The New Yorker Radio Hour - Newt Gingrich on What Trump Could Accomplish in a Second Term

Episode Date: October 4, 2024

Long before Donald Trump got serious about politics, Newt Gingrich saw himself as the revolutionary in Washington, introducing a combative style of party politics that helped his party become a dominating force in Congress. Setting the template for Trump, Gingrich described Democrats not as an opposing team with whom to make alliances but as an alien force—a “cultural élite”—out to destroy America. Gingrich has written no less than five admiring books about Trump, and he was involved with pushing the lie of the stolen election of 2020. Like many in the Party, he balks at some of Trump’s tactics, but always finds an excuse. “I would probably not have used the language Trump used,” for example in calling Vice-President Kamala Harris “mentally disabled,” Gingrich says. “Partly because I think that it doesn’t further his cause. . . . I would simply say that he is a very intense personality . . . and occasionally he has to explode.” But he sees Trump as seasoned and improved with age, and his potential in a second term far greater. “It’s almost providential: he’s had four years [out of office] to think about what he’s learned . . . and he has a much deeper grasp of what has to be done and how to do it.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Earlier this week, the editors of The New Yorker, probably to no one's surprise, endorse the Democrat, Vice President Kamala Harris for president. The long editorial, published in the magazine and on New Yorker.com, in addition to reviewing Harris's virtues and promise, made the case that Donald Trump is simply unfit, morally unfit to hold the office. If Trump is elected once more,

he'd come to the White House in a spirit of vengeance. That's his word. His economic policies, his tariffs and tax cuts for the wealthy, they'd hammer the middle class with inflation and aggravate the inequality in this country, which is already extremely severe. He'd go on belittling the climate emergency and leave the people of Ukraine

to the tender mercies of Vladimir Putin. In short, he beat Trump unbound, a threat to the constitutional order and the national security of the United States. Recently, I spoke on the program with Sarah Longwell, a leader of the never-Trump Republicans. Longwell sees the MAGA movement as an aberration, even a betrayal of conservative values, but that's a fringe view now in the Republican Party. The most influential Republicans see Trump still as their champion. And a key figure here is former House Speaker, Newt Gingrich. Long before Trump got serious about politics,

Gingrich was the revolutionary who wanted to break Washington. He went to battle with Democrats not as an opposing team, but as an alien force, cultural elites, out to destroy America, unless he destroyed them first. Gingrich has written no fewer than five admiring books about Donald Trump. Right now, hundreds of establishment Republicans and many former Trump officials have come out against this candidacy. Newt Gingrich has held absolutely firm. I wanted to know why and what it is he's hoping for in a second Trump term.

Mr. Speaker, let's just get right to it. In 1978, June 24th, you gave a speech to a group of college Republicans, and you said that one of the great problems that we have in the Republican Party is that we don't encourage you to be nasty. We encourage you to be obedient, neat, loyal, faithful, all those Boy Scout words, which would be great around the campfire, but are lousy in politics. And now it's 2024,

and just last week, the Republican Standard Bear, Donald Trump, said more than once in a speech that Kamala Harris is mentally disabled. This is not the first time that he's made such remarks. And I wonder, is that what you had in mind? And do you support him because of that kind of style, that kind of rhetoric or in spite of it?

Well, we'd been the minority party for 40 years. And part of the reason we were the minority party was we weren't prepared to be direct and tough and explicit. And we were up against a Democratic majority leading back to Franklin Roosevelt. And they were quite happy to have a weak, confused and incompetent Republican opposition. because it enabled them to stay in power. So if you were trying to figure out a way to this lodge a machine that had been around for a long time, you had to be much tougher and much more explicit than we'd been.

I would probably not have used the language Trump used last week, partly because I think that it doesn't further his cause. I'm very happy to tough and direct about Kamala Harris, But I think you can do that in ways that are more effective. I've been very clear that I think that they're out of touch with reality and that their programs are very destructive and represent a value system that I think most Americans don't agree with. I wonder if you agree with some of the people in the Trump campaign

that think this is hurting Trump very badly. In other words, his emphasis on that kind of rhetoric, his sense of resentment and speeches that go on for quite a long time, cats and dogs being eaten in Ohio, and all that kind of thing, as opposed to a critique of Harris and Waltz in ideological terms, that that's really hurting the campaign. Do you agree with that?

