C (4:51)

On this episode of Newts World. Calista and I were guests of Speaker Mike Johnson at President Donald J. Trump's address to the joint session of Congress. Our seats were directly above the House Democrats. It was an amazing place to be. On the one hand, we could see President Trump clearly. We were directly across from the first lady and her guests, and directly below us were the Democrats. So I want to share with you what it was like to be in the House chamber on Tuesday night. I want to start by just talking in general about what a night like that is like. Calista and I arrived early. We went to Speaker Johnson's office where there was a reception, and it was a very efficient way to see a heck of a lot of congressmen and their friends. So we chatted with folks and I dropped in briefly to discuss with Speaker Johnson the possibility of the Democrats trying to be disruptive. He was totally prepared. He and the Sergeant Arms had been working through it for the previous week, and they knew that it was possible and they knew that they were going to handle it in a very firm and authoritative way. So then we wandered over to our seats. We'd been assigned two seats in Speaker Johnson's section, which is directly across from the First Ladies area, and has a great view of President Trump. But also put us directly above the Democrats, which was kind of fun to watch and see how they were reacting, what they were doing. So you get there early for good reason, because it's a little bit complicated and confusing and there's not much space, and people often go to the wrong place and find they're in the wrong seat and they've got to get up and move around. So that went on for a while. Then you gradually have the buildup. The Supreme Court arrives, the diplomats arrive, the military leadership is already there. And then the final big buildup, of course, you have the US Senate come in, and it's all very slow, takes a lot of time because they're all politicians and they're all chatting with each other. So it's a very effective way. Having done this for many years, I can tell you the amount of business you can get done before the speech, because everybody's there. There are no constituents, there's no staff, there's no news media, and you're just talking one on one with all sorts of folks. And that was going on now. Interesting side note, going back to the French Revolution, which happened to be very close to the way the U.S. house is organized, they had a dividing line down the middle, and they had a right and a left, which is based actually on the language of the French Revolution. I remember at one point we were on the Republican side, which, if you're the president looking out, is ironically on your left and the Democratic side is on your right. And we were there at one point, at one of our first meetings with Ronald Reagan, all the Republicans were gathered up. We were all sitting over on the left, exactly where Republicans sit today. He came down the middle aisle, went over to the Democrat microphone, and we're all staring. What is he doing? And he looked up for a minute, he said, oh, yeah, this is where I used to be. Walked over and Talked to us from the Republican microphone. Well, all of these folks are there, and you'll see some of them. For example, Marcy Kaptor is a great example. She's a Democratic congresswoman who has survived miraculously in a series of close races in Toledo, Ohio. She always sits herself right on the center aisle so that when the president comes in, she'll be able to say hi to him and be on camera. And there are certain people who do this. They'll go in very early and they'll seize these seats and almost hold them like personal property. So finally comes the big moment, and they send out the committee to escort the president in. I had this strange experience when I first got elected in 1978, in January of 79, Jimmy Carter, president Carter was coming to give his State of the Union. And back then, they don't do it this way now, but back then the home state delegation was the escort committee. And so the ground rule was that the senior Democrat and the senior Republican came in immediately behind the President. Now, I've been in office about 30 days, and because I was the only Republican, I was by definition the senior Republican. So I ended up walking in literally directly behind the President of the United States. A good friend of mine who had supported me said that he fell off his couch wondering how I had gotten promoted that rapidly, when, of course, the whole