Gingrich found his way to the upper echelons refusing to accept the minority in the house. He worked with president Ronald Reagan to bring positive change in america. According to his new book trump and the american future solving the great problems of the time and the spread of the virus, the highs and lows of the economy, 2020 will continue to be a process of change. He is here withes here with uss book and thoughts on america. We invite you to enjoy our Virtual Program coming from the academy oval office with Newt Gingrich and Reagan FoundationInstitute Director john heibusch. Spee we planned to have few lives and in person as they have so many times. I want you to know when the pandemic is behind us and they were able to travel we still would love to have you out at the Reagan Library again with your new book or the next one you write. Thank you so much for joining us today. I am a huge fan of the Reagan Library particularly the educational in the way that you create learning experiences with a i wonder could you have ever imagined a situation like the world and the United States finds itself today, can you imagine a pandemic stopping at the world in its tracks in your lifetime . Guest it was both latino unemployment in everything was going well. Then you go to politicians deciding what you can and cannot do, then people being totally fed up isolated and you have the tragic death of george floyd and all of a sudden the country seems to come apart at the seams so if you were to ask me could i have imagined putting all of that together i think the answer is no. Ive written a bunch of models but i dont know that i have the imagination. People said it wasnt believab believable. The left is better organized. Host you mentioned this steve as a decade. I was trying to think back what is the closest experience that america has had in the last century to what they are facing today and went a pandemic initially arrived people were comparing the halt in the economy to 27, 20 weight pure coke. As i thought about it and they want your view on this whether you think its been since world war ii and the attack on pearl harbor and the nation mobilized in a different way of course i think that might be the closest experience. Guest i pretend things for the publication and the white house that this is the largest mobilization effort since world war ii. I wrote a piece, which ended up because i was over here in italy and assumed six weeks before washington i wrote a piece and said whatever you are planning to do, triple with because you dont understand how big this is going to get. And i think that was because they knew i was here and it changed the conversation and that led us to the very march and the effort to start a stabilized the economy. But its sort of i think a big challenge right now and compounded because we are as politically divided as we have been in a long time. The civil war historian of princeton says the language resembles the slave owning newspapers in South Carolina attacking lincoln. The level of vitriolic and the nastiness into the degree of hatred, you never know the depth of things you are giving about trump. Thats all feeds into this and a lot of people as we found a lot of people all of a sudden found social distancing as long as you are doing the right thing so its a very strange and complicated the time. Host the theme it seems to me from your newest book america finds itself in a cultural civil war and i know you also are a civil war historian of i wonder if you can explain that to us. Guest i wrote a newsletter entitled three generations of brainwashing and its the address where he says what he deeply regrets i his not being able to institutionalize teaching patriotism and tha that hes really worried that we are losing the ability to talk to ourselves about who we are and the country starts to disappear. When you go back and realize he gave this in 1989, he is pressing and about where we are today. He had a pretty good instinct that we are in a cultural civil war and clearly have people who have accepted a letter how to organize and to treat other people you have people who despise america when you refuse to stand for the National Land and its not because you are repudiating it but you are with the eight states you have a large group that its almost like the radical generation of the 60s but has had almost 50 years to grow and strengthen it together more force so in that sense i think we are in a cultural war that will in many ways have a huge effect on the kind of country do we become over the next century. Guest host you turned the book into your publisher early, mid march, just as the pandemic have struck. So this book was written before george floyd. Guest we do have a chapter on poverty and the big cities that relates to this. We dont have as strong a chapter as we showed on race in america. And again, i had already had to redo the book once for covid and for the selfimposed depression, so that was pretty loud and the most complicated thought id ever written. Host a magnificent book, mr. Speaker. In the back half of the book, you cover all the ground. I bet, had q. Within the book or finished it next week, for example, you would have doubled down on your thinking about this being a cultural civil war because of the addition of the whole issue of racism and george floyd. Guest idea newsletters and ive done a series on exactly this. The big moment was when the New York Times reporters forced to fire him because he published an oped by a conservative senator, and i thought that if we had gotten to the point of tierney on the left where one conservative opinion piece in a virtually totally leftwing newspaper was such an act of heresy that they had to be basically fired, get rid of him, the principal in a town that is 97 white said should all lives matter. Then there was a professor at ucla that read Martin Luther king jr. s letter from the