Speaker gingrich its terrific to have you with us at the Reagan Library. As you know we originally had planned to have you live and in person as we have so many times and i want you to know when the pandemic is behind us and you are able to travel and things can be safe again we still would love to have you out at the Reagan Library again with your new book or the next one the right. So thanks so much for joining us today. I like to say first of all i am a huge fan of the Reagan Library and particularly the educational things you do in the way you create learning experiences for young people and i cannot remember a time when i visited that we did not have a wonderful experience so i can assure you as soon as im allowed to get back to the west coast i will be dropping in to see you. Correct it. Would love to have a mr. Speaker and ambassador gingrich as well. I have known you for years. You are an intellectual. You are a historian. You are an imaginative guy. I wonder mr. Speaker could you have ever imagined a situation like the world that the United States has found itself in today and have you ever imagined a pandemic thats literally stopping the world in its tracks in your lifetime collects the mac no, when i first started writing trump and the american future it was at the peak of great economic lows, lowest black economic and latino. We were negotiating with the chinese and then boom you start with what originally was the chinese virus now given a different name or political reasons. Then you go to the first time ive ever seen countries deliberately created depression and then you go to politicians deciding what you can and cant do then you go to people had weeks than then isolated and worried economically and you have the tragic death of george floyd and then all of a sudden the country seems to come apart at the seams. If you had asked me could i have imagined putting all of that together i think the answer is no. Ive written a bunch of novels and i dont know that if i would have the imagination. People said it wasnt believable and then of course you have the impeachment of the middle of that in all sorts of things in it. The level of turmoil in some ways resembles the late 1960s except that the left is better organized and more totalitarian now than it was in the late 60s. You mentioned the 60s as the decade that i was trying to think that newt two whats the closest experience that america has had in the last century. They were calling the economy to the 2008 time period and i wanted to review whether or not you think its been since world war ii and the attack on pearl harbor and the nation literally mobilized in a very different way but i think that might be the closest experience to present day. I think thats right. I have written things for publication and for the white house saying that this is the largest localization effort since world war ii and in fact i wrote a piece which turned out to be unusually impactful because i was over here in italy so i assume this building six weeks before washington did and i wrote a piece and said whatever you are planning to do in tripoli because youd understand how big this is going to get and i think people read it because they knew i was here and change the conversation and let us to the very large bills that they passed and the effort to stabilize the economy. Its a really i think big challenge right now and i think its compounded because we are probably as politically divided as weve been in a long time. I know a civil war historian at princeton who said the language used to attack trump resembles the slaveowning newspapers of South Carolina attacking lincoln in the 1860s. The level of the cherlin the nastiness and the degree of hatred is really unlike, roosevelt never got over the death of and it goes to how do you mobilize the country where the country itself is deeply split and a lot of people as we have found a lot of people decided social distancing as long as you are ideologically pure and doing the right thing. So its a very strange very complicated time. Yeah and in fact a core theme it seems to me of your newest book newt that america finds itself in a cultural civil war and i know you two are a civil war historian. I wonder if you can explain that to us. Actually i recently wrote a newsletter entitled three generations of brainwashing and the core of the newsletter is reagans farewell address where he says the one thing he most deeply regrets his not being able to institutionalize teaching patriotism and American History and that hes really worried that we are losing the ability to talk to ourselves about who we are and that happens then the country starts to disappear. I think that when you go back and you read it you realize he gave this in january of 1989. He is amazingly prescient about where we are today. Partly i suspect because as governor of california he had dealt with the moe coos and the radicals of berkeley soviet pretty good instinct for how bad it was going to be. We are clearly in a cultural civil war. We clearly have people who have did except at the leninist maoist view of how to organize and how to treat other people and clearly there are people who despise america. When you refuse to stand for the National Anthem is not because you were repudiating its because you are repudiating the United States. You have a surprisingly large number of people today, its almost like the radical generation of the 60s that has now had almost 50 years to grow and strengthen and gather more force and so in that sense i think we are in a very deep cultural war which will in many ways affect the country over the next halfcentury. In fact i looked pretty closely and i think that you