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The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show
The Truth with Lisa Boothe: Trump's Triumph with Newt Gingrich
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- [00:00]
Lisa Booth
This is an iHeart podcast. Welcome to the Truth with Lisa Booth, where we cut through the noise to get to the heart of what matters, to get to the heart of what's shaping our nation. Today we have the great honor to have former Speaker New Gingrich, a political titan and also the author of the new book Trump's America's Greatest Comeback. On the show, we're going to get to a lot of a lot to unpack with Speaker Newt Gingrich because basically he's brilliant. We'll unpack why President Trump remains one of the most misunderstood figures in modern politics. We'll also dive into the details of the big beautiful bill. We know it's big, but is it beautiful? We'll also tackle some of the pressing issues, like the challenges of cutting government spending and whether Speaker Johnson and Majority Leader Thune are moving fast enough to deliver results for you, the American people. We'll also talk about Joe Biden's mental decline. How much should Congress focus on that? What should they do about it moving forward? Should we have hearings? And we'll also get into the rising political violence on the left. Has he seen the political left be so dangerous before? What's the impact of that on the country? We'll also dig into the Democrats struggles and the future of the Republican Party. And lastly, and maybe most importantly, how will history remember President Trump? So stay tuned for this very thoughtful conversation with Speaker Newt Gingrich, who's been very generous with his time. It's an honor to have him on. And trust me, you're going to love this interview. Well, Speaker Newt Gingrich, it's always such an honor to have you on the show. You know, I was telling you before we got started, obviously there is an influx of information in today's world and most of it's not correct. And most people are lighting their hair on fire when they shouldn't be. So it's always just great to hear what you have to say because obviously you're a student of history, but you've also lived it in a very meaningful way. So you always just provide such great wisdom. So I'm really looking forward to this conversation.
- [02:16]
Newt Gingrich
Well, I'm delighted to be with you and to be with your podcast. I think you do a great job and this is a terrific chance to have a good conversation.
- [02:24]
Lisa Booth
Thank you, sir. I really appreciate that. So I wanted to ask you, obviously, we'll get into your book later, but I also wanted to start off with after writing your latest book, Trump's America's Greatest Comeback. Why do you think President Trump is still so misunderstood by so many?
- [02:43]
Newt Gingrich
I think for two reasons. One, they get overwhelmed by the daily noise, including his noise. And so it's very hard for people to put it all together. So they don't. Part of the reason I wrote Trump's triumph was to give a historic framework in which to think about him. And then two, for the people who don't like him, their distaste is so great, they can't think and they can't back off and in an objective way try to understand why he's so effective despite how much they dislike him. And I think that's a very, very big part of what's going on here, that you, you just don't have people who are willing to think beyond the immediate and have some sense of what could be done and how it could be done. And I find that the Trump, if you, if you view Trump strategically, he's, he's pretty understandable. But if you just try to follow the, the day after day tactical maneuvering and the sheer noise of. It's very hard to sort it out. I spend probably three to five hours a day trying to understand Trump and trying to understand what's going on. Not just Trump, but things like the Ukrainian extraordinary achievement in taking out the Russian aircraft, or what's happening in the markets, or what's happening with new breakthroughs in robotics and what have you. I mean, all that stuff is just amazing.
- [04:11]
Lisa Booth
How much of it do you think is because he just doesn't fit any mold. Right. Like he just creates his whole new paradigm. So it's. You know what I mean?
- [04:20]
Newt Gingrich
Yeah, I think that's a very big part of it. And I find in my own case, because I've been around long enough, that I have a lot of legacy thinking still in my head and I have to sometimes back out and reassess things. And frankly, the reporting on him is so biased and the people in the propaganda media are so hostile. I mean, we went through this, this, the taco attack on him, and I thought it was amazing because it was implying that Trump always caves. But the fact is this is a guy who, you know, was lied about by the CIA and the FBI, had a serious two year investigation by Mueller that proved nothing, was impeached twice by the House, with the Senate refusing to take it, had four efforts to put him in jail, two assassination attempts, and these guys write about him as though he's shallow and soft and confused, when in fact, everything we know about him in terms of his historic record is that he's very determined, very courageous, has enormous levels of energy, and is driving towards change on a scale that no president since Franklin Roosevelt comes anywhere close to the level of change that Trump is engaged in. And if Trump can succeed in the 26 election and the 28 election, he will be, I think, the most consequential president since Washington and Lincoln. So he's changing the culture, he's changing the government, he's changing the politics and creating an entirely new coalition. And people who on the left and old time Republicans both find it impossible to think about him in a rational, reasonable way.
- [06:12]
Lisa Booth
What is interesting is as you're laying out everything that he has survived and been able to triumph over, you know, per your book, it is remarkable. I mean, is there anyone else that could handle all that? I mean, I would be like, curled up in the corner crying. Like, even one of those things would probably break me as a human.
