May 27, 2025 • 44 mins
Former Speaker Newt Gingrich discusses what's wrong with higher education, DOGE, and whether President Trump is actually a conservative. Part 1 of a 2 part conversation.
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Speaker 1 (00:09):
This is Gavin Newsom and this is new Kidkrich. I
just wanted if I could just briefly up top. You
sent out a couple of tweets over the last twenty
four hours specific to Ukraine. Obviously topical issue, and I
appreciated candidly your tweets which were a little more assertive
(00:30):
pushing back on this notion that somehow time is our
ally with Putin, that it's time to be a little
more muscular, time to call him out. You also called
out I thought an important fact that's not necessarily part
of the discourse. He spent twenty one years in Sweden.
I mean, these guys have a longer.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
View version that was actually the Napoleonic Wars.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
Yeah, it was Putin who said, look, we fought Sweden
for twenty one years. You think I want to slow down.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
You think I'm going to slow down, So tell me,
I mean, where are you in the over under? I mean,
is you know, I appreciate your advocacy for trump et cetera.
But I think, I mean it is the revelation that
he's waking up to this new reality that this is
not something you can snap your fingers. Putin's a different
kind of character.
Speaker 3 (01:17):
Well, I think that first of all, he probably shares
a lot of people's concern that if you push Putin
too hard you end up with a tactical nuclear war.
And then maybe more so, I think there's a there's
a dance around Putin that's a little more complicated than
(01:39):
just yes or no. On the other hand, I think
he actually believed from his first term when they did
a pretty good relationship. Although he had sent lethal weapons
to Ukraine. He is much tougher than Obama had been,
but he was pleasant. They had no major fights, and
I think he had in the back of his head
to look, we're reasonable, we can talk with each other.
(02:04):
And it's taken him, I think, about five months to
realize nothing Putin says matters. That what matters is what
Putin does. And when he says to you, oh, I
really like to get to a truce, but by the way,
for the next three days, I'm going to bomb civilians.
After a while begins to sink in. You know, it's
(02:24):
the opposite of George W. Bush. I'll never forget the
day Bush said that he looked into Putin's eyes and
saw his soul, and I knew that was nuts, because
you can't be a KGB lieutenant colonel have a soul.
So with the whole concept of you know, somehow we
try to make him a Western figure, he's not. He's
a Russian figure, and Russia is a different culture than
(02:47):
Western Europe.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
And so the idea of what secondary oil sanctions you're
advocating for.
Speaker 3 (02:54):
Well, I mean I advocate four big things, more weapons,
faster and something which the German minister Preme minister said
today that they'd agreed to, which has used the weapons
in Russia, so you start causing him pain in his territory.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
And this is the longer range weapons, allowing them more range.
Speaker 3 (03:15):
We've begun to give them weapons that can reach Russia,
and of course they have lots of They're going to
produce some astonishing number of drones this year. Yeah, I
mean what I think, like a million five or something.
I mean, people forgot Ukraine used to be a major
industrial center for the Soviet Union. There's a lot of
engineers in Ukraine, a lot of hardworking, smart people, and
(03:38):
they now mobilize and fighting. I think, so second, you
give them permission to fight inside Russia. Third, you apply
very severe sanctions on particularly sale of oil, which is
their only currency that they generated, any hard currency. And fourth,
I would start picking up all of the ships that
(03:58):
are carrying illegal oil and just literally let it be
known worldwide. You know, if you if you own a
ship and you use it to carry Russian oil, you're
going to lose the ship and we're gonna We're gonna
basically impound it forever. And at that point, his method
of hiding from the sanctions collapses, his ability to sell
(04:18):
within the sanctions collapses.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
And then the other thing I would do, which has
some legal implications, but I'm a historian, not a lawyer,
so I don't worry about that, is I would take
the three hundred billion that is impounded in the West
of Russian money, I give it all to Ukraine.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
What has been the reticence of That's what I mean.
It's interesting that Trump didn't move more aggressively to do that,
or is it part of a tactical negotiation?
Speaker 3 (04:43):
State Departminent Treasury will tell you there are all sorts
of complicated questions about doing that, to which my answer,
in the Franklin Roosevelt tradition is fine, let them fight
it out in court. Take the money.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
I appreciate it. Well, that's a perfect segue into your
new book, Trump's Triumph, because I think a lot of
that is sort of reflected, sort of this notion of
action and moving beyond process and having a more entrepreneurial
mindset in terms of governance, et cetera. But let's frame
this book. This book comes out on June third, it's
(05:19):
your how many, mister speakers, Seriously, how many books have
you written?
Speaker 3 (05:23):
Well, I'm told forty four. So are you?
Speaker 1 (05:27):
And you're you're writing all these books. You actually write
these books.
Speaker 3 (05:31):
You have help, but I write all these books.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
And this one unsurprising that you'd come out with a
book about Trump's triumphs, but you But what surprised me
a little bit is this notion that you place them
as one of the five giants up there with Jackson
and Jefferson and people like Lincoln and Fdr himself. I mean,
is that your your current belief or is that one
(05:57):
that reflects.
Speaker 3 (05:59):
I believe that since the summer of twenty fifteen, because
I watched him do two things that were kind of amazing.
One was tap into the deeply felt emotions of at
least half the country and particularly and this is one
(06:21):
of the great ironies that I know you're wrestling with
and I've heard you talk about it. You know, we're
having this switch of which party is the working class
party and which party is the elite party. Well, Trump
intuited this, and people forget he had thirteen years of
doing The Apprentice at NBC. He was a natural salesman
(06:42):
and a natural showman, so his instinct was to go
right for the blue collar worker. And he did two things.
In August of twenty fifteen. Vince Haley, who's now the
Domestic Policy director at that time, was working with us,
and he walked in one day in August and said,
(07:03):
you have to see the c SPAN coverage of Trump
in Arizona because Trump is talking about illegal immigration. And
then he invites the father of a young man who's
been killed to come up on stage. And then Trump
steps way back and allows this guy to have like
five or ten minutes on stage. Was a willingness to
(07:27):
give up the spotlight that most people watch Trump will
thinks not likely and that most politicians would find very
scary to give control of the microphone to this person.
And I watched the dynamics of that. And then you
may remember the very first debate Chlis and I were
watching in our living room and there was the one
(07:50):
where he got this really nasty, embarrassingly personal.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
Fight and was this the Megan Kelly Kelly?
Speaker 2 (07:59):
I mean, it was just it was kind of like, ooh,
I don't yeah, nothing about them.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
I thought that was it. I thought it was over.
Speaker 3 (08:08):
They were racing to the bottom, and I think he
got there first. And which is a line actually that
a year later somebody would use to describe the fight
with Hillary in the last month that she was going
towards the bottom, but we thought we could beat her
to it. So so anyway, so we watched this debate
(08:29):
and everybody, mean Frank once had a focus group. They
all thought Trump had lost. Everybody, like you know, everybody
at our level thought Trump had lost. Watching these various
online things and he's at seventy and eighty percent out
of sixteen, and I'm thinking, I wait a second, that
there's a mismatch here between everyday Americans and the elites
(08:53):
on a grant, on a giant scale. And at that
point I decided that what you had was a phenomenon
who had somehow tapped into a core desire of the
American people that they wanted to have a leader who
would profoundly change Washington. And in Trump you had somebody who,
(09:17):
by personality and by background, was pretty enthusiastic. I mean,
he's always wanted to be a person of consequence, and
you know, if you're the guy who breaks up the
Rooseveltian system after ninety years, you get to be a
person of consequence. And so it fit what his particular
(09:39):
half of the country wants, it fit what I think
is a historic necessity as a conservative, a political leader,
and it fit you know, his personal desire to have
a prime he wondered. And it's very interesting to think
back to this in terms of the politicians you've known.
His slogan wasn't Trump. His slogan was make America great again.
(10:00):
So he was picking a topic bigger than himself within
what he could grow. And I think after surviving the
two assassination attempts, he really personally believes that God spared
his life for the purpose of actually achieving that. So
I would My point is not whether you like him
(10:22):
or just like him, but if you look at the
great change agents, they really are. Jefferson Jackson, Lincoln and FDR.
And I think there's a fifty to fifty chance. It's
not a certainty yet. And I've told him, you know,
all he did was he earned a ticket to the dance. Now,
if he dances well enough and he wins the twenty
(10:44):
sixth election, then I'll learn a ticket to winning the
twenty eight election. And then which will probably be JD.
Vans on our side. And if we get the Trump
vice president's only forty years old. If we get the
Trump vice president on top of the Trump president, see,
then he will be in a league with those guys.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
We're going to get to that, and we'll get to
twenty six in a second. But I want to go
back a little bit.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
I'm not doing your show, Fish, and by the way,
you only thinking about it.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
No, All I want to say is I'm grateful you're here.