Well, I think that to the degree that Trump remains focused on big ideas and big issues and big contrast, he gets more votes. And I think that some of these things are distraction from that. And I think that that's always been a part of who he is. I mean, go back and look at various tweets over the years. There's a German poet who said once, If my demons flee, will my angels flee also?

And so Trump is an enormously complicated, very powerful personality. He came out of nowhere to beat 15 other Republicans, pivoted, and won electoral college against Hillary Clinton when virtually no one thought. he could and survived. He came back to completely dominate his own party and have a reasonably good chance, I think a probability that he'll be the next president. As a part of that makeup, he has a kind of aggressive personality, which at times does 10% more than it should. What are Donald Trump's demons so far as you can tell? You've known him for quite a while. Well, I don't know. First of all,

I'm not the business of psychoanalyzing the candidate I support. I would simply say that he is a very intense personality. He has an ability to work that's astonishing. And I can't figure out how he has that much energy. And occasionally he has to explode. So he does. That's just part of his personality. Is it part of his character?

In other words, what a lot of people who are opponents of Trump And they see him as somebody who is not a decent person, Mr. Speaker. Somebody who is willing to mock the mentally disabled, say racist things, misogynist things. And it's not a matter of political correctness or anything like that. You hear it. Is this somebody that you've, in a sense, made a bargain with that you agree with and you swallow the fact that his character is deficient? Is that wrong to say?

Oh, I don't know. In my lifetime, you could go back through what we learned later about John F. Kennedy. We could go back through what we learned about, ultimately about London Johnson. You could go back through Teddy Kennedy, just to take three examples. I'm not very much in the business of worrying about that sort of thing. Trump came out of a different world in a remarkable way. He has never tried to communicate that he was somehow apparent. arrogant of something other than who he really is. And I think it's that authenticity that probably

was uniquely effective. The reason I am for Trump is I think the system is stunningly and dangerously corrupt. And I think that it desperately needs somebody of almost an Andrew Jackson kind of aggressiveness who is willing to take on the entire establishment and to fight for very profound changes. And those kind of personality. very often have great strengths and great weaknesses. Drucker used to talk about that, that you could find people who were sort of mountains, but then mountains have valleys.

But those are the kind of people who get real things done. And if you look for people who are plateaus, they very seldom get things done. So I'm pretty happy to have the totality of Trump, if you will. There are the things I wish he did differently. Sure. But I think that would be true. of anybody I support it.

Mr. Speaker, you call yourself a genuine populist. How does that job with Trumpism? Oh, I think that Trump's greatest support comes from people who believe that they have been misgoverned by an elite, which seeks to impose its values on them. I think that's why we're in the middle of this amazing revolution where the Republicans are becoming the party of the working class and the Democrats are becoming the party of the literati. Of the literati.

Yeah, the educated elite PhDs. I see. What do you make of the fact that so many people who have worked with Donald Trump in his first administration from 2016 to 2020 are now in opposition to him? His vice president, national security advisor, secretary of state, defense secretary, chiefs of staff, chairman of the joint chiefs, all of whom think that he is a threat to national security? I think that we are in the middle of a profound cultural fight in which the old order, most of the people you described ultimately are in the old order, correctly identify Trump as a threat. A threat to national security. Well, a threat to their security. I'm speaking today with Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour with more to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and I'm speaking today with Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House. When Donald Trump came along as a contender in 2015, he ditched some of the central concerns of traditional conservatism like free trade and low deficits. And despite that, Newt Gingrich supported his presidency to the very end. And he was involved with pushing the idea of a stolen election in 2020. I spoke with Gingrich last week, and it was just before new evidence in the January 6th case against Donald Trump was unsealed. We'll continue our conversation. Trump was asked at the debate, a very simple question, he was asked the debate whether he wanted

Ukraine to prevail after being invaded by Russia. He avoided that answer and expressed great admiration for Vladimir Putin. Recently, he met with Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, and the day after expressed nothing but contempt for Zelensky. Do you agree with him on that? I think that it is very hard to imagine without direct use of American and other forces, how Ukraine is going to, quote, win this war. I can imagine and I suspect that there could be a truce and that Ukraine could have a future, but it's not going to have a future fighting a war of attrition against a country dramatically bigger than it is. I mean, the Russian army in Ukraine is larger than the entire American army. And I think that part of what you're seeing is a reaction to the idea that we just routinely commit more and more money to a fight for which no one has a strategy for success.

