June 15, 2025 • 23 mins
Newt discusses President Trump's five major challenges, providing a comprehensive overview of the complexities facing the White House. The challenges include managing a domestic crisis involving opposition groups, navigating the Israeli-Iranian conflict, advancing significant legislation known as the "Big Beautiful Bill," addressing the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, and reshaping the global trade system through tariffs. Newt emphasizes the multifaceted nature of these issues, highlighting the need for strategic communication, international diplomacy, legislative negotiation, and economic restructuring. He reflects on historical parallels and the potential impact of these challenges on Trump's presidency, offering insights into the political landscape and the administration's efforts to maintain order and progress.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
On this episode of News World, I felt that there
were so many different things going on that talking about
President Trump's five biggest challenges would really be helpful in
framing everything the White House is trying to deal with.
And I got there because it occurred to me. When
they get up in the morning and they're looking at
all these different things, they have to keep all these
(00:27):
balls in the air. They have to remember what they are.
So the five challenges I want to talk about are,
first of all, the domestic crisis of who governs. Second,
the Israeli Iranian War. Third, getting to the big beautiful
Bill and getting it signed. Fourth, dealing with the Russia
Ukraine fight, which continues to go on, and five the
(00:48):
challenge of reshaping the entire world trade system through tariffs.
And I think if you look at the five and
you think, you know, President Trump has to keep all
five of these in mind all day, it'll give you
some sense of how much change is underway and how
really complicated it is. Let me start with what I
(01:16):
think is going to be a growing domestic crisis. And
while you might say that it comes out of the
Los Angeles riots, it's really much bigger than that. There
have been organized groups who were determined to take on
the President and the United States government in a direct confrontation.
(01:37):
You're going to see continued efforts at direct confrontation. And
you can tell how determined some Democrats are to force
the confrontation when you watch Senator Padilla try to interrupt
the Secretary of Homeland Securities press conference to such a
degree that he gets arrested, handcuffed, and taken out. This
(01:58):
is a United States senator who deliberately is forcing a confrontation.
You see this in the calculated strategic decision of Governor
Newsom of California, who has decided that being the anti
Trump is his road to get to be the Democratic
presidential nominee. And there's this very odd coalition of illegal
(02:21):
immigrants who don't want to be deported, radical groups, and
a bitterly anti Trump wing of the Democratic Party. And
if you see those three as a coalition, that's what's
coming together is that constant sense that each of them
has a common enemy and it's the Trump administration. And
(02:42):
that because in their world the Trump administration is seen
is so bad, anything they do to stop it, or
disrupt it, or cause a confrontation is to their advantage. Now,
it's an interesting strategy. It was tried in the nineteen sixties,
and people tend to forget this, But the period of
the late nineteen sixties was the largest left wing insurgency
(03:05):
in modern American history. There were twenty five hundred bombs
set off. There were a million people surrounding the Pentagon
at one point. There were police riots in Chicago at
the Democratic Convention in nineteen sixty eight. There was a
huge fight at Berkeley where radical students tried to take
over the campus and literally was an open fight with
(03:27):
the California State Police, the California National Guard, and at
one point Governor Reagan, who we now think of as
a positive, friendly person, but at one point he got
so angry he said in a speech, it's going to
take bloodshed. Let's get it over with. There was a
huge confrontation between all the different elements of the left,
the anti war left, the anti racism left, the.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
Pro gay rights left.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
All of them came together in the late nineteen sixties
early nineteen seventies, and the result was the American people,
when forced to choose, gave President Nexon one of the
largest majorities in American history. They carried to every state
except Massachusetts. Again, Reagan, having been very tough with the students,
ended up getting re elected by a seven point margin
(04:10):
over the Democrat. So, when forced to choose the American
people prefer orderly structured government, I think you're going to
see a continued effort here. And if you think about it,
it makes perfect sense because when you're dealing with the
disaster of the Biden immigration policy, which essentially was an open.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
Border, and you have millions and millions.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
Of people here, why would you expect all of them
to go cheerfully and pleasantly they want to stay here.
They already broke the law to get here. Why wouldn't
they break the law to stay here? And if you
combine that with the radicals, people like Antifa, who had
kept the city of Portland in turmoil for three years,
the radicals are always looking for an excuse to be
(04:53):
out there fighting. They were the people who in many
ways were very helpful, both in Ferguson were clearly people
were being bussed in during the riots and Ferguson clearly
during the summer of twenty twenty, there was a nationwide
network of people eager to cause trouble, riot and burn
things down. We do have as an additional point here
(05:14):
that the Democratic Party, I would say probably sixty percent
of it, of the elected Democrats, are now so radically
alienated by Trump that causing confrontation strikes them as reasonable
because they can't beat him any other way. They're not
going to beat him in the Senate, They're not going
to beat him in the House. He's gradually taking over
(05:34):
the executive branch, which they have dominated for ninety years.
