Solving America’s Most Pressing Problems with Speaker New Gingrich
The Charlie Kirk Show- 1,363 views
- 2 Sep 2020
Charlie sits down with former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, to discuss his newest book, “Trump and the American Future: Solving the Great Problems of Our Time,” to explain why Trump is the clearest electoral choice facing the American people in a generation. From trade, the economy, the budget, and healthcare, Speaker Gingrich breaks it all down while framing 2020 in historic context to help the American voters make sense of our unique moment in time. Don’t miss this exclusive, long-form discussion with American hero, and former Speaker Newt Gingrich.
Thank you for listening to this podcast, one production now available on our podcast podcast, one Spotify and anywhere else you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody.
Today on The Charlie Cook Show, we are joined by the speaker of the House, the former speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, one of the smartest, wisest people in the country and in the conservative movement. Newt Gingrich joins us to talk about Trump, America and so much more. Please consider supporting our program at Charlie Cook Dotcom Slash Support Charlie Kakamega report. You guys want to get behind the work that we are doing here on the Charlie Cook Show to podcast every weekday one every week on Charlie Cook Dotcom slash support Newt Gingrich's year.
Everybody buckle up. Here we go.
But we are lucky to have Charlie Charlie Cook's run in the White House. I want to thank Charlie. He's an incredible guy, his spirit, his love of this guy. He's done an amazing job. We are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country. Hey, everybody, welcome to this episode of The Charlie Kirk Show. I am so thrilled and thankful to be joined by someone that I have learned so much from throughout the years. Speaker Newt Gingrich and Mr.
Gingrich, thank you so much for joining the Charlie Kirk show. You have a new book called Trump and the American Future Solving the Great Problems of Our Time. Please tell us why you wrote this book. And also, I think it's pretty timely considering the upcoming election.
Well. You know, it occurred to me late last year that the way the Democrats were moving to the left, this would be the biggest choice since Lincoln in eighteen sixty four ran for reelection against somebody who was willing to surrender to the south. Break up the union and preserve slavery. And when I look at where Trump is trying to take the country in terms of jobs and free enterprise and conservative conservative judges, the strong pro-American trade and defense policy and I look at where a Biden, Harris, Pelosi, Schumer team would take the country.
I say it's the biggest gap we've seen certainly in the last hundred and sixty years. So I wanted to write a book that sort of armed our side and said, here are the facts. Here's the context. Here's what you can say to people who aren't sure. And I think Trump in the American future really lays out the big issues, some of them, frankly, a little scary. I mean, we finished the book in March and we have a section in there on the Democrats willingness to support crime and oppose the police.
And that chapter now is coming alive every evening. So I look at stuff like that and I think we sort of caught the big underlying river that's coming down our way in terms of left wing ism and the world they would create if they could.
So in the 1990s, you balanced the budget and worked with Bill Clinton and the Democrats to accomplish serious reforms that helped our country. It seems as if today it's no longer that we can cooperate with Democrats. We have no choice but to defeat them and to basically repudiate their awful ideas. Can you give us some idea of what happened since the 1990s to now with the Democrat Party?
I think Ronald Reagan in the 80s created a national consensus and people have forgotten. But Bill Clinton helped organize a centrist group of Democrats and really ran as a centrist Democrat, much as Tony Blair would do with the Labour Party in Great Britain. So basically, one of the key themes of the Clinton campaign was ending welfare as we know it now. It was worded cleverly. So if you're a liberal, you thought that meant more money, you're a conservative less.
But nonetheless, it was indicating people were tired of things in the 90s period, for example, where out of sheer desperation with crime, New Yorkers turned to Rudy Giuliani. And in the most successful reform of crime and I know of in history, within two years, he began to bring the murder rate down dramatically. So I think what happened was we existed at a moment when for about half the Democratic Party, that's when we did welfare reform. We split the Democratic Party.
One, two, one, two, one, two, one in the House, literally half for about half the Democratic Party, plus the Democratic president. It was a common ground that have been created by Reagan that they could negotiate with us, some for the other half of the Democratic Party who came to hate Clinton because they saw him as a total. So they were rabidly opposed to us deeply, bitterly. But they weren't the president and they they weren't big enough to stop us.
