The Truth with Lisa BootheThe Truth with Lisa Boothe: Trump's Triumph with Newt Gingrich
In this episode, Lisa interviews former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich about Donald Trump’s political legacy, the challenges facing the Democratic Party, and the current state of American politics. Gingrich discusses Trump’s unique connection with everyday Americans, his evolution after surviving an assassination attempt, and his enduring influence on the Republican Party.
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 or nation today. We have the great honor to have former Speaker new Gingridge, a political titan and also the author of the new book Trump's Triumph, America's Greatest Comeback, on the show. We're going to get to a lot a lot to unpack with Speaker new Gingridge, because basically he's brilliant well impact 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?
Willso tackle some of.
The pressing issues like the challenges of cutting government spending and whether Speaker Johnson a majority leader thoon or moving fast enough to deliver results for you, the American people. We also talk about Joe Biden's mental decline, How much to Congress focus on that, what should they do about it?
Moving forward? We have hearings.
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 new 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.
We'll speak her New 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 letting their hair on fire when they shouldn't be. So it's always just great to 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.
Well that's so 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.
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 you know, after writing your latest book, Trump's Triumph America's Greatest Comeback, why do you think President Trump is still so misunderstood by so many?
I think for two reasons.
One, they get overwhelmed by the daily noise, including his noise, and so it's very hard for normal for people to put it all together, so they Part of the reason I wrote Trump's Triumph was to give a historic framework and wish to think about him.
And then two, for the people who.
Don't like him, 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 big part of what's going on here, that 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 that Trump. If you view Trump strategically, he's pretty understandable. But if you just try to follow the day after day tactical maneuvering and the sheer noise. 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 and 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.
I wonder 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.
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, uh, and the people in the print of the propaganda media are so hostile. I mean, we went through this this the Taco attack on him and the truth. 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 up out by the CIA and the FBI, had a serious two year investigation by Mulla that proved nothing, was impeached twice by the House, with the Senate refusing to take it up, 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 twenty sixth election, in the twenty eight 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.
What is interesting is, as you're laying out everything that he has survived and been able to triumph over per your book, it is remark. I mean, is there anyone else that could handle all that? I mean I would be curled up in the corner crying, like even one of those things would probably break me as a human.
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 year tax cuts and rebuilt American civic morale. But Reagan never had this kind of assault. Nixon maybe the closest. And of course, in Nixon's case, he tried to operate within the system as opposed to fighting back. I mean, 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 had a unique moment in American history where a movement that began with Goldwater and sixty four. And I always tell 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 sixty four. 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 of America, which was pure Reaganism, in winning the first majority for the House Republicans in forty years and the first re elected majority since nineteen twenty eight, and changed the whole balance of power in Washington. Before we took over, there had been sixty years of Democrats and four years of Republicans in charge of the House. After we won, it's been twenty two years of Republicans in eight years of Democrats, a 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 works 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.
What do you think makes him so tough?
You know, the man you've also you know, lived through just you know, monumental and key moments in history.
What makes him so tough.
Moving 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 let him in. And I think he decided at some point. I mean I've never actually talked about it in fascinating conversation, but there was some point I think in his twenties 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 him along. He took him on when one of the reasons he counterpunches so aggressively is he learned from page six that when they attacked him, he had to attack back within twelve 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 thirteen years of The Apprentice, so here he is on on national television for thirteenth straight years. He ran the Miss Universe contest, and he did things like one of the great events, which was saving the woman's skating rink. The New York City had spent six years and thirteen million dollars 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 three million dollars, and in six months, I'll fix it. Well, when 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 twenty five percent under budget. So he's spending, you know, about two and a half million on a project that for six million the city couldn't solve.
And 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 they 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's the best ice making company? And they said, this is firm in Montreal. So he calls them 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. But he's doing all this as an outsider. So if you're you know, if you're part of the investment class and City Bank, 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 readid Trump Tower. He originally wanted to keep the art deco front, and then the Times loved it and praised him. And then his engineer said it's going to cost three million dollars, and he said he didn't want to keep it that butt, so they decided they weren't going to keep the Art deco front. And for three days, the New York Times attacked him. And 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 say 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.
You know, it's interesting because especially the ice skating, how you laid the rank, 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 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 turffs 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 well?
And to take the example of tariffs, he talked about tariffs in the nineteen eighties.
He said America is.
Getting ripped off the way of 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 terr Effact and who ran for President I 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 mind It 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 terrified 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 gut her in the Loe and four days he comes back with literally a trillion dollars, not a billion, a trillion dollars 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.
And I liked the line in his speech in Saudi Arabia about how the future of the region was commerce, not chaos.
Well exactly, I mean, and he has a vision.
And it occurred to me, actually, and I have not ever talked 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 of the Persian Gulf with the highest hotel willing in the world and proof that you can be an Arab and have a very modern, very commercial society. Killis and I were there a few years ago. We went to mass with about eight hundred 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.
We've got to take a quick commercial break more with speaker new Gingrich. On the other side, 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 you know, they 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.
Why do you think they're struggling?