But you're okay, and Trump is okay, with an end result in which large part of Ukrainian territory remains in Russian hands. I'm not okay with it, but I'd like someone to show me a strategic plan that is a reasonable risk that orders that. The biggest, and I think the most galvanizing campaign subject for Donald Trump has been immigration. There's no question about it. What do you make of the Senate Republicans torpedoing the immigration bill back in February of this year, largely at the urging of Donald Trump?

Well, as it has been explained to me, and I'm not an expert on that bill, the bill would, in fact, have locked into law a series of steps, which would actually have limited Trump's ability to change immigration. regulation policy when he got elected. In other words, they torpedoed it in his electoral interest, not in the interest of the subject itself. No, they repeated it in the interest of his presidential power if he does win the election. It wasn't about the immediate campaign. It was about a bill which had been drafted in a way that had locked into law, a series of provisions, which are currently executive orders, which he can currently change with the stroke of a pen, in which he would have to get Congress to agree to dismantle once the

the bill was passed and signed into law. I mean, the people who know the most about immigration on our side all agreed that it was a bad deal. You mean Stephen Miller or who do you mean? Well, Stephen Miller, but also people I work with at the American First Policy Institute, who had been actively involved, for example, in controlling the border. In a profile written in 2016 when you were still being considered by Trump for vice president, your longtime colleague and friend, former Minnesota representative Vin Weber, said that you and Trump shared a lot of the same attributes.

How much of yourself do you see in Trump? Where do you think you influenced him and where do you kind of overlap, do you think? Well, I don't know how much I've influenced him. I would say, first of all, I don't think he was ever seriously thinking he allowed me for vice president. No? I think that was a game designed to keep the news media amused. And were you on to it right away? Well, look, I always strongly supported Mike Pence for a practical reason.

What was the practical reason? Well, I told Trump at one point that he was a pirate and I'm a pirate and you can't have a two-pirate ticket. Because there's no one for normal people to identify with. And that Pence would in fact be really good because he could reach out to the Paul Ryan's and to the regular members of the party. in a way that Trump and I couldn't. Do you think a second administration would be all pirates? No, I think it will actually be a lot of technically very, very smart people who have achieved a great deal

and who understand how tough the fight is and how determined they are to profoundly change Washington. Meaning what? What kind of politician that was in power in 2016 would no longer find a place in the second Trump administration? What has Trump learned? How has he changed? that would influence his appointments?

They're totally different circumstances. Trump in 2016 was on a wild roller coaster ride from going down that big escalator in June of 2015, defeating 15 opponents, pivoting, defeating Hillary. And they put together the entire project on the run. Because when you come from that far behind and from that far outside the normal process, you spend all day, every day learning

and all day, every day, trying to execute a campaign capable of winning. He's now had, I think it's almost providential, he's had four years to think about what he's learned. And he is a very smart guy. And he's dealt with all the world's major leaders. And he has dealt with large parts of American society. And he has a much deeper grasp of what has to be done and how to do it. And he has allies, many of whom were second and third level. people in the administration, but very substantial people. I mean, the director of OMB, for example,

or the person in charge of FEMA, people who were in a position now to have thought through, you know, what went right, what went wrong, what do we learn from it, what's it going to take to be successful? And I think you'll see a dramatically more managerial and practical administration this time. Oriented toward doing what? In other words, what do you think would be the real goals of a second Trump administration? Would not be? NATO survive it, for example? Oh, sure.

I mean, look, Trump said exactly the right things to NATO, and the head of NATO, the Secretary General said Trump had been enormously helpful in forcing the weaker allies to understand that they had an obligation. Trump has never suggested that he was anti-NATO. He just went out of NATO that actually collectively defended itself. But I would say that the primary goal will be a very practical focus on making things work. Do you think we're going to see a lot of tax cuts for the wealthy? No, not particularly. I think you're likely to see tax cuts for senior citizens. You're likely to see tax cuts for people who have

tips. You like to see substantial middle class tax cuts. And I suspect, but I don't know this, I suspect that if he goes down a route of raising tariffs, that they will probably, much like the Alaska oil fund, find a way to return the tariffs to the American people as reductions in taxation? Do you think a 20% tariff is a good idea? I'm not sure what the specific number is. I am fairly comfortable, much more so than most of my colleagues, with the basically McKinley strategy, which between 1865 and 1928 made us the most consistently growing industrial power in the world. And that's a strategy, which is not a theoretical fair free trade strategy in the world that doesn't have free trade. And I think in Trump's case, he really likes tariffs because they give

