And, This is More With Speaker Newt Gingrich

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Speaker 17 This is Gavin Newsom.

Speaker 17 And Newt Gingrich continues.

Speaker 17 You worked on this book, which again is... You know, it's very much in the spirit of Reagan.

Speaker 17 And you talk about his last speech. I mean, I mean, that where he talked about Lady Liberty's torch and, you know, I mean, talked about that life force of new Americans, et cetera.

Speaker 17 And again,

Speaker 17 my fundamental concern about this assault on higher education is the impact that will have in terms of our capacity to get these PhDs and STEM folks and to be able to pull

Speaker 17 that chill it's already, I think, having around the rest of the world, but pull the best and the brightest minds and keep them as part of that innovation cycle. But you specifically,

Speaker 17 you brought up in the book, which I loved, the Chinese Exclusion Act. And so much of that comes from, the embers of that are very familiar to folks out here in the Bay Area.

Speaker 17 I remember what I would refer to unfairly, I would admit, this guy, Dennis Kearney, who was sort of the original Trump. And he began and ended every

Speaker 17 speech by saying, whatever else we do, the Chinese must go. And they were building virtual walls to keep the Chinese out.

Speaker 17 And of course, the beginning of the Chinese Exclusion Act ultimately came out of the Bay Area and some of those movements. But interesting to me is we're now close to peak immigration again.

Speaker 17 We dropped very low in 1970. I think it was 4.8%.

Speaker 17 Don't quote me. And now we're closer to 14, 14.8, wherever it is.
Again, don't quote me. But it's significantly grown.
How concerned, you talk about assimilation.

Speaker 17 You talked about the things you can't talk about from a European prism.

Speaker 17 But But as you balance the journey to America and you balance this immigration debate and deal with the issue of criminal behavior and quote-unquote illegal immigration, as you refer to it, how do we find a balance?

Speaker 17 How do we strike that balance? At peril, we go back to the instincts of the 1880s or go back, frankly,

Speaker 17 to, well, I mean, maybe we're back there today. Curious, your assessment.

Speaker 18 I think, no, I think, first of all,

Speaker 18 there were two

Speaker 18 huge challenges. One is sheer volume.
I mean, you can't have six, eight, nine million people crossing the border illegally.

Speaker 18 The other, which I began writing about in the seven, in the 80s,

Speaker 18 I was visited when I was a congressmen in Georgia by a Vietnamese small business owner who said that when he came over after the fall of Saigon, he and his brother arrived.

Speaker 18 And he went straight to work. And his brother got hooked up in Southern California with the welfare office and learned that you could get public housing and you could get food stamps and so forth.

Speaker 18 And so his brother never developed the kind of entrepreneurial drive because life was adequate.

Speaker 18 And it hit me that what had worked historically in America, which was very tough, people should not kid themselves.

Speaker 18 You know, Calista's grandmother came through Ellis Island. We actually went up and looked at her.

Speaker 18 her signature and her.

Speaker 17 From Poland, is that right? Huh? Polish?

Speaker 18 Yeah, her grandmother's polish on her father's side ironically since she's been nominated to be ambassador to switzerland uh her grandmother on the on the swiss side uh which is her mother uh is from bern so she's actually going back to her grandmother's home area um

Speaker 18 but

Speaker 18 The

Speaker 18 paternal grandmother came from Poland in 1908, and you can literally track her coming in. Well, every person that came in was inspected for health.

Speaker 18 And if you had a communicable disease, you were excluded and sent back. Everybody was checked to see if they were willing to go to work.
And if you weren't prepared to work, you were sent back.

Speaker 18 I mean,

Speaker 18 it wasn't an automatic open door.

Speaker 18 It was a controlled open door. But there was a second part, which was very tough.
People expected you to become American.

Speaker 18 They expected you to learn English. They expected you to go to work.
They expected you to be a neighbor. They expected you to obey the law.

Speaker 18 And so there's a great deal of socialization that went into being an immigrant in the U.S.