- [06:32]
Newt Gingrich
Well, look, I worked very closely with Reagan, and Reagan was an extraordinary leader who ultimately defeated the Soviet empire and relaunched our economy with his three tax cuts and rebuild American civic morale. But Reagan never had this kind of assault. Nixon may be the closest. And of course, in Nixon's case, he tried to operate within the system as opposed to fighting back. I mean, he. He had enough information that he could have survived if he was willing to take on and fight the entire establishment, but he wasn't because it was inconceivable in his generation. So Trump's at a unique moment in American history where a movement that began with Goldwater in 64. And I always. People, you can go on YouTube and you can find Ronald Reagan's A Time for Choosing, a speech he made on behalf of Goldwater in October of 64. It's called a Time for Choosing. It is still totally relevant today. And this movement began growing and growing and growing. It was the key reason we were able to succeed with the Contract With America, which was pure Reaganism, in winning the first majority for the House Republicans in 40 years and the first reelected majority since 1928, and changed the whole balance of power in Washington. Before we took over, there'd been 60 years of Democrats and four years of Republicans in charge of the House. After we won, it's been 22 years of Republicans and eight years of Democrats. Huge, decisive change that was coming from the grassroots, and the grassroots came back with the Tea Party movement. And then Trump really is. And this is why the title of my book is Trump's Triumph and America's Greatest Comeback, because it's the combination of the movement and the man that made this, this experience possible. And it's the combination of the energy of the movement and the man. And I know of no political leader who has the sheer energy that Donald Trump has and the willingness to get up every day, work seven days a week, and consistently move both the United States and the world in a direction very different from where it was going under the Obama Biden system.
- [08:43]
Lisa Booth
What do you think makes him so tough? You know, the man you've also lived through just monumental and key moments in history. What makes him so tough?
- [08:55]
Newt Gingrich
What's the source of that moving from Queens to Manhattan? Yeah, because when he got to Manhattan, he was never accepted because he was clearly a queen's kind of middle class, you know, wealthy, but not us. And the elites never, never let him in. And I think he decided at some point. I mean, I've never actually talked about him in fascinating conversation, but there was some point, I think, in his 20s, when he decided, look, you know, if you guys aren't going to let me in your club, I'm just going to build my own club. And he just took them all on. He took them on. One of the reasons he counter punches so aggressively is he Learned from page 6 that when they attacked him, he had to attack back within 12 hours. And so all of a sudden, here you have this guy who is totally outside the cultural elite system, growing, getting wealthy, becoming famous, and in a sense, creating his own support system. And, you know, I mean, people tend to Forget he did 13 years of the Apprentice. So here he is on, on national television for 13 straight years. He ran the Miss Universe contest. And he did things like which one of the great events which was saving the, the woman's skating rink. New York city had spent six years and $13 billion and could not get the rink to make ice. And Trump's apartment looked out over the rink. And he finally got so terrible watching them fail that he publicly said, you give me the project, give me $3 million and in six months I'll fix it. Well, the politicians did not want him to prove how incompetent the bureaucracy was, but public pressure forced them to turn it over to him. He solved it in four months, came in 25% under budget. So he's spending, you know, about three and a two and a half million on a project that for six million, the city couldn't solve. And it's in his book, the Art of the Deal, he has this great line where he says, you know, I looked at making ice, they'd hired a firm from Florida to try to make ice. And I thought, and he said, I thought to myself, who's really good at making ice? And I thought, hockey. And he went to the National Hockey League and he said, who, who's the best ice making company? And they said, it's this firm in Montreal. So he calls him and they come down and they look at the project and they say, this is really embarrassing. This is so easy to solve. And so he said, later on, he said it was just common sense and good management. He said it wasn't a miracle. And, but, but he's doing all this as an outsider. So if you're, you know, if you're part of the investment class and Citibank and you know, the Metropolitan Museum and the, the, the opera, you know, and you're, you're in the elites, who is this outsider doing all this stuff? And the New York Times consistently disliked him when he redid Trump Tower. He originally wanted to keep the Art Deco front, and the Times loved it and praised him. And then his law, his engineer said, it's going to cost $3 million. And he said, we didn't want to keep it that much. So he, they decided they weren't going to keep the, the Art Deco front. And for three days the New York Times attacked him. And what he, what he said he learned from that was that being attacked actually sent a signal that he was building condos. And he had dozens and dozens of people calling to see if they could buy a condo. And he decided, you know, any news helps, just doesn't matter good or bad. Any news helps. And that's the base of the rise of Donald Trump.
- [12:48]
Lisa Booth
You know, it's interesting because especially the ice skating, how you laid the rink, how you lay that out, because he is so different, right? Like, he just comes up with these ideas and then oftentimes they're criticized. But then when you really think about it, you're like, actually, it's really smart, right? He's a problem solver. He's taking a totally different lens to government, which is healthy, because clearly things aren't working out so great. And even on tariffs, right? It's, it's something that we haven't done in modern history as much. And it is sort of an outside the box idea. Do you think are these tariffs a good idea or are we just kind of like not catching up with where he is on it and the media is just not understanding or I guess, how do you assess all of that?