thing was just an accident. They now appoint the leadership from the House and the Senate, both Democrat and Republican. And a number of Democrats did not go to join the escort committee, which was sort of in their mind, I guess, a slap at President Trump. They announced the President of the United States. And of course, by this stage, you have the speaker of the House, who is the actual host of for the event, because it's in the House chamber, and you have the Vice President in his role as President of the Senate. So that's why those two sit up behind the President, because the president, in fact, is their guest. So he's there in a sense subordinated to them in terms of procedure, although he's obviously the President of the United States. So they announce the president, he comes in, and of course, you now have a 10 minute trying to get to the front because everybody wants to shake his hand, everybody wants to say something to him, and he's very good at dealing with people and he doesn't mind it being slow. He knows the whole country is watching, the cameras are right on him, and it makes him bigger, more important. This whole time, of course, we are all standing, giving him a standing ovation for about 10 solid minutes. He comes up front and if you'll notice, he always hands a copy of his speech to the vice president and a copy of his speech to the Speaker. This is a ritual that has been going on for a very long time. In 1996, for the state of the Union, which is the one where Bill Clinton says that the era of big government is over and basically he's going to work with the House Republicans. He comes in, Al Gore, who at that time was the Vice president and therefore President of the Senate. Al Gore and I are sitting up there. Clinton comes in, walks over, hands me an envelope, which is not the speech. I look at it for a second, I look at Gore. We both shrug. I open it, and it's a letter that says, to Speaker Newt Gingrich from President William Jefferson Clinton. You're right, I resign. We're both broken up. Laughing. It comes and says, oh, I gave you the wrong document. Can I have that back, please? And he gave us the speech. And that's the speech where he basically sold out the left and basically indicated that he was going to work with the House Republicans to reform welfare, balance the budget, and do all the things we did. So the president comes in, he's now giving both the vice president and the Speaker a copy of his speech. He gets another round of applause, and he's ready to start talking. And at that point, exactly what we thought might happen. A Democratic Congressman Green from Texas, who had earlier filed an impeachment and who's sort of a maverick and a wild guy, jumps up and starts yelling at the President. And because he had been prepared, Mike Johnson immediately gaveled order and read from the rules of the House about the procedure and the requirement to operate within the decorum of the House. Members are directed to uphold and maintain decor quorum in the House and to cease any further disruptions. That's your warning? Well, that doesn't affect the congressman. He jumps back up a second time. Members are engaging in willful and continuing breach of decorum, and the chair is prepared to direct the sergeant at arms to restore order to the joint session. Then he gets up a third time, and at that point, the sergeant arms comes over. This had all been bland all week. They thought this through very carefully, came over, took him out of the House. Finding that members continue to engage in willful and concerted disruption of proper decorum, the chair now directs the sergeant at arms to restore order. Remove this gentleman from the chamber. Part of what it did is it signaled to the other Democrats, if you, in fact act out, if you try to do any of this, what you're going to discover is that we're going to throw you out. You're not going to be here very long. And interestingly, the only other real display I saw sitting directly above them was fairly late in the speech. Three of the women members took off their jacket and they had on T shirts that said resist. And they stood there for a minute together, the three of them in their resist T shirts, and then they voluntarily left before the sergeant arms could even be called in. But I thought that Johnson, by reacting so decisively and so quickly, had cut off the opposite of what, for example, the president of Columbia University did he had cut off any chance for any kind of serious thing which allowed Trump then to give his speech.