This is a hell of the thing that the two
of us are having this conversation. So take me back.
It's interesting, you know, and you're absolutely right, and I
appreciate because we had Frank Lunz on and I want
to talk a little bit about what Frank talked about
in a minute a little bit going back the contract
with America, et cetera. But Frank made that point about
those focus groups. But I want to I'm curious your
(11:36):
point of view. Then with Trump. You must have known
him tangentially. But you were the leader of the as
you said yourself a second ago, conservative movement. Here's a
former Democrat, kind of all over the place, no strong
ideological mornings necessarily. I mean, you must have been pretty
distrustful early on. Were you of Donald Trump? You weren't,
(11:57):
for sure.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
I've known Trump for a quarter century.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
Right, Uh, politics, though he wasn't always a line.
Speaker 3 (12:03):
I knew him back when he's a businessman. He was
a very noisy businessman. And I'd read his two books,
which I'd recommend everybody. If you want to understand Trump,
you read The Art of the Deal and The Art
of the Comeback. Comebacks the more important of the.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
Two, because it opens up with some very telling lines.
Speaker 3 (12:23):
It's amazing. He opens up with, Uh, my property in
Atlantic City's losing money. The economy is going down because
of Iraq. I'm nine hundred million dollars in debt personally
to the banks, and my wife just called and said,
you wanted a divorce. And he has this great line.
He says, this is the moment you either get depressed
(12:44):
or you plan a comeback. This book is about that,
which also tells you a lot about how he survived
the last four years.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (12:52):
This is a guy who's resilient on a scale that
is historic. We first talked with him Pliston and I
had breakfast with him in Des Moines, in all places,
in February of twenty fifteen, and we talked about running
for president because we'd run in twelve and learned the
hard way that if the other guy has many millions
more than you bet on the money. But I learned
(13:14):
a lot of out running for president.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
Even though you won easily by any objective measure, you
want all those NAMN debates.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
At least enough TV, the ads cout on do the debates.
Speaker 3 (13:25):
For me. It was a wonderful learning experience, and I
think in my willingness to take on the news media
head on, I was probably a forerunner for Trump's invention
of fake pop news. Well, we talked at length about
running and it was very interesting, and you could tell
that he had now moved from that would be an
(13:47):
interesting thing to kind of a businessman thinking through what
would it take, how much would it cost, how would
you structure it? And so I watched his development all
through fifteen, and I I wasn't particularly pro Trump at
that point, right, Frankly, if you remember, Jeb Bush was
(14:07):
the front runner, He had the most.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
Money, hundred million in a pack, he had his father and.
Speaker 3 (14:13):
His brother, he had nationwide name mighty, and watching Trump
psychologically take him apart low energy the case study, well,
he got so far inside Jeb's head. The Jeb is
running around New Hampshire in shorts jogging. Now the average
(14:33):
New Hampshire writing regards the idea of a presidential candidate
who's jogging has disqualification on ground just automatically, which which
was really unfortunate. Jeb's actually was a very good reform
governor of Florida. But Trump just had this ability to
somehow set the stage where you couldn't win.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
And it's a it's a very unusual capability.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
So it's interesting. So I appreciate in twenty fifteen you started,
I mean there was sort of the dance of sort
of developing more of this formal relationship as it relates
to the political and said, did you find him particularly
policy driven then was he inquisitive in terms of tactics policy.
Speaker 3 (15:20):
Look, he's talking about tariffs forty years ago. Yeah, true,
talking about immigration, I mean the whole He's talking about
the corruption of washermen. There are some basic themes. But
what I was going to say, though, is, and this
may help you understand where I'm coming from. Trump is
not a conservative, right. Trump is the best anti liberal
(15:41):
politician in my lifetime, better than Reagan. Reagan was the
great conservative articulator. I sort of stood on his shoulders
with the Contract with America, and we came out of
a formed philosophical background. Trump understands that the current doesn't
work and that the woke phase of the American left
(16:04):
is totally destructive of the American system. This is my view, obviously,
and therefore he is prepared to fight everybody I want
to fight. Now. The fact that he doesn't read Bill
Buckley and he doesn't have a National Review subscription, I
don't care because I know that instinctively he'll get up
(16:25):
every morning and think, you know what part of the
left can I take apart today? And one day it'll
be Harvard, and another day will be The New York Times,
and another day it'll be some bureaucracy, but every day
he will cheerfully go out and engage and tear apart
the people who I think need to be torn apart.
So I'm very happy to have a non conservative, anti liberal,
(16:49):
entrepreneurial activist with all the skills of a great businessman.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
Well so, at peril, I jump right into the book
and get chapters and chapters ahead. He's also taking on
things that you've champion. I mean, you've highlighted in the
book the importance of of genomics and synthetic biology and
discovery and invest you know in R and D, the
issues obviously with DARPA, et cetera. I mean, how concerned,
(17:15):
including by the way, you just did a documentary with
your wife on of all things, four letter word for
some of your friends PBS. Very proud PVS to me,
but on journey to America on immigration, and so I'm
curious just that tension. I get this sort of owning
the lib and liberalism more broadly defined. But where do
(17:36):
you are you? Where are you in this.
Speaker 3 (17:38):
Sort of I think I think when everything shakes out,
let's start with immigration. Trump is as pro legal immigration
as he is anti illegal immigration. I mean, two of
his wives are foreign born. His mother came from Scotland. Uh,
(17:59):
you know he he's not going to jump up and down.
And he has said openly, I mean he's come up
with this idea of this five million dollar you know,
avenue to America.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
What happened to that?
Speaker 3 (18:09):
Well, I suspect it will be implemented. He wants the money.
I'm not sure his calculations are right.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
Yeah, No, that's a little generous.
Speaker 3 (18:19):
Enough people show up to make it a big deal.
But Canada and other countries have had very similar, smaller
scale example proudgets. There's no question that the most aggressive
pieces of the Trump coalition would do things that I
would regard as destructive. There's also no question if you
(18:41):
look at, for example, the caliber of the people he's
appointed at the Center for Disease Control or for the
National Institute of Health. These are very smart, very senior people.
And and I just had a conversation with the new
head of NIH, who clearly wants to clean out the underbrush.
But and I say this as a guy who, while
(19:02):
balancing the federal budget for four years in a row,
the only time in one hundred years, we doubled the
size of nih Well balancing the budget so deeply in science.
But I'll also tell you it's now a big It
kept growing. So what we doubled was the baseline from
which it just kept growing. And it's a big bureaucratic
(19:22):
system with a lot of ballogne. I mean, when you're
paying sixty five percent more than the grant so that
Harvard or Stanford or somebody can pay for overhead, there's
a lot you can do that doesn't hurt genuine reform.
You also have a big problem which I don't know
how they're going to solve, and that is they've gotten
into this ropidope system where people will file for a
(19:45):
research project, not reach the conclusion because they've already filed
for continuing and if they reached the conclusion, they have
to go out and find a whole new topic. That's
a fair amount of stating down research by your rocratizing it.
So I mean, I'm passionate about this stuff. I'll give
you one other example. I am totally committed to space.
(20:06):
I have been since in nineteen eighty one, I introduced
the Northwest Ordinance for the Moon, saying that if you
got to a certain population, you could apply for statehood,
which at that time people thought was nuts. Now they
still think it's nuts, but not quite as nuts.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
I remember you in the debates talking about space and
we were wondering what the you know, you were on
the edge there, so you have been you consistent.
Speaker 3 (20:30):
I'm just glad that Elon came along and maybe doable.
And I'll give you an example. When the starship actually
gets settled down and works properly, it has thirty three engines,
it produces two point three times as much thrust as
the Saturn five the rocket went to the Moon two
point three times as much. So your choice is to
go with the traditional NASA spend an amazing amount of
(20:52):
money and maybe get two people in the surface of
the moon. Or this thing will lift one hundred people
or one hundred and fifty tons, so you could put
fifty to seventy people on the Moon in one bite.
I mean, just boom.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
But to your point, that requires ns It requires all
of the innovation and entrepreneurs I mean, it requires research institutions,
It requires presumably institutions of higher learning as well. Are
you concerned about what's happening in terms of those partnerships?
I mean, just I think about Sandia Labs, Lawrence Livermore Labs,
I think about all the R and D that's happening
(21:29):
with military and obviously with academia. I mean, you're concerned
that there's a recklessness. I appreciate solving for issues of
some abuse or some inefficiencies, but there seems to be
a blunt approach.
Speaker 3 (21:45):
Now, first of all, I think there is. As a historian,
I would argue that when you try to make change
on this scale, you're going to have very sloppy margins.
You cannot move slow enough to be careful or the
old order will surround you and drown you. Here here
you have you have to be, which means you're going
(22:06):
to make mistakes and you're going to screw things up.