I think what happened was the Gore Bush election of 2000 left a lot of liberals thinking that Gore had really won a plurality of the vote, but did not win the Electoral College almost like 20, 16. And then Bush ran a very brass knuckles campaign against Kerry in 2004. And that left a bad taste among Democrats. And they nominated somebody who on the surface was very reasonable. And this was where I think all of us just frankly made a big mistake.
Barack Obama was a neighborhood organizer, which we joked about. But in fact, in the language of the left, the neighborhood organizer is the radical who is organizing much like antifa or Black Lives Matter. I mean, it's really part of a Marxist construct. And the only person in 2008 who really understood this was Sean Hannity, because he'd read all the books. He knew where Obama was coming from. So what has happened is Obama carried the Democrats further and further to the left.
And then on election night 2016, which I know you remember vividly at eight o'clock in the evening, the Democrats were icing the champagne. They were going to break the glass ceiling. You're going to elect a woman president. And two hours later, they suddenly realized that Donald Trump was going to be president. Those two hours with the equivalent of an IED in Iraq, the left suddenly had the equivalent of. PTSD, and every morning when they would get away, Trump would tweet to remind them that he had one and it just drove them crazy.
So you're now dealing with basically a crazy people watch Pelosi. Broekman Schumer is not exactly crazy. He's too laid back and he's a New York machine politician. But Pelosi really represents San Francisco, just as Kamala Harris really represents San Francisco. And if you watch Pelosi, at times she's just loony tunes and she still represents a different planet. I just I don't know if you did this. I watched Mayor Wheeler or Portland the other night, and I just wrote a newsletter again, which was sexually entitled The Democrats are the Lion King Party.
Because if you watch them, whether it's in foreign policy or it's at home, they don't believe predators exist. They think lions and zebras and warthogs are supposed to get along together and sing together and dance together. And if you watch Wheeler after ninety four consecutive days of violence, having had a Trump supporter killed in cold blood. And the strongest he can do is pathetically appeal to people, please don't be violent. And I watched and I thought this is sort of the end of the left as the defender of Western civilization.
So, Mr. Speaker, in 2012, when you were running for the presidency, I was a senior in high school and I was watching C-SPAN and you said something repeatedly said Barack Obama is an Alinsky ite and you said it. And you might remember it made a lot of news because it really bothered the mainstream media because you were unafraid to call him out for what he was. I never heard the term before, but then I looked up Saul Alinsky and I ended up reading Rules for Radicals.
You were one of the few people that introduced this idea of Alinsky tactics into the mainstream of conservative thinking. I think that's been a really significant contribution, because when I visit Tea Party groups or Republican groups, almost everyone has an understanding of Saul Alinsky.
My question, though, is, do you think that because of how individuals like Mayor Wheeler and Nancy Pelosi, they're no longer hiding their radicalism, do you think that Alinsky tactics are now being put by the wayside because the Saul Alinsky way of approaching things would not being say he would never say get rid of Mt. Rushmore. He'd never say get rid of the American flag. He would say disguise yourself as something as who you're not slick back your hair, take over the institutions and then you can do those things.
Do you think that there's some tension right now between the radicalism that's revealing itself in the prior Alinsky tactics that was more of a camouflage for communism? Well, first of all, I do want to go back and repeat, I got it from Sean Hannity, who was the first person, and when he first said I thought it was nuts and he kept going on and on about the relationship that that Obama had with Bill Ayers, who had been a weatherman who had set bombs and tried to kill people who actually on 9/11 was quoted as saying his only regret was he hadn't set more bombs.
So Sean really has got the rhythm of this thing, and I went about exploring it some more, and I have known about Wolinsky for many years and by the way. Hillary Clinton senior paper was on Wolinsky, and she was a very close personal friend of Alinsky, so it's easy to forget how deep the radicalism of the Chicago left was. I think two things have happened. I think among the senior Democrats, there's a kind of desperation that four more years of Trump will come very close to ending their world in four more years.
He's already got almost three hundred federal judges. So four more years of judges, four more years of tax cuts, four more years of a pro-American trade and defense policy. Trump in the second term will be much more aggressively pro-American in terms of history and cleaning up the universities. And I think they sense all of this. So there's also the the older level, they're desperate. I think at the younger level they have between. What's happened to them is, you know, you're a twenty to thirty five year old radical.