turn the book into your publisher early in midmarch as the pandemic had struck in a major way. So this book was written. George floyd. We do have the chapter on poverty and the chapter on the failure of the big cities that relates to this. We probably dont have the strongest chapters we should have on the question of race in america. But again i had already had to redo the book once for covid and once for the selfimposed depression so was pretty wild. The most comp related its the most complicated book ive ever written. And magnificent book mr. Speaker had you covered the waterfront. Especially the back half of the book oh my gosh you cover all the grounds. Its just great to see. Ill bet had you written a book or finished up next week for example you would double down on your thinking about the cultural civil war because of the addition of the issue over racism. Actually i do a podcast every week which is free and i do a newsletter, friedan news clip and ive done a series on exactly this. I would say for me the really big moment was when the news york times reporters forced the firing of their editor because he had opposed an oped by conservative center and i thought that we gotten to a point on tyranny on the left where one conservative opinion piece of a totally leftwing newspaper was such an act of heresy that the man who admitted it had to be basically fired. Then i watched a principle in vermont in a town thats 97 white he tweeted shouldnt all lives matter and the following day she was fired. And there was a professor at ucla who actually read Martin Luther king, jr. s letter from the birmingham jail and was then suspended. How it could offend someone on the left to read kings letter which of course is about nonviolence and its about the american dream. King was very much saying to america you have to talk about the great dream you had it not repudiate america. You look at all of that and you just think this is truly a cultural civil war. Black lives matter is popular right now because its a slogan but when you look at the organization what one of its exclusive goals as the destruction of the Nuclear Family. Why are they going to destroy the Nuclear Family and not sure. It strikes me as a rational socially and a step towards weakness but its in there and you realize that people who funded black lives matter are anti in the sense they want a totally different american they want to replace the america of today. The other example is the congresswoman of minnesota who is a malian. How you can leave mogadishu for minneapolis and have a grudge rather than gratitude i think is one of the great things worth studying. You know she left a society which is a disaster dominated by warlords and people starving, no sense of individual opportunity, very oppressive behavior for women to come to the most open and free society in the world and shes angry. I dont get it. You would think in fact id be curious im trying to get a friend of mine to ask does she really think mogadishu is better than minneapolis . She behaves like we have done it hurt herbal and justice by making an american. You know of course the conversation the debate and the discussion about the issues and racism are of course important and i wonder what you think about the evolution of their command on the left now where the new phrase is coined systemic racism. Its his concept of wealth you are racist but you just dont know it. First of all i think you have to acknowledge that africanamericans more than any other group experienced sleights and ive had very famous famous africanamericans tell me and tims got the senator from South Carolina in introducing the bill on racial reform and think he was stopped six times last year. Hes a u. S. Senator so i think in that sense we have to start by balancing that its more challenging to be black and that there are inherent difficulties we have to overcome. The question then becomes its a really simple test which im going to be writing about and that is it more important for blacks to succeed were for whites to feel guilty . For some bizarre reason the left has decided that white guilt and announcing that you are guilty feeling bad about being guilty somehow achieves this and i said in an interview id be a lot more sympathetic with the multimillionaire nfl players who wanted to take in the fa when albums founded the Charter School and help children succeed but im totally unimpressed by people who america has made into millionaires who now want to impose on the rest of us their particular viewpoint. I think we need a conversation and the nice thing about the left is they cant contain themselves and because they own the news media they have no Feedback Mechanism to say youre nuts. So for example the California Assembly just passed by as 565 creating a commission on reparations which is the number one goal of the black caucus in the california legislature. Reparations are both morally and mechanically the focus and its a fight that the left will expand with but they just have have to do is pray they cant stop themselves. Pelosis 3 trilliondollar bill includes paying 1200. Person for every illegal immigrant in the United States but thats part of the stimulus. Thats over reach of the scale which i suspect 75 of the country will disagree with. If they had some ability to be self disciplined it would probably be dramatically more dangerous. I have a galley copy of the book mr. Speaker and i think your title was initially trump and the american future building a better american future and as the book hits the shelves i think you change the title and updated it to solving the great problems of our time. Tell me why this shift their. I felt as i looked at all