You got to go back and fix them. At the
same time, I would say, uh, I really I worry
about our greatest universities. Partially I suspect the opposite of
your view, which is partially I think they're so left
wing now that they're virtually to tolitarian, and that they
create a group think that is really destructive. And yet
(22:28):
at one point, just a generation ago, these were the
greatest centers of learning, on the planet. Uh, And it
does worry me. How how do you how do you
keep the best of Harvard or the best of MI
I T or the best of Stanford or Berkeley? Uh,
without well at the same time taking head on the
kind of ideological group think that has become literally almost
(22:50):
to tolitarian in its unwillingness to have any competition of ideas.
And I think that's a real challenge and we don't
truth is, we don't have a good answer.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
No, I mean, how do you square that circle? Specifically
on this notion of the journey to America? And I
want to talk to about the timing of that. And
by the way, congratulations ninety minute documentary on PBS that's
really a love letter to absorbing the best and the
brightest and who we are as America in the spirit
of Reagan. You talked about the life force of new Americans,
(23:21):
that language evocative of who we are. But now we're
starting to talk about twenty seven percent of the student
body as international at Harvard, and you're basically saying now
you don't need to apply, and they're opening up their
arms and their wallets in places like China. How do
we square that?
Speaker 3 (23:39):
I think it's very hard. I think that there are
two conflicting things going on, and we don't talk about
them very honestly. I think what's happened in much of Europe,
where the culture is literally being drowned, should be a
(24:00):
much greater alarm, and it's something you can't even talk about.
But if you look at places in Britain or France,
or Sweden or neighborhoods and Brussels, you're seeing basically the
end of Western civilization. So on the one hand, you
have to say, are there legitimate concerns about who comes
(24:23):
here and why they come here? The other side of
that is with the Chinese. A very great deal of
China's technological advance has come from American universities, where Chinese
students come, learn a heck of a lot and go
back home. And if China is our biggest competitor, which
I think may turn out to be exaggerated a decade
(24:44):
from now, nonetheless, for planning purposes, they are our biggest competitor.
Do you really want cal Tech and MIT to be
providing the best Chinese scientists in the world so they
can go back home? I those are topics that deserve
a lot deeper and more conversation. And I think I'm
(25:06):
perfectly happy to say that there will be pieces of
the Make America Great Again movement that are going to
have to go back and be fixed because they're going
to be destructive. Some of them are just playing going
to be wrong. I mean, I'm a very big advocate
for science. I wrote a piece recently on why we
should not cut science funding at NASA. For example. On
(25:30):
the one hand, I'm totally in favor of wiping out
the Space Launch System, which is stunningly expensive and has
accomplished nothing. And by the way, you could probably pay
for a decade of NASA science with the cost of
the Space Launch System, you know. So I think there
are ways that there are good things we should protect,
(25:51):
and that's going to lead to fights, because you're going
to have some people who are clumsy or sloppy, or
who ideologically are pretty cheerful about being ignorant.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
I mean, I mean, look, you you talk about Doge
in the book, you write about it rather and you
but you write about it very in laudatory terms, but
you make the point you just made as it relates
to if you're going to move fast, you're going to
break some things. But this notion of iteration and time
to move and speed. You you even highlight old Peter
(26:20):
Drucker talking about excellence and efficiency, which I appreciated, But
I mean, what is your over under just you know,
doge in particular? Is it? You know, are you satisfied
with the two trillion dollars in savings?
Speaker 3 (26:36):
It will turn out to have at least two patterns.
One is more noise than achievement. Yeah, uh. And the
other is that it will have exposed for us a
number of things that were going on that are kind
of astonishing. Uh. And that you you know, so on
the one.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
Hand, condoms in Gaza, which you know turn out not
to be the case.
Speaker 3 (27:00):
What do you mean? Well, for example, it's pretty clear
that I think at least ten percent of the UN
refugee workers in Gaza were pro Hamas.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
Oh that's separate, separate. I'm just I'm just I'm lamenting
on the sort of Orwellian notion of fifty million dollars
of condoms, which the President reminded me of in the
Oval office, which I told him was not true.
Speaker 3 (27:22):
And there's a good California, and I'm sure you fondly
remember Reagan.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
I do, by the way, speaker, I'm in his office
every day as a point of pride.
Speaker 3 (27:31):
That's well, that's right, I mean right there, right there
in the governorship. Yeah. Every once in a while, Reagan
would see something in the newspaper and it was click
in his head. I would repeat it endlessly. I see
where you're going, And now look there there's a great
rookie who is a German poet once said, if you
(27:53):
drive away my demons, will my angels flee? Also, well,
talent's with the charismatic leader of Trump's power is there's
five or ten percent where you go, really, and then
there's this other stuff that is amazing and historic, and
you may not be able to separate the two.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
Yeah or yeah, I mean I may have a different
I'm maybe ninety ten of your flipped.
Speaker 3 (28:19):
That's one of the reason I wanted to do the
show with you. I remember when we talked about Citizenville.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
Yeah, and all the ideas you had decade ago before
you ran.
Speaker 3 (28:28):
Into the Sacramento bureaucracy.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
God bless by the way, I still tell people that's
a really worthwhile book.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
I appreciate you for saying that. By the way, I
think so much. It's interesting. I reflected on that our
conversations and a little bit on that book. As reading
your book, I mean, you talk about, you know, governing,
not just campaigning. You talk about issues around efficient and
effective government and more novel and I think what's always
interested me about you is your willingness to lean into
(28:58):
the future and talk about healthcare differently than others, as
you did again here even highlighted my friend Dean Ornige
in terms of some of his work on wellness and prevention.
These four p's. You talk about predictability and personalization in
the healthcare space, but you also take on other spaces
which I appreciate as well, like the old Eisenhower frame
(29:21):
on the military industrial complex. And I'm curious, in relationship
to the DOGE question, why do you think there's been
so little willingness to enter into that space, even the
space launch example you just gave.
Speaker 3 (29:34):
I think you know, I had one fight in the
first bushes of Trump's first term over HUAWEIH and what
we needed to do to dramatically strengthen American telecommunications, and
it's the one fight that I clearly decisively lost, and
I lost it because AT and T was on the
(29:56):
other side, and AT and T is so big, big,
contributes so much money as so many lobbyists by so
many TV ads that you know, I just just ran
over me. It was an exciting experience, but I felt
like a lot. I felt like the guy in Tanneman Square,
the tankage. So I started with that. I mean it is.
(30:20):
I think the space launch system is one of the
best examples of the sickness of the old order and
what Eisenhower did warn about. I mean, people should go
back and read his farewell address because he's very clear,
and this guy had been a five star general commander
of Allied forces in Europe as well as president, so
he had pretty good knowledge and he's saying correctly. In
(30:44):
order to build a system big enough to defeat or
contain the Soviet Empire, you have to turn over so
much money and power to a bureaucracy which will then
hire a big corporations that you're going to have the
permanent danger that they grow together into sort of a
single organism which then operates for its own benefit. And
(31:09):
that's an enormous problem across It's a problem in healthcare too.
I mean, big health in many ways is as bad
as Big Defense. And I'm working on a paper right
now which will amuse you when he finally comes out
talking about Trump time and Trump's savings and going back
to the skating rink in New York. Yeah, city had
(31:33):
the rink had quit making ice, which makes it very
hard if your skating rink, and the city had for
six years tried to fix it and spent thirteen million dollars.
Trump talks about this in his first in the book,
The Art of the Deal.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
This is one of his great successes.
Speaker 3 (31:48):
Yeah, objectively, and he says, you know, he's looking at
his apartment, looks out over the rink, the woman rink,
and so he finally gets so pissed off at six
years they can't make ice, and he challenges the mayor
publicly and says, you give it to me, and I
will fix it in less than a year for under
(32:09):
three million dollars. Well, he fixed it in four months,
and we came in twenty five percent below budget, and
they already spent six and a half million. He came
in twenty five percent below the three million dollar budget,
totally fixed in four months. And in the book, is
this great line where he says, they had this firm
in Florida that had won the contract and didn't know
(32:31):
what they were doing. And so I said to myself,
who builds skating rinks? I thought Canavan? I went, oh,
excuse me. So he goes to the National Hockey League
and says, who builds the skating rinks? And this is
firm in Montreal And they fly down and they look
at it and they go, this is really embarrassing. This
(32:53):
is so easy to fix, you can't believe it. And
when he finally got it done, somebody said what happened?
