. And when the 15th amendment was proposed by the radical reformers in Congress, they campaigned around the country to defeat it. And their argument was so specious. Their argument was, if women can't have the vote now, then neither can black slaves. And there was such an insipid racism in it. And I just thought, if I spend three years with these people, I'm going to get very depressed. So I thought, let me look to the 1910s and see what finally pushed this thing over the front finish line. And I started reading the newspapers of the day, which were many, and I saw mention of these very fashionable, trendy socialites. And I thought, well, this is kind of interesting. The more I delved into it, the more I understood that, like Oprah, not so much anymore, but like she used to be, if she endorsed anything, it could be shampoo, it could be a book. If Oprah endorsed it, you were golden. And that same thing happened with these women. They were such fashion plates, they were such media celebrities. They were all married to incredibly wealthy men, and they all had huge mansions and estates to run. So they were very entrepreneurial, or at least good managers. And this is the book documenting how when they endorsed this issue that had been in the doldrums for decades, that was a backwater issue. All of a sudden it had buzz and excitement and young people. And so as you do when you're writing a dissertation, you worry that someone else is thinking along the same lines and will beat you to it. But in this case, it wasn't something that academia was ever going to report on because they were not interested in the wealthy.
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That's interesting. In a sense, it was fashion which carried politics.
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Yes, very well put.
E
That's fascinating.
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I mean, you can find those clips that I have of them showing up at an event or leaving their own suffrage event, and the reporter will include a description of their clothes or the decor. Because they were such entrepreneurial women, they tended to set up their own suffrage organizations. They didn't want to play with the mainstream one. And so I remember Catherine Mackey opened her suffrage organization on Fifth Avenue and the press went crazy. They described the decor, what she wore, her greatest fashion hits. It's rare that you laugh on reading microfilm, but I did.
E
But then you also sort of indicate that they then sort of went into Orwell's memory bin. Then, once it was over, it was somehow inappropriate to admit that these fashion plates had played a major role.
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Yes, because the mainstream organizations, which had toiled for decades, they wanted the credit and they weren't about to share, would be like the National Education association admitting that Moms for Liberty had helped their cause. It was an odd alliance.
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When we come back, six founding fathers and one founding mother touched down in today's Washington, D.C. and Johanna will tell us exactly what she means by the title Trump's Superpower.
B
Why should you listen to Armstrong and Getty on demand? We're not boring. A lot of news is boring and tedious and depressing and makes you angry. You don't want to live your life like that. Hey, I'm Jack Armstrong. He's Joe Getty. We're Armstrong and Getty. We try to bring you the truth and help you figure out this crazy
A
modern world about something about a comedic tone.
B
We have a winner. Yes, listen to Armstrong and Yeti on Demand on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
D
The Joel Osteen Daily Podcast.
C
God's plans for you are for good.
D
BNC inspired.
C
Get ready. God is about to exceed your expectations.
D
Joel Osteen Daily Podcast.
C
You are coming out of that dry place into More than enough daily encouragement
D
right when you need it.
C
There are opportunities in your future bigger than you can imagine.
D
Listen to the Joel Osteen Daily podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite podcasts.
E
I think in this particular era, figuring out a title Trump's Superpower, by itself is an act of artistic achievement. So this is a very audacious and interesting idea. Did it pop in your head one morning, or how did it evolve?
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Well, it's funny, speaking of Moms for Liberty, I was in D.C. for one of their conferences, and I had a little time one morning, so I ran over to the National Archives, where, as you know, in the rotunda we house our foundational documents. And they're kept under dark conditions to preserve the signatures, and it's very cold in the room and so forth. But a couple of months earlier, two environmental crazies had snuck in there and thrown this red chemical powder all over the glass cases. And the archives closed for four days. Conservators took four days to make sure that the documents were not affected. And I wanted to make sure for myself. So I went over there and I got in line and I walked through and I was just so sort of moved again, you know, every time you see those documents, it's just stirring. And as I walked the rotunda, I thought, I wonder what they would think of us now. I wonder what the founders would think of the country we have become. And that was the germ of the book. And I got back and started researching them. By this time, also in 2024, President Trump and of course, I was addicted to his rallies, but he was mentioning America 250 in almost every speech. And I don't think anyone else was talking about it back then. In fact, I asked AI when his first mention was of the holiday, and Grok said it was in his State of the Union in 2017. So it was top of mind for Trump for a long time. The reason I called it Trump Superpower is because I really believed that he was standing on the shoulders of these people and that he understood that there had been this war of more than a century to diminish the founders and the founding, and that if he really wanted to make the country great again, he was going to have to rescue them from the attacks of the universities and the media. And that's, I believe, what he has done I loved. One of the energy of the book, for me, is that I was able to combine what I knew of politics with what I knew of history. One of my favorite chapters is the White House dinner where the founders come. Everybody in town wants to come. There's an ongoing debate about whether these are really from heaven or just great actors who have mastered their parts of brilliantly. And Trapp, of course, treats it like it doesn't matter to him. You know, whatever they are, he's thrilled. And he rises in a toast to them and, you know, he's sitting between Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. So the photographers are going crazy. And it just. For me, because I had been blessed to be a guest at White House dinners, I knew something of the architecture of that kind of event, and I knew there was a lot of table hopping. And so some of my bitter moments in that book are famous Washington figures talking to each other. And so that's the magic for me. And what would they say? I mean, there's one scene where they come to the archives for rehearsals for the. For the reenactment that they're supposedly in, and they encounter protesters and Newt, they have signs, you know, we want our history back. And Mercy Otis says to one of them, what do they want? They said, well, they want us to disappear. And she said, so we're the British now. So I had fun in those moments, sort of trying to spotlight the hypocrisies of culture war and the primacy of the founders.
