And, This is More With Speaker Newt Gingrich

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This is Gavin Newsom.

And Newt Gingrich continues.

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

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

And again,

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 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,

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.

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

speech by saying, whatever else we do, the Chinese must go.

And they were building virtual walls to keep the Chinese out.

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.

We dropped very low in 1970.

I think it was 4.8%.

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.

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

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?

How do we strike that balance?

At peril, we go back to the instincts of the 1880s or go back, frankly,

to, well, I mean, maybe we're back there today.

Curious, your assessment.

I think, no, I think, first of all,

there were two

huge challenges.

One is sheer volume.

I mean, you can't have six, eight, nine million people crossing the border illegally.

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

I was visited when I was a congressman 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 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.

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

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

You know, Calista's grandmother came through Ellis Island.

We actually went up and looked at her

signature and her from Poland.

Is that right?

Huh?

polish yeah she's 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

but

The

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.

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.

I mean,

it wasn't an automatic open door.

It was a controlled open door.

But there was a second part, which was very tough.

People expected you to become American.

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.

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

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

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.

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 right

it would be like in the middle of the 19th century when the sati was still practiced in india and widows were expected to be burned on the uh with their husbands uh

so the question becomes can we find a path back to work and and i and i voted for all this in and in 1986 we passed the simpson mazoli act we gave We thought we were giving amnesty to 300,000, turned out to be 3 million.

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

And of course, he got neither.

So, as one of the guys who voted for this thing, yeah, you were an advocate, I think, what, in 1985, right?

Even before when it was in its infancy in bill form.

So, you know, I think

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

No.

It's not going to happen.

We are going to deport most of the criminals.

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

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

it's okay to be against illegal immigration,

but you want to be passionately for legal immigration.

And you want to recognize that there are dividing lines.

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

Clearly, 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.

So is it just, they're just a political football then?

That's right.

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

Exactly right.

They grew up in America.

For all practical purposes, it is their native country.

So

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

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.

And it may even happen starting in 26.

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.

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.

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

It was starting to gradually shift.

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.

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 in effect.

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?

And, you know, is it tactical?

You say he supports legal immigration.

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.

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.

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

That's right.

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

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.

I mean, there's a sense of I paid my dues, I waited, I obeyed the law.

And these, and I frankly know, I left these people behind.

I don't want a Venezuelan gang in my neighborhood.

And while that's exaggerated,

it's real enough.

And particularly if you look at the people

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

you don't need many symbols.

No.

Country to decide, you know, I don't, that's a risk I don't want.

No, I just,

what I hate is how it's exploited.

And as we know, I mean, we all know the stats.

I mean,

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

without documentation.

But you're right.

I mean, what you just said is potently accurate.

It doesn't take that many examples.

Well, and I suspect if you limited it down to

MS-13 gang members, Venezuelan gang members,

there are enough examples there

that you can earn a living off of it.

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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.

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.

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

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

when

there's a John Wayne film where

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

you as several foreign governments have learned you take Trump head on and he goes nuts

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 this theory.

Okay.

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

And he is going to beat on them and beat on them.

It has nothing to do with the rest of the country.

I hope not.

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.

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, 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.

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.

I mean, if Harvard were semi-smart,

say, you know, this is a losing fight.

Even if

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

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

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,

partly because he likes their football team.

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.

And then he negotiates against himself.

Oh, but Max, you do want to talk.

Yeah.

Well, and then he delays the, I mean, it, I, it, by the way, you, well, you open this door.

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.

It was celebrated in my party.

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

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

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

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

Well, I think a couple of things.

One, I would say looking back, I was wrong.

Do you say that conveniently?

Or do you, I mean...

No, I say it because I evolved over 10.

I'll give you the best example.

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.

And I

totally misunderstood Deng Xiaoping's Southern Tour, 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.

And it sounded like he was really talking about openness.

Well, a couple of 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.

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

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

Leninism.

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.

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.

And by the way,

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, 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.

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

You can define what his interest is worth on any given day.

And you can buy it at your definition.

They said, yeah, that's how we do things.

Not with my client.

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.

And again, I'm a European historian.

I've lived in four European countries.

And I have an enormous affection for Europe historically.

The Europeans decided to go to litigation and regulation rather than innovation.

They're literally the exact opposite of Silicon Valley.

That's interesting.

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

And this isn't, so what is it?

So they rigged the game in clever ways.

And for a very long time, 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

and then you realize after a while it just this current system doesn't work 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 yeah he knows in every negotiation including china in the end he's the bank they're going to have to negotiate with him sure 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 until august yeah

this row or the or the lack of stock in the warehouse because of all the indecision and the business chill i mean there are a lot of a lot of people that aren't going to make it five months that's my fear.

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

I mean,

it's being felt.

It's pretty profound.

I hope there's an end game here, but time is not on the side of a lot of these small entrepreneurs.

I think that's right.

Look, there's going to be a lot of floundering around and ultimately we may be at a better future, but the interim is going to be...