A (14:28)

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B (15:29)

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E (15:59)

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C (16:35)

While some people at the White House have suggested it would be about an hour long speech, which I never thought was possible, partly because you just have applause, time, etc. He actually gave the longest speech to a joint session of Congress in modern history. Bill Clinton had that record. Clinton had spoken for an hour 28 minutes and 49 seconds in 2000. Trump spoke for an hour 39 minutes and 32 seconds, which was almost up to his first term. When he had spoken for an hour 22, which was slightly shorter than Clinton, it was a long speech, but frankly, it was so well structured and it didn't seem all that long. And I want to talk about that in a minute. The fact is that overall, you had this very amazingly clear delineation. You had the Republicans who stood over and over and over, and the House Democrats who never stood, and the Senate Democrats would stand occasionally or applaud occasionally, but the rigidity among the House Democrats was unbelievable. Now, they'd had some people decide not to come. I mean, Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, for example, Senator Patty Murray. But overall, most of the Democrats came. In fact, looking back, I wondered if they wouldn't have been better off not coming now, because some of them didn't come. There were some vacancies on the Democratic side, and I noticed after a couple minutes, there were a group of Republicans who had decided they would go sit on the Democratic side and fill up the vacancies. So you would occasionally see people standing and applauding on the Democratic side. They were always Republicans, they were never Democrats, but they were over there having fun and sort of driving the Democrats crazy. What I was struck by first of all, let me talk about Trump's speech itself, and then I want to talk about the Democrats reaction, because I think they're each worthy of considerable focus. This was a classically Trump speech, and I think maybe because of the contrast with the Democrats, the most consequential speech he's given up to now. And I say that because I think that in this speech, with the active help of the Democrats, Trump delineated two remarkably different futures and two remarkably different styles. First of all, if you think back to the speech and you get a copy of it and you read through it, just the sheer number of things he covered, the number of things he was doing, the number of things he could report, was astonishing. There are entire presidencies that didn't cover the amount that he'd covered in the first 30 some days of his presidency. So that was fascinating. And it reminded you of the breadth of his concerns, the breadth of his willingness to engage, and the way in which, on a couple occasions, for example, in Making America Healthy Again, he cited and brought up Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. And he brought up Pete Hegseth, and he brought up farmers and Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins jumped up to applaud. He was weaving things in in a way that covered an immense amount of ground. Second, the speech really has sort of three major segments. Segment number one was outlining what he believed, what he had accomplished. And he began early on by Looking straight at the Democrats and saying, look, I realized that even if I announced I had cured cancer, you're not going to applaud. So they clearly at the White House had thought through that the Democrats were going to sulk and they were going to sit in their hands and they decided they would turn it into a positive and make sure that the country understood that this was an example of how bad the partisan split was. But if you go through the things he talked about in that opening section, first of all, the scale of it is amazing and he talks about an extraordinary range of things. But second, the fact is that many of them, for example, he mentions that we've had a huge surge in volunteering for the Army. Well, that ought to be a good thing. I don't care if they're Democrat or Republican. The fact that young Americans are willing to go out and risk their lives and join the military should be a positive thing. Democrats couldn't move. He talked about the fact that he was in favor of lowering taxes for middle class Americans. He went through eliminating the tax on tips, eliminating the tax on interest for buying a car if it's made in America, eliminating the tax on Social Security payments. Now, all of those things should have been, you would have thought, for the Democrats, pretty easy things to applaud. Not a single motion. He talked about the work that Melania had done focusing on the whole problem of illegal revenge porn and the kind of things that are done on the Internet. And again, you would think for the Democrats, this shouldn't be that hard. Now, he did get into what are clearly big ideological differences. And he went through a litany that was really amazing where he talked about protecting women's sports. He talked about a whole range of things that you would think that people could have been supportive of. And yet the fact was that he was just simply not able to to get the Democrats to applaud a single thing. And the gap, frankly, was pretty remarkable when you look at it. We're talking here. I just want to give you a couple examples because it was so striking to me. And we had done a lot of this research at America's New Majority Project, which you can see if you go to America's New Majorityproject.com. so let me give you just a couple examples. The president talks about the fact that in his judgment, there are two genders, male and female. Well, the American people overwhelmingly agree. About 75% say, yes, that's exactly right. But not the zombie Democrats question about should boys be blocked from playing women's sports. And he had a great example of a young woman who had been very severely injured playing volleyball, where there was a male who was on the women's team and who hit the ball so hard that it really caused profound damage. When you talk about stopping men from playing women's sports, the American people agree by a large margin. In fact, One poll found 66% of the American people think that men should not be playing women's sports, but not the zombie Democrats. When you ask the question, should English be the official language of the United States? This is overwhelming. 81% of Americans think so, but not the zombie Democrats. And when you ask the question, which I think may be the most profound contribution that Trump makes to rebuilding American culture, should merit and performance be the basis for hiring and promotion? Now, this is not a close call. Overwhelmingly, 81% of the American people think so, but not the zombie Democrats. And I go through this list because I was sitting there watching and I was thinking, surely at some point they're going to break and at some point they're going to get involved in applauding something. But they didn't. He also, frankly, had a series of kind of current events that you don't normally think of. In a speech to a joint session, he reported that we'd captured an ISIS terrorist that masterminded the Aby Gatek. Again, why wouldn't the Democrats applaud the fact that we captured a terrorist? He reported that he'd actually gotten a letter from President Zelenskyy of the Ukraine. He read the letter as part of this letter had come in yesterday. Again, you'd think he's now doing what supposedly the Democrats wanted him to do. They're getting back together to try to find a way to end the war. And there was a very funny exchange where Trump was saying that we don't want the war to go on. And apparently the senator from Massachusetts was nodding aggressively that she didn't agree with him. And he turned. He called her Pocahontas, which was probably not total decorum, but even she laughed about it. And it was not seen as overly hostile. But what you have here was he's talking about things that are literally happening that day. Now, I don't remember that experience ever in a joint session.