He said, it wasn't magic, it was common sense and management. Well,
to the degree that we could bring common sense and management,
we would. I think you could get better defense for
twenty five percent less than the current defense budget if
(33:15):
you could clean out all the bureaucracy and all the
cronyism and all the bad contracts. I tell every audience
if you took the Pentagon and turned it into a triangle,
and took the other two thirds and turned into a museum,
you would get a better defense system overnight. And the
reason simple. You'll understand. This is the governor of a
(33:37):
state with a huge bureaucracy. They built the Pentagon in
nineteen forty three so that twenty six thousand people could
manage World War two with carbon paper, manual typewriters and
filing cabins, And in fact, Marshalls chief of staff, used
to run drills to see how fast you could find
(33:58):
paper if you needed a certain document, where is and
how do you get there? Well, everybody depending on now
has a smartphone, an iPad, a laptop, computer, and I
have never gotten you. You might be able to get
somebody caltech to figure this out. I've never been able
to get an exchange rate. That is, if you have
one person over here with a carbon paper distribution and
(34:20):
one person over here with the smartphone or an iPad
or computer, what's the relative exchange rate of information flow?
My guess is it's above a million. Well, just one.
You have the same twenty six thousand people. Now, since
they're not filing paper and they're not writing on carbon,
what they're doing is writing each other to prove that
(34:41):
their job is important so they can stay employed. So
you screw up the whole system with the person A
writing person B who writes person see, who then writes
person A and they beat these things to death, and
exactly the way New York City was failing with the
ice rate, because you have a bunch of bureaucrats who
write papers that have no meaning. And I think I
(35:04):
helped found the Military Reform Caucus in eighty one. I
helped pass the Goldwater Nichols Reform in eighty six against
every active duty senior officer, none of them wanted it. Nowadays,
I'll tell you it's invaluable. We need a deep, thorough
review of all of our national security, not just defense,
all of it. If we're going to compete in the
(35:25):
modern world.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
It just seems of all things. And you know, I
appreciate the skating rate because is a reminder of under
promise over deliver. And we can talk about some of
those day one actions that Trump may or may not
have succeeded with in a moment. But I'm curious as
it relates to the issues of the Pentagon. I mean,
Trump's been bold, and he's provided a lot of space
(35:53):
for Doge and certainly Musk in the last one hundred days,
but the Pentagon does seem to be off limits. I mean,
is that is.
Speaker 3 (36:02):
That is that accurate? I don't think so. I think
I think they will presently be as ruthless as the
Pentagon as they will be anywhere else.
Speaker 1 (36:10):
Interesting. F thirty five comes to mind? Huh, what F
thirty five comes to mind?
Speaker 3 (36:16):
Actually, I've gotten real pushback on that because I was
one of the people who's really critical. Yeah, but three
or four people who I'm writing this paper, and I
was talking about examples of cost overruns, and I've had
three or four people who do not work for Lockheed,
aren't part of the system, but they're very smart right
back and say to me, that is an inaccurate measurement
(36:38):
that you actually look at the plane they have built.
It has no relationship to the original contract. It is
vastly superior, and the price has dropped now to about
a reasonable price for a fifth generation fighter. I mean,
I was shocked. I took it out of my paper
because there are too many people writing me back and saying,
so the other examples are terrific, this one's just dumb.
(37:00):
It's not seconically right. It's interesting because I would have
a week ago I would have said to you exactly that.
Speaker 1 (37:06):
Yeah, no, it's sort of it's we throw that one around. Now.
Speaker 3 (37:10):
I'm getting beaten up by people who know a lot
more than I do, saying now, I have a lot
of good examples in my paper, but that ain't want to.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
Them, that ain't want them interesting. So all right, so
you'll you'll stipulate we should see some more. I mean,
obviously the Secretary of Defense has done some personnel moves,
et cetera, but they seem relatively modest compared to the
overall reforms that that you're advocating for. But you know,
one of the things I've struck in the book, and
again unsurprising, is it's been a consistent theme with you
(37:40):
is sort of anticipating the next war, not necessarily relitigating
and reflecting exclusively on on the last one. And the
issues of electron electronic EMF issues are that you've been
sort of focused on issues a space in relationship to defense,
et cetera. Talk to me a little bit about what
you sort of positive you least promote in this book
(38:01):
as it relates to future security on national effects, I.
Speaker 3 (38:04):
Think there are three big things. The first is we
need to quit talking about war fighting and think about
war winning. The fact that we have great taxical capabilities
and wonderfully courageous people who go for twenty one or
twenty two years in a place like Afghanistan and don't
win should bother us because war fighting is not the goal.
(38:25):
War winning is the goal. And as suns Sooo wrote,
the group find five hundred BC, the greatest of all
generals win bloodless victories. So you know, the the question
is can America design a war winning series of strategies
rather than a war fighting strategies. The second thing I
would say is you have to look at all of
national security. You mentioned, for example, the real threat of
(38:46):
electromagnetic pulse attack, and a very close friend of mine,
Go Fortune, wrote a remarkable novel called One Second After,
in which he shows you a village in North Carolina
after electricity has been cut off by an electromatic post.
I mean, it is a breathtaking book. He was actually
invited to Sandia. You'd mentioned Sandia Labs earlier. He was
(39:07):
invited there by the physicists who were grateful that somebody
could explain what they worried about, and thought his book
really was a very accurate projection. So you need to
think about not just the Defense Department, but the totality
of national security and then in the defense department itself,
I've beengun writing something which only occurred to me. By
watching Ukraine. We are seeing an extraordinary change in the
(39:36):
nature of warfare, and none of us understanding it. I'm
actually going to write a paper on Podier, Crasie and Agincoreps,
which are the three great battles in the Middle Ages
where the British annihilate the French because the French cannot adjust.
They have to be armored knights. Their culture requires it.
And the British have developed a longbow which slaughters armored knight.
(40:00):
And that takes place over a century, and in that
entire period that a culture will not allow them to change. Well,
we may have a similar problem. We like big, expensive,
sophisticated long to develop long to field systems you're now
up against. As I said a while ago, I think
the numbers for next year are for this year for
(40:22):
Ukraine are going to be a million, five hundred thousand drums. Now,
most of them are small, most of them are simple.
Most of our guys would look down their nose at them.
But Lord Nelson, who won the Battle of Trafalgar, set
a one point numbers annihilate and if you take the
combination of artificial intelligence, robotics, three D printing, new specialized
(40:46):
kinds of chemistry. There's a firm in your state actually
called Divergent, which is probably the most advanced factory on
the planet, far ahead of anything in China, and they
use those techniques to be able to shift what they
make within a matter of hours. I mean, it's astonishing
to visit them. And they're in La not far from
(41:06):
an in and out burger, and they I measure my
trips to calig But anyway, when you when you start
thinking about, for example, you don't just measure the Chinese
warship navy. All the Chinese merchant ships have been designed
(41:27):
now for twenty years to be capable of launching drones. Well,
if I have a ship and it happens to have
forty drones on it, is that an aircraft carrier or
is that a merchant ship? And if I have eighteen
hundred of them, does that count as part of my
navy or is that just an auxiliary group? And how
(41:48):
many munitions does an American ship carry? And how many
drones can it stop? If the other guy's able to
send endless quantities, I'm just giving you a flavor. I
don't think we realize yet. You know, I talked to
occasionally to the Amazon people about their use of robotics,
which is part of the reason they've been able to
be so amazing. We have no notion yet of how
(42:12):
fast the modern battlefield is going to become and how
complicated it's going to become. And our current bureaucracies, in
our current procurement system makes it very difficult to be
agile enough. And frankly, excuse me, the dominance of these
big corporations, the Lockheeds, the Boeings, what have you read
(42:35):
you on makes it very hard to have the kind
of entrepreneurial change that you've seen in Silicon Valley for
your entire lifetime. You know, it's the small company today
that's the giant company in twenty years. And if you
can't grow the small companies because they can't get through
the Defense Department's paperwork, then you're not ever going to
(42:55):
have the rate and rhythm of innovation that you need.
Speaker 1 (42:59):
No, And that's something you highlight sort of that framework
of iteration, the sandbox and procurement reform, which is so
foundational and it's it's really it's about you know, it's
the incumbency racket. You talk about incumbency capitalism versus innovation capitalism,
and that sort of innovation capitalism is a big part
(43:20):
of what we focus on and obviously I think is
part of the secret sauce to your point of Silicon Valley.
I'm curious just going back a little bit, and you know,
and we're bouncing around a little bit here, but again
back to timing, because Journey to America, you did it
with your wife, and you guys have done how many documentaries? Now,
you've done forty.
Speaker 3 (43:37):
Four books'n we've done ten movies, and I've done forty
four books. She and I have done I think four
or five of them together. She wrote six children's books. Yeah,
about Elis the Elephant and American history. Yeah. Well, Peignaterton
because you know, she's a music major. She was a
piano major, plays the French horn, spent twenty years in
(43:58):
a professional choir at the Basilica in Washington. Uh So
that's her natural background. Then she was a clerk in
the Agriculture Committee in the House. And she, you know,
she works really hard. She works much harder than I do.