of the things that were emerging that we needed to shift towards a world open problem solving. I think in the world but for the pandemic and before the depression it was easier to imagine trump really contending to solve things in this nation. Now we are in a situation so complicated with so many different unknown parts that i think we will all have to pitch in to solve it. I dont think trump by himself can be the solution or they think he can lead the solution but its going to take millions of americans to get us out of the ditch where an. I know youve commented on this before because you are a historian but now we seem to see an acceleration of the phenomenon and that is that the left believes we can improve the future by destroying the past and this rush to pull down not the civil war monuments but monuments of american president s and the revolution. Comment on that and whats happening in America Today on that front. Well again one reason i wrote the article on the three generations of brainwashing is it hit me that we have lots of people who are so badly educated they dont understand how much much they are doing a street dance we have done before. We have the french revolution. We have had the Russian Revolution in 1917. We have had maoism. We know how these things work. If they could read they could read not just in 1984 but they could read animal farm and they would understand orwell would bennett trotskyite and was in the trotsky brigade in the spanish civil war when stalin decided to wipe it out. If he had seen how close it of course he had mussolini and he had hitler and its very significant that he puts 1984 in britain. Its not describing moscow. The challenge for this society will be to create a totally false story to then have the memory hole that will put everything that doesnt fit the story and wilburs letter for the right of the state to change the story. Thats what these people are doing. Where does it start and where does it stop . For example should the suffragettes probably almost all of whom believe in traditional marriage therefore have the statues pull down because they werent adequately sensitive to what 100 years later would emerge as a the idea that washington more than any other Single Person created the framework within which people could say their rights came from god or the jefferson who wrote the words, that these people are anything less than historically astonishing figures who advance the cause of human freedom. What you are dealing with is a mob and the mob has no mind. It has a motion and it doesnt understand the patterns that are totally unacceptable and i think very very dangerous and by the way in Seattle Washington in the middle of all of us knew. He there is a sevenfoot tall statue of lenin which was put there years and years ago. Some guy bought it when it was being thrown away. I dont object to lenin being there because i think its a great opportunity to teach people what a monster he was and how many peoples lives were destroyed by it. If they get to not down jefferson can i not download and . Its crazy but its inactive colter warfare and enact the proving that they have the energy and the drive and the courage to rebel so they see it as both things coming together and i think its a very dangerous pattern. Again it goes back to this idea that for three generations reagan once said it is and what they dont know that so troubling is what they know that isnt true and i think thats a we are seeing today. Id like to touch for just a second on russia meddling in the election and the rest of that. I think President Trump would make the point that he won fair and square and whether russia set up a few facebook sites and so forth is barely irrelevant but i wonder if you think newt at the present time with america in this cultural civil war without knowing at present if russians are intentionally stoking the fires and trying to set americans against themselves i think they are they cant. Theres a very long historic tradition of countries meddling in other countries. We have been the domick country for long enough dari that there people who nationally resent us and would like to knock us off. Ive fear the chinese more than i fear the russians. Both i suspect they are involved. It went back and read Clark Cliffords 44 page memo. It was an amazing document. This is before the socalled red scare. This union is communist dominated or that man is a communist. And thats where was. But its easy for us to forget in the 30s there was enough penetration that the house originally was set up to go after the nazis, not the communists. After world war ii there was enough communist penetration that they were going after the calmness and then they were told they werent allowed to do that so they had to liar about whether there were any communist and his awareness that there were communist in the screen actors guild. I look at all that and they can try to interfere. They might be able in some ways one thing went to worry about if we centralize elections and right now legends are run on the county level and does has huge disadvantages but its really hard to rig. Its just too decentralized. Now on the other hand messages on twitter or facebook or would have you are as and ever russian tv station. I dont think theres a comparable chinese station although the chinese newspapers but i just think the nature of the modern world and this was a huge fight as early as washingtons administration when the. Sent people over to try to get as and it blew up because people didnt want foreigners interfering with the american system. We have a long history that an ethic its good the administration has set up teams to work on this. We have been