You see this floundering around. So President Trump's first great
challenge is to communicate with the country, much like President
Eisenhower did in the fifties when he sent troops into
Little Rock, Arkansas, much like President Johnson did when he
sent troops into Detroit during a riot. He simply has
(05:57):
to communicate to the country that this this is a
struggle between the legitimate, constitutional, elected forces of law and
people who in fact want to seat usurp and take
over governing America for totally different values and totally different reasons.
In the short run, it's going to be a mess,
and the long run, it's almost certain that the American
(06:18):
people who will believe in support some process of enforcing
the law in some process of having people who are
here illegally leave the country. So that's the first great
challenge and has to spend some time every single day
dealing with that, because it doesn't go away. They don't say, oh,
we know you're busy, why don't we come back Thursday.
Every single day from here until it ends, you're going
(06:40):
to see some kind of challenge somewhere in America, and
you're going to see an entire network, some of it
being the news media. You may remember the reporter in
Los Angeles who's talking about how happy and friendly people
looked as cars were burning, which, if you think about
it's pretty weird. So you're going to have news media
on the other side, you're going to have an effort
to paint this and to use it as a device
(07:02):
to disrupt the momentum of the Trump administration. Momentum which
I have reported recently in a newsletter means that since
the election, over a million people have shifted from the
Democratic Party to the Republican Party, and as of this week,
a Quinnipiac poll showed the Democrats in the House are
down to twenty one percent approval, so from their perspective.
(07:23):
They're desperate to find a way to change the momentum,
and that has to be ultimately the number one challenge,
because the president has to be able to govern the
country in order to have an effective presidency. The second
big challenge frankly blew up, although people could see it
coming for months now. President Trump has said to the Iranians,
why don't we arrange a deal where you give up
(07:46):
your nuclear weapons program and we'll drop the sanctions. You
re enter the world of prosperity, you have a great future.
We don't have any particular reason to fight with you.
And for months the Iranians have said no, that their
bottom line is they have to have an ability to
build nuclear weapons. Well, what that means is that you
are dealing with a genuine crisis, because remember that this
(08:12):
particular Iranian dictatorship says publicly that they want to destroy
Israel and destroy the United States. And the Ayatola Hamenis
actually gone to national television and reassured the Iranian people
that these are not just slogans, that their policy is
(08:33):
to destroy Israel and destroy the United States. So Prime
Minister Netnahu is the longest serving prime minister in Israeli history.
He was very patient, watched this for months, and the
Iranians clearly refused to give up their nuclear program. And
so the Israelis, who had very long time had a
(08:54):
plan to do this, had a combined operation. Remember that Mussad,
which is the Israeli intelligence service, focuses pretty narrowly on
the survival of Israel, and at that job, it is
probably the best intelligence service in the world. They perform
astonishing things. And in the last couple of days we
now know they infiltrated weapons into Iran so that they
(09:18):
could take out a variety of missiles, of aircraft, defense
systems and other things, and they could identify where scientists
and generals were, so that when some two hundred Israeli
fighter planes crossed into Iranian airspace, they knew exactly where
they're going, exactly what they.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
Were going to hit.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
And Prime Minister Netniel who has said publicly and explicitly
they're going to continue this air campaign until they completely
destroy any possible nuclear program. So that is an enormous shift.
You know, Israel has now I think really spurred on
by the massacres in October two years ago, where they
(09:59):
were so stunned to realize how vulnerable they were, and
they were so horrified by the number of people, including
children and babies, who were killed, and the grotesque hostility
of women being drag naked through the streets, people behaving,
rockstrown at them. They methodically set out to destroy Amas,
which they're still in the process of doing. They broke
(10:20):
the back of Hezbollah with a series of brilliant intelligence operations.
So AMAS is on their south, Hesblas in the north
in Lebanon, and by the way, now that has Bela
has been shattered, the Lebanese government announced publicly that they
would not in any way participate in an effort to
attack Israel. Over this assault in Iran, then the Syrian
(10:41):
government collapsed. The replacement government, although it's led by somebody
who we've defined as a terrorist for years, has said
very clearly they don't want to fight anybody. They just
want to find a way to rebuild Syria, which has
been damaged now for almost twenty years by an internal
civil war. So that front now has been solved, and
so the great opponent is Iran. Iran is a very
(11:04):
big country, about twice the size of Texas. Israel's a
relatively small country, I think about the size of New Jersey.