E
What did you mean by Trump's superpower?
A
I believe that he draws strength from them. I believe he absorbed their stories and their importance to America and culture. And he's using is his greatest strength. He's using it to forward his cause. And I noticed after this really joyous weekend, this long, almost drunken celebration of our founding, and I was just going to write something for my blog about this. I think the founders are trending again, Newt. I mean, they're popular again, this movie, the Young George Washington. I went to see it on the 4th of July at 1 o' clock in the afternoon, and there were 50 people in the theater. And it's doing very well at the box office. And now they're talking about a sequel called 1776. This is all from Angel Studios. You have to wonder. And then I noticed this morning there was a debate on the Smithsonian and what they have done to it, which I feature prominently in my book. So I was very happy to see that. It's almost like history, which was so long considered an unnecessary skill, seems to be fashionable again.
E
I think that this is amazing and fascinating. I really wish you well with it. You're actually getting right at the heart of the cultural fight that we're in the middle of. And I think you're doing it in a very, very clever way. I am truly delighted. I want to thank you for joining me. I want to remind everyone your new novel, Trump's Superpower, a historical novel about the Founding Fathers and one Founding mother, published by Post Hill Press. It's available now wherever books are sold. You've made my afternoon as a fellow historian, so I thank you so much for being with us.
A
And you have made Maureen thank you.
E
Thank you to my guest, Johanna Newman. Newt's World is produced by Gingrich360 and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Garnesy Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. Special thanks to the team at Gingrich 360. If you've been enjoying Newts World, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate us with five stars and give us a review so others can learn what it's all about. Join me on substack@gingrich360.net I'm Newt Gingrich. This is Newts World.
A
Foreign.
B
Getty on Demand. We're not boring. A lot of news is boring and tedious and depressing and makes you angry. You don't want to live your life like that. Hey, I'm Jack Armstrong. He's Joe Getty. We're Armstrong and Getty. We try to bring you the truth and help you figure out this crazy
A
modern world about something about a comedic tone.
B
We have a winner. Yes. Listen to Armstrong and Yeti on Demand on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
D
The Joel Osteen Daily Podcast.
C
God's plans for you are for good.
D
Be inspired.
C
Get ready. God is about to exceed your expectations.
D
Joel Osteen Daily Podcast.
C
You are coming out of that dry place into more than enough daily encouragement
D
right when you need it.
C
There are opportunities in your future bigger than you can imagine.
D
Listen to the Joel Osteen Daily podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your favorite podcasts.
A
This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.
Host: Newt Gingrich
Guest: Johanna Newman
Date: July 11, 2026
This episode is a layered reflection on America's 250th anniversary, the resilience of its founding ideals amid current challenges, and the ways in which historical memory is shaped, revived, and wielded during cultural conflicts. Newt Gingrich is joined by historian and novelist Johanna Newman, who discusses her new novel, "Trump's Superpower," a speculative and satirical story in which the Founding Fathers (and one Founding Mother) return to contemporary America during this anniversary year. Together, they explore history’s ongoing influence on politics, culture wars, and America’s sense of itself.
[01:08–05:43]
[06:49–17:35]
[21:20–26:01]
[28:02–34:40]
[33:40–34:40]
For listeners seeking inspiration, historical perspective, or insight into how America’s self-understanding evolves with each generation, this conversation is both thought-provoking and entertaining.