him leverage. I mean, he recognizes as the largest market in the world that people have a greater desire to access us than we do to access them. And yet every economist across the board just about, just about, I'm not saying it's unanimous, thinks that this is a terribly inflationary idea, a terrible idea in general? Well, it's not inflationary if the money's returned to the American people as tax cuts. And as Ronald Reagan once said,

if every economist in the country was laid in, that would be a good thing. Which is a nice little saying, but it doesn't mean much. I'm a historian. I'm not a theoretical economist. I'm a historian. And I think that it's as useful

to read Lynch and his work in the 1830s as it is to read Adam Smith. And by the way, Smith also said there are circumstances where you need to restrict trade. Smith was not an automatic free trader. The Heritage Foundation has been working for quite a long time on a very detailed report for Trump's election. In fact, the preface for that report's written by his vice presidential nominee. And yet at a certain point, Donald Trump immediately distanced himself from that plan for 2025.

Why is that? I think there are some parts of that report. which are politically totally unsustainable, and the Trump instinctively understood that. What was unsustainable there? I think there were things pretty involving, for example, Social Security, and the kind of issues that would blow up and cause you to lose the campaign

and would make perfect sense in a think tank and no sense in a political operation. Another thing in the Project 2025, abortions mentioned around 200 times, and while it doesn't call for an outright national ban, And it does state that the Department of Health and Human Services should maintain a biblically-based social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family. Where do you exactly think Donald Trump is on abortion?

I mean, he put in place Supreme Court justices who voted the way they did, and now he seems to be waffling here and there because of the election. Where does he actually stand, and do you stand with him? Well, let me first of all say that the idea of returning power back to the states is something which a judge, then judge, later Justice Ginsburg, gave a speech about it in 19, I think it was 1993. She said she thought that Roe versus Wade was wrong. It was wrong in the way in which it politicized abortion. And it was wrong to have nine lawyers make a decision that the country should make. So in that sense, the question about Roe versus Wade is different than a question about, therefore, what about abortion? My personal belief is, look, I'm very deeply affected by Lincoln's provision that with public sentiment, anything is possible, and without public sentiment, nothing is possible.

And I believe deeply in government of the people, by the people, and for the people. I believe that in the issue of abortion, while I, at a personal level, I would hope there'd be as few as possible. I think at a practical level, the country would sustain a 15-week limit on abortions, with exceptions for rape, life of the mother, and incest. I think the country would be as appalled by the eight babies who've been allowed to die. in Tim Walts's Minnesota, under an extreme pro-abortion position, as they would by having zero abortion. So I think the country will come to a general consensus over time, and it will be something on the order of 15 weeks, with the three exceptions.

How do you analyze Donald Trump's behavior leading up to and on January 6th? I think that he was convinced that the election was not valid. I think he did everything he could to represent his interests. Do you agree with him on that? I look, I don't think the election was stolen, but I think it was rigged. What's the difference? What's the difference? I have zero doubt that it was rigged.

You have zero doubt. Zero doubt. Starting with the $420 million that the founder of Facebook put into selective turnout, $420 million, going to the major, social media, deliberately suppressing the New York Post and the Hunter Biden story, let me just go down the list. Look, as a historian, I thought this was a legitimate all-out effort by the national establishment to get rid of the guy who they felt was a direct threat to them.

And they did everything they could. But it certainly made it a very weird election. But I would also point out that he asked before January 6th that they send National Guard and said he would authorize sending National Guard to the Capitol because he did think it could become tumultuous. In addition, if you actually look at the speech he gave, he talked about peaceful demonstration. That was the import of his performance before the rally on Capitol Hill and the violence on Capitol Hill. That was the key takeaway for you as peaceful. That was the sumtotal of the rhetoric there? Not we're going to march on the Hill, not his refusal to call

on his supporters to stand down? I mean, it went on and on, hour after hour. It did. Look, I think it's probably the worst single day of his president. Isn't it disqualifying? No.