So you have a David and Goliath moment. But the
fact is that the Israelis have extraordinarily competent military in
an even more competent intelligence service, and my guess is
that they'll keep pounding on the Iranians, certainly until they've
(11:25):
destroyed the nuclear program and potentially until they've destroyed the
regime and allowed the Iranian people to reclaim their own country.
Every poll I've seen says over eighty percent of the
Iranian people dislike the regime. But it's a police state,
and it's ruthless and it will kill you, and so
they're not able to get rid of it. But I
suspect if it's weakened enough that in fact it may
(11:48):
fall and you may see sort of a post Byatola
Iran in the not distant future. But that's again, that
means every single day President Trump has to get up
and get a briefing on his exactly what's going on
and who's getting involved? Are the Russians going to try
to get involved? On many ways, Iran has been a
client state of Russian and the Iranians have sold the
(12:08):
Russians a huge number of weapons to fight in the
Ukraine War. Are the Chinese going to try to get involved?
And pretty hard for them to do. It's a long
way off and they don't have the kind of deep
sea naval power we do. Over the next few days,
we'll see how things evolve. What's impressive is that all
of the Arab states, there's nobody defending Iran. The Saudis
are terrified of the Iranians, the UAE is terrified of
(12:31):
the Iranians. They probably deep down are pretty happy and
hope these willies will finish the job. But that's the
second challenge. So on the one sound front, President Trump
has to look at home and deal with real opposition
and real hostility. On a second front, he has to
try to manage what's going on in the Middle East,
and one try to keep the Americans out of it,
which they've done a good job so far. Secretary Marco
(12:53):
Rubio has a Secretary of State, has been very clear
that we're not going to pick a fight with Iran
unless the Iranians pick a fight with us.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
So that's a second challenge.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
The third challenge, in some ways, the definition of the
success of this administration is the big beautiful bill that's
currently in the Senate that passed the House, and you
probably notice that as a second step, they passed in
the House the Recision Bill to cut nine billion dollars
in spending, which was a very direct, very specific cut
(13:36):
they are now negotiating. There are a number of people
who want really deep cuts. The fact is they can't
get really deep cuts beyond what's in the current build
that came out of the House because the House majority
is so narrow that they'll lose the Moderates and the
Water simply won't vote for really really deep cuts. On
the other hand, if you think of this as the
(13:56):
first in a series of bills, and I try to
remind everyone that when we balance the budget, will I
have a speaker. We didn't do it in one bill.
Took us four years of constant work to get to
a balanced budget. So I think there's going to be
a very big effort made, particularly by Speaker Mike Johnson,
to figure out a formula so that the people who
want real deep cuts are going to have a chance
(14:18):
to get them, but not in this bill. This bill
has to remain pretty close I would say ninety five
ninety six percent of what came out of the House,
because it has to go back through the House again,
and they simply don't have the margin. Something as simple
as passing the recision cuts about nine point two billion dollars.
They only passed it by a two vote margin. So
(14:39):
I think it's really important to recognize that this is
going to be a continuing challenge. If I were betting
the bill will pass, it will be signed into law,
it'll be a huge tax cut, a huge deregulation bill,
and a modest cut in spending. But it will only
happen because the President personally gets involved, listen to everybody,
(15:01):
and gradually helps hammer out an agreement that everybody can
vote for. So here you have the president who already
has to pay attention to the domestic challenge of people
who want to take on the American government. He has
to deal with what's happening between Israel and Iran, and
then he has to find the energy and the time
to negotiate with Senators and then to negotiate with the House,
(15:23):
and to find a way creatively to get to a
bill everybody can vote for. I think they'll get it done,
but imagine the amount of time and the level of effort.
When we got to the balanced budget agreement with Bill Clinton,
we spent thirty five days face to face. Now imagine
what a drain of time and energy that is for
a president who already has all these other things on
(15:43):
his plate. The fourth great challenge is the Russian Ukrainian War,
and here I think President Trump has been deeply disappointed.
I think he looked back on his first term when
he had a good relationship with Putin and he thought,
somehow they could work something out easily, and I think
he honestly believed he could get to.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
A peace agreement in a few days.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
He's gradually learning that, in fact, Putin has decided that
this is the capstone of his life, that he is
the man who is going to reunify the Russian Empire,
and that the key step for that is to crush
Ukraine so that it in fact cannot survive as a
independent country, and so much a definition of his life
(16:28):
that he's not backing down. And I think my sense
is that President Trump has been very disappointed that the
inability to get Putin to take seriously finding a way
to get to a peaceful solution, and what Putin basically
is gambling on is that while they talk that the
Russian military, which is about four or five times bigger
(16:49):
than the Ukrainian military, that it will gradually wear out
the Ukrainian military and win a crushing military victory. Now
there's not much evidence yet that that's going to happen.