Speaker 18 We went into a cycle which was captured in a book called The Tragedy of American Compassion

Speaker 18 where starting really in the big way with the great society, it became inappropriate to suggest to people that they give up wherever they came from.

Speaker 18 to say that the habits and the culture you came from aren't you know so if you happen to come from a place which engages in clitorectomy uh who are we to suggest as a matter of women's rights that maybe that's not a very good habit?

Speaker 18 It would be like in the middle of the 19th century when sati was still practiced in India and widows were expected to be burned

Speaker 18 with their husbands.

Speaker 18 So the question becomes, can we find a path

Speaker 18 back to work? And I voted for all this. And in 1986, we passed the Simpson-Mazzoli Act.

Speaker 18 We thought we were giving amnesty to 300,000, turned out to be 3 million.

Speaker 17 Yeah.

Speaker 18 And Reagan, in his diary, says, I signed the bill because we were going to get control of the border and we were going to have a work permit system so we could control immigration.

Speaker 18 And of course, he got neither. So as one of the guys who voted for this thing, yeah.

Speaker 17 You were an advocate, I think, what, in 1985, right? Even before when it was in its infancy in bill form.

Speaker 18 So, you know, I think

Speaker 18 we're not going to deport 10 or 12 or 14 million people.

Speaker 17 No. It's not going to happen.

Speaker 18 We are going to deport most of the criminals.

Speaker 18 And if you are here without having yet been a criminal and you become a criminal, we're going to deport you.

Speaker 18 And then once, I mean, my theory of all this, which may be wrong, but it's part of why we did a journey to America was to remind people that

Speaker 18 it's okay to be against illegal immigration,

Speaker 18 but you want to be passionately for legal immigration. And you want to recognize that there are dividing lines.

Speaker 18 I'm very concerned about the DREAMers, the people who came here at two, three, four years of age.

Speaker 18 Surely they should be treated differently than they're being treated right now. I mean, it's just, it's wrong to toss them in as though they're illegal in any traditional sense.

Speaker 17 So is it just they're just a political football then? That's right.

Speaker 18 Well, and most of them don't speak the language of their native country.

Speaker 17 Exactly right.

Speaker 18 They grew up in America. For all practical purposes, it is their native country.
So

Speaker 18 we couldn't have that debate until we got control of the border.

Speaker 18 My guess is that by sometime in 27, we will begin to have a very healthy debate. People will have calmed down and will now be into how do we solve this problem as opposed to just being so rigid.

Speaker 18 And it may even happen starting in 26.

Speaker 18 I mean, I thought the speed, I don't know what your reaction was, but I thought the speed with which they turned around the southern border was almost unbelievable.

Speaker 17 Yeah, I mean, directionally, it significantly declined in terms of the total number of border crossings, but unquestionably, yeah, the acuity to which, in essence, is shut down is rather remarkable considering where we were two years prior.

Speaker 17 But clearly the message was delivered a little bit in the last nine months to a year of the Biden administration to step up.

Speaker 18 It's starting to gradually shift.

Speaker 17 But then Trump came in and it really shifted. No, no doubt.
I mean, look, rhetoric matters. And I'm curious just from that perspective, because I think a lot of it was rhetorical.

Speaker 17 I mean, it was substantive in terms of some of the moves that he's made, but mostly rhetorical, I think, in terms of the impacts even occurring before in the executive orders went into effect.

Speaker 17 And certainly no fundamental legislative shifts yet. But what about the rhetoric? What about sort of the pain a lot of our diverse communities feel about the rhetoric from the president himself?

Speaker 17 And, you know, is it tactical? You say he supports legal immigration.

Speaker 17 We saw that debate play out with the Bannon-Musk frame, but that debate's still pretty alive in the base of the mega movement, right? Anti-immigrant, legal, too.

Speaker 18 Look, the challenge for Trump's critics on this line of reasoning is that he got the highest percentage any Republican has ever gotten in the Hispanic community.