A (24:57)

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E (25:58)

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C (26:34)

In addition, he's talking about really dramatic change when you realize that literally a month and a half ago our borders were basically wide open. We now have in the south the lowest rate of illegal immigration crossing the border since the 1960s. I mean, the numbers have collapsed so decisively. I would never have predicted that it would happen this quickly, but in fact the word has gone out. Don't try to come to America. They're not going to let you in and you're seeing the entire pipeline dry up of illegal immigration. He also took some very tough, very bold positions and got very strong support from everybody except the zombie Democrats. When he said that we should punish cop killers with the death penalty, there was overwhelming support in the room outside of the Democrats. When he talked about the notion that he's declared war on the brutal trend Aragua gang, which is the Venezuelan gang, but also on gangs from places like El Salvador, Ms. 13 and the cartels in Mexico. These are big changes moving in the right direction. He gave, I think, the longest, clearest explanation of his terrorist policy. We've really not had a serious debate about tariffs since the early 1930s, and yet for most of American history, tariffs were very important both in getting businesses inside the US and in raising money. In Jefferson's second inaugural in 1805, he points out that there are no internal Revenue agents Because we make so much money out of the tariffs. And as late as McKinley, the whole strategy is raise the cost of coming into the U.S. encourage people to invest in building in the U.S. you'll have very, very effective industries with very high salaries. And that mostly worked. It's shocking nowadays because from the mid-1930s on, our elites taught us that you're supposed to be for free trade, which by the way, doesn't exist anywhere, as Trump pointed out. I mean, you have some countries that charge 400% tariffs, yet the Americans are shipping things in. Well, you already seen even in the first weeks the impact of his tariff policy because you had a major auto firm announce that instead of building their next factory in Mexico, they're now going to build it in Indiana. And that's specifically because of the tariff policy. So you really have a number of things going on. He made a very important step in saying that they're going to have an office in the White House dedicated to rebuilding American shipbuilding. This is an enormous crisis. Both the Coast Guard and the Navy have been disasters at building ships. We are way behind not just China, but Korea. And we could not build ships today in an effective way in order to be able to defend the country. It's a really big problem and I'm delighted to see that they're taking it very seriously. They're working to try to make sure that we get back into being capable of producing first rate ships and producing large numbers of them, which is what we're going to need. All of that was good, solid stuff. And of course the Democrats sat in their hands. But what was to me more intriguing was watching the President building on something that Ronald Reagan had really perfected. Identifying specific people who are guests of he and Melania sitting in the audience. And the Democrats couldn't respond. So he identifies someone that he had helped free from Russia after Biden had failed for three and a half years. And he has this 95 year old mother there now. How can you not applaud a 95 year old mother? But they didn't. He had a young man who wants to go and serve his country by going to West Point. And it had, in a very striking moment, announced that the young man had now been accepted. The commander in chief has a pretty big impact if he wants somebody to go to West Point. The young guy of course, was thrilled. It was a great moment, a moment of patriotism. But the Democrats just couldn't respond. There were specific examples of mothers, of people who'd been killed by illegal immigrants. There was the case of the firefighter who had been killed, who'd thrown himself to cover his daughters and his wife during the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, and had been killed each of these, and the daughters and the wife were there. President Trump recognized them. You'd think that'd be pretty emotional. And the Democrats sat on their hands. But the one that really struck me was there was a young boy, 13 years, a cancer survivor, very courageous, whose thing which has really given him energy and hope and the desire to beat cancer was he really wants to become a policeman and apparently has had over 500 departments that have made him an honorary policeman. Well, there, right in front of everybody, President Trump announced, and the head of the Secret Service was right there, that he was now going to be a special agent in the Secret Service at 13 years of age. If you look at the picture of that boy's face, you look at his eyes and you look at how excited he is, how could you not stand up and applaud? When I saw it later on television, you really see his eyes light up and he's so excited. If you can't applaud a 95 year old mother and a 13 year old cancer survivor, there's something really profoundly wrong. And I think that was a part of it. So you have the current events, this is what we're doing now section, you have the human, this is how we're