Ukrainians have turned out to be very inventive. They've always
been a center of manufacturing in the Soviet Union. They
have lots of engineers and lots of capable people, and
they've been very inventive. They drove the Russian Black Sea
(17:12):
fleet out of the Black Sea into the Cia of
Azov because they've developed a series of drones that could
sink ships. See, you have a five thousand dollars drone
and a sixty million dollar cruiser, and the drone would
beat the cruiser. The Russians just gave up. They pulled
back to get out of range. The recent effort by
the Ukrainians to hit the Russian strategic bombers, some of
(17:36):
them thirty four hundred miles away from Kiev has amazing achievements,
an achievement comparable to some of the things the Israelis
have done. So that's going to.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
Continue to go on. The question.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
In my mind, the Europeans are going to stand firm
because the Europeans genuinely do believe that Ukraine is the
barrier that protects them from Putin and protects them from Russia.
It's not clear to meident Trump comes down in this.
He wants peace. He's also very worried about nuclear war.
Somehow people convinced him in this first term just how
(18:10):
truly horrible a nuclear war would be. Putin does have
six thousand nuclear weapons, and so I think the president,
while he's more aggressive than Joe Biden was, he's still
careful because he doesn't want to push Putin into a
corner where he decides that tactical nuclear weapons are better
than being defeated. I think that this will go on
(18:30):
for a while. I think it's a great disappointment to
President Trump. I think he really did, sincerely believe he
could get to a truce and it just didn't quite
work out. So that's the fourth problem. Again. Put yourself
in President Trump's position. You wake up in the morning,
you look at home to see what's happening in terms
of unrest. Then you look to Israel Iran to see
how that campaign's going. Then you come back and look
(18:52):
at the Congress to see what has to get done
to move towards passing this huge important legislation. Then you
pivot and you're looking at Russia and Ukraine. And then finally,
the fifth grade challenge is fundamental effort by President Trump
to reorder the entire world trading system. The trading system
had grown up as a global system in which the
(19:14):
United States sacrificed a great deal economically in order to
sustain an open trading system around the whole planet, and
other countries learned to take enormous advantage of this, and
so over a period of about thirty years, the system
became more and more destructive for the United States and
more and more positive for Europe and particularly China. And
(19:35):
Trump came along, and he had talked about this a
lot back when he was a businessman, so this was
not some new theme to him. But he came along
and said, look, we're going to simply have to change
the agreement. We're the largest market in the world. We
ought to have the most leverage. People ought to in
fact be paying us for access to our market, and
we should not be allowing ourselves to be taken advantage of.
(19:57):
So he has begun to build a tariff Bay East system,
which ultimately leads to bilateral that is, one country to
one country agreements across the whole planet. It is an
enormous undertaking. The truth is virtually every country wants to
get into the American market. You're seeing a huge increase
in manufacturing in the US by countries where their companies
(20:19):
have just decided in order to be able to be productive,
they've got to be in the United States. And you're
going to see every country negotiate a unique, separate deal.
It's a very large change from the multinational system that
had grown up and that had been kind of a
global trading system, but one in which everybody else took
advantage the United States. Working all that out is going
(20:40):
to take several years. So again you have President has
to meet with Secretary Treasury Vessent and others, sit down
and look at each of these agreements, decide, you know,
what happens with the European Union, what happens with Japan,
what happens with China, on and on for about one
hundred and ninety countries.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
So to wrap all of this up.
Speaker 1 (20:57):
I think the five biggest challenges present and Trump faces
right now, and the way he has to balance his
energy and his focus are first, re establishing domestic order
while we in fact do solve the problem of illegal immigration. Second,
ensuring that Israel wins the war with Iran and ideally
that we help the Iranian people take control of their
(21:18):
government again. Third, getting the big beautiful bill through the
House and Senate and signed into law this summer so
that the American people have money in their pocket so
the economy starts booming by early next year. Fourth, sustaining
the Ukrainians, pressuring putin potentially going towards something like Senator
Lindsey Graham's sanctions bill, which has eighty five sponsors in
(21:40):
the Senate and which would be imposed very very harsh
sanctions on Russia, and try to basically bankrupt the government.
And then finally continue day by day negotiate the tariff
agreements with Fortunately somebody is smart and as capable as
Secretary Bessen taking the lead. It is a big agenda,
It is an exhausting agenda, and I think, frankly, I
(22:00):
don't know of any other president who could carry simultaneously
as many different challenges as President Trump, and I think
it will be fascinating to see how it evolves, and
in future weeks I'll report again on how I see
this whole process evolving.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
Thank you for listening.
Speaker 1 (22:17):
Newtsworld is produced by Gangris Street sixty and iHeartMedia. Our
executive producers guard Zie Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson.
The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley.