birmingham jail, and was then suspended. How this could offend somebody on the left to read kings letter, which of course is about nonviolence and is about the american dream, and king was very much a saying to america you have to live up to the dream you have you not repudiate america. And you look at that and think this is truly a cultural civil war. Its popular right now because it is a slogan but when you look at the organization, which has as one of its goals the destruction of the nuclear family, why they want to destroy the nuclear family, im not sure. It is a socially guaranteed step towards weakness, but its in there. And you realize the people who founded the class matter they want a different america and that they replace the america that exists today. The other example is the congresswoman from minnesota. How you can leave mogadishu for minneapolis i think that is one of the things worth studying. She left the society which is a disaster dominated by the world war, people starving, no sense of opportunity to come to the most open society in the world, and shes angry. I dont get it. Does she really think that mogadishu is better because she behaves like the terrible injustice. Host what do you think in the conversation and discussion about issues of racism that are of course important, and i wonder what you think about the evolution of the argument on the left where this new phrase is claimed, systemic racism. If this concept of you are a racist, but you just dont know it. Guest you have to acknowledge that africanamericans more than any other groups experience that famous. Then tim scott, from South Carolina, introducing the bill on Police Reform said i think that he was stopped six times last year and he is a u. S. Senator. Is it more important for blacks to succeed or whites to visit . For some bizarre reason the wrath until left has decided in announcing your guilty and i said an interview, i would be a lot more sympathetic to all of the multimillionaire nfl players who want to take any if they each went out and found a Charter School and actually help children succeed. But im totally unimpressed by people who American Made into billionaires 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, they cannot contain themselves in because they own the news media, they have no Feedback Mechanism to say or not, for example the California Assembly just crashed by 56 5 creating a commission on reparations which is the number one goal of the black caucus in the california legislation. Reparations is morally to focus and its a fight that the left will lose but they just have to do it, they cannot. 3 trilliondollar bill includes paying 1200 for every illegal immigrant in the states as part of the stimulus, that is overreached on a scale in which i suspect 75 85 of the country will disagree, if they had some ability to be self discipline, they would probably be dramatically more dangerous than they are. I got a galley copy of the book mr. Speaker and i think your title was initially trump in the american future, building a better american future i think you changed the title to solving the great problems of our time, tell me why the shift. I felt as i look to all the things that were lurching that we need to shift towards an open problem solving, i think in the world before the pandemic and before the depression, it was easier to imagine trump really continuing to sell things at a rate and it was so complicated that i think all of them have to pitch in, i dont think trump by himself can be the solution, i think he can lead the solution but it will take millions of americans to get us out of it. I dont believe in, and on this before because your historian but now we see an acceleration of this phenomenon that is the left believes we can improve and destroying the past, the russian pulldown, not the civil monuments but the monument of american president s in the revolution, i comment, and whats happening in america day in that front. I think this is part of where, part of the reason i wrote this is brainwashing, and hit me, we have lots of people who are so badly educated, they dont understand how much there doing a street dance, we had the french lover lucian, we had the Russian Revolution in 1917, we know how these things work, if they could read, they could read not just 1984 but all of them and they would understand it was actually in the spanish civil war when stalin decided to wipe it out. So he has seen up close and then of course mussolini and hitler and is very significant that he puts 1984 in britain, hes not describing moscow, he said the tendency of the society will be to create a totally false story to then have a memory of which will put everything in reserve the right to change the story whenever it wants to. Well thats what these people are doing, where does it start, where does it stop, for example, should the suffrage probably almost all of them believe in traditional marriage, therefore have their statutes built down because they were not adequately sensitive to what 100 years later wouldve worked as a gateway. The idea that washington who more than any other Single Person created the framework within which people can say that the rights came from god or that jefferson who actually wrote the words, these people are anything less than historically astonishing figures who advance the cause of human freedom is an absurdity, what youre dealing with is a mob, the mob has no mind, it has emotion and it does not understand is beginning to set up patterns that are totally unacceptable and i think very dangerous. By the way in seattle, washington, the middle of all of this purity, there is a 7foot tall statue of leonard, which was put their years and years ago, some guy bought it when it was being thrown away. But i dont object to lenin being there because i think its a great way to teach people what a monster he was and how peoples lives were