You can run all over Seattle. And the mayor says it's going to be a summer of love. You run all over Portland and the mayor begged you to be nice while you're running over people, destroying the places you'd shock. Just three days ago, the police in Kenosha picked up three vehicles from Seattle that had driven to Kenosha. They were actually at a gas station filling up containers of gasoline so they could go out at night and start fires all over the city.
And they arrested all of their own people. And in fact, the people who been arrested so far in Kenosha, I think. Forty four different states are represented. And so what you're seeing is a younger generation of very hard line, almost like like the young Nazis or young communist in the 30s who are willfully out there trying to destroy things. These are the people who were trying to attack Senator Rand Paul. And I mean, these are people who, frankly, are stunningly dangerous physically.
And then there's the older crowd who really this is their last stand. And they also don't have any choice. When you couldn't go to the Democrats for life trying to have a caucus meeting at the convention, we're told now if if you want to and said, well, I'd like to have a pro police caucus at the Democratic National Convention, they just said, you're in the wrong party. Why why are you to go join the Republicans? And what you're what you're putting so well is the lack of discipline amongst some of the younger revolutionaries and some of the last stand of the Schumer Pelosi kind of wing of the party where you are correct that if Trump does win four more years, people are predicting endless violence.
I think that there might be some unrest immediately. But I'm of the opinion that actually might be a death blow to the left, the likes of which that we haven't seen in quite some time because they have so overextended themselves on a referendum of the president politically that another four years, I think that it will really deflate them and cause a Democrat civil war that is long overdue, which is what I want to ask you about. What do you make about these kind of coalition of Democrat groups that quite honestly have very little in common with each other, such as the corporate wing of the Democrat Party that is playing nice with a Bernie Sanders, Alexandra Kicillof, Cortez wing of the party?
I'm of the opinion the sooner we can get them to have them fight amongst themselves, it's actually getting much healthier for our country. One of the few reasons as to why the president, I think, has a more difficult road to re-election than he should is because of how unified the entire left has been towards defeating him, when in reality the Democrat Party is really more ideologically fractured than the Republican Party. What do you think? Do you think that's something we may make of that?
And first of all, I think you're right. I think it's a coalition with very, very different interests. I also think that it's essentially the anti Trump Party. I mean, this is you saw this happen with Andrew Jackson in the eighteen twenties, nineteen thirties, where he was such a disruptive and such a polarizing figure that everybody who didn't like him joined the Whigs. And the Whigs grew up actually in response to Jackson and then disappeared in the eighteen fifties.
So I think that what you have is a party currently being held together by Donald Trump, ironically, and I think that they will break up a lot if Trump gets re-elected, especially if as a consequence of that re-election, Kevin McCarthy becomes speaker. And we pick up a couple seats in the Senate, which I think is very likely. At that point, I think, for. Sort of the corporate types and for the more traditional politicians, reality will set in and they'll try to find some way to accommodate the president.
I mean, Trump coming into a second term, understanding Washington dramatically better than he did in 2016 with a cabinet already in place with a senior staff at the White House already in place, he will be very formidable. And these guys are mostly timid and cowards. I mean, the money, money, there's an old story that money is a coward and will always flee when threatened. And so I think you'll suddenly see all these corporate CEOs try to find a way to get along with Trump.
I think, on the other hand, a Trump victory would derange the younger radicals. If you remember the day after his inaugural, you ended up with Madonna saying that she dreams of seeing the White House blown up. Now, you know, I can't quite imagine what they'll say if they wake up the morning after the election and Trump has been re-elected, but for the hard line radicals, I suspect they'll take to the streets and they'll go down fighting.
This is this has been a continuation of the Occupy Wall Street has been a long cycle here. People tend to forget, and I think that they would almost be beside themselves, would resemble the samurai charges of sixty or they just they prefer dying to giving up their swords. And I think these people would go into the street and have one great last stand for left wing radicalism.
And so in your book, you devote a lot of a lot of chapter, a couple of chapters and a lot of space to health care. And I think this is something the Republican Party has gotten. So I don't want to say wrong. I just think that they're either contradictory or they understand the issue very well. I I'm just going to give you one personal frustration. One of the reasons why you were able to win back the house in the 90s is you ran on very specific promises to the American people of a Contract with America.