Speaker 1 (44:13):
And tune in for the rest of the conversation with
New Gingrich
This is Gavin Newsom and this is new Kidkrich. I
just wanted if I could just briefly up top. You
sent out a couple of tweets over the last twenty
four hours specific to Ukraine. Obviously topical issue, and I
appreciated candidly your tweets which were a little more assertive
(00:30):
pushing back on this notion that somehow time is our
ally with Putin, that it's time to be a little
more muscular, time to call him out. You also called
out I thought an important fact that's not necessarily part
of the discourse. He spent twenty one years in Sweden.
I mean, these guys have a longer.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
View version that was actually the Napoleonic Wars.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
Yeah, it was Putin who said, look, we fought Sweden
for twenty one years. You think I want to slow down.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
You think I'm going to slow down, So tell me,
I mean, where are you in the over under? I mean,
is you know, I appreciate your advocacy for trump et cetera.
But I think, I mean it is the revelation that
he's waking up to this new reality that this is
not something you can snap your fingers. Putin's a different
kind of character.
Speaker 3 (01:17):
Well, I think that first of all, he probably shares
a lot of people's concern that if you push Putin
too hard you end up with a tactical nuclear war.
And then maybe more so, I think there's a there's
a dance around Putin that's a little more complicated than
(01:39):
just yes or no. On the other hand, I think
he actually believed from his first term when they did
a pretty good relationship. Although he had sent lethal weapons
to Ukraine. He is much tougher than Obama had been,
but he was pleasant. They had no major fights, and
I think he had in the back of his head
to look, we're reasonable, we can talk with each other.
(02:04):
And it's taken him, I think, about five months to
realize nothing Putin says matters. That what matters is what
Putin does. And when he says to you, oh, I
really like to get to a truce, but by the way,
for the next three days, I'm going to bomb civilians.
After a while begins to sink in. You know, it's
(02:24):
the opposite of George W. Bush. I'll never forget the
day Bush said that he looked into Putin's eyes and
saw his soul, and I knew that was nuts, because
you can't be a KGB lieutenant colonel have a soul.
So with the whole concept of you know, somehow we
try to make him a Western figure, he's not. He's
a Russian figure, and Russia is a different culture than
(02:47):
Western Europe.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
And so the idea of what secondary oil sanctions you're
advocating for.
Speaker 3 (02:54):
Well, I mean I advocate four big things, more weapons,
faster and something which the German minister Preme minister said
today that they'd agreed to, which has used the weapons
in Russia, so you start causing him pain in his territory.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
And this is the longer range weapons, allowing them more range.
Speaker 3 (03:15):
We've begun to give them weapons that can reach Russia,
and of course they have lots of They're going to
produce some astonishing number of drones this year. Yeah, I
mean what I think, like a million five or something.
I mean, people forgot Ukraine used to be a major
industrial center for the Soviet Union. There's a lot of
engineers in Ukraine, a lot of hardworking, smart people, and
(03:38):
they now mobilize and fighting. I think, so second, you
give them permission to fight inside Russia. Third, you apply
very severe sanctions on particularly sale of oil, which is
their only currency that they generated, any hard currency. And fourth,
I would start picking up all of the ships that
(03:58):
are carrying illegal oil and just literally let it be
known worldwide. You know, if you if you own a
ship and you use it to carry Russian oil, you're
going to lose the ship and we're gonna We're gonna
basically impound it forever. And at that point, his method
of hiding from the sanctions collapses, his ability to sell
(04:18):
within the sanctions collapses.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
And then the other thing I would do, which has
some legal implications, but I'm a historian, not a lawyer,
so I don't worry about that, is I would take
the three hundred billion that is impounded in the West
of Russian money, I give it all to Ukraine.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
What has been the reticence of That's what I mean.
It's interesting that Trump didn't move more aggressively to do that,
or is it part of a tactical negotiation?
Speaker 3 (04:43):
State Departminent Treasury will tell you there are all sorts
of complicated questions about doing that, to which my answer,
in the Franklin Roosevelt tradition is fine, let them fight
it out in court. Take the money.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
I appreciate it. Well, that's a perfect segue into your
new book, Trump's Triumph, because I think a lot of
that is sort of reflected, sort of this notion of
action and moving beyond process and having a more entrepreneurial
mindset in terms of governance, et cetera. But let's frame
this book. This book comes out on June third, it's
(05:19):
your how many, mister speakers, Seriously, how many books have
you written?
Speaker 3 (05:23):
Well, I'm told forty four. So are you?
Speaker 1 (05:27):
And you're you're writing all these books. You actually write
these books.
Speaker 3 (05:31):
You have help, but I write all these books.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
And this one unsurprising that you'd come out with a
book about Trump's triumphs, but you But what surprised me
a little bit is this notion that you place them
as one of the five giants up there with Jackson
and Jefferson and people like Lincoln and Fdr himself. I mean,
is that your your current belief or is that one
(05:57):
that reflects.
Speaker 3 (05:59):
I believe that since the summer of twenty fifteen, because
I watched him do two things that were kind of amazing.
One was tap into the deeply felt emotions of at
least half the country and particularly and this is one
(06:21):
of the great ironies that I know you're wrestling with
and I've heard you talk about it. You know, we're
having this switch of which party is the working class
party and which party is the elite party. Well, Trump
intuited this, and people forget he had thirteen years of
doing The Apprentice at NBC. He was a natural salesman
(06:42):
and a natural showman, so his instinct was to go
right for the blue collar worker. And he did two things.
In August of twenty fifteen. Vince Haley, who's now the
Domestic Policy director at that time, was working with us,
and he walked in one day in August and said,
(07:03):
you have to see the c SPAN coverage of Trump
in Arizona because Trump is talking about illegal immigration. And
then he invites the father of a young man who's
been killed to come up on stage. And then Trump
steps way back and allows this guy to have like
five or ten minutes on stage. Was a willingness to
(07:27):
give up the spotlight that most people watch Trump will
thinks not likely and that most politicians would find very
scary to give control of the microphone to this person.
And I watched the dynamics of that. And then you
may remember the very first debate Chlis and I were
watching in our living room and there was the one
(07:50):
where he got this really nasty, embarrassingly personal.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
Fight and was this the Megan Kelly Kelly?
Speaker 2 (07:59):
I mean, it was just it was kind of like, ooh,
I don't yeah, nothing about them.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
I thought that was it. I thought it was over.
Speaker 3 (08:08):
They were racing to the bottom, and I think he
got there first. And which is a line actually that
a year later somebody would use to describe the fight
with Hillary in the last month that she was going
towards the bottom, but we thought we could beat her
to it. So so anyway, so we watched this debate
(08:29):
and everybody, mean Frank once had a focus group. They
all thought Trump had lost. Everybody, like you know, everybody
at our level thought Trump had lost. Watching these various
online things and he's at seventy and eighty percent out
of sixteen, and I'm thinking, I wait a second, that
there's a mismatch here between everyday Americans and the elites
(08:53):
on a grant, on a giant scale. And at that
point I decided that what you had was a phenomenon
who had somehow tapped into a core desire of the
American people that they wanted to have a leader who
would profoundly change Washington. And in Trump you had somebody who,
(09:17):
by personality and by background, was pretty enthusiastic. I mean,
he's always wanted to be a person of consequence, and
you know, if you're the guy who breaks up the
Rooseveltian system after ninety years, you get to be a
person of consequence. And so it fit what his particular
(09:39):
half of the country wants, it fit what I think
is a historic necessity as a conservative, a political leader,
and it fit you know, his personal desire to have
a prime he wondered. And it's very interesting to think
back to this in terms of the politicians you've known.
His slogan wasn't Trump. His slogan was make America great again.
(10:00):
So he was picking a topic bigger than himself within
what he could grow. And I think after surviving the
two assassination attempts, he really personally believes that God spared
his life for the purpose of actually achieving that. So
I would My point is not whether you like him
(10:22):
or just like him, but if you look at the
great change agents, they really are. Jefferson Jackson, Lincoln and FDR.
And I think there's a fifty to fifty chance. It's
not a certainty yet. And I've told him, you know,
all he did was he earned a ticket to the dance. Now,
if he dances well enough and he wins the twenty
(10:44):
sixth election, then I'll learn a ticket to winning the
twenty eight election. And then which will probably be JD.
Vans on our side. And if we get the Trump
vice president's only forty years old. If we get the
Trump vice president on top of the Trump president, see,
then he will be in a league with those guys.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
We're going to get to that, and we'll get to
twenty six in a second. But I want to go
back a little bit.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
I'm not doing your show, Fish, and by the way,
you only thinking about it.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
No, All I want to say is I'm grateful you're here.
This is a hell of the thing that the two
of us are having this conversation. So take me back.