destroyed by them, but as a conservative if they knocked on jefferson can you knocked on lenin, this is crazy. But its both an act of cultural warfare and its an act of proving that they have the energy in the drive and the courage to rebel. To see as both things coming together and i think it is a very, very dangerous pattern. But again, he goes back to this idea that three generations with not realizing reagan once said its not what they dont know that is so troubling, its what they know that is untrue, i think thats what were seen today. I want to touch for just a second on russia and rest of not, i think that President Trump would make a point that he won fair and square whether russia set up a facebook site and that sort of thing, its barely irrelevant, but i wonder if you think at the present time with the cultural civil war without knowing it russias of the world are intentionally stoking the fires in trying to set americans against themselv themselves. I think they are if they can. There is a very long historic tradition of countries meddling in other countries, even the dominant country for a long enough. That there are people who naturally would like to knock us off, i feel th fear the chinese more than i do the russians, both of my suspects are involved, i went back and read Clark Cliffords 44 page memo with harry truman he wrote in 1947 it was an amazing document. He talks about communist, this is before he said this unions communist or that merely communist, thats what it was, it wasnt doing anything bad necessarily, he cant forget in the 30s there was enough not the penetration that the Activities Committee originally was set up to go after the knocked these, not the communist and after world war ii there was a communist penetration that they were going after the communist and we are told youre not allowed to do that so we had to lie whether they were communist and one of the reasons reagan got into politics was awareness that there were communist. So i look at all of that and i think they can try to interfere, they might be able in some ways, nor do we have to worry about it we centralize elections in right now elections are run down to county level and it is chaotic and huge disadvantages but its really hard to rig, its too decentralized, now having messages on twitter or facebook or what have you were and, they were russian tv station with the penetration to not operate much, i dont think there is a comfortable chinese station although there are chinese newspapers. But i just think its a nature of the modern world and this of course is a huge fight as early as washington when the princess and some people over to try to get us to the antibritish and it blew up because people do not want foreigners interfering with the american system, we had a long history of that and i think its good for the administration instead of teams to work on th this, i think we had an amazingly competent attorney general and a very serious and dedicated patriot and i suspect we will be okay on that front. I worry much more about democrats stealing the election as they do in california with boat harvesting than i do with the chinese and russians. Is it fair to say democrats prepandemic you likely felt that this race in 2020 was President Trumps to lose, but now maybe not so much because does he really have a fight on his hands. When i first set out to write the book, i thought trump had a very substantial advantage and i wouldve said at the time that my expectation was he would win by a big margin. I think now its up in the air, i think it depends on part of what happens, the economy starts to come back enough, the people feel like they see hope. Then 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, then i think its a problem, the challenge for democrats i didnt interview on biden, Schumer Pelosi and i said this is not an election between President Trump and president biden, its an election between President Trump and the sheet which biden is the weakest of the three. In a number of friends, instead of theirs cleared of him and stressing about biden, pelosi and schumer and those supervision, it would be wild. I think for the moment its ironic, biden is a candidate who is so weak that the longer he can hide, the better off he is. So i think the morning he starts campaigning, if he ever does, it will be so painful to watch his inability to function then i think he can melt pretty quickly. You make a point in the book that President Trump made a bet in his use of social media could beat the news media and hes been at it now and using those tactics for several years, do you think that technology is such today and his grasp on social media still gives him an advantage on the left or what we seen as a result while the cultural war and the balancing of the power . I think without social media, trump wouldve been driven off the field, remember as early as the summer of 16, people are 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 we had 92 or 93 hostility every single day of winning the election until today. If he had not had a huge social media page, he wouldve been broken. As it is he actually has a slight advantage, hes gotten them got a lot of people think about the fake news than i ever wouldve thought of course when i had the experience to tour in the second largest egyptian collection outside of egypt for strange reasons, anyway we have a guide to take us to this museum and were going through one of the halls and as he points to start you, he says people will tell you that that is fake news, i am an italian guy with an Egyptian Museum using donald trump language, that is Cultural Impact and i would say, i wish he was a little more disciplined and i wish he deleted 10 of his tweets before he sent them, but having said that, his ability to keep it away has saved his presidency and he wouldve been crushed with an environment, the media hates him at a level of