Speaker 18 He got the largest percentage of African-American males of any Republican since Eisenhower, you know, 70 years ago.

Speaker 17 That's right.

Speaker 18 He's the first Republican to get a majority of the Catholic vote.

Speaker 18 So there are an awful lot of people who are first and second generation legal immigrants who are as mad about illegal immigrants as people whose relatives came over in 1700.

Speaker 18 I mean, there's a sense of, I paid my dues, I waited, I obeyed the law. And at least, and I frankly know, I left these people behind.
I don't want a Venezuelan gang in my neighborhood.

Speaker 18 And while that's exaggerated,

Speaker 18 it's real enough.

Speaker 18 And particularly if you look at the people

Speaker 18 who have been killed or the people who have been raped,

Speaker 18 you don't need many symbols.

Speaker 17 No.

Speaker 18 Country to decide.

Speaker 18 That's a risk I don't want.

Speaker 17 No, I just,

Speaker 17 what I hate is how it's exploited. And as we know, I mean, we all know the stats.
I mean,

Speaker 17 native-born

Speaker 17 are more likely to commit crimes than foreign-born, legal or

Speaker 17 without documentation. But you're right.
I mean, what you just said is potently accurate. It doesn't take that many examples.

Speaker 18 Well, and I suspect if you limited it down to

Speaker 18 MS-13 gang members, Venezuelan gang members,

Speaker 18 there are enough examples there. Oh, you're right.
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Speaker 17 Look, I get your broader point, but I'm encouraged by your core belief that Trump has the capacity, to your point, to move if he feels that we've made the progress on the border to a much more comprehensive conversation.

Speaker 18 You said publicly that we ought to really be thinking about: if you graduate in science or engineering, we give you a green card with your graduation.

Speaker 17 Well, that's been challenged by him eliminating all the foreign students at Harvard, but we'll see.

Speaker 18 That's now, let me just suggest to you for a second: as somebody who's studied Trump a fair amount,

Speaker 18 when there is, there's a

Speaker 18 John Wayne film where

Speaker 18 he gets really mad at somebody, picks up a chair, breaks it over their head, and his partner turns and says, God, you get really go crazy.

Speaker 18 As several foreign governments have learned, you take Trump head on and he goes nuts.

Speaker 18 And he says, I'm going to prove to you, it's classic alpha male. I now have to prove to you who's dominant.
Well, Harvard decided, let's test this theory. Okay.

Speaker 18 So they now have Donald Trump about four o'clock every morning figuring out what he can do next.

Speaker 18 And he is going to beat on them and beat on them. It has nothing to do with the rest of the country.

Speaker 17 I hope not.

Speaker 18 Harvard has decided to pick a head-on fight. They're a big institution.
They've got a ton of money. They have great prestige.

Speaker 18 And we'll see whether or not they can, this is a little bit like in, I think it's 1902, they have a huge coal mine strike.

Speaker 18 And Theodore Roosevelt calls in the coal mine owners and says, this is going to get settled. And the coal mine owners say, well, you don't understand.
We own the coal mines.

Speaker 18 And Roosevelt says, you don't understand. I am the president of the United States, and I will have the army take over all of your mines.
And they said, oh, well, let's talk.

Speaker 18 I mean, if Harvard were semi-smart, they'd say, you know, this is a losing fight.

Speaker 18 If they win round one in court, because he's going to be there for four years, they

Speaker 18 win one round in court, the Justice Department will be there with round two, two, three, and four.

Speaker 18 And he's not going to give up until they Kaltow. It's just now, he's not necessarily going to go and pick a fight with, you know, the Ohio State University,

Speaker 18 partly because he likes their football team.

Speaker 18 But as a general rule, this is classically Trump behavior. You saw him just do it to the Europeans.
The Europeans said, we don't want to talk. He said, fine, 50% tariff next Monday.

Speaker 17 And then he negotiates against himself.

Speaker 18 He said, oh, we actually do want to talk.