- [13:30]
Newt Gingrich
Well, to take the example of Tariffs. He talked about tariffs in the 1980s. He said America was getting ripped off. We have these really bad deals, and that other countries were exploiting us and taking advantage of us. So it's not like it's new. And I think he began to look at the work of William McKinley, who had passed the Great Tariff act and who ran for president, won. And McKinley's approach was to have high barriers to importing, create the biggest possible American manufacturing base, have very high labor payments. We had the best paid workers in the world, and that was a clear model of how to do things. And so Trump has been enamored, I think, of two things. One is that he can get foreigners to pay for the right to come and sell in America. And the other is that is the largest market in the world. He has enormous leverage in negotiating, and he likes making deals. And the tariff fight allows him to go country by country making deals that, at the margin, improve the American economy. And I think you're going to see that by the time he's done, he will have had a very substantial increase in revenue paid for by foreigners, and he will have rebuilt an American industrial base on a scale that people would have thought was impossible. And you saw some of this when he went to Saudi Arabia and Qatar and the uae. In four days, he comes back with literally a trillion dollars. Not a billion, a trillion dollars in sales and a trillion dollars in investment commitments while you do that. And you're going to really have. I think by next summer, you're going to have a Trump economic boom that people will be amazed by.
- [15:16]
Lisa Booth
And I liked the line in his speech in Saudi Arabia about how the future of the region was commerce. Not.
- [15:23]
Newt Gingrich
Well, exactly. I mean, and he has a vision. And I. It occurred to me, actually, and I have not ever talked to him about it, but instead of talking about turning Gaza into a Riviera, he should have talked about turning Gaza into Dubai. I mean, here's this extraordinary city in the middle of the Persian Gulf with the highest hotel building in the world and proof that you can be an Arab and have a very modern, very commercial society. Callista and I were there a few years ago. We went to Mass with about 800 people, most of them from India and from the Philippines, and they were practicing Catholicism right in the middle of a Muslim country because it's a. It's a very modern, very open, very commercially oriented country.
- [16:09]
Lisa Booth
We've got to take a quick commercial break. More with Speaker Newt Gingrich on the other side. When it comes to your health, you shouldn't have to beg for permission. You've seen how the system really works. Faceless bureaucrats and billion dollar companies playing God, deciding whether you get care and what you're allowed to take. And ultimately whether you live or die. It's time to take your power back. All Family Pharmacy puts the control in your hands, not theirs. No more waiting rooms, no more red tape. Just fast direct access to over 200 trusted medications like ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, bimendazole, antibiotics and emergency kits. A licensed doctor reviews your request, writes your prescription, and your medication is shipped directly to your door. They believe in medical freedom, that you have the right to choose what's best for your body and your family. Over 100,000Americans already trust All Family Pharmacy. Maybe it's time you did, too. Go to allfamilypharmacy.com and use code USA20 to get 20% off today. Again, that's all family pharmacy.com with code USA20 to save 20% today. You know, the Democrat Party has been struggling. You know, they've experienced low approval ratings. They're spending all this money trying to figure out men, which is like, if you're working that hard, then clearly you don't get it. You know, to try to figure out a group of voters. Do you think the reason they're struggling so much is the basis of the conversation we're having so much or we've had so far that he's just so different, you know, and so they don't know how to respond to that, I think. Or why do you think they're struggling?
- [17:42]
Newt Gingrich
Look, I think the core problem of the Democratic Party is that they have been taken over by a left wing, anti American, anti male, anti white, anti business ideology captured by somebody like aoc. And if you look at their more radical members, their views are frankly nuts. And they believe them. I mean, they get in rooms and talk to each other and they believe all this stuff. So it's not even. It's not actually Trump. The rise of Trump is in part being fueled by people who are so turned off. When Trump had the highest vote among Hispanics of any Republican in history, he had the highest vote among African American males of any Republican since Dwight eisenhower in the 1950s. And it's partly because they're being driven away by a Democratic Party which is dedicated to crazy values. I mean, if you look around the country, for example, the number of Democratic cities and state governments that are sanctuary cities for illegal criminals, I mean, it's one thing to say, they want to be sanctuaries for people who are here illegally but are have not committed crimes. But they're sanctuary cities for murderers and rapists and armed robbers. That's a pretty crazy value system.
- [19:02]
Lisa Booth
So, looking at the midterms, I guess one thing I am a little bit concerned about is President Trump's so unique and he's been able to build this coalition that's so different, transform the Republican Party. But I wonder if Republicans can carry it on. And I just, I wonder how they'll do in the midterms without. I mean, even though President Trump's in office, he's not on the ballot.
- [19:25]
Newt Gingrich
He had. Look, the only person who can maximize the Republican chance of winning the midterms is Donald J. Trump. He has to make the midterms a vote in favor of Trumpism and a vote for President Trump. And the marginal House members are going to be reelected if President Trump can turn out the vote. But we've got, I think, 13 Democrats in the seats that Trump carried and another 21 Democrats in seats that Trump got within 20, within 5%. And if he can turn out the vote, we've had this unique, extraordinary transition. Where in the old days it was the Democrats who had trouble in off years because their voter base included a lot of people who would only vote for president. Now we've switched. We're the party of working Americans and we're the party of young people in a way that was unthinkable 10 years ago. And so we now have to worry about turning out the vote among people who aren't in the habit of voting in off year elections. And I think the only way to do that is to an effect, psychologically put Trump on the ballot in every single campaign and have the Trump voters decide that they have to vote because it's about whether or not the Trump MAGA revolution continues or whether the Democrats take control and do everything they can to block it for two years. If that gets driven through and that's the choice on election Day, then I think, in fact we'll have a big enough turnout to win the election.