Special thanks to the team at Gingrishtree sixty. If you've
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and both rate us with five stars and give us
a review so others can learn what it's all about.
(22:40):
Right now, listeners of Newtsworld can sign up for my
three free weekly columns at gangrishtreet sixty dot com slash newsletter.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
I'm newt Gingrich. This is Newtsworld.
On this episode of News World, I felt that there
were so many different things going on that talking about
President Trump's five biggest challenges would really be helpful in
framing everything the White House is trying to deal with.
And I got there because it occurred to me. When
they get up in the morning and they're looking at
all these different things, they have to keep all these
(00:27):
balls in the air. They have to remember what they are.
So the five challenges I want to talk about are,
first of all, the domestic crisis of who governs. Second,
the Israeli Iranian War. Third, getting to the big beautiful
Bill and getting it signed. Fourth, dealing with the Russia
Ukraine fight, which continues to go on, and five the
(00:48):
challenge of reshaping the entire world trade system through tariffs.
And I think if you look at the five and
you think, you know, President Trump has to keep all
five of these in mind all day, it'll give you
some sense of how much change is underway and how
really complicated it is. Let me start with what I
(01:16):
think is going to be a growing domestic crisis. And
while you might say that it comes out of the
Los Angeles riots, it's really much bigger than that. There
have been organized groups who were determined to take on
the President and the United States government in a direct confrontation.
(01:37):
You're going to see continued efforts at direct confrontation. And
you can tell how determined some Democrats are to force
the confrontation when you watch Senator Padilla try to interrupt
the Secretary of Homeland Securities press conference to such a
degree that he gets arrested, handcuffed, and taken out. This
(01:58):
is a United States senator who deliberately is forcing a confrontation.
You see this in the calculated strategic decision of Governor
Newsom of California, who has decided that being the anti
Trump is his road to get to be the Democratic
presidential nominee. And there's this very odd coalition of illegal
(02:21):
immigrants who don't want to be deported, radical groups, and
a bitterly anti Trump wing of the Democratic Party. And
if you see those three as a coalition, that's what's
coming together is that constant sense that each of them
has a common enemy and it's the Trump administration. And
(02:42):
that because in their world the Trump administration is seen
is so bad, anything they do to stop it, or
disrupt it, or cause a confrontation is to their advantage. Now,
it's an interesting strategy. It was tried in the nineteen sixties,
and people tend to forget this, But the period of
the late nineteen sixties was the largest left wing insurgency
(03:05):
in modern American history. There were twenty five hundred bombs
set off. There were a million people surrounding the Pentagon
at one point. There were police riots in Chicago at
the Democratic Convention in nineteen sixty eight. There was a
huge fight at Berkeley where radical students tried to take
over the campus and literally was an open fight with
(03:27):
the California State Police, the California National Guard, and at
one point Governor Reagan, who we now think of as
a positive, friendly person, but at one point he got
so angry he said in a speech, it's going to
take bloodshed. Let's get it over with. There was a
huge confrontation between all the different elements of the left,
the anti war left, the anti racism left, the.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
Pro gay rights left.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
All of them came together in the late nineteen sixties
early nineteen seventies, and the result was the American people,
when forced to choose, gave President Nexon one of the
largest majorities in American history. They carried to every state
except Massachusetts. Again, Reagan, having been very tough with the students,
ended up getting re elected by a seven point margin
(04:10):
over the Democrat. So, when forced to choose the American
people prefer orderly structured government, I think you're going to
see a continued effort here. And if you think about it,
it makes perfect sense because when you're dealing with the
disaster of the Biden immigration policy, which essentially was an open.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
Border, and you have millions and millions.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
Of people here, why would you expect all of them
to go cheerfully and pleasantly they want to stay here.
They already broke the law to get here. Why wouldn't
they break the law to stay here? And if you
combine that with the radicals, people like Antifa, who had
kept the city of Portland in turmoil for three years,
the radicals are always looking for an excuse to be
(04:53):
out there fighting. They were the people who in many
ways were very helpful, both in Ferguson were clearly people
were being bussed in during the riots and Ferguson clearly
during the summer of twenty twenty, there was a nationwide
network of people eager to cause trouble, riot and burn
things down. We do have as an additional point here
(05:14):
that the Democratic Party, I would say probably sixty percent
of it, of the elected Democrats, are now so radically
alienated by Trump that causing confrontation strikes them as reasonable
because they can't beat him any other way. They're not
going to beat him in the Senate, They're not going
to beat him in the House. He's gradually taking over
(05:34):
the executive branch, which they have dominated for ninety years.