It's interesting, you know, and you're absolutely right, and I
appreciate because we had Frank Lunz on and I want
to talk a little bit about what Frank talked about
in a minute a little bit going back the contract
with America, et cetera. But Frank made that point about
those focus groups. But I want to I'm curious your
(11:36):
point of view. Then with Trump. You must have known
him tangentially. But you were the leader of the as
you said yourself a second ago, conservative movement. Here's a
former Democrat, kind of all over the place, no strong
ideological mornings necessarily. I mean, you must have been pretty
distrustful early on. Were you of Donald Trump? You weren't,
(11:57):
for sure.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
I've known Trump for a quarter century.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
Right, Uh, politics, though he wasn't always a line.
Speaker 3 (12:03):
I knew him back when he's a businessman. He was
a very noisy businessman. And I'd read his two books,
which I'd recommend everybody. If you want to understand Trump,
you read The Art of the Deal and The Art
of the Comeback. Comebacks the more important of the.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
Two, because it opens up with some very telling lines.
Speaker 3 (12:23):
It's amazing. He opens up with, Uh, my property in
Atlantic City's losing money. The economy is going down because
of Iraq. I'm nine hundred million dollars in debt personally
to the banks, and my wife just called and said,
you wanted a divorce. And he has this great line.
He says, this is the moment you either get depressed
(12:44):
or you plan a comeback. This book is about that,
which also tells you a lot about how he survived
the last four years.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (12:52):
This is a guy who's resilient on a scale that
is historic. We first talked with him Pliston and I
had breakfast with him in Des Moines, in all places,
in February of twenty fifteen, and we talked about running
for president because we'd run in twelve and learned the
hard way that if the other guy has many millions
more than you bet on the money. But I learned
(13:14):
a lot of out running for president.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
Even though you won easily by any objective measure, you
want all those NAMN debates.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
At least enough TV, the ads cout on do the debates.
Speaker 3 (13:25):
For me. It was a wonderful learning experience, and I
think in my willingness to take on the news media
head on, I was probably a forerunner for Trump's invention
of fake pop news. Well, we talked at length about
running and it was very interesting, and you could tell
that he had now moved from that would be an
(13:47):
interesting thing to kind of a businessman thinking through what
would it take, how much would it cost, how would
you structure it? And so I watched his development all
through fifteen, and I I wasn't particularly pro Trump at
that point, right, Frankly, if you remember, Jeb Bush was
(14:07):
the front runner, He had the most.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
Money, hundred million in a pack, he had his father and.
Speaker 3 (14:13):
His brother, he had nationwide name mighty, and watching Trump
psychologically take him apart low energy the case study, well,
he got so far inside Jeb's head. The Jeb is
running around New Hampshire in shorts jogging. Now the average
(14:33):
New Hampshire writing regards the idea of a presidential candidate
who's jogging has disqualification on ground just automatically, which which
was really unfortunate. Jeb's actually was a very good reform
governor of Florida. But Trump just had this ability to
somehow set the stage where you couldn't win.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
And it's a it's a very unusual capability.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
So it's interesting. So I appreciate in twenty fifteen you started,
I mean there was sort of the dance of sort
of developing more of this formal relationship as it relates
to the political and said, did you find him particularly
policy driven then was he inquisitive in terms of tactics policy.
Speaker 3 (15:20):
Look, he's talking about tariffs forty years ago. Yeah, true,
talking about immigration, I mean the whole He's talking about
the corruption of washermen. There are some basic themes. But
what I was going to say, though, is, and this
may help you understand where I'm coming from. Trump is
not a conservative, right. Trump is the best anti liberal
(15:41):
politician in my lifetime, better than Reagan. Reagan was the
great conservative articulator. I sort of stood on his shoulders
with the Contract with America, and we came out of
a formed philosophical background. Trump understands that the current doesn't
work and that the woke phase of the American left
(16:04):
is totally destructive of the American system. This is my view, obviously,
and therefore he is prepared to fight everybody I want
to fight. Now. The fact that he doesn't read Bill
Buckley and he doesn't have a National Review subscription, I
don't care because I know that instinctively he'll get up
(16:25):
every morning and think, you know what part of the
left can I take apart today? And one day it'll
be Harvard, and another day will be The New York Times,
and another day it'll be some bureaucracy, but every day
he will cheerfully go out and engage and tear apart
the people who I think need to be torn apart.
So I'm very happy to have a non conservative, anti liberal,
(16:49):
entrepreneurial activist with all the skills of a great businessman.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
Well so, at peril, I jump right into the book
and get chapters and chapters ahead. He's also taking on
things that you've champion. I mean, you've highlighted in the
book the importance of of genomics and synthetic biology and
discovery and invest you know in R and D, the
issues obviously with DARPA, et cetera. I mean, how concerned,
(17:15):
including by the way, you just did a documentary with
your wife on of all things, four letter word for
some of your friends PBS. Very proud PVS to me,
but on journey to America on immigration, and so I'm
curious just that tension. I get this sort of owning
the lib and liberalism more broadly defined. But where do
(17:36):
you are you? Where are you in this.
Speaker 3 (17:38):
Sort of I think I think when everything shakes out,
let's start with immigration. Trump is as pro legal immigration
as he is anti illegal immigration. I mean, two of
his wives are foreign born. His mother came from Scotland. Uh,
(17:59):
you know he he's not going to jump up and down.
And he has said openly, I mean he's come up
with this idea of this five million dollar you know,
avenue to America.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
What happened to that?
Speaker 3 (18:09):
Well, I suspect it will be implemented. He wants the money.
I'm not sure his calculations are right.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
Yeah, No, that's a little generous.
Speaker 3 (18:19):
Enough people show up to make it a big deal.
But Canada and other countries have had very similar, smaller
scale example proudgets. There's no question that the most aggressive
pieces of the Trump coalition would do things that I
would regard as destructive. There's also no question if you
(18:41):
look at, for example, the caliber of the people he's
appointed at the Center for Disease Control or for the
National Institute of Health. These are very smart, very senior people.
And and I just had a conversation with the new
head of NIH, who clearly wants to clean out the underbrush.
But and I say this as a guy who, while
(19:02):
balancing the federal budget for four years in a row,
the only time in one hundred years, we doubled the
size of nih Well balancing the budget so deeply in science.
But I'll also tell you it's now a big It
kept growing. So what we doubled was the baseline from
which it just kept growing. And it's a big bureaucratic
(19:22):
system with a lot of ballogne. I mean, when you're
paying sixty five percent more than the grant so that
Harvard or Stanford or somebody can pay for overhead, there's
a lot you can do that doesn't hurt genuine reform.
You also have a big problem which I don't know
how they're going to solve, and that is they've gotten
into this ropidope system where people will file for a
(19:45):
research project, not reach the conclusion because they've already filed
for continuing and if they reached the conclusion, they have
to go out and find a whole new topic. That's
a fair amount of stating down research by your rocratizing it.
So I mean, I'm passionate about this stuff. I'll give
you one other example. I am totally committed to space.
(20:06):
I have been since in nineteen eighty one, I introduced
the Northwest Ordinance for the Moon, saying that if you
got to a certain population, you could apply for statehood,
which at that time people thought was nuts. Now they
still think it's nuts, but not quite as nuts.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
I remember you in the debates talking about space and
we were wondering what the you know, you were on
the edge there, so you have been you consistent.
Speaker 3 (20:30):
I'm just glad that Elon came along and maybe doable.
And I'll give you an example. When the starship actually
gets settled down and works properly, it has thirty three engines,
it produces two point three times as much thrust as
the Saturn five the rocket went to the Moon two
point three times as much. So your choice is to
go with the traditional NASA spend an amazing amount of
(20:52):
money and maybe get two people in the surface of
the moon. Or this thing will lift one hundred people
or one hundred and fifty tons, so you could put
fifty to seventy people on the Moon in one bite.
I mean, just boom.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
But to your point, that requires ns It requires all
of the innovation and entrepreneurs I mean, it requires research institutions,
It requires presumably institutions of higher learning as well. Are
you concerned about what's happening in terms of those partnerships?
I mean, just I think about Sandia Labs, Lawrence Livermore Labs,
I think about all the R and D that's happening
(21:29):
with military and obviously with academia. I mean, you're concerned
that there's a recklessness. I appreciate solving for issues of
some abuse or some inefficiencies, but there seems to be
a blunt approach.
Speaker 3 (21:45):
Now, first of all, I think there is. As a historian,
I would argue that when you try to make change
on this scale, you're going to have very sloppy margins.
You cannot move slow enough to be careful or the
old order will surround you and drown you. Here here
you have you have to be, which means you're going
(22:06):
to make mistakes and you're going to screw things up.