- [20:56]
Lisa Booth
Well, it's sort of ironic because, you know, the media and the Democrats have tried to lead throughout the years that Trump's toxic, but in fact, like, he's the real reason people are turning out in support of the Republican Party. Like, he's the reason why we have the House, he's the reason we have the Senate. No one else would have been able to win the popular vote but President Trump heading into 2028. Do you see anyone who is able to keep that America first coalition together and to carry on the mantle, or, I guess, what happens to the Republican Party beyond this term and beyond President Trump?
- [21:31]
Newt Gingrich
Well, I think President Trump picked J.D. vance, who was actually a year younger than Richard Nixon when Dwight Eisenhower picked him in 1952. So Vance is now the youngest vice president in American history. And I think Trump picked him because he thought he was the most likely person to carry on the MAGA tradition. And I think, frankly, if Trump is successful, it will be almost inevitable that JD Will become the nominee because he will have stood next to Trump for four years. I watched them on Memorial Day at Arlington National Cemetery as a team, and you could just sense that JD Was the logical, younger, next generation version of Trump and that he and his wife are going to be very attractive people who I think will have probably a 90% likelihood of being the Republican nominee and probably a much better than even chance of being the president.
- [22:27]
Lisa Booth
He does seem to really respect him. Even just, you know, the way in which he talks about him, he does seem to have. President Trump does seem to have a lot of respect for the vice president. Obviously, there's a lot of conversation right now about the big, beautiful bill. Obviously, everyone's in agreement that it's big, but is it beautiful?
- [22:49]
Newt Gingrich
Well, given the nature of the American Constitution and the legislative process, it's very hard to be beautiful while you're going through the process. Somebody once said that you don't want to watch making either sausage or laws because both of them are pretty hard, difficult. I think in the end, we will get a bill because the president will intervene and listen to people and find a way to bring people together. We will only get the bill because of Trump. And it's tricky because there are things the senators want that will not pass the House and there are things that House members want that will not pass the Senate. And getting everybody in the same room to understand this is the most you can get, but it beats not getting anything is going to take time. And people have to, frankly, get worn down by the process and finally come to a decision. Yeah, I've gotten all I can get and I'm going to vote yes because for this bill to fail would be unthinkable. And therefore they've got to find, you know, it's not there yet, but they've got to find a way to get to a yes that will pass both the House and the Senate. I think Senator Thune is doing a very good job as the majority leader in the Senate. And I think that Mike Johnson is doing an astonishing job as the speaker of the House. And with Trump's leadership, the three of them, I think we'll eventually get to a bill that'll pass.
- [24:12]
Lisa Booth
You know, and you've spearheaded this process before when you were speaker. Why is it so hard for Congress to cut spending?
- [24:21]
Newt Gingrich
Well, because everybody who wants the money is excited and aroused and angry, and everybody who would like to balance the budget is so soft and passive and not. Not going to get in the fight. And I found that this is part of my advice to fiscal conservatives. There are two big things I would advise them to do. First, resurrect the balanced budget as the goal. Because if the goal is balancing the budget, people will tolerate spending cuts dramatically better. After all, if you're just running a smaller deficit, why can't I have mine? Because it's going to be a deficit anyway. But if the goal is a balanced budget, then people will tolerate cuts that they will not tolerate in a period of deficits. Second, I think you have to have Make America Healthy Again as a core goal, because if people are healthy and don't need health care, then the cost of healthcare will drop dramatically, not because you're cutting it, but because people are healthier. And I think you can get probably 4% of the gross domestic product just by implementing Making Americans Healthy again. And that 4% is enough, basically, to get you to a balanced budget.
- [25:32]
Lisa Booth
How would you assess President Trump's job so far? How do you think he's doing in this term, and how would you sort of compare that to his first term?
- [25:41]
Newt Gingrich
Well, I think in scale of achievement, it's an A plus. He, as I've said earlier, he currently is on a path to be far and away the biggest change agent since FDR. And if he can win in 26 and 28, he will have been an even bigger change agent, I think, than fdr. But I would also say that. That I'd probably give him an A minus for style. I mean, he gets involved in fights he doesn't need, and he gets involved in.
- [26:09]
Lisa Booth
It is entertaining, though.
- [26:10]
Newt Gingrich
I mean, I mean, it's entertaining, but it's not. It's not necessarily helpful.
- [26:14]
Lisa Booth
Yeah.
- [26:15]
Newt Gingrich
So, but he's still, you know, he's, he's simply an extraordinary person. And that's why when I wrote Trump's triumph, and we began in October, because I was sure he was going to win. It's hard to imagine anybody else having the endurance and the courage and the energy and, frankly, the Intelligence. I mean, this is a very, very smart guy. And the left made a huge mistake by rigging the election in 20 and giving him four years in the wilderness to think about things and to put together what he really wants to accomplish. And I think he's going to be extraordinarily effective.