bill bar and amazingly competent attorney general and the very serious and dedicated patriot and i suspect well be okay on that front. I worry much more about democrats stealing the election in california with both harvesting. Is it fair to say that. Pandemic you likely felt the race in 2020 was President Trump still loose but now maybe not so much. Do you think he is a real fight on his hands . When i first set out to write the book i thought trump had a very substantial advantage and i would have said its time that my expectation was to win and win by a big margin. I think now its up in the air but i think it depends in part or what happens. If the economy starts to come back enough that people feel they see hope than i think the president has a huge opportunity to win. If the economy stumbles and it feels like whatever trumps magic was he aint got it anymore than i think theres a problem. The challenge for democrats and i read a newsletter the other day on the Biden Schumer pelosi is a machine. This is not an election between President Trump would resident biden. Its an election between President Trump and the machine in which biden is the weakest of the three. A number friends wrote in called me and said, really scared them as they started thinking about biden pelosi and schumer in a room with no supervision. So i think for the moment its truly ironic. Biden was a candidate thats so weak the longer he can hide the better off he is. So i think the morning he starts campaigning it will be so painful to watch his inability to function that i think he could melt pretty quickly. You made a point in the book newt that President Trump made a bet and that is his use of social media could be the news media and hes been at it now and that war and using those tactics for several years. Do you think that technology is such today that its grasp on social media still gives them an advantage over a unified left or are we seeing as a result of all this cultural war at balancing of that power . I think without social media trump would have been driven off the field. This is a guy who as early as the summer of 16 people were writing columns that say we might have to impeach him. On the day he was sworn in the Washington Post had an article about whether or not trump would be impeached. So he has had 92 or 93 hostility every single day since winning the election to today. He had a huge social mediabased. As it is he actually has a slight advantage. He has gotten them, he has got a lot more people than i would have thought likely. We had the experience of going to the secondlargest collection outside of egypt but anyway we got a guide to take this test takers to this museum and we are going through one of the halls and he points to the statute and he says people will tell you x but thats fake news. I havent a tiein guide in the injection museum. Thats cultural in fact so i would say i wish he was a little more disciplined and i wish he would read 10 of the streets before he sends them but saying that his ability to keep pounding away i think has saved his presidency and he would have been crushed in the. Information age environment because the media, and never seen any candidate base with the level of hostility that trump is everyday. Its an interesting point that you make newt about trump, his style of pounding away just relentlessly always always counterpunching whether counterpunching up or down. Thats how he plays it. Do you think that the left has learned something from that . I get the sense that they have become a role in the attack as well. I think thats who they are. Its what they did to jerry ford. Ford hits his head getting off air force one and that becomes a relentless series of jokes. I think there are two different stories of trump they you touched on. One is he believes in counterpunching and i think he learned that by coexisting in new york that i think he learned early on that as long as he did that he was getting lots of publicity. In the early days it was a relatively unknown Young Real Estate guy and he wants to rise and he wants to be known and manhattan is probably at toughest environment as there is for doing that. So one part is his deeply held belief but the other part is that hes a genius at branding. If you go back to his first book the art of the deal which was a bestseller for years and years and you look at how many trump towers, trump hotels, trump golf courses and one time i went to see him before he was the candidate and he gave me several trump tizon said the reason they are successful as they are 2 inches longer than most thais. You may remember he once did this entire shtick where i think it was late in the campaign where romney had said something about trump is not really a business guy so he brings in trump steaks and trump water and 25 minutes bringing products out and the number one tv show which stayed on the air for a think 13 years so i would say he understands relentlessly positive optimistic branding and thats the premise in the trump tizon so forth. They are very different patterns. So lets talk about trump for a minute. You have worked with a number of american president s. Trump seems to me to be in a class all his own from the standpoint of governing and running, operating the federal bureaucracy environment fairly through instinct. I know there are papers written in briefings and the rest of that but he seems to govern learn and educate and decide purely by instinct. That is often saved him. Hes often done quite well by that so i wonder if its sustainable. We will find out in about five months. The president made the energex in the jackson had an extraordinarily strong or saudi once shot a man. And jackson