You see this floundering around. So President Trump's first great
challenge is to communicate with the country, much like President
Eisenhower did in the fifties when he sent troops into
Little Rock, Arkansas, much like President Johnson did when he
sent troops into Detroit during a riot. He simply has
(05:57):
to communicate to the country that this this is a
struggle between the legitimate, constitutional, elected forces of law and
people who in fact want to seat usurp and take
over governing America for totally different values and totally different reasons.
In the short run, it's going to be a mess,
and the long run, it's almost certain that the American
(06:18):
people who will believe in support some process of enforcing
the law in some process of having people who are
here illegally leave the country. So that's the first great
challenge and has to spend some time every single day
dealing with that, because it doesn't go away. They don't say, oh,
we know you're busy, why don't we come back Thursday.
Every single day from here until it ends, you're going
(06:40):
to see some kind of challenge somewhere in America, and
you're going to see an entire network, some of it
being the news media. You may remember the reporter in
Los Angeles who's talking about how happy and friendly people
looked as cars were burning, which, if you think about
it's pretty weird. So you're going to have news media
on the other side, you're going to have an effort
to paint this and to use it as a device
(07:02):
to disrupt the momentum of the Trump administration. Momentum which
I have reported recently in a newsletter means that since
the election, over a million people have shifted from the
Democratic Party to the Republican Party, and as of this week,
a Quinnipiac poll showed the Democrats in the House are
down to twenty one percent approval, so from their perspective.
(07:23):
They're desperate to find a way to change the momentum,
and that has to be ultimately the number one challenge,
because the president has to be able to govern the
country in order to have an effective presidency. The second
big challenge frankly blew up, although people could see it
coming for months now. President Trump has said to the Iranians,
why don't we arrange a deal where you give up
(07:46):
your nuclear weapons program and we'll drop the sanctions. You
re enter the world of prosperity, you have a great future.
We don't have any particular reason to fight with you.
And for months the Iranians have said no, that their
bottom line is they have to have an ability to
build nuclear weapons. Well, what that means is that you
are dealing with a genuine crisis, because remember that this
(08:12):
particular Iranian dictatorship says publicly that they want to destroy
Israel and destroy the United States. And the Ayatola Hamenis
actually gone to national television and reassured the Iranian people
that these are not just slogans, that their policy is
(08:33):
to destroy Israel and destroy the United States. So Prime
Minister Netnahu is the longest serving prime minister in Israeli history.
He was very patient, watched this for months, and the
Iranians clearly refused to give up their nuclear program. And
so the Israelis, who had very long time had a
(08:54):
plan to do this, had a combined operation. Remember that Mussad,
which is the Israeli intelligence service, focuses pretty narrowly on
the survival of Israel, and at that job, it is
probably the best intelligence service in the world. They perform
astonishing things. And in the last couple of days we
now know they infiltrated weapons into Iran so that they
(09:18):
could take out a variety of missiles, of aircraft, defense
systems and other things, and they could identify where scientists
and generals were, so that when some two hundred Israeli
fighter planes crossed into Iranian airspace, they knew exactly where
they're going, exactly what they.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
Were going to hit.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
And Prime Minister Netniel who has said publicly and explicitly
they're going to continue this air campaign until they completely
destroy any possible nuclear program. So that is an enormous shift.
You know, Israel has now I think really spurred on
by the massacres in October two years ago, where they
(09:59):
were so stunned to realize how vulnerable they were, and
they were so horrified by the number of people, including
children and babies, who were killed, and the grotesque hostility
of women being drag naked through the streets, people behaving,
rockstrown at them. They methodically set out to destroy Amas,
which they're still in the process of doing. They broke
(10:20):
the back of Hezbollah with a series of brilliant intelligence operations.
So AMAS is on their south, Hesblas in the north
in Lebanon, and by the way, now that has Bela
has been shattered, the Lebanese government announced publicly that they
would not in any way participate in an effort to
attack Israel. Over this assault in Iran, then the Syrian
(10:41):
government collapsed. The replacement government, although it's led by somebody
who we've defined as a terrorist for years, has said
very clearly they don't want to fight anybody. They just
want to find a way to rebuild Syria, which has
been damaged now for almost twenty years by an internal
civil war. So that front now has been solved, and
so the great opponent is Iran. Iran is a very
(11:04):
big country, about twice the size of Texas. Israel's a
relatively small country, I think about the size of New Jersey.
So you have a David and Goliath moment. But the
fact is that the Israelis have extraordinarily competent military in
an even more competent intelligence service, and my guess is
that they'll keep pounding on the Iranians, certainly until they've
(11:25):
destroyed the nuclear program and potentially until they've destroyed the
regime and allowed the Iranian people to reclaim their own country.