- [26:52]
Lisa Booth
What's the thing? People never give him credit for how smart he is. And I think one thing that really stood out to me this in the past election cycle, particularly in the, particularly in these longer form interviews that he did with, you know, his sit down interview with Joe Rogan or the interview he did with Elon on X. I mean the guy's brilliant. Like, name one Democrat who could sit down with anyone and have a two to three hour conversation in depth and be able to really understand the issues, dive into the issues and then also present ways to solve them.
- [27:22]
Newt Gingrich
Yeah, Bill Clinton.
- [27:24]
Lisa Booth
Yeah, well, yeah, actually that's a good point.
- [27:26]
Newt Gingrich
Bill Clinton is the one modern Democrat who could, who could do Joe Rogan and be fine. Nobody else could. Obama couldn't. Obviously Biden would be silly. And I don't know of any Democratic governor or senator who could go through three or four hours like that and have the range of knowledge and the range of common sense. And they're prohibited by their ideology from having solutions. They can't take on the teachers union, they can't take on the government bureaucracy, they can't take on their left wing allies. So they can't solve things. I mean, it's a huge problem for the Democratic Party right now. It's become the party of.
- [28:05]
Lisa Booth
No, well, yeah, the party of 20% issues. You know, it's like, it's sort of baffling. Like even on the men and women's sports, it's like, you know, 80% of the country disagrees with you, yet they're digging in in states like California or.
- [28:20]
Newt Gingrich
Maine, you know, or favoring the return of who are deported for being criminals or being offended that we're locking up people who are criminals. You know, I mean, you go through item after item. We do a project, we run a project called the America's New Majority Project, which people can see if they go to america'llor majorityproject.com and it is astonishing to me that the Democrats are consistently on the 15 to 20% range and it's gradually wearing their party down.
- [28:48]
Lisa Booth
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- [30:33]
Newt Gingrich
No, I think what's happened is that the district level judges, the left wing ones appointed by Obama and by Biden, have become the last stand trying to stop Trumpism. And so they made decisions which are clearly unconstitutional. I do not believe the district judges have the ability to issue a nationwide injunction usurping the President of the United States. I mean, the idea that some local district judge who's never been elected and is not particularly an expert on the subject matter can overrule the incumbent chief of staff, chief executive and President United States is crazy. And Jefferson said rule by judges would be an oligarchy. Lincoln made the 1858 Senate race around the Supreme Court being wrong on the Dred Scott decision that extended slavery to the whole country. In fact, Lincoln lectured the Chief justice of the Supreme Court who was sitting in front of him when he gave his inaugural address in 1861. And I'm convinced that Lincoln in part said, government of the people, by the people and for the people as a rebuke to the judges. And so I think that we are right at the edge of a genuine constitutional crisis in which judges are grotesquely overreaching and doing things that they don't have the power to do in areas that they don't have the knowledge of. And they are trying to usurp somebody who got 77 million votes. Well, they got zero.
- [32:02]
Lisa Booth
What's the path forward on that? Like what, what, what do we do about it?
- [32:06]
Newt Gingrich
Well, we. I testified in this House Judiciary Committee a couple of months ago, and I started my testimony by reading the names of 14 people who turned out to be the 14 judges who were abolished by Jefferson in the judicial act of 1802. He didn't impeach him, he just, he just eliminated the courts. So one, one step would be for the Appropriations Committees to simply abolish the payment for the judges who are nuts. Another step would be to pass, finish passing the bill which Darrell Issa passed in the House, which blocks district judges from issuing nationwide injunctions. There's a parallel bill by Senator Grassley and the Senate. If those two bills could be passed, then that would frankly eliminate the district judge level problem. But there are steps that can be taken and should be taken. The Founding Fathers were very clear, if you read the Federalist Papers, that the court was to be the weakest of the three, not the strongest, and that the Supreme Court was supreme only among courts. It's not supreme over the House and Senate. And the Founding Fathers would have thought it was absurd to have some of the kind of power invested in the judiciary that is currently vested in them. And they would have said that it's an infringement on the right of a people to govern themselves, to have a small bunch of judges who think that they can be a floating constitutional convention by 4 to 3 or 5 to 4 majorities in which one swing judge suddenly becomes the equivalent of, of an entire Constitutional Convention.
- [33:47]
Lisa Booth
You know, in the past few weeks, we have seen someone torch the Pennsylvania Governor's mansion. Josh Shapiro, because he's Jewish. Two Jews executed at the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. and then over last weekend, we saw elderly Jewish people set on fire in Boulder, Colorado. How dangerous is the political left? And have they gotten more dangerous since your time in office?
- [34:16]
Newt Gingrich
Well, they've become much more extreme and much more violent, much more self righteous, convinced that their moral purity allows them to do whatever they want to And I think more desperate, I think we have to clamp down on antisemitism. Antisemitism should be the equivalent of the Ku Klux Klan. I mean, people would not tolerate the Ku Klux Klan demonstrating at Columbia University or Harvard. They wouldn't tolerate the Ku Klux Klan trying to kill people at a black church. And I think that we have to have the same decision that being anti Semitic is simply unacceptable in American society. That if you are here on a visa, we should expel you. If you're here as an American, we should have very strict penalties, and we should make it very, very expensive to be openly anti Semitic.