Speaker 17 Yeah. Well, and then he delays.
I I mean, it, I, it, and by the way, you, well, you opened this door.

Speaker 17 And Mr. Free Trade, I remember you back in the day.
I'm old enough to remember NAFTA and everything else. And that was bipartisan.
It was hardly Newt Gingrich, Speaker Gingrich.

Speaker 17 It was celebrated in my party.

Speaker 17 So you, you've evolved. A lot of folks have, not just, you know, including, by the way, Democrats.
I mean, the tariff policies were advanced and

Speaker 17 increased against China in particular during the Biden administration, administration, but not across the board, not with this fits and starts, not negotiating against ourselves.

Speaker 17 Tell me, tell me that you find the approach to tariffs under the Trump administration foolhardy and not necessarily productive at this stage?

Speaker 17 Or am I missing this great negotiator's capacity to deliver punches like a chess master five months from now or a year from now?

Speaker 18 Well, I think a couple of things. One, I would say looking back, I was wrong.

Speaker 17 Do you say that conveniently or do you, I mean...

Speaker 18 No, I say it because I evolved over 10. I'll give you the best example.

Speaker 18 I really thought, as did most of the people who studied it, that opening up China economically was a great step towards a more open China.

Speaker 17 And I

Speaker 18 totally misunderstood Deng Xiaoping's southern tour, where he gave the speeches about markets and said, you know, I don't care whether it's a black cat or a white cat, as long as it catches the rat.

Speaker 18 And it sounded like he was really talking about openness.

Speaker 18 Well, a couple years ago, I did a book called Trump in China, and I went back and did a lot of research. And I was, frankly, pretty embarrassed.

Speaker 18 I mean, Deng Xiaoping was one of the 24 people in Paris who create the Chinese Communist Party.

Speaker 18 He leaves Paris at the end of World War I, goes to Moscow, and spends a year at Lenin University studying Marxism,

Speaker 18 Leninism.

Speaker 18 He is saying, and none of us caught this, we have to have a market to create enough prosperity to strengthen the party's grip on the country.

Speaker 18 Because if people stay too poor, they're going to throw the party out. So I'm not going to an open market so I can open up China.
I'm going to an open market so I can sustain the dictatorship.

Speaker 18 And by the way,

Speaker 18 since it is a dictatorship and since we are China, if I get to rip you off, that's fine. Now, part of my education after I left the speakership,

Speaker 18 I was approached by a former Walmart president who was going to do a deal in China. And he thought having a former speaker would help given negotiating.
So my lawyer talked to the Chinese lawyers.

Speaker 18 And after he looked at the proposed contract, he said, let me get this straight.

Speaker 18 You can define what his interest is worth on any given day, and you can buy it at your definition.

Speaker 18 They said, yeah, that's how we do things. He said, not with my client.

Speaker 18 So it's been looking at that. And then in the European case, the Europeans, and this is a genuine tragedy.
And I think you have to read J.D. Vance's speeches in Paris and Munich in this context.

Speaker 18 And again, I'm a European historian. I've lived in four European countries.

Speaker 18 And I have an enormous affection for Europe historically.

Speaker 18 The Europeans decided to go to litigation. and regulation rather than innovation.
They're literally the exact opposite of Silicon Valley.

Speaker 17 That's interesting.

Speaker 18 In the long run, that's a losing game. So what they have to do is they have to somehow tax Amazon or Apple or

Speaker 18 Google or Meta or Microsoft because they literally can't compete with them.

Speaker 18 And this is a, so what is it? So they rigged the game in clever ways. And for a very long time,

Speaker 18 we operated within a model of somehow trying to get to a balanced world where it would also, you know, the World Trade Organization would work. I mean, I was for China joining the WTO.

Speaker 18 And then you realize after a while, it just, this current system doesn't work.

Speaker 18 Now, what Trump has done, which I don't candidly don't think he's explained very well, Trump is a reversion to the late 19th century Republican model, best articulated by William McKinley, that we are going to have higher tariff walls, we're going to have higher paid workers, we're going to have huge prosperity, and in the end, because we're the largest economy, we have an, I mean, he loves this.