You got to go back and fix them. At the
same time, I would say, uh, I really I worry
about our greatest universities. Partially I suspect the opposite of
your view, which is partially I think they're so left
wing now that they're virtually to tolitarian, and that they
create a group think that is really destructive. And yet
(22:28):
at one point, just a generation ago, these were the
greatest centers of learning, on the planet. Uh, And it
does worry me. How how do you how do you
keep the best of Harvard or the best of MI
I T or the best of Stanford or Berkeley? Uh,
without well at the same time taking head on the
kind of ideological group think that has become literally almost
(22:50):
to tolitarian in its unwillingness to have any competition of ideas.
And I think that's a real challenge and we don't
truth is, we don't have a good answer.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
No, I mean, how do you square that circle? Specifically
on this notion of the journey to America? And I
want to talk to about the timing of that. And
by the way, congratulations ninety minute documentary on PBS that's
really a love letter to absorbing the best and the
brightest and who we are as America in the spirit
of Reagan. You talked about the life force of new Americans,
(23:21):
that language evocative of who we are. But now we're
starting to talk about twenty seven percent of the student
body as international at Harvard, and you're basically saying now
you don't need to apply, and they're opening up their
arms and their wallets in places like China. How do
we square that?
Speaker 3 (23:39):
I think it's very hard. I think that there are
two conflicting things going on, and we don't talk about
them very honestly. I think what's happened in much of Europe,
where the culture is literally being drowned, should be a
(24:00):
much greater alarm, and it's something you can't even talk about.
But if you look at places in Britain or France,
or Sweden or neighborhoods and Brussels, you're seeing basically the
end of Western civilization. So on the one hand, you
have to say, are there legitimate concerns about who comes
(24:23):
here and why they come here? The other side of
that is with the Chinese. A very great deal of
China's technological advance has come from American universities, where Chinese
students come, learn a heck of a lot and go
back home. And if China is our biggest competitor, which
I think may turn out to be exaggerated a decade
(24:44):
from now, nonetheless, for planning purposes, they are our biggest competitor.
Do you really want cal Tech and MIT to be
providing the best Chinese scientists in the world so they
can go back home? I those are topics that deserve
a lot deeper and more conversation. And I think I'm
(25:06):
perfectly happy to say that there will be pieces of
the Make America Great Again movement that are going to
have to go back and be fixed because they're going
to be destructive. Some of them are just playing going
to be wrong. I mean, I'm a very big advocate
for science. I wrote a piece recently on why we
should not cut science funding at NASA. For example. On
(25:30):
the one hand, I'm totally in favor of wiping out
the Space Launch System, which is stunningly expensive and has
accomplished nothing. And by the way, you could probably pay
for a decade of NASA science with the cost of
the Space Launch System, you know. So I think there
are ways that there are good things we should protect,
(25:51):
and that's going to lead to fights, because you're going
to have some people who are clumsy or sloppy, or
who ideologically are pretty cheerful about being ignorant.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
I mean, I mean, look, you you talk about Doge
in the book, you write about it rather and you
but you write about it very in laudatory terms, but
you make the point you just made as it relates
to if you're going to move fast, you're going to
break some things. But this notion of iteration and time
to move and speed. You you even highlight old Peter
(26:20):
Drucker talking about excellence and efficiency, which I appreciated, But
I mean, what is your over under just you know,
doge in particular? Is it? You know, are you satisfied
with the two trillion dollars in savings?
Speaker 3 (26:36):
It will turn out to have at least two patterns.
One is more noise than achievement. Yeah, uh. And the
other is that it will have exposed for us a
number of things that were going on that are kind
of astonishing. Uh. And that you you know, so on
the one.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
Hand, condoms in Gaza, which you know turn out not
to be the case.
Speaker 3 (27:00):
What do you mean? Well, for example, it's pretty clear
that I think at least ten percent of the UN
refugee workers in Gaza were pro Hamas.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
Oh that's separate, separate. I'm just I'm just I'm lamenting
on the sort of Orwellian notion of fifty million dollars
of condoms, which the President reminded me of in the
Oval office, which I told him was not true.
Speaker 3 (27:22):
And there's a good California, and I'm sure you fondly
remember Reagan.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
I do, by the way, speaker, I'm in his office
every day as a point of pride.
Speaker 3 (27:31):
That's well, that's right, I mean right there, right there
in the governorship. Yeah. Every once in a while, Reagan
would see something in the newspaper and it was click
in his head. I would repeat it endlessly. I see
where you're going, And now look there there's a great
rookie who is a German poet once said, if you
(27:53):
drive away my demons, will my angels flee? Also, well,
talent's with the charismatic leader of Trump's power is there's
five or ten percent where you go, really, and then
there's this other stuff that is amazing and historic, and
you may not be able to separate the two.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
Yeah or yeah, I mean I may have a different
I'm maybe ninety ten of your flipped.
Speaker 3 (28:19):
That's one of the reason I wanted to do the
show with you. I remember when we talked about Citizenville.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
Yeah, and all the ideas you had decade ago before
you ran.
Speaker 3 (28:28):
Into the Sacramento bureaucracy.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
God bless by the way, I still tell people that's
a really worthwhile book.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
I appreciate you for saying that. By the way, I
think so much. It's interesting. I reflected on that our
conversations and a little bit on that book. As reading
your book, I mean, you talk about, you know, governing,
not just campaigning. You talk about issues around efficient and
effective government and more novel and I think what's always
interested me about you is your willingness to lean into
(28:58):
the future and talk about healthcare differently than others, as
you did again here even highlighted my friend Dean Ornige
in terms of some of his work on wellness and prevention.
These four p's. You talk about predictability and personalization in
the healthcare space, but you also take on other spaces
which I appreciate as well, like the old Eisenhower frame
(29:21):
on the military industrial complex. And I'm curious, in relationship
to the DOGE question, why do you think there's been
so little willingness to enter into that space, even the
space launch example you just gave.
Speaker 3 (29:34):
I think you know, I had one fight in the
first bushes of Trump's first term over HUAWEIH and what
we needed to do to dramatically strengthen American telecommunications, and
it's the one fight that I clearly decisively lost, and
I lost it because AT and T was on the
(29:56):
other side, and AT and T is so big, big,
contributes so much money as so many lobbyists by so
many TV ads that you know, I just just ran
over me. It was an exciting experience, but I felt
like a lot. I felt like the guy in Tanneman Square,
the tankage. So I started with that. I mean it is.
(30:20):
I think the space launch system is one of the
best examples of the sickness of the old order and
what Eisenhower did warn about. I mean, people should go
back and read his farewell address because he's very clear,
and this guy had been a five star general commander
of Allied forces in Europe as well as president, so
he had pretty good knowledge and he's saying correctly. In
(30:44):
order to build a system big enough to defeat or
contain the Soviet Empire, you have to turn over so
much money and power to a bureaucracy which will then
hire a big corporations that you're going to have the
permanent danger that they grow together into sort of a
single organism which then operates for its own benefit. And
(31:09):
that's an enormous problem across It's a problem in healthcare too.
I mean, big health in many ways is as bad
as Big Defense. And I'm working on a paper right
now which will amuse you when he finally comes out
talking about Trump time and Trump's savings and going back
to the skating rink in New York. Yeah, city had
(31:33):
the rink had quit making ice, which makes it very
hard if your skating rink, and the city had for
six years tried to fix it and spent thirteen million dollars.
Trump talks about this in his first in the book,
The Art of the Deal.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
This is one of his great successes.
Speaker 3 (31:48):
Yeah, objectively, and he says, you know, he's looking at
his apartment, looks out over the rink, the woman rink,
and so he finally gets so pissed off at six
years they can't make ice, and he challenges the mayor
publicly and says, you give it to me, and I
will fix it in less than a year for under
(32:09):
three million dollars. Well, he fixed it in four months,
and we came in twenty five percent below budget, and
they already spent six and a half million. He came
in twenty five percent below the three million dollar budget,
totally fixed in four months. And in the book, is
this great line where he says, they had this firm
in Florida that had won the contract and didn't know
(32:31):
what they were doing. And so I said to myself,
who builds skating rinks? I thought Canavan? I went, oh,
excuse me. So he goes to the National Hockey League
and says, who builds the skating rinks? And this is
firm in Montreal And they fly down and they look
at it and they go, this is really embarrassing. This
(32:53):
is so easy to fix, you can't believe it. And
when he finally got it done, somebody said what happened?