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 actually Trump. The rise of Trump is in part being fueled by people who are so turned off. Mean, 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 nineteen fifties. 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 have not committed crimes, but they're sanctuary cities for murderers and rapists and armed robbers. That's a pretty crazy value system.
So looking at the midterms.
I guess one thing I am a little bit concerned about is, you know, 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.
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 trump Ism and a vote for President Trump. And the marginal House members are going to be re elected if President.
Trump can turn out the vote.
But we've got I think thirteen Democrat Democrats in the seats that Trump carried and another twenty one Democrats and seats that Trump got within twenty within five percent, 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 ten 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 yr elections. And I think the only way to do that is to an affect 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 mega 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 in election day, then I think, in fact, we'll have a big enough turnout to win the election.
What it's sort of ironic, because the media and the Democrats have tried to lead throughout the year, is that Trump's talk, but in fact, like he's the 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. You know, no one else would have been able to win the popular vote, but President Trump heading into twenty twenty eight, 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.
Well, I think President Trump picked JD. Fans, who was actually a year younger than Richard Nixon when Dwight Eisenewer picked him in nineteen fifty two. So Vance is now the youngest vice president of 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 one Memorial Day at Arlington National Cemetery as a team, and you could just sense that the 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 ninety percent likelihood of being the Republican nominee and probably a much better than even chance of being the president.
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?
Well, given the nature of the American Constitution and the legislative process, it's very hard to be beautiful while they'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 can 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 gonna 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's doing an astonishing job as the Speaker of the House. And with Trump's leadership, the three of them, I think will eventually get to a bill that will pass.
You know, any spearhead of this process before, when you were speaker. Why is it so hard for Congress to cut spending?
Well, because everybody who wants the money is excited and aroused and angry, and everybody who would like to balance the budget is soft and passive and not going to get in a 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 balance budget as the goal, because if the goal is balancing the budget, people will tolerate spending cuts dramatically better. After 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 balance budget, then people will tolerate cuts that they will not tolerate in a period of deficits. Second, I think you have to make America healthy again as a core goal, because if people are healthy and don't need health care, then the cost of health care will drop dramatically, not because you're cutting it, but because people are healthier. And I think you can get probably four percent of the gross domestic product just by implementing making Americans healthy again, and that four percent is enough basically to get you to a balanced budget.
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.
Well, I think in scale of achievement, it's an a plus. 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 twenty six and twenty eight, he will have been an even bigger change agent I think than FDR. But I would also say 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 it is entertaining, though, I mean, I.
Mean it's entertaining, but it's not necessarily helpful. Yeah.
So, but he's still you know, he's he's simply an extraordinary person. And that's why when I wrote Trump's Tiumph and we began in October because I was sure.
He was going to win.
It's 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 Left made a huge mistake by rigging the election in twenty 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.
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 and particularly in these line, 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 is 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.
Yeah, Bill Clinton, Yeah, well, yeah, actually that's a good point.
Well, Bill Clinton.
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 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 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 Democrat Party right now. It's become the party of.
No well and yeah, the party of twenty percent 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, eighty percent of the country disagrees with you, yet they're digging in in states like California or Maine.
You know, or favoring the return of people 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's New Majority Project dot com. And it is astonishing to me that the Democrats are consistently on the fifteen to twenty percent range and it's gradually wearing their party down.
We've got to take a quick commercial break, but if you're enjoying this episode so far, please post on social media or share with your friends. What's interesting is I mean, if you think about at least the immigration issue, like I wonder if this was thought out or because if you think about it's kind of genius. Because Joe Biden earned the Democrat party they led in like millions of illegal aliens to the country. Obviously they want some sort of pathway to citizenship and pathway to vote for them, so import like this new voter base, and then it's virtually impossible to deport all of them because judges keep trying to block President Trump's attempts, and he's trying to be creative and finding ways to deport them so they might be stuck here, and so like, that's kind of brilliant. And what's the long term impact of that on the country? And do you think that that was some thought out master plan of theirs or it just sort of happened.
No. I think what's happened is that the district level judges, the left wing, once appointed by Obama and by Biden, have become the last stand trying to stop trump Ism, and so they made decisions which are clearly unconstitutional. I do not believe the dish judges have the ability to issue a nationwide injunction usurping the President 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, a chief executive in president United States is crazy. And Jefferson said rule by judges would be an oligarchy. Lincoln made the eighteen fifty eight 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 eighteen sixty one. 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 grotesque 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 seventy seven million votes, Well they got zero.
Well what's the path forward on that? Like, what do we do about it?
Well?
I testified in the House Judiciary Committee a couple of months ago, and I started my testimony by reading the names of fourteen people who turned out to be the fourteen judges who were abolished by Jefferson in the Judicial Act of eighteen o two. He didn't impeach him, he just eliminated the courts. So 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 Daryl Aia passed in the House which blocks district judges from issuing nationwide injunctions. There's a parallel bill by Senator Grassley and the Senate. If that, 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 has currently invested 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, you know, they can be a floating constitutional convention by four to three or five to four majorities in which on one swing judge suddenly becomes the equivalent of an entire constitutional convention.
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, DC, and then over last weekend we saw utterly Jewish people set on fire and boulder at Colorado. How dangerous is the political left And have they gotten more dangerous since your time in office.