Speaker 17 Yeah.

Speaker 18 He knows in every negotiation, including China, in the end, he's the bank. They're going to have to negotiate with it.

Speaker 17 Sure.

Speaker 18 And so he's now going to have an exciting and enthusiastic six or eight months. I tell all of my friends, do not look at your stock until August 20th.

Speaker 17 Or the lack of stock in the warehouse because of all the indecision and the business chill. I mean, there are a lot of people that aren't going to make it five months.
That's my fear.

Speaker 17 And disproportionate number out here in America's America's largest economy, California, with all that goods movement and the dock workers and truckers and obviously the small business supply chains.

Speaker 17 I mean, it's being felt. It's pretty profound.
I hope there's an end game here,

Speaker 17 but time is not on the side of a lot of these small entrepreneurs.

Speaker 18 I think that's right. Look, there's going to be a lot of floundering around, and ultimately we may be in a better future, but the interim is going to be...
I tell people,

Speaker 18 this is not a beer party on a houseboat on a quiet lake.

Speaker 18 This is canoeing in the rapids of a wild river. And that's just a fact.

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Speaker 6 Ulta Beauty's early Black Friday event is happening now through November 22nd.

Speaker 8 Shop $10 beauty minis from brands like Mac and Too Faced.

Speaker 3 Take 30% off Lancome and Touchland fragrances and body mists.

Speaker 9 With new offers dropping every week, our associates can help you find the perfect gifts.

Speaker 11 Head into Ulta Beauty today to shop our early Black Friday event, Ulta Beauty.

Speaker 7 Gifting happens here.

Speaker 20 Want Black Friday prices without the crowds? Lowe's gets it.

Speaker 21 Shop their early Black Friday deals and beat the rush.

Speaker 24 $99 is all you need to grab a select seven-foot pre-lit artificial Christmas tree for the holidays.

Speaker 20 And don't sweat what gifts to get, Dad.

Speaker 25 They have up to 40% off select tools and accessories going on now.

Speaker 20 That's how Lowe's celebrates Black Friday early. Selection varies by location while supplies last.

Speaker 14 It's the season to come together over your holiday favorites at Starbucks. Warm up with a creamy caramel brulee latte.
Get festive with an iced gingerbread chai, or share a velvety peppermint mocha.

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Speaker 17 All right, let's go back just briefly because I'd be remiss if we didn't talk about this. So here's, this is how I spent my Memorial Day.

Speaker 17 I somehow landed on a New Hampshire town hall that you and President Clinton conducted together.

Speaker 17 It was shockingly civil. I tuned in because I was expecting the opposite.

Speaker 17 And the fact that the President of the United States, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, at the peak of their differences, engaged in a civil conversation, it makes me long for those days or wait or not, because my reflection was one of critique and constant, you know, just, you know, confrontation,

Speaker 17 vitriol, government shutdowns. So which was it? What was your relationship like? Do you remember that day in New Hampshire? What What the hell were you two thinking?

Speaker 17 And

Speaker 17 what's happened to our country since? And

Speaker 17 how much do you feel, Mr. Speaker, in the lunch conversation, responsible for

Speaker 17 some of that sort of toxicity, as some have described in our politics as it relates to the relationship that you had with our party, our party with you, and the contract with America?

Speaker 18 Oh, well,

Speaker 18 you just managed to ask about three different questions.

Speaker 17 I did. Yeah.
First of all,

Speaker 18 Quentin and I had a, I think, remarkably good personal relationship.

Speaker 17 Yeah.

Speaker 18 We were about the same age group. We were both, we were both inherently graduate students.
We liked to sit around and shoot the breeze about all the

Speaker 17 time.

Speaker 18 Occasionally, late at night, I'd go down and have a drink with him and we just BS. I mean, it was just, you know, as you know, he is one of the great BSers in American history.
I mean, it's God bless.