Why House Republicans don't do that now is beyond me. A lot of people think in terms of lists, it's just maybe you can offer some insight or some wisdom. I tell them every time I see the leadership in the Republican Party, I say, did you not learn anything in the 90s? Can you just comment on that and then segue into the health care portion of your book?
Yeah, and the answer, that's No. Parties are parties are large cultural institutions, and they don't change very fast. Reagan came along, showed them how to do it, and they promptly forgot I came along and showed them how to do it again, and they promptly forgot. And Trump has come along and they've split into those who bitterly resent him and those who follow them, but don't necessarily understand why they're applauding this. But that's the nature of big institutions like this takes a long time to ship them.
Look, I think I believe we should be for a patient centered, customer style, market oriented health system. And we ought to say it bluntly, directly, aggressively, which means one of the things I'm most passionate about is transparency. Of course, you have every right to know what your back operation is going to cost as you do to walk into Wal-Mart and know what a TV is going to cost. And if we had a system where you went all the way through Wal-Mart and not knowing any prices and you didn't learn the price of how you checked out.
And you couldn't, by the way, return anything, people would think it was insane, but you have a conspiracy between doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, medical technology companies to block the individual from knowing accurately what it's going to cost them, that what we believe that one change. Allowing you to know what your health care is going to cost probably would take 40 percent of the system. I think it's that big a deal.
And Cynthia Fisher is someone I've been working with on the price transparency. And I know that you know her. And it's been really interesting, though, Mr. Speaker, and I'd love to have your opinion on this. And you kind of touched on it is the forces that are fighting against this very common sense pro market reform? I'm a Milton Friedman guy, but one thing that Milton Friedman talked about is the need for a price system. If you don't know prices, a market is not truly a market.
Everyone's just flying blind and there's a lack of information there. What do you have to say to some of the people that are saying that some of the reforms you're proposing are anti free market? It's more government interference? I don't hold that view, but that is something that some of the strict libertarians say towards us when we're trying to put forth these transparency reforms. Well, I think they're crazy. I mean, how how how can you argue that having contracts, which guarantees secrecy?
Is in any way in the public interest. And they can say, well, the market would work. No, that's the whole point. This is an anti market system of oligopolies, huge hospitals, huge insurance companies, huge medical technology companies. The medical technology company signs a contract with a hospital that insists that the price is secret.
Now, why should I mean, that's not libertarianism, that is Adam Smith said at one point, any time a group of businessmen get together, it's a conspiracy against the consumer. I am a consumer oriented free market guy. I am not a producer oriented free market guy. I want the consumer to have the widest range of choices. And then the producers got to go out there and work hard and invent in order to earn the participation of the consumer.
And I think it's very important for us to understand the difference of the two, you have every right to know. And frankly, the same thing goes for surprise building where you you think everything's paid for. But, oh, they didn't tell you this is a true story. They didn't tell you the anesthesiologist wasn't part of the package. He has a six thousand dollar bill. You know, well, the president's been pretty good about this, they haven't put it together into a really easy to communicate strategy, and I would say Cynthia Fisher is one of the people who has moved the ball further than almost anybody else on this topic.
And I think when you ask the American people, it's like eighty eight percent of the country thinks they ought to have the right to know.
I totally agree with that. And so some people and I think there's a divide happening. And I think this population is very small and it's mostly focused in Washington, D.C., at very well funded think tanks that probably have financial relationships with these companies that are pushing for it, because I can't really find any sort of public interest or consumer advocacy argument to say that when someone walks into the emergency room, I've had this experience recently, there are no posted prices.
I travel quite a lot. So I'm out of network. And then I get some sort of a bill a couple of weeks later, as you said, that is so extreme that you almost are less likely to go into a hospital and you're less likely to even go into the health care network.
And you probably got a bill you couldn't read. That's correct. It was just so I needed to hire a lawyer to help me understand.
Right. Exactly. OK. And I think this has been part of part of the I've done a lot on health care since nineteen seventy four. When I first ran for Congress, I wrote a book called Saving Lives and Saving Money. I founded the Center for Health Transformation. And I absolutely believe I was shocked when I when I left the speakership, I decided I would focus on national security, on health, because they're both life and death and they're both very big and complex.