never seen any candidate phase with the level of hostility that trump has to live with everyday. Its an interesting point that you make about trumps this style of pounding away, relentlessly always always counter punching whether counter punching up or down, thats how he plays it. You think the left has learned something from that, i get the sense that they have become as relentless in the attack as we well. I think they already were over. What they did to hitting his head off of air force one and that becomes a relentless series of jokes, i think theres two different stories to trump that you touched on, one is he believes in counter punching and i think he learned that by coexisting with page six in the book, i think he learned early on the every candidate to hit him he hit them, as long as he did that, an early days its relatively unknown real estate guy and he wants to rise and be known in manhattan is probably is in a tough and his environment as it is in doing that. And you always counter punch, but the other part you the genius at branding and you go back to his first look which was a bestseller for years and years, you look at how many trump towers, trump hotels, trump golf courses, one time i went to see them before candidate and he gave me several trump ties and said the reason they are successful is 2 inches longer than most sides and the americans are great people and you may remember he did this entire script word late in the campaign where romney said something about trump is not really a business guy, so he brings in trump stakes, trump water, and they had the number one tv show which has stayed on the air for 13 years, i would say relentlessly positive optimistic branding and thats the trump ties and so forth and he understands counter punching but the actually different patterns and they happen to fit together but very different patterns. Lets talk about trump instincts for a minute. You have worked up close with a number of american president s, trump seems to me to be in a class all on his own in a standpoint of governing, operating the bureaucracy in an environment certainly their instinct, i know theyre all process that you move, but he seems to govern, learn, educate, decide purely by instinct. And that is often saved him and is often done quite well, as you know i wonder if its sustainable. We will find out in five months. , i would say the president hes most like is Andrew Jackson, jackson was a populist in a disrupter, jackson had an extraordinarily strong personality, jackson was very hard to manage because he followed his own interinstinc interinstincts, in many ways i see trump as addict sony and type figure, but the other thing to remember, quite frankly very equally impressed with trump as a person, reagan had eight years of governor as california in ten years as governor of arkansas, bush had been president for eight years, george w. Bush had been governor for eight years. , obama grew up in politics and served as state legislator, understood the game, trump is a business guy, his opinions but he does not have policies, he runs a very small shop and has lots of people around the world but the core Trump Enterprises is very small and so he really does not have the kind of depth of background among how you run exist years, i think hes Getting Better and better at it but the first couple of years were pretty chaotic and he did not understand the legislature and frankly his instinct was right and theres was wrong, he was still the republican leader in congressman with obamacare and thats the first thing they should do and they lost by one vote and what he shouldve done was start with the tax bill and in fact i wouldve argued the tax bill first then infrastructure then you can consider a lot of things, but they tag them down this fantasy line and i think he learned from that that his instincts were better than theirs. And whats the other thing to remember, its why john bolton goes nuts and other people who are never trumpers, trump is a genuinely disruptive figure who came in from the outside, determined to change them, everybody has a big investment is going to be terrified and offended and say how can he do this, this is a he was elected to do and in many ways he is living out what his commitment that got him elected in more traditional members of the establishment by his language and the risktaking and is pretty clever. I get asked the question compare Ronald Reagan with donald trump, i often go back to thinking of the times that reagan was in the white house, i visualize reagan as a prizefighter, boxing was popular in america, trump on the other hand seems to be the real amendment, this is gloves off, this is really, really tough stuff, what do you think of that, do you find that comparison . [laughter] i think that reagan had a remarkable sense of playing a role, the role of a lifetime, i think he believed ives and howard type tradition of what the president should be like, his wife said he would never take his coat off and oval office. A good friend of mine was sworn in and had a very bold idea, which wouldve shaken the system up radically. , reagan intern said is a very interesting idea but i wear the white hats. You have to have a guy that wears a black cat that does something, i think reagan had a sense of limitations any new had to go through strengths minimizing his imitations. He also acquired a discipline pleasantness and fdr had a huge level of discipline and reagan was almost always pleasant, but people made a real mistake that there was softness under the pleasant because he was very tough and very willing to do what he believed in. The other thing i would say reagan began moving and all through the 50s the communist and increasingly because of nancys father on tax and other issues in the guy who hired he did 375 speeches and he would always go and train he ways gave conservative economic books because he did not