Speaker 18 All you got to do is relax and let him roll for a while.

Speaker 18 And

Speaker 18 so, in that sense,

Speaker 18 what happened was, which was, which was, and I wrote a book on it called March of the Majority. We spent 16 years growing a majority.
All of it's standing on Reagan's shoulders.

Speaker 18 The contract is entirely Reagan.

Speaker 18 But when we won, because we had based everything we were doing on the American people, so every single item in the contract is 70% or better. There's a big fight in the White House in June of 95.

Speaker 18 and Reagan's staff, I mean, Carter, Clinton's staff says,

Speaker 18 you've got to fight Gingrich.

Speaker 18 You know, you owe it to the party. And Clinton, who had been beaten in 1980 for re-election and knew that it wasn't fun, said to them, if I do that, I'm going to lose.

Speaker 18 I'm not going to fight Gingrich.

Speaker 18 I'm going to protect the things I have to protect, and I'm going to take shots at him when I can, but I want to work with him because if I work with him, I'll probably get re-elected.

Speaker 18 And I like being in the White House. And it was a huge brawl.

Speaker 18 I mean, I remember at one point, Leon Panetta, we were in a negotiating session, and Panetto was screaming at him and saying, you can't give that away.

Speaker 18 We have Democrats who lost their seats because they voted for that.

Speaker 17 And Clinton was long, yeah, but I don't want to lose my seat.

Speaker 18 And, you know, then he turned to me and said, I guess I can't do that one.

Speaker 18 This may surprise you. We negotiated for 35 days, face-to-face.

Speaker 17 We produced face-to-face. I mean, literally the two of you in the room not outsourcing it to staff.

Speaker 18 Other people around, but the two of us sitting across the table for 35 days, and we produced the only four balanced budgets in a century.

Speaker 18 And we did it because we listened to each other and we talked with each other. Now,

Speaker 18 I was a harsh partisan for a reason you'll understand perfectly.

Speaker 18 I mean, it's what you have not, you haven't really had the kind of quality of opposition you should have in California that methodically goes out and spends 16 years and gradually becomes a majority, which is tragic.

Speaker 18 It's not good for the state.

Speaker 17 Yeah, I hear you. I get it.
I mean, I get that argument. Absolutely.
Yeah. So.
No, sincerely. Yeah.

Speaker 18 Yeah. So I had to be polarizing because I'm the minority.

Speaker 18 I mean, if I'm going to get in, I've got to make sure that people decide not to vote for the Democrats.

Speaker 17 And so. It's not your natural state.
I mean, it was, I mean, it,

Speaker 17 I mean, it was. It was a very intentional strategy.

Speaker 18 I mean, you'll like this because I think in some ways you'll identify. Okay.
My natural state is winning.

Speaker 17 There you go. I appreciate that.

Speaker 18 If sitting for 35 days wins, I'm for winning.

Speaker 18 If closing the government for 27 days is a necessary prelude,

Speaker 18 negotiate, I'm for closing the government for 27 days. All right.

Speaker 17 But they were instrumental.

Speaker 18 It's not a personality thing. They were instrumentalities of getting something done.

Speaker 17 And so that town hall sort of reflected that, that you guys had a civil conversation outdoors in New Hampshire.

Speaker 18 I think he said you happened to be there already he was coming down do you remember it at all yeah bob bob dole had we had this deal dole wanted to run for president and he didn't want me because i was the brand new guy on the block and i was nationally pretty popular at that time he didn't want me to run for president so he loaned me his entire new hampshire organization

Speaker 18 And I went up and toured New Hampshire.

Speaker 18 And while we were up there, we suddenly heard, oh, Bill Clinton's going to be here.

Speaker 18 And so we promptly said to the press, wouldn't it be great to get together and have a debate about or a dialogue about election reform?

Speaker 18 Well, the White House suddenly gets this call from the press corps. Is the president willing to sit down with Newt Gingrich in New Hampshire?

Speaker 18 You can imagine what Clinton's staff said.