Every poll I've seen says over eighty percent of the
Iranian people dislike the regime. But it's a police state,
and it's ruthless and it will kill you, and so
they're not able to get rid of it. But I
suspect if it's weakened enough that in fact it may
(11:48):
fall and you may see sort of a post Byatola
Iran in the not distant future. But that's again, that
means every single day President Trump has to get up
and get a briefing on his exactly what's going on
and who's getting involved? Are the Russians going to try
to get involved? On many ways, Iran has been a
client state of Russian and the Iranians have sold the
(12:08):
Russians a huge number of weapons to fight in the
Ukraine War. Are the Chinese going to try to get involved?
And pretty hard for them to do. It's a long
way off and they don't have the kind of deep
sea naval power we do. Over the next few days,
we'll see how things evolve. What's impressive is that all
of the Arab states, there's nobody defending Iran. The Saudis
are terrified of the Iranians, the UAE is terrified of
(12:31):
the Iranians. They probably deep down are pretty happy and
hope these willies will finish the job. But that's the
second challenge. So on the one sound front, President Trump
has to look at home and deal with real opposition
and real hostility. On a second front, he has to
try to manage what's going on in the Middle East,
and one try to keep the Americans out of it,
which they've done a good job so far. Secretary Marco
(12:53):
Rubio has a Secretary of State, has been very clear
that we're not going to pick a fight with Iran
unless the Iranians pick a fight with us.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
So that's a second challenge.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
The third challenge, in some ways, the definition of the
success of this administration is the big beautiful bill that's
currently in the Senate that passed the House, and you
probably notice that as a second step, they passed in
the House the Recision Bill to cut nine billion dollars
in spending, which was a very direct, very specific cut
(13:36):
they are now negotiating. There are a number of people
who want really deep cuts. The fact is they can't
get really deep cuts beyond what's in the current build
that came out of the House because the House majority
is so narrow that they'll lose the Moderates and the
Water simply won't vote for really really deep cuts. On
the other hand, if you think of this as the
(13:56):
first in a series of bills, and I try to
remind everyone that when we balance the budget, will I
have a speaker. We didn't do it in one bill.
Took us four years of constant work to get to
a balanced budget. So I think there's going to be
a very big effort made, particularly by Speaker Mike Johnson,
to figure out a formula so that the people who
want real deep cuts are going to have a chance
(14:18):
to get them, but not in this bill. This bill
has to remain pretty close I would say ninety five
ninety six percent of what came out of the House,
because it has to go back through the House again,
and they simply don't have the margin. Something as simple
as passing the recision cuts about nine point two billion dollars.
They only passed it by a two vote margin. So
(14:39):
I think it's really important to recognize that this is
going to be a continuing challenge. If I were betting
the bill will pass, it will be signed into law,
it'll be a huge tax cut, a huge deregulation bill,
and a modest cut in spending. But it will only
happen because the President personally gets involved, listen to everybody,
(15:01):
and gradually helps hammer out an agreement that everybody can
vote for. So here you have the president who already
has to pay attention to the domestic challenge of people
who want to take on the American government. He has
to deal with what's happening between Israel and Iran, and
then he has to find the energy and the time
to negotiate with Senators and then to negotiate with the House,
(15:23):
and to find a way creatively to get to a
bill everybody can vote for. I think they'll get it done,
but imagine the amount of time and the level of effort.
When we got to the balanced budget agreement with Bill Clinton,
we spent thirty five days face to face. Now imagine
what a drain of time and energy that is for
a president who already has all these other things on
(15:43):
his plate. The fourth great challenge is the Russian Ukrainian War,
and here I think President Trump has been deeply disappointed.
I think he looked back on his first term when
he had a good relationship with Putin and he thought,
somehow they could work something out easily, and I think
he honestly believed he could get to.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
A peace agreement in a few days.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
He's gradually learning that, in fact, Putin has decided that
this is the capstone of his life, that he is
the man who is going to reunify the Russian Empire,
and that the key step for that is to crush
Ukraine so that it in fact cannot survive as a
independent country, and so much a definition of his life
(16:28):
that he's not backing down. And I think my sense
is that President Trump has been very disappointed that the
inability to get Putin to take seriously finding a way
to get to a peaceful solution, and what Putin basically
is gambling on is that while they talk that the
Russian military, which is about four or five times bigger
(16:49):
than the Ukrainian military, that it will gradually wear out
the Ukrainian military and win a crushing military victory. Now
there's not much evidence yet that that's going to happen.