I was shocked after the first two years to realize that the biggest impediment to health reform is the health system. And that it's a whole the whole range of different things, but that who you're who you're ultimately really fighting with are the people who have a pretty good deal of the multi-million dollar hospital administrator. That's right. I mean, anybody I have Betsy McCoy on my podcast a couple of weeks ago, former lieutenant governor of New York, a brilliant woman, and she was commenting on the impact of the New York Hospital Association lobbyist on Governor Cuomo, his decision to put senior citizens in nursing homes who are already infected, which probably killed between six and twelve thousand senior citizens.
She said it was entirely corrupt and it was basically taking care of the hospital association, who has the highest paid lobbyist in New York. And so I would say to my libertarian friends, you know, in the real world, the fact is the game is currently rigged by the big boys against the average American in health. And the left sensors add a layer of bureaucracy. And the right answer ought to be to give you the power for you to know what you what you're going to get and what you're going to pay.
I totally agree with that.
And I think it also resonates with younger voters as well. When I talk about health care, I think it's a much better option, obviously, than socialized Medicare for all. And so here's my question, Mr. Speaker, is, as we're talking about these issues to challenge kind of the corporate interests on behalf of the consumer and being able to effectuate that change, something we run into is how much power these corporations have in being able to influence politicians and bureaucrats.
For example, the president signs an executive order for price transparency within a moment's notice. The hospital is suing him and putting him into the courts. Would you advocate at all in any sort of campaign finance reform or being able to have at least some sort of changes in how are politicians? Elections are funded? And I only say this because some of these very simple ideas seem to be nearly impossible to put forth legislatively because of how much the capital flow from these special interests towards the legislative process.
I think this is an area where the cure is continuously worse than the disease because you have to set up some kind of a rigged system, which you then have to have the government enforce, and then you have smart people who figure out how to get around the system. I've always said, for example, that the easiest election reform is to allow anyone to accept any amount of personal or corporate money under the under the Citizens United Group directly into your campaign.
As long as you reported that I totally saw on the Internet and that my reasoning is middle class candidates could raise the money to defeat rich people, but they can't do it if they're limited to twenty five or twenty seven hundred dollars a donation and the rich person can write a 20 million dollar or in the case of Bloomberg, two hundred million dollar check. On the other hand, Bloomberg is a great SISMI is a great case study, but money is not enough.
You know, if you're a big enough jerk, the country figures it out no matter how many ads you buy, it's such a good point. I ask because there's a big movement for campaign finance reform. And I think that sort of reform makes a lot of sense because it actually trusts the people to look within 24 hours. I think the issue is the dark money packs that are not disclosed that do things on behalf of a candidate with almost an unspoken quid quid pro quo.
I think that's where the relationship really breaks down.
And so, Mr. Speaker, so that I don't I don't see any reason for us to have dark money. This is why I think contribution ought to be reported online every night. I totally agree and that's transparency and it's also when it comes to freedom of speech. So your book is Trump in the American Future Solving the Great Problems of Our Time. Mr. Speaker, can you give us an analysis where you think the race stands today? There's a lot of differing opinions.
I think it's widely accepted based on Joe Biden now being flushed out of his shelter in place, strategy to win the White House and actually trying to do his version of campaigning at the polls are truly tightening. Don Lemon kind of signal the fire alarm last week when he said that not that they care about the rioting and the looting for people's livelihoods being destroyed, but it's showing up in the focus groups, Mr. Speaker. That's the reason to start caring about it.
Where does this race stand and what does Trump need to do? What are two or three things he needs to do to win? Well. I I always try to remind people that races are not Polaroid shots, they're moving pictures. By that, I mean all these any time somebody runs in with the next pope, that's a Polaroid, that's that's as of this morning under these circumstances. And in the case of Trump, it is almost certainly going to understate his support.
But somewhere between five and 15 points, I mean, we know that. And the people of Trafalgar who are the most accurate people in both twenty, sixteen and twenty eighteen, will tell you that they routinely assume that Trump is, at a minimum, seven points stronger than the polls and people just won't tell you. And they believe, for example, right now he is probably carrying Minnesota, carrying Wisconsin, carrying Michigan, carrying Pennsylvania, which will not show up in the traditional polls.