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 anti Semitism. Anti Semitism 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 to a Black church. And I think that we have to have the same decision that being anti Submitica 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 submitted.
You know, we saw with a suspect in Boulder, Colorado. He was denied a visa in two thousand and five, granted one under the Biden administration, and then he overstayed, and that 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 in 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 which I've done about it?
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 couldn't have sharia in the context of the US 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 becoming spies. And we now know that that's a real problem or and 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 our unwillingness to accept foreign threats being injected into our society.
Yeah, 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, fifty percent 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 Hitler, as they have pointed out previously and then on the right over the past four years in the Bio administration, We're like, this guy is a threat to democracy.
So you have half of.
The country believing the other part. You know that there 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 a historical perspective, and like, what do we do about it moving forward?
Well, when it was this divided in the eighteen fifties, right, yeah, you know, I mean, but we.
Shouldn't kill ourselves. I had a very famous Lincoln scholar.
I guess more in modern history it probably should have.
Asked, 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 elites worldview, just as Lincoln had ultimately meant the end of slaveholding 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 you with, 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 that's a horrifying idea, and there's a sign that we're totally insensitive.
Or if we insist.
That, uh, you know, 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 that's a horrifying idea. Or if we insist that parents have a right to know what's being told there are 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. Uh And and many elements 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 these are real, fundamental, profound differences and they're not going to go away easily.
We're finding out a lot about Joe Biden's mental a client well and office. Obviously we all knew it at the time, but we're finding out just you know, how deep it went and how.
Bad it 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 Thoon, how.
Would you handle this issue in Congress?
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 twenty twenty three Biden lost the ability to be president. And for example, after the election, on one day, they commuted twenty four hundred sentences. Now it was then with an auto pen Who picked the twenty four hundred? Why were they included? Why was that particular action undertaken? 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 coming to the other day that they had shoveled his award, was shoveled seventy three billion dollars 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 twenty three, 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.
I also find it interesting because even going back to twenty nineteen, you know, we had that basement campaign during the twenty twenty 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 twenty nineteen in this book that he forgot the name of an AID who had been with him since I think nineteen eighty one, so it's basically a family member at this point. You know, So this wasn't even just a you know, a twenty twenty four issue. It seems like this was a twenty twenty issue.
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 so Taper 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.
Well, speaker, I'm sure you saw did he just did it?
Creane gene Pierre, of all people, I mean, that's like you were the mouthpiece, yes for all questions.
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 Lovet's doing it, it's astonishingly how difference the impact is.
One thing I think we found.
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 Stacy Abrams. I think it was like two billion dollar 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.
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 this is why they're 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 was 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 me. You go back to go look at the various green firms that would get two, three, four hundred million dollars and then fail deliver nothing. And it was all basically a way.
Of paying people off, like Clendra.
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. Was this was a twelve year I think of Biden as the Obama's third term. This was a twelve year project of trying to move America to the left and trying to build a machine with taxpayer money.
Quick break stay with Us.
Has any other Democrat president done as much harm to the country than Obama?
Well, I mean, you can.
Make an argument for a Buchanan and just before the Civil War, but if you look at the last century, I would say no 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 the overtime. And in a sense, if Trump had had accepted defeat and gone away, he would have been sort of a brief interruption in the gradual decay of America.
Uh.
And it was. It was part of the reason I wrote Trump's Triumph. It 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.
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 here's this guy that like, survives a bullet and his immediate instinct is to stand up and say a fight, fight, fight, Like who is.
Made of that? You know? It's like, yeah, it was remarkable.
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 mugshot 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.
As somebody who's written multiple books about Trump, what new insights or perspectives did you cover in writing this book, Trump's Triumph.
Well, I think that there's a continuity to Trump, So in that sense, I don't think there's a 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 fifty thousand 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 eighty seven percent of the country goes to McDonald's at least once a year, and forty million Americans, including Jeff Beza's work 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 more on logo when the FBI or when the Secret Service came in to brief Trump on this second effort to kill him, which was the guy that they caught in the golf course. And he said that really shook Trump and 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 is God's desire to make America great again. And it reminded me Callissa and I had done two movies, Nine Days to Change the World about John Paul the second and then Run The 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 but 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 was 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 twenty sixty.
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?
Well, Calicia, 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 an American. 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 a sort of stabilizing and growing the church. I think you'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, tried to to talk some things, and he President Trump has already invited him to come to the US, and I think that there's a real possibility that will happen. Apparently JD Vance met with him. Jadevance 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 that can really work with and I think that will be You know, there are a billions, three hundred many Catholics around the world, and working together you can accomplish big things. Cloister 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.
Before we go through what else about Trump's triumph?
Would you like to convey to the audience that we haven't addressed yet 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 two hundred and fiftieth 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 two hundred and fifty 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.
Speaker New Gingridge, 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.
Lisa, Lisa, You're so flattering. I've always glad to come back in the show because you make me feel.
Good perfect, then I'll keep having you back.
But I truly always learn so much from you, so it really is an honest sir, And thank you for being so being so generous with your time. We really appreciate it. Glad to do it though a speaker New 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.