Really? You know, I'm sure that this is probably the great cultural divide we live in. No, I know. I'm getting blamed for being literati,

but isn't that disqualifying from holding the highest office in the land again, that kind of behavior? By definition, not. Well, no, not by definition, but in your view, from a moral point of view. I would say that with all of his weaknesses, that Donald Trump is better for America's future than his opponent and better for America's future than Hillary Clinton.

But is there anything morally, independent of your stand on this political position or not, is there nothing that, that, morally disqualifying. We live in a real world. In the real world, five weeks before an election, there's no possibility of my getting involved in a conversation like that.

None. Why's that? Because it would promptly be exploited and used. How do you mean? I'm not sure I understand. I have one of the president's most public allies, and I have been for a long time. And I very much want this president to win,

and I very much believe that the election of Kamala Harris will be a disaster of the first order. When you see people that are close to you ideologically quit on Trump, do you think they're being cowards in a sense, in a raw political sense? No, I think that they're drawing a different set of conclusions. I mean, I don't know of anybody else in my lifetime who's had the sheer courage to take on this.

the national establishment as frontally and directly as Trump has. And that to me is worth a lot. What do you think his prime motive is? What drives him? I think his prime motive is to try to somehow fix the country. I think that's what drives it. Do you think that's why he ran for president in 2016? I think he, well, look, he talked about it for years. I think, Oprah asked him. And the presumption always, obviously turned out to be wrong, the presumption of it is that it was a branding exercise, that it was ego, that, you know, he was a certain kind of figure, as you know, in the 80s and in the 90s in New York on the kind of, you know, page six realm of life, and that he would say that he was going to run for president in not a dissimilar spirit as Kanye West saying he was going to run for president or many of the other people in the past who would tease running for president for reasons of publicity. Well, something changed. Oprah asked him, I think, as early as the late 80s, if he's going to run for president.

I'll tell you what, one of the things that really impressed me in the South Carolina primary in 2016, he was frontally assaulting the war in Iraq and George Bush and Dick Chetty. And I called him when I said, you know, Bush is still like an 80% approval among Republicans in South Carolina. Is there some reason you feel like picking this fight? Because it's funny because he favored the war in the first place. And then he changed. Yeah, but right. Which is interesting.

Well, as John Maynard Keynes once said, when facts change, your opinion should change. Trump said a lot of people died who didn't have to, and the war was wrong. And I'm going to keep saying it. Now, that was at a point when it could have cost him the nomination. He said that in what year, though? In probably February or March of 2016.

Right, a dozen years later. But was, gee, let me make this point. Sure. Because I think it's frankly irritating. I was for the war in Iraq because I thought we were going to be competent. I was for the war in Afghanistan because I thought we were going to be competent. I was for China entering the WTO because I thought Deng Xiaoping, represented the modernization of China, and I was totally wrong. I wrote a book later. I was totally wrong.

So when I look at those three things, I look back, and it's a good example of why I think we need very deep, very serious discussion about how weak and how sick our system has become. We fought for 22 years and lost in Afghanistan, and no one has suggested we ought to rethink it. We went into Iraq with a plan that would have worked, and George W. Bush changed that plan without no comprehension of what he was doing. And it went from being an easy victory to a disaster. So, yeah, I think it's okay for people to change their opinion. Did you think J.D. Vance was a good choice for your vice president? I thought he was a risky choice. Why?

Well, because he has, he's had a long career of evolving. It sounds like you're being polite. No, I know. I mean, you know, this is a guy who's changed his name five times. This is a guy who, on the one hand, comes out of a hillbilly elegy, and on the other hand is a Yale law graduate of which it's hard to find a more prestigious element of the old order. So it sounds like you think he was a lousy choice. No, no, I said risky.

If Trump loses in November, and the race is excessive, extremely close. Do you think Trumpism survives? And how does it evolve? Yeah, Trumpism survives for the same reason that you just saw conservative parties winning in France, Germany, Austria, Italy. Maloney is in a sense an example of Trumpism. And I think it's because there's an increasing belief by a very large number of people that the old deal doesn't work, that it's rigged against them, and that is trying to, impose values on them that they don't believe them. Newt Gingrich, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time. Be well. Bad to do it. Newt Gingrich was Speaker of the House representing Georgia in Congress.

He's the author of many books, host of a podcast, and runs a political consulting firm. I'm David Remnick, and that's our program for today. Thanks for listening. And see you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. The theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of tune arts, with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Walton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Summer.

With guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Parrish, Victor Gwan, and Alejandra Deccan. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.