There's a great video. By may toot my own horn for a second, about two weeks before the election, I did Megan Kelly and this is this is somewhere on YouTube and. We got into how was the race gone and I said, OK, Trump wins. And she said, what do you mean? I said, well, if they win, it's going to win. He said, Well, the polls show him losing Pennsylvania. I said, yes, I said it in your world, he will lose Pennsylvania.
In my world, you will win Pennsylvania. She says, well, I mean, they show I'm losing Wisconsin. I said, yes, in your world. And I went through all the key swing states and I was right. Whatever you want to, just so frustrated. So it was fun to watch. And in fact, we got off on the whole thing because she brought up the sports tape about Trump. And I just stopped and I said, why are you fixated on sex?
And I understand your fascination with sex. I thought we were talking about the election and she got totally flustered. But anyway, my point is, I said back in January, Trump will win probably by a surprisingly big margin. They'll probably pick up two Senate seats. And there's a 50 50 chance that McCarthy will be the speaker of the House. And people said, yeah, but tell me what you really think is going to happen. Well, I think Trump is going to win by a surprisingly big margin.
We're going to pick up several U.S. Senate seats and McCarthy has a 50/50 chance of being speaker. That's the reason I say that, is the Democrats went out of their way to nominate the weirdest ticket since George McGovern. I mean, I just hope people close your eyes and imagine the American president negotiating with General Secretary Xi Jinping, who was a really tough dictator in China. Now, would you rather have a tough guy who's a little rough around the edges, or would you like to have a commander in chief who falls asleep halfway through the.
You know, I just think as people come to grips with reality, as we move away from the summer, you know, what are the news media tell you?
You should think. And then second, I have written on this in my newsletter, Gingrich be 16, about to do another one. And also to a podcast where I'm taking all of Kamala Harris is really stupid of sports prizes, which is a lot. And we have amazing stuff from her, including people are going to keep demonstrating and writing all the way up to election, but just get used to it, which in the context of what's now going on, sounds really bad and is really bad.
So I think that she is. An absolute disaster. Remember, she was at 15 percent in July and was up four when she dropped out of the race. She was actually running fourth among African-Americans, widened her eight times as many black voters as she did. Why they picked her? I assume it's for Hollywood and Silicon Valley money. But I think by the time we get to the middle of October, this this race will be a shambles and the Democrats will be in the process of collapsing.
There is there's a growing movement in this country to embrace. The president from northern Illinois spent a lot of time in southern Wisconsin. It has been a 30 point swing, I could tell you, in people that used to be Democrats and Trump supporters. When you start to see neighborhoods, you grow up and burned to the ground. All of a sudden you go to the Propolis Law and Order, Safety Party. The book is Trump in the American Future Solving the Great Problems of Our Time.
Any closing thoughts, Mr. Speaker? And thank you for joining and being so generous.
I would say, first of all, Charlie, I've been watching you. I've been watching your growth. I've been watching your effectiveness. You're doing an amazing job. You are clearly going to emerge as one of the great leaders of the next generation. And I am delighted that you have the courage and the energy and the drive to stay out there and all you can to help save the country. And I would just say to all of our listeners and viewers, this is all real right now.
For the next 60 days, you have a chance to shape American history in a way that your children and grandchildren will thank you for. And I hope everybody who's listening will take seriously this opportunity to have a positive citizenship to offset those who would destroy and tear up things.
I totally agree. Mr. Speaker, thank you so much for joining and trumping the American future. Talk to you soon. Thank you.
Thanks so much for listening. Everybody get involve a turning point. USA, take out your phone and go to CPUSA Dotcom. That's t.P USA dot com to get involved in the fight for the next generation on college and high school campuses across the country. TPE, USA, Dotcom. Email us, email us as always and freedom at Charlie Cook Dotcom Freedom at Charlie Cook Dotcom type in Charlie Cook showed your podcast provider hit Subscribe. Give us a five star review.
Screenshot and email us at Friedemann. Charlie Dotcom. If you guys want to win a signed copy of the New York Times best seller The Magga Doctrine. Thank you guys so much for listening. Please consider supporting us a Charlie Cook dotcom slash support. Thanks so much. God bless.