- [35:09]
Lisa Booth
You know, we saw with a suspect in Boulder, Colorado, he was denied a visa in 2005, granted one under the Biden administration, and then he overstayed, and then was also granted a work permit after overstaying. And then yet the Trump administration has been condemned for trying to revoke visas. Do we, I mean, I feel like we should just do a complete overhaul in the visa process. Like, why are we letting these people into the United States? Like, what does that vetting look like? Who are we letting into the United States? You know, what are your thoughts on that and what you've done about it?
- [35:41]
Newt Gingrich
Look, I think that's why they've, for example, suspended student visas, because we, we have to build a very different system. I would say that unless you are prepared to accept that the US Constitution is the law of the land and that, for example, you could, you couldn't have Sharia in the context of the U.S. constitution, I think anybody who is either a member of the Chinese Communist Party or whose family can be blackmailed by the Chinese Communist Party. It's very dubious to me why you would give them the student visa because you know that they're going to become, they have a very high possibility of becoming spies. And we now know that that's a real problem or in a real challenge. And we've, we've had some very sobering reports, such as the couple, for example, who had brought in a fungus which could have been devastating as an epidemic, and there's no good reason for them to have brought it in. And they brought it in secretly and in violation of our national security laws. And so I think we've got to become much tougher and much clearer about our unwillingness to accept foreign threats being injected into our society.
- [36:57]
Lisa Booth
One thing, you know, I'd love your perspective on this historically, but what's interesting to me is we are in a time right now where, you know, 50% of the country, like they believe, or probably less than that, but they believe President Trump is a threat to democracy. Like, they basically view him as, you know, Hitler, as they have pointed out previously. And then on the right over the past four years in the Biden administration, we're like, this guy is a threat to democracy. So you have half of the country believing the other part that they were threat to democracy and vice versa. So how do we navigate that moving forward? Have you, have you ever seen the country this divided from historical perspective? And what do we do about it moving forward?
- [37:38]
Newt Gingrich
Well, when it was this divided in the 1850s, it led to a civil war, right?
- [37:41]
Lisa Booth
Yeah.
- [37:42]
Newt Gingrich
I mean, but we shouldn't kid ourselves. I had a very famous Lincoln scholar.
- [37:47]
Lisa Booth
I guess, more in modern history, I probably should have asked.
- [37:51]
Newt Gingrich
There have been periods when we've had some limited threats, but nothing on this scale. And I had a Lincoln scholar tell me in October that the hostility to Trump very much represented the hostility of the slave states to Lincoln. And it was for the same reason, because Trump represented the end of the left wing elite's worldview, just as Lincoln ultimately meant the end of slave holding in the Southern culture. And I think that we have to understand this is a real cultural civil war. This is the people sincerely, deeply believe things on the left which you and I would think are crazy, but they believe them and they operate on those beliefs and they're not going to give them up easily. And they feel extraordinarily threatened by the MAGA movement and by Trump and by the whole notion that we are not going to tolerate, for example, that we're going to insist that boys should not be competing in girls sports. Well, if you are truly on the left, that's a horrifying idea and is a sign that we're totally insensitive. Or if we insist that the only flag you should fly in front of a US Embassy is the American flag. Well, from the standpoint of the gay pride movement, that's a horrifying idea. Or if we insist that parents have a right to know what's being told their children in class, then you have a large part of the teachers union that feels that we have now usurped their role as the ultimate controller of children. And many elements of the teachers union are anti parent and don't want parents in the classroom, don't want parents involved. So, I mean, I think these are real, fundamental, profound differences and they're not going to go away easily.
- [39:41]
Lisa Booth
We're finding out a lot about Joe Biden's Mental decline while in office. Obviously, we all knew it at the time, but we're finding out just how deep it went and how bad it was. Was how much should Republicans focus on it? Should Republicans have hearings? You know, what do you like? Is that looking back, should we be looking forward or, you know, if you were Speaker Johnson or Majority Leader Thune, how would you handle this issue in Congress?
- [40:08]
Newt Gingrich
Well, look, I think it's probably going to turn out to be the biggest scandal in American history. You had you clearly, sometime, I think in 2023, Biden lost the ability to be president. And for example, after the election, on one day, they commuted 2,400 sentences. Now it was done with an auto pen. Who picked the 2,400? Why were they included? Why was that particular action undertaken? Who. Who decided it? Because clearly Biden didn't. So there was somebody basically playing the role of president because it's clearly a presidential prerogative in the Constitution. And you can just go through item after item like that. I mean, Secretary of Energy, right, commented the other day that they had shoveled, his word was shoveled, $73 billion in grants out of the Energy Department in a very short period of time, trying to get the money out before Trump could come in and block it. Well, again, who's making those kind of decisions? Because I think you're going to find that there's almost no presidential control and no presidential influence, except in the very broadest sense of things. But that overall, at some point, as I said, I think it's in 23, Biden simply ceased to be capable of following the information and following the ideas and making big decisions. So somebody was. And if not him, who?