trying to recognize and encourage people. And then you have a closing, which is relatively short, but I think very important, where Trump goes back to talking about a golden age for America, that we have not really seen anything yet, that our best years are ahead of us, that we can have through technological advance, that we can have a better economy, better national security, higher incomes, a better quality of life. And he's really painting a remarkably positive picture, which I happen to believe in, of the kind of future that is possible with the right policies because of everything that's happening. Even then, the Democrats couldn't be positive. So you had this very interesting dichotomy, and this is why I think this is such a consequential speech. On the one hand, you have President Trump outlining what he is doing, outlining how much he cares about people, and outlining a dramatically better, more exciting, more positive future. On the other hand, you have a Democratic Party which can't function. They don't know how to oppose him, they don't know how to work with him. And in a sense, they really are zombies. I mean, they're sitting there afraid to break. Every once in a while, you'd see one of them applaud and then stop and realize that they weren't supposed to be doing that, which is crazy. The United States does not want to see a party which is totally negative, totally out of touch. This is what happened with the Republicans under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. As Roosevelt rolled out the New Deal, the Republicans became negative and bitter and hostile, and they didn't really recover from that for a generation. And I think that there's a real danger here that the Democrats could suddenly walk themselves into sort of a back alley where they can't get out. People are not going to want to vote for somebody who is always negative, always hostile, who cannot share your values, and who has to consistently be with the most radical, the largest number of strange people who don't fit the rest of the country. And yet that's what you're seeing begin to develop. It was a very, very interesting speech and a fascinating evening. And I think the early polling results, 76% of the people who watched the speech were totally supportive. The people who watched the speech tended to be pro Trump. So in that sense, it is a little bit of a skewed number, but that's always true. Whoever is president, whether it's Biden and the Democrats or Trump and the Republicans or Obama and the Democrats, you tend to get your own partisans to watch more than independents and certainly the opposition party. Nonetheless, I don't remember ever seeing a 76% approval number for a speech like this. So I think from President Trump's standpoint, the speech was extraordinarily well received. It laid down a marker of what he wants to accomplish. It outlined a set of values he's willing to fight for and projected a dramatically better future that should affect every American and offer them a better future. So I thought it was a remarkable evening. Klista and I just had a wonderful time. Speaker Johnson's team was very good to us, having once been speaker, and calista had spent 18 years working on the Hill. It's kind of nice to be back in places we'd been a lot and to see what was going on. I really. If you have not looked at the speech, I encourage you either to look at a rerun of it on video or to read the transcript, although you'll get a much stronger feeling if you watch it on video and realize how strange the dichotomy was of the Republicans consistently being positive and the Democrats sitting on their hands. One final note, and I don't know how much this was organized or if it was just spontaneous. But early on, when the Democrats would start to make noises, the Republicans would just break into USA, USA, USA. I know from research we did as early as 1983 that the most powerful political words in America are American nationalism. People are proud to be American, they're proud of the country. And USA is a pretty darn powerful statement. And the fact that the Democrats had no countervailing chant, but at the same time really couldn't break into saying usa, USA was fascinating. There was also a moment very late in the speech where the Republicans suddenly broke in to fight, fight, fight, picking up exactly on what Trump had said after he was shot at Butler. Those were moments where if you were in the room, they were galvanizing and, you know, you'll never quite forget them. And I think that it was a remarkable speech. I think it moved the Trump agenda significantly and I think has strengthened dramatically both his base of support in the country at large and his base of support in the Republican Party. And it left the Democrats, I think, in a pretty deep hole. And if they end up truly becoming zombie Democrats, I think they could, like the Republicans in the 1930s, find themselves really non competitive for a very long time. New to World is produced by Gingrich360 and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Garnesey Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show is was created by Steve Pendley. Special thanks to the team at Gingrich 360. If you've been enjoying Newtsworld, 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. Right now, listeners of Newtsworld can sign up for my three free weekly columns at Gingrich360.com Newsletter I'm Newt Gingrich. This is Newtsworld.

A (38:19)

This is an I Heart podcast.