Speaker 17 Wow.

Speaker 18 And so they then interviewed me, and I said, well, I'd be delighted. It was a great thing for America to have the two of us talk.
At which point Clinton goes, oh, yeah, I guess we'll do it.

Speaker 18 And if you watch it, I mean, he's very good.

Speaker 17 Yeah.

Speaker 17 But I mean, i candidly it was not i didn't enjoy it you were you were very good i mean answering tough questions i mean a lot of seniors are there and you're talking about you know cuts to their programs and others i mean it was it was it was it was a remarkably civil conversation at the highest level and but there's not been anything like that since well you know it's it was a tragedy there's a book uh called the pact written by a guy i think a duke in which he found all the papers interviewed people.

Speaker 18 Bill and I actually had an agreement in late 97

Speaker 18 that we were going to launch an effort in 98 to reform Medicare and Social Security. And he would do it in the State of the Union.
I would do it in a major speech in Georgia. Wow.

Speaker 17 And we were going to work together.

Speaker 18 And then Lewinsky occurred. Well, at that point, I had to become partisan, and he had to go to the left because it was the left that was going to save him.

Speaker 18 And so, boom, it got, but the book's kind of fascinating because it's really true.

Speaker 18 We did a lot of, we created the Hart Rudman Commission, which was the deepest and biggest review of national security since 1948.

Speaker 18 And actually, after I stepped down, even though I had helped him impeach him in the House, they called and said, would you like to serve on the commission since you created it?

Speaker 17 And I said, yes. So

Speaker 18 it's that kind of relationship.

Speaker 17 It's fascinating. And you're reminding me of the impeachment.

Speaker 17 I mean, so what do you, and it was the third part of that three-legged stool question, and forgive me for not articulating it more effectively.

Speaker 17 But and again, this is not an indictment, but it was in the conversation of Luntz, who said he was never more proud to be associated with anything than the contract with America, which was fascinating to me, how quick he was to not only defend it, but how reverential he thought it.

Speaker 17 was at the time in terms of just being a communication document, how it had transparency, how it did represent, as you said, the will of the American people, at least in terms of the 70% threshold and the fact that you submitted it to the public, meaning you tested that theory.

Speaker 17 But the impeachment, the toxicity, the winning at all costs, hardly new and novel in politics. So I'm not suggesting

Speaker 17 you're the OG in this space. But the Tea Party, people connect this moment to those moments.
Is that fair or unfair? Did Democrats oversimplify?

Speaker 18 I think we profoundly mishandled the impeachment.

Speaker 18 And I I think it was partly because of Kenneth Starr.

Speaker 18 In my mind, the impeachment was about committing perjury. It actually goes back to arguments we have today about whether or not

Speaker 18 the Supreme Court has ruled. And I suspect had the Supreme Court already ruled, we wouldn't have had a leg to stand on.
But the question was, it was pretty clear.

Speaker 18 that he had been convicted of committing perjury, which you know, is a felony. And in fact, he later on was barred from practicing law for five years in Arkansas.

Speaker 18 I thought it was important as a matter of constitutional record that a president should be held accountable.

Speaker 18 But when Starr came out with his report, it was so lurid and so related to sex that it poisoned the whole project. And I'll never forget that summer.

Speaker 18 I was home in August, and my two daughters and I went to lunch at OK Cafe in Atlanta.

Speaker 18 And they both looked at me and they said to me, if our 401ks get destroyed because of some stupid intern, we're going to be really pissed off.

Speaker 18 I thought, okay, I had clearly misunderstood the American people and how they were going to rank, how this was going to work. And in a way,

Speaker 18 Clinton's whole behavior from 92 on changed the whole context in which you deal with sexual issues and politics.

Speaker 18 You couldn't imagine the Hillary Clinton,

Speaker 18 Donald Trump last debate in a pre-Bill Clinton world.

Speaker 17 It's impossible.

Speaker 17 Well, and of course, Bannon bringing out the ghosts of the past in the front row of that debate as well.