- [41:46]
Lisa Booth
Well, I also find it interesting because, like, even going back to 2019, you know, we had that basement campaign during the 2020 presidential election, and they blamed Covid. But now increasingly, it's looking like, no, he was just already experiencing mental decline, and that was an excuse to hide him in the basement. And even they were saying in 2019 in this book that he forgot the name of an aide who had been with him since, I think, 1981. So it's basically a family member at this point. You know, so this wasn't even just a, you know, a 2024 issue. It seems like this was a 2020 issue.
- [42:22]
Newt Gingrich
I think it could have been, except that you had the propaganda media so deeply committed to propping him up, which is why I think having somebody like Jake Tapper write a book is hysterical because Tapper was one of the chief defenders of Biden. And now he's writing a book saying that the media failed to cover this when he was part of the people who failed to cover it.
- [42:44]
Lisa Booth
Well, Speaker, I'm sure you saw, did you see that Crean Jean Pierre, of all people. I mean, that's like you were the mouthpiece.
- [42:53]
Newt Gingrich
I think she's setting up to sell books. So she's now left the Democratic Party, creating news by becoming an independent. Frankly, I suspect a number of Democrats are glad she's left. I always thought that she was a peculiarly bad press person for the president and she didn't help him at all, I didn't think. And that's a very hard job anyway. But if you look at the contrast with how Caroline Levitt's doing it, it's astonishingly how different the impact is.
- [43:24]
Lisa Booth
One thing I think we found in that, you know, it's been interesting with all the Doge information that has surfaced is you look, I mean, you look at all this money, like even the Stacey Abrams, I think it was like $2 billion grant that she received, if memory serves me correct. I mean, how much of government spending is just like a money laundering scheme for politicians?
- [43:46]
Newt Gingrich
Well, I mean, I think that's a good example where we have to get to the bottom of it. I mean, what was she doing for the money? Did she actually do it? The amount was astonishing. But look, one of the key parts of the Democratic Party is that it's a machine that's held together by money. And if it, and this is why they're in for a very difficult challenge, because if the Republicans and Trump can cut off the flow of government money and taxpayer money to these machines, they're going to start collapsing because they're not held together by affection, they're held together by cash. And that's why, if you watch both Obama and Biden, they were very, very big on giving out money. The various green issues were probably their best cover for doing it. But they were paying off a lot of people with a lot of money. And the number of corporations that failed once they could no longer access, you know, that kind of money is just astonishing. You go back, go, go look at the various green firms that would get 2, 3, $400 million and then fail, deliver nothing. And it was all basically a way.
- [44:59]
Lisa Booth
Of paying people off, like Solyndra.
- [45:03]
Newt Gingrich
That's the classic example. And it came under Obama, which is a key part of this. And I keep talking about the Obama, Biden connection because I think we're, I think we're missing it. If we, if we just focus on Biden, this was, this was a 12 year. Think of Biden as Obama's third term. This was a 12 year project of trying to move America to the left and trying to build a machine with taxpayer money.
- [45:27]
Lisa Booth
Quick break. Stay with us.
- [45:30]
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- [46:34]
Lisa Booth
Has any other Democrat president done as much harm to the country than Obama?
- [46:38]
Newt Gingrich
Well, I mean, you can make an argument for Buchanan just before the Civil War, but, but if you look at the last century, I would say, no, that, that. But again, I think what you had was the Obama team came back in the White House with Biden and everything which Obama had started just got a lot sicker and a lot worse over time. And in a sense, if Trump had accepted defeat and gone away, he would have been sort of a brief interruption in the gradual decay of America. And it was. Part of the reason I wrote Trump's triumph is just the sheer courage of saying, no, I'm not leaving. I'm going to stay here, I'm going to fight it out, and I'm going to get this country back on track. And then I think he interpreted the providential moment of turning his head at the exact second necessary to avoid getting killed at Butler. I think that gave him a real sense that God had saved his life for the purpose of making America great again. And it's made him a much more, I think, focused and a much more reverential person than he was in the first term.
- [47:50]
Lisa Booth
Well, probably the moment that won him the election, because, you know, America is really in need of a fighter, and we had an incredibly weak president. And then here's this guy that, like, survives a bullet and his immediate instinct is to stand up and say, fight, fight, fight. Like, who is made of that? You know, it's like, it was remarkable.
- [48:08]
Newt Gingrich
It was really one of the iconic moments in defining him as was, I think, the picture they took in the Fulton County Sheriff's office, the mug shot where Trump looks very angry. And I think I was told that in a number of black barbershops, they were putting that picture up because it showed that the man was after him, just like they were after, in their mind, their community. So it actually created a common identity.
- [48:32]
Lisa Booth
As someone who's written multiple books about Trump, what new insights or perspectives did you cover in writing this book, Trump's Triumph?