play cards so reagan was very, very thoughtf thoughtful, truth is hes not just a real estate guy, hes not a finance guy, hes a construction guy, trump is very comfortable hanging out and he mustve made in the 90s and trump at one of his hotels doing every job so im dressed up as the guy and walks the dog for the lady and he comes back and she says thats really great, my dog is so happy, but hes cleaning rooms with the maiden checking people in and he was having the time of his life. But there was a nonintellectual relaxed happiness about trump who is very expert central way that reagan was not, but reagan was very longterm and had a very good sense of history, trump is really, really smart and Getting Better pretty fast and is not that hes simplistic but that he tries to find Core Principles and then operates off of those principles over and over and over again, sometimes you cannot figure, it is my job to understand them and if they do something, what is that they thought they were doing and with reagan you had a longterm to defeat the soviet empire and with trump you had an opportunist. Whether trump is in office for more months or four more years, as you say a real student of the presidency, i wonder if there is one or two things that you feel that trump has perhaps forever changed about the presidency given his style and how hes carried himself. I actually doubted, the reason i doubt it is because you go back to Andrew Jackson and there are certain people you steal the room, the next person aint going to fill the room the same way, almost certainly he succeeds trump in january or four years later would be more organized and have better staff, all of which are things that cripple trump, its not that he needs and not what he wants, so my first instinct is to say i dont think that he will significantly change the presidency, i think you will significantly change the country and if he gets four more years. And for example the National Security council has been shrunk back to preobama size and in other ways hes gone on to somebody else. Last question and you covered this extensively in your book, it has nothing to do a trump has everything to do with china and i think this is overstating it into ucs literally at war someday with china because of the direction where everything is going and i dont necessarily mean some terrible nuclear war but it just seems to be, conflict seems inevitable. We saw the chinese kill 20 indian soldiers for no particular good reason, i assume they were sending a signal about something, we saw the north koreans, i think its pretty alarming, the challenge that we have in this is last year i wrote trump versus china because i found i have made significant mistakes in analyzing china and i began to understand the mistakes my whole interpretation changed and im a bit with china since 1960. And its one reason they worry about things in the New York Times rebellion, the Chinese Communist party is a stalinist party, consciously so, we spent years in the university, when the secret speech attacks talent and 56, the chinese were horrified, stalin was the great leader and they believed in him and could not understand why. Xi jinping is a general secretary of the chinese commonest party, that is the base of his power, the chairman of the military commission which is the military wing of the party, not the government, not the Government Army and hes president of china which is the least important job, when you understand that and you understand in their mind they have the left the century and once again the coming the central king. It is very promotable, you have people who work hard and are smart and they dont follow any rules, so they can cheat and steal and they will, its on tour and let the buyer beware because if we can steal from you and if its your fault for not having stop this from stealing, shame on you. And what were up against, i can imagine a flashpoint tipping over taiwan in the South China Sea where you would have become that, i worry about the escalating on both sides, it was a genocide he was losing to go up the escalation because they would be so shocked at losing but i think its the most difficult challenge for us to try to think about how do we get to a world 40 or 50 years from now where we have continuing china with minimum conflict that we have not been allowed to dominate and i think thats one of the most important questions that they ask. Perhaps a question over time. Mr. Speaker its been a delight to have you with us, thank you so much, thank you for writing yet another i want to think your team for the collective leadership, the way you elaborate is a National Treasure in an extraordinary institution, the kids and grandkids, make sure they get there and im so grateful that you have been dedicated to conveying the spirit of Ronald Reagan and in that sense he will create a Building Block of our future and we will continue to be a unique country. Thank you so much mr. Speaker, thank you for being with us, stay safe. Weeknights this month were featuring book tv programs as a preview of whats available every weekend on cspan2, wednesday night starting at eight eastern, New York Times journalist reported on a girl scout troop which started for girls living in a homeless shelter in new york city and sparked a creation of similar trips around the country, and then American Interest contributing editor offered her thoughts on why some americans are moving away from traditional religion, later journalist Erica Barnett looked at addiction in america and discussed her own struggles with alcoholism. Enjoy book tv on cspan2. You are watching book tv on cspan2, every weekend with the latest nonfiction books and authors, cspan2 created by americas Cable Television company as a Public Service and brought to you by your television provider. Im going to start by introducing our guest, then they will give us overview of the book and jackl