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Hi, I'm Erica Cruz-Guevara, host of KQED's podcast, The Bay.

When something important is happening in the Bay Area, I want to know what it actually means for the people who live here.

In every episode of The Bay, we ask deeper questions, cut through the noise, and keep you connected to the community that you and I love.

Buy new episodes of KQED's The Bay every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, wherever you get your podcasts.

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All right, let's go back just briefly because I'd be remiss if we didn't talk about this.

So, I here's this is how I spent my Memorial Day.

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

It was shockingly civil.

I tuned in because I was expecting the opposite.

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,

vitriol, government shutdowns.

So which was it?

What was your relationship like?

Do you remember that day in New Hampshire?

What the hell were you two thinking?

And

what's happened to our country since?

And

how much do you feel, Mr.

Speaker, in the lunch conversation, responsible for

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?

Oh, well,

you just managed to ask about three different questions.

I did.

Yeah.

First of all,

Glendon and I had a, I think, remarkably good personal relationship.

Yeah.

We were about the same age group.

We were both inherently graduate students.

We like to sit around and shoot the breeze about all the stuff.

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.

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

And

so in that sense,

what happened 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.

The contract is entirely Reagan.

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.

And Reagan's staff, I mean, Carter, Clinton's staff says,

you've got to fight Gingrich.

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.

I'm not going to fight Gingrich.

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 reelected.

And I like being in the White House.

And it was a huge brawl.

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

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

And Clinton's going, Yeah, but I don't want to lose my seat.

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

This may surprise you.

We negotiated for 35 days, face to face.

We produced the...

Face to face.

I mean, literally the two of you in the room not outsourcing it to staff.

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.

And we did it because we listened to each other and we talked with each other.

Now, I was a harsh partisan for a reason you'll understand perfectly.

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.

It's not good for the state.

Yeah, I hear you.

I get it.

I mean, I get that argument.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

So.

No, sincerely.

Yeah.

Yeah.

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

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

And so.

It's not your natural state.

I mean, it was, I mean, it,

I mean, it was, it was a very intentional strategy.

I mean, you'll like this because I think in some ways you'll identify.

Okay.

My natural state is winning.

There you go.

I appreciate that.

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

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

negotiate, I'm for closing the government for 27 days.

All right.

But they were instruments.

It's not a personality thing.

They were instrumentalities of getting something done.

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

I think he said you happened to be there already.

He was coming down.

Do you remember it at all?

Yeah.

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 in 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.

And I went up and toured New Hampshire.

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

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?

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?

You can imagine what Clinton's staff said.

And so they then interviewed me, and I said, well, I'd be delighted because it's 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.

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

Yeah.

But I mean, 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 was a tragedy.

There's a book called The Pact written by a guy, I think a Duke, in which he found all the papers, interviewed people.

Bill and I actually had an agreement in late 97 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.

And we were going to work together.

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.

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

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

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?

And I said, yes.

So

it just it was that kind of relationship.

It's fascinating.

And you're reminding me of the impeachment.

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.

But 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 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.

But the impeachment, the toxicity, the winning at all costs, hardly new and novel in politics.

So I'm not suggesting

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

we i think we profoundly mishandled the impeachment

and i think it was partly because of kenneth star

um in my mind the impeachment was about uh committing perjury i mean it actually goes back to arguments we have today about whether or not you know whether 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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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,

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

You couldn't imagine the Hillary Clinton,

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

That's impossible.

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

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.

Yeah, that was, was,

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.

June 3rd, we got Trump's triumph.

But you knew scum, everything's scum.

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,

one of two things has to happen.

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

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,

which you would be very aware of.

Just last week, Trump signed that bill.

Right.

Totally bipartisan.

Yep.

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

Otherwise, what has to happen is one side or the other has to win.

I mean, historically, when you're in a period where both sides think it's life and death, and both sides think they potentially could win or lose,

the drive to

more and more extremism, I was very struck.

Alan Guelzo is an extraordinary professor of Abraham Lincoln.

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.

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.

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

He's not just a competitor, but if he wins, her world

shrinks radically.

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.

Jefferson after 1800.

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.

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.

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.

Well, I appreciate it.

And

you have a chapter in the book.

You talk about the 250th anniversary and, you know, and our pride in the best of Greek democracy and the Roman Republic,

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?

45.

Okay, well, see, we're going to have to have another episode on that.

And then 2028, President Vance,

40%.

Probably runs against Governor Newsom.

Vice President Vance runs against Vice President Vance.

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.

I'm not.

I'm not getting in the middle of all of this.

Unbelievable.

But I would not be at all shocked to have a Newsom Vance going to election 28.

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

By the way.

I appreciate you doing this.

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.

Good sale.

Good to see you.

Thank you, sir.

It was a lot of fun.

I hope you enjoyed it.

Hi, I'm Erica Cruz-Guevara, host of KQED's podcast, The Bay.

When something important is happening in the Bay Area, I want to know what it actually means for the people who live here.

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