was i think very hard to manage because he followed his own sense. In many ways they see trump is a jacksonian type. The other thing to remember, im frankly barely a very deeply impressed with trump as a person. Reagan had eight years of governing california. Clinton had Something Like 12 years as governor in 10 years as governor of arkansas. George Herbert Walker bush had then Vice President for eight years. George w. Bush had been governor for eight years. Obama grew up in politics and served in the state legislature understand understood the game. Trump was a business guy. He has opinions but he doesnt have alosis. He runs a very small shop and has lots of people out around the world that the actual core of Trump Enterprises is very small. So he really doesnt have the kind of depth and background to learn how you run big systems. I think hes Getting Better and better at it that the first couple of years were chaotic and he didnt understand the legislature and frankly his instinct was right and theirs was wrong. Republicans leaders in congress he believes they should repeal obamacare. What he should have done is in fact i would have argued to infrastructure and then you can consider obamacare. I think he learned from that that his instincts were better than theirs and thats the other thing to remember. Which is why people like john bolton and other people who are never trumpers, trump is the genuinely disrupting figure who came in from the outside to come in and change things. Everybody has a big investment is going to be terrified and offended and say how can you do this . Thats what he was elected to do and thats why he won and in many ways hes living out his commitment that got him elected and more term it traditional members of the establishment are deeply offended both by his language and the risktaking but in fact hes shoes rubin is pretty clever. I often get asked the question compare Ronald Reagan with the donald trump and i often go back to thinking of the time that reagan was in the white house and i visualize reagan as a boxer when boxing was popular in america. Trump seems to me that he is mma. This is gloves off. This is really really tough stuff. What do you think of that . Do you buy that compares and . Ive never thought of it quite that way. I think that reagan had a remarkable sense of playing a role think it was the role of a lifetime and they think he had an instinctive belief really grown out of the eisenhower tradition of what the president should be like and why for example he would never take his coat off in the oval office. A good friend of mine had been with him just before he was sworn in and had a very bold idea. He had shaken up the system radically. He said its a very interesting idea but i wear the white hats. You have to have the guy that wears the black hats do Something Like that. Reagan had a sense of and he knew how to build the strength while minimizing his inhibitions. He also had acquired i think a disappointment pleasantness and her mind two of fdr. He had a huge level of discipline and reagan was almost always pleasant but people made a real must take if they thought there was softness under the pleasantness. He was actually very tough and very willing to do what he believed in. The other thing i would say is reagan began moving to the right after his with the stalinists in 1947 in the 50s spoken with ian they come is increasingly because of nancys father on taxes and other issues and the guy who hired him. Reagan is your member wouldnt fly so he did. And 75. Speeches. He was given conservative books to read. Reagan evolved to become very thoughtful. Trump is not just a real estate guy and is not a finance guy. Hes a construction guy so trump is comfortable hanging out and theres a great series on youtube it must have been the 90s of trump in his hotel doing every job at one point he dressed up as the guy agreed to at the door and he walks the dog for the lady and he comes back and he says thats really great by dog is so happy. Any system they get a tip . Buddies cleaning rooms have been made and checking people in. He was having the time of his life but there was a nonintellectual relaxed happiness about trump. Hes very existential in a way that reagan was not. Reagan was very longterm and had a very good sense of history. Trump really is in the moment. Hes really smart and hes Getting Better pretty fast and its not that hes simplistic but that he tries to find Core Principles and operates off of those principles over and over again and sometimes you cant figure it out. Its my job to understand them. If they do something i dont say boy that was its what is it that they were doing and with reagan you have a very longterm im going to move the system meant defeat the soviet empire will and pie or with trump you had daily. Whether trump is in office four more months or four more years as you say you are a real student of the presidency and i wonder if there are one or two things that you feel that trump has perhaps forever changed about the presidency given his style and how he has carried himself. I actually doubted in the reason i doubt it is again if you go back to Andrew Jackson there are certain people who fill the room and the next person aint going to fill the room the same way. Most certainly whoever succeeds trump next january or four years later will be more managerial and organized and have that her staff. All which are things that would cripple trump. Its not what he needs and its not what he wants. So my first instinct is to say i dont think that he will significantly change the residency. I think he will significantly change the country if he gets four more years. In some ways hes done