- [48:42]
Newt Gingrich
Well, I think that there's a continuity to Trump, so in that sense, I don't think there are giant changes, but I think his ability as a communicator, I mean, you can't imagine anybody else passing out French fries at McDonald's and then riding in a garbage truck and going into a 50,000 person rally wearing a garbage collector's vest and saying, they say this makes me look thinner. Maybe I should wear it for the rest of the campaign. I mean, that ability to connect with Americans, remembering that 87% of the country goes to McDonald's at least once a year, and 40 million Americans, including Jeff Bezos, worked at McDonald's. He has a sense of where the average American is better than any politician I've ever seen. And at the same time, I think you see this growth in my book on Trump's triumph. He really did become a more serious person and a more reverential person, particularly after the second assassination attempt. I was talking with Speaker Mike Johnson at one point, and he said he happened to be at Mar a Lago when the FBI or when the Secret Service came in to brief Trump on the second effort to kill him, which was the guy that they caught in the golf course. And he said that really shook Trump. It made it different from, there was this nut in Butler, too. There really is a serious desire to kill me. And Johnson went off with Trump to a private room and they prayed for two hours. And I think that that was the moment where Trump really believed that he had a moral duty to implement what he saw as God's desire to make America great again. And it reminded me. Calista and I had done two movies, Nine Days that Changed the World, about John Paul ii and then Rendezvous with Destiny about Reagan. And when the two of them got together for the very first time, they were comparing notes. They'd both been actors. John Paul was an actor before he became a priest. And, of course, Reagan had been very successful as an actor. And they'd both been shot and survived. And they talked about, what does it mean that God has spared us? And their mutual conclusion was that they'd been spared in order to defeat the Soviet empire. And so they agreed that they'd have an alliance to do just that. And, of course, a few years later, the Soviet empire disappeared. I think in Trump's case, there's a similar moment where it hits him that if God had not intervened, he would be dead. And so he actually owed the rest of his life to try to implement what God's will was. And I think that that made him a significantly different, more mature person from the guy who ran in 2016.
- [51:33]
Lisa Booth
You know, your wife was the previously served as the ambassador to the Holy See. We have an American pope. What are your thoughts on him, and what does that mean for our country?
- [51:44]
Newt Gingrich
Well, Calista, who knew Pope Francis pretty well and liked him, they were actually friends. She went to the funeral. We were surprised when the white smoke went up and out came in America. And I don't think any of us expected that. Her line was that he's good for the church and he's good for America. And I think that's probably right. I mean, he's a genuine American. But he also served in Peru for a very long time, so he has a real feel for Third World countries and for the nature of poverty in these rural communities. And I think he's going to be a very successful pope at sort of stabilizing and growing the church. I think he'll have a real effect on young people and a real focus on bringing the new generation into the church, on values and on attitudes that are very, very central to being a Catholic and being a Christian. And in that sense, I think he's going to be a very significant force moving in the right direction. He's very committed to trying to help mediate things. I think I noticed that he was calling Putin, trying to talk some things, and President Trump has already invited him to come to the US And I think that there's a real possibility that that'll happen. Apparently, J.D. vance met with him. J.D. vance was the last major figure to meet with Pope Francis before almost Literally, as soon as he was inaugurated. And I think they had a sense that this is somebody they can really work with. And I think that will be. You know, there are a billion, 300 million Catholics around the world, and working together, you can accomplish big things. Calista had done that with working on everything from immigrants to humans who had been sold into slavery to problems of poverty. And so she had a real sense of the complexity of the church. And I think that the church can be an enormous force for good, and I think that this Pope is going to be very open to working with the American government.
- [54:04]
Lisa Booth
Before we go, sir, what else about Trump's triumph would you like to convey to the audience that we haven't addressed yet?
- [54:11]
Newt Gingrich
Well, I think two things. One, that it is truly a miraculous story of a comeback that probably no one else could have pulled off. And the second is that you have to think ahead. You have to look at the future. When he talks about America entering a golden age, he means it. And I think with the 250th anniversary of our founding next year, if we spend half of our time looking back at how we got here and half of our time looking forward to the next 250 years, we'll have some sense of what an extraordinary thing it is to be an American and what a remarkable opportunity we have to create a better future, not just for ourselves, but for the whole world. And I think we owe a great deal of that to Donald J. Trump.
- [54:52]
Lisa Booth
Speaker Newt Gingrich. It's always such an honor to have you on the show. You just have such a depth of knowledge that no one else has. I could ask you a billion questions because I feel like I learned so much from you, and it's truly an honor.
- [55:03]
Newt Gingrich
Lisa, you're so flattering. I'm always glad to come back in the show because you make me feel good.
- [55:08]
Lisa Booth
Well, perfect, then I'll keep having you back. But I truly always learned so much from you, so it really is an honor, sir, and thank you for being so. Being so generous with your time. We really appreciate it.
- [55:18]
Newt Gingrich
Glad to do it.
- [55:19]
Lisa Booth
That was Speaker Newt Gingrich. We appreciate him for taking the time to come on the show and being so generous with his time. Appreciate you guys at home for listening every Tuesday and Thursday, but of course, you can listen throughout the week. Until next time, this is an I Heart podcast.