Speaker 18 It was Bannon who said to me, we concluded she was going to go to the basement and we were going to get there first.

Speaker 17 Yeah, that was,

Speaker 17 look, look, in closing, give me something more optimistic. Are we going to, look, I'm new scum.
I mean, here we are. I appreciate your book.

Speaker 17 June 3rd, we got Trump's triumph. But you knew scum, everything's scum.

Speaker 17 This sort of divisiveness, this, you know, everyone's longing to figure out a way to get damn back together and start to solve problems. I would say, as a historian,

Speaker 18 one of two things has to happen.

Speaker 18 Either there has to be a very concerted effort to reach out

Speaker 18 and to try to find bipartisan ways to work together. I just did a podcast with Ted Cruz, who had worked with Amy Klobuchar, the Democrat from Minnesota,

Speaker 18 which you would be very aware of.

Speaker 17 Just last week, Trump signed that bill.

Speaker 18 Right. Totally bipartisan.

Speaker 17 Yep.

Speaker 18 And it's possible that you could see just enough bipartisanship on practical things begin to re-knit the system.

Speaker 18 Otherwise, what has to happen is one side or the other has to win. I mean, historically, when you're in a period where

Speaker 18 both sides think it's life and death, and both sides think they potentially could win or lose,

Speaker 18 the drive to

Speaker 18 more and more extremism, I was very struck. Alan Guelzo is an extraordinary professor of Abraham Lincoln.

Speaker 18 And Guelzo wrote me at one point in the 2004 campaign and said, the level of vitriol against Trump resembles the level of vitriol against Lincoln among southern slaveholders in the 1860 campaign.

Speaker 18 He said you can draw almost an exact parallel. And it's because both the left in its modern form and the slaveholders actually saw their way of life about to be extinguished.

Speaker 18 I mean, Trump is a mortal threat if you're AOC.

Speaker 18 He's not just a competitor, but if he wins, her world shrinks radically.

Speaker 18 So you either have to get to a point where one side clearly won, this is FDR in 34, 36, where he wins so decisively that everybody operates within the Rooseveltian world.

Speaker 18 Jefferson after 1800.

Speaker 18 I would hope you could have a combination. That is, I encourage constantly finding ways to be bipartisan because I think it's better for the country.
It's how the founding fathers designed the system.

Speaker 18 They wanted to make it so hard that it's very, very difficult, as we just saw in the House, for a purely partisan effort to work.

Speaker 18 And that's by design. I mean, they wanted to avoid dictatorship by creating a machine so hard to work that we can barely get it to work voluntarily.

Speaker 17 Well, I appreciate it. And

Speaker 17 you have a chapter in the book. You talk about the 250th anniversary and

Speaker 17 our pride in the best of Greek democracy and the Roman Republic,

Speaker 17 three co-equal branches of government. I hope that's the spirit that defines that.
I have two final questions, over-under, simple questions. Speaker Jeffries, 60% chance?

Speaker 18 45.

Speaker 17 Okay, well, see, we're going to have to have another episode on that. And then 2028, President Vance

Speaker 18 probably runs against Governor Newsom.

Speaker 17 Vice President Vance runs against Vice President Vance.

Speaker 18 And I look at some of your other candidates. I mean, the governor, with all due respect, the governor of Illinois as a presidential candidate.
Give me a break.

Speaker 17 I'm not getting in the middle of the day.

Speaker 18 Unbelievable, but I would not be at all shocked to have a Newsom Vance general election 28th.

Speaker 17 Well, that's a hell of a way to end this podcast.

Speaker 17 By the way,

Speaker 17 I appreciate you doing this.

Speaker 17 It's a hell of a thing, and I hope folks got a lot out of it. I certainly did.
And congratulations on your 44th book, Trump's Triumph, on sale, June 3rd.

Speaker 18 Good sale.

Speaker 17 Good to see you. Thank you, sir.
It was a lot of fun.

Speaker 18 I hope you enjoyed it.

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