some good for example the National Security council has shrunk back to. Obama size but in other ways the machinery just runs and if it doesnt run under trump its going to run under somebody else. Last question you covered this extensively in your new book. It has nothing to do with trump and it has everything to do with china. Maybe this is overstating it up he is literally at war sunday with china because of the direction of thing is going and i dont necessarily mean something terrible like a nuclear war but it conflicts seems almost inevitable. We just saw the chinese kill 20 indian soldiers for no particularly good reason. I said they were sending a signal about something. We saw the North Koreans blow up missions at the head of south korea. This is part of why i wrote trump versus china because i had found i had made some significant mistakes in analyzing china and as i began to understand the mistakes my whole whole interpretation change. Id been been looking at china since 1960. And its one of the reasons i worry about things at the news york times rebellion. The Chinese Communist party is a leninist doll in this party, consciously so. Deng xiaoping spent a year at the university of moscow. When khrushchevs secret speech attacks stolen and 56 the chinese were horrified praise stalin was their great leader and they believed in him and couldnt understand why khrushchev would do it or a xi jinping is the general secretary of the chinese, his party. Thats the base of his power. He is the chairman of the military commission of the Peoples Liberation army which is the military wing of the party, not an government army. This is his least important job. When you understand that and you understand that in their mind they have left a century of humiliation and once again im telling you the theme, its very political. You have people who work hard and they are smart. They dont follow any rules so they can cheat and steal they will. Let the buyer beware because if we can steal from you we will let your fault for not having stopped as so shame on you. That is what we are up against and i can imagine a flashpoint particularly taiwan in the South China Sea where you have exchange of combat. I would worry about it escalating him both sides. Whichever side was losing it would go up the escalation ladder but i think its the most difficult challenge for us to try to think about how do i get to world 40 or 50 years from now where we have contained china with a minimum conflict that they have not been allowed to dominate and i think thats one of the most important questions you have to ask in the next few years. Perhaps the question of our time. Mr. Speaker its been a delight to have you with us and thank you so much. Thank you for writing yet another great book create. Thank you for your leadership and i want to thank your team for their collective leadership through the Reagan Library is a National Treasure its an extraordinary institution and every american should visit it and if they have kids and grandkids they should make sure they get there im so grateful you have been dedicated to invading the spirit of Ronald Reagan and i think in that sense you have created a real Building Block for the future that gives us hope that we will continue to be a unique country. Thank you so much mr. Speaker. Thank you again for being with us and stay safe there. Thank you. Its interesting because so much of politics is about medication and everybody considers her one of the great orators of our age. Thats not to say shes not bright and articulate and thoughtful and she is at one of these robotic politicians that is so stiff because they are terrified of saying the wrong thing that they just repeat themselves over and over and one answer any questions but she is and someone who engages with a lot of introspection. Shes not going to tell you all the things shes been thinking about herself. You have to figure her out and shes not a natural storyteller. Thats part of it too. A lot of compelling political speech are always reeling off these personal anecdotes and theres a conspicuous acts aspect of most of her public speaking was an occasion for me to reflect on the role of communication and perception and politics in setting her and thinking about what is the relationship between how a politician but perceived and how much of that do they do and how much are they responsible and how much is our society responsible for and how much is it about the person. I dont want to get to deconstructionists on you but we hear about this all the time with the president right at a lot of the presence defenders will say people get mad at his tweets with look at what he does and a lot of critics will say what he doesnt do matters just as much as what he does do. Theres not quite that disjunction and nancy pelosi of but another thing about her is a communicator i would say the thing that you get to understand about her everything with hers about results and what shes going to get out of whatever the interaction is whether its the interview or whether its being on television giving a speech at a fundraiser whatever. She is just much more adjusted in driving the message home than she is in making you like her or making herself feel good or even making an audience what is it that im trying to communicate here and how many times do i have to repeat it for you to get a message . Im delighted to introduce our special guest. Ive had the pleasure of working with them. David is the author of race, 100 years of electorate interference. His reporting appeared in his publications including the new york times, new yorker and foreign affairs. David is getting a doctorate at the university of oxford, as a