Ukrainians have turned out to be very inventive. They've always
been a center of manufacturing in the Soviet Union. They
have lots of engineers and lots of capable people, and
they've been very inventive. They drove the Russian Black Sea
(17:12):
fleet out of the Black Sea into the Cia of
Azov because they've developed a series of drones that could
sink ships. See, you have a five thousand dollars drone
and a sixty million dollar cruiser, and the drone would
beat the cruiser. The Russians just gave up. They pulled
back to get out of range. The recent effort by
the Ukrainians to hit the Russian strategic bombers, some of
(17:36):
them thirty four hundred miles away from Kiev has amazing achievements,
an achievement comparable to some of the things the Israelis
have done. So that's going to.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
Continue to go on. The question.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
In my mind, the Europeans are going to stand firm
because the Europeans genuinely do believe that Ukraine is the
barrier that protects them from Putin and protects them from Russia.
It's not clear to meident Trump comes down in this.
He wants peace. He's also very worried about nuclear war.
Somehow people convinced him in this first term just how
(18:10):
truly horrible a nuclear war would be. Putin does have
six thousand nuclear weapons, and so I think the president,
while he's more aggressive than Joe Biden was, he's still
careful because he doesn't want to push Putin into a
corner where he decides that tactical nuclear weapons are better
than being defeated. I think that this will go on
(18:30):
for a while. I think it's a great disappointment to
President Trump. I think he really did, sincerely believe he
could get to a truce and it just didn't quite
work out. So that's the fourth problem. Again. Put yourself
in President Trump's position. You wake up in the morning,
you look at home to see what's happening in terms
of unrest. Then you look to Israel Iran to see
how that campaign's going. Then you come back and look
(18:52):
at the Congress to see what has to get done
to move towards passing this huge important legislation. Then you
pivot and you're looking at Russia and Ukraine. And then finally,
the fifth grade challenge is fundamental effort by President Trump
to reorder the entire world trading system. The trading system
had grown up as a global system in which the
(19:14):
United States sacrificed a great deal economically in order to
sustain an open trading system around the whole planet, and
other countries learned to take enormous advantage of this, and
so over a period of about thirty years, the system
became more and more destructive for the United States and
more and more positive for Europe and particularly China. And
(19:35):
Trump came along, and he had talked about this a
lot back when he was a businessman, so this was
not some new theme to him. But he came along
and said, look, we're going to simply have to change
the agreement. We're the largest market in the world. We
ought to have the most leverage. People ought to in
fact be paying us for access to our market, and
we should not be allowing ourselves to be taken advantage of.
(19:57):
So he has begun to build a tariff Bay East system,
which ultimately leads to bilateral that is, one country to
one country agreements across the whole planet. It is an
enormous undertaking. The truth is virtually every country wants to
get into the American market. You're seeing a huge increase
in manufacturing in the US by countries where their companies
(20:19):
have just decided in order to be able to be productive,
they've got to be in the United States. And you're
going to see every country negotiate a unique, separate deal.
It's a very large change from the multinational system that
had grown up and that had been kind of a
global trading system, but one in which everybody else took
advantage the United States. Working all that out is going
(20:40):
to take several years. So again you have President has
to meet with Secretary Treasury Vessent and others, sit down
and look at each of these agreements, decide, you know,
what happens with the European Union, what happens with Japan,
what happens with China, on and on for about one
hundred and ninety countries.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
So to wrap all of this up.
Speaker 1 (20:57):
I think the five biggest challenges present and Trump faces
right now, and the way he has to balance his
energy and his focus are first, re establishing domestic order
while we in fact do solve the problem of illegal immigration. Second,
ensuring that Israel wins the war with Iran and ideally
that we help the Iranian people take control of their
(21:18):
government again. Third, getting the big beautiful bill through the
House and Senate and signed into law this summer so
that the American people have money in their pocket so
the economy starts booming by early next year. Fourth, sustaining
the Ukrainians, pressuring putin potentially going towards something like Senator
Lindsey Graham's sanctions bill, which has eighty five sponsors in
(21:40):
the Senate and which would be imposed very very harsh
sanctions on Russia, and try to basically bankrupt the government.
And then finally continue day by day negotiate the tariff
agreements with Fortunately somebody is smart and as capable as
Secretary Bessen taking the lead. It is a big agenda,
It is an exhausting agenda, and I think, frankly, I
(22:00):
don't know of any other president who could carry simultaneously
as many different challenges as President Trump, and I think
it will be fascinating to see how it evolves, and
in future weeks I'll report again on how I see
this whole process evolving.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
Thank you for listening.
Speaker 1 (22:17):
Newtsworld is produced by Gangris Street sixty and iHeartMedia. Our
executive producers guard Zie Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson.
The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley.
Special thanks to the team at Gingrishtree sixty. If you've
been enjoying Newtsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcast
and both rate us with five stars and give us
a review so others can learn what it's all about.
(22:40):
Right now, listeners of Newtsworld can sign up for my
three free weekly columns at gangrishtreet sixty dot com slash newsletter.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
I'm newt Gingrich. This is Newtsworld.
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