He said, it wasn't magic, it was common sense and management. Well,
to the degree that we could bring common sense and management,
we would. I think you could get better defense for
twenty five percent less than the current defense budget if
(33:15):
you could clean out all the bureaucracy and all the
cronyism and all the bad contracts. I tell every audience
if you took the Pentagon and turned it into a triangle,
and took the other two thirds and turned into a museum,
you would get a better defense system overnight. And the
reason simple. You'll understand. This is the governor of a
(33:37):
state with a huge bureaucracy. They built the Pentagon in
nineteen forty three so that twenty six thousand people could
manage World War two with carbon paper, manual typewriters and
filing cabins, And in fact, Marshalls chief of staff, used
to run drills to see how fast you could find
(33:58):
paper if you needed a certain document, where is and
how do you get there? Well, everybody depending on now
has a smartphone, an iPad, a laptop, computer, and I
have never gotten you. You might be able to get
somebody caltech to figure this out. I've never been able
to get an exchange rate. That is, if you have
one person over here with a carbon paper distribution and
(34:20):
one person over here with the smartphone or an iPad
or computer, what's the relative exchange rate of information flow?
My guess is it's above a million. Well, just one.
You have the same twenty six thousand people. Now, since
they're not filing paper and they're not writing on carbon,
what they're doing is writing each other to prove that
(34:41):
their job is important so they can stay employed. So
you screw up the whole system with the person A
writing person B who writes person see, who then writes
person A and they beat these things to death, and
exactly the way New York City was failing with the
ice rate, because you have a bunch of bureaucrats who
write papers that have no meaning. And I think I
(35:04):
helped found the Military Reform Caucus in eighty one. I
helped pass the Goldwater Nichols Reform in eighty six against
every active duty senior officer, none of them wanted it. Nowadays,
I'll tell you it's invaluable. We need a deep, thorough
review of all of our national security, not just defense,
all of it. If we're going to compete in the
(35:25):
modern world.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
It just seems of all things. And you know, I
appreciate the skating rate because is a reminder of under
promise over deliver. And we can talk about some of
those day one actions that Trump may or may not
have succeeded with in a moment. But I'm curious as
it relates to the issues of the Pentagon. I mean,
Trump's been bold, and he's provided a lot of space
(35:53):
for Doge and certainly Musk in the last one hundred days,
but the Pentagon does seem to be off limits. I mean,
is that is.
Speaker 3 (36:02):
That is that accurate? I don't think so. I think
I think they will presently be as ruthless as the
Pentagon as they will be anywhere else.
Speaker 1 (36:10):
Interesting. F thirty five comes to mind? Huh, what F
thirty five comes to mind?
Speaker 3 (36:16):
Actually, I've gotten real pushback on that because I was
one of the people who's really critical. Yeah, but three
or four people who I'm writing this paper, and I
was talking about examples of cost overruns, and I've had
three or four people who do not work for Lockheed,
aren't part of the system, but they're very smart right
back and say to me, that is an inaccurate measurement
(36:38):
that you actually look at the plane they have built.
It has no relationship to the original contract. It is
vastly superior, and the price has dropped now to about
a reasonable price for a fifth generation fighter. I mean,
I was shocked. I took it out of my paper
because there are too many people writing me back and saying,
so the other examples are terrific, this one's just dumb.
(37:00):
It's not seconically right. It's interesting because I would have
a week ago I would have said to you exactly that.
Speaker 1 (37:06):
Yeah, no, it's sort of it's we throw that one around. Now.
Speaker 3 (37:10):
I'm getting beaten up by people who know a lot
more than I do, saying now, I have a lot
of good examples in my paper, but that ain't want to.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
Them, that ain't want them interesting. So all right, so
you'll you'll stipulate we should see some more. I mean,
obviously the Secretary of Defense has done some personnel moves,
et cetera, but they seem relatively modest compared to the
overall reforms that that you're advocating for. But you know,
one of the things I've struck in the book, and
again unsurprising, is it's been a consistent theme with you
(37:40):
is sort of anticipating the next war, not necessarily relitigating
and reflecting exclusively on on the last one. And the
issues of electron electronic EMF issues are that you've been
sort of focused on issues a space in relationship to defense,
et cetera. Talk to me a little bit about what
you sort of positive you least promote in this book
(38:01):
as it relates to future security on national effects, I.
Speaker 3 (38:04):
Think there are three big things. The first is we
need to quit talking about war fighting and think about
war winning. The fact that we have great taxical capabilities
and wonderfully courageous people who go for twenty one or
twenty two years in a place like Afghanistan and don't
win should bother us because war fighting is not the goal.
(38:25):
War winning is the goal. And as suns Sooo wrote,
the group find five hundred BC, the greatest of all
generals win bloodless victories. So you know, the the question
is can America design a war winning series of strategies
rather than a war fighting strategies. The second thing I
would say is you have to look at all of
national security. You mentioned, for example, the real threat of
(38:46):
electromagnetic pulse attack, and a very close friend of mine,
Go Fortune, wrote a remarkable novel called One Second After,
in which he shows you a village in North Carolina
after electricity has been cut off by an electromatic post.
I mean, it is a breathtaking book. He was actually
invited to Sandia. You'd mentioned Sandia Labs earlier. He was
(39:07):
invited there by the physicists who were grateful that somebody
could explain what they worried about, and thought his book
really was a very accurate projection. So you need to
think about not just the Defense Department, but the totality
of national security and then in the defense department itself,
I've beengun writing something which only occurred to me. By
watching Ukraine. We are seeing an extraordinary change in the
(39:36):
nature of warfare, and none of us understanding it. I'm
actually going to write a paper on Podier, Crasie and Agincoreps,
which are the three great battles in the Middle Ages
where the British annihilate the French because the French cannot adjust.
They have to be armored knights. Their culture requires it.
And the British have developed a longbow which slaughters armored knight.
(40:00):
And that takes place over a century, and in that
entire period that a culture will not allow them to change. Well,
we may have a similar problem. We like big, expensive,
sophisticated long to develop long to field systems you're now
up against. As I said a while ago, I think
the numbers for next year are for this year for
(40:22):
Ukraine are going to be a million, five hundred thousand drums. Now,
most of them are small, most of them are simple.
Most of our guys would look down their nose at them.
But Lord Nelson, who won the Battle of Trafalgar, set
a one point numbers annihilate and if you take the
combination of artificial intelligence, robotics, three D printing, new specialized
(40:46):
kinds of chemistry. There's a firm in your state actually
called Divergent, which is probably the most advanced factory on
the planet, far ahead of anything in China, and they
use those techniques to be able to shift what they
make within a matter of hours. I mean, it's astonishing
to visit them. And they're in La not far from
(41:06):
an in and out burger, and they I measure my
trips to calig But anyway, when you when you start
thinking about, for example, you don't just measure the Chinese
warship navy. All the Chinese merchant ships have been designed
(41:27):
now for twenty years to be capable of launching drones. Well,
if I have a ship and it happens to have
forty drones on it, is that an aircraft carrier or
is that a merchant ship? And if I have eighteen
hundred of them, does that count as part of my
navy or is that just an auxiliary group? And how
(41:48):
many munitions does an American ship carry? And how many
drones can it stop? If the other guy's able to
send endless quantities, I'm just giving you a flavor. I
don't think we realize yet. You know, I talked to
occasionally to the Amazon people about their use of robotics,
which is part of the reason they've been able to
be so amazing. We have no notion yet of how
(42:12):
fast the modern battlefield is going to become and how
complicated it's going to become. And our current bureaucracies, in
our current procurement system makes it very difficult to be
agile enough. And frankly, excuse me, the dominance of these
big corporations, the Lockheeds, the Boeings, what have you read
(42:35):
you on makes it very hard to have the kind
of entrepreneurial change that you've seen in Silicon Valley for
your entire lifetime. You know, it's the small company today
that's the giant company in twenty years. And if you
can't grow the small companies because they can't get through
the Defense Department's paperwork, then you're not ever going to
(42:55):
have the rate and rhythm of innovation that you need.
Speaker 1 (42:59):
No, And that's something you highlight sort of that framework
of iteration, the sandbox and procurement reform, which is so
foundational and it's it's really it's about you know, it's
the incumbency racket. You talk about incumbency capitalism versus innovation capitalism,
and that sort of innovation capitalism is a big part
(43:20):
of what we focus on and obviously I think is
part of the secret sauce to your point of Silicon Valley.
I'm curious just going back a little bit, and you know,
and we're bouncing around a little bit here, but again
back to timing, because Journey to America, you did it
with your wife, and you guys have done how many documentaries? Now,
you've done forty.
Speaker 3 (43:37):
Four books'n we've done ten movies, and I've done forty
four books. She and I have done I think four
or five of them together. She wrote six children's books. Yeah,
about Elis the Elephant and American history. Yeah. Well, Peignaterton
because you know, she's a music major. She was a
piano major, plays the French horn, spent twenty years in
(43:58):
a professional choir at the Basilica in Washington. Uh So
that's her natural background. Then she was a clerk in
the Agriculture Committee in the House. And she, you know,
she works really hard. She works much harder than I do.
Speaker 1 (44:13):
And tune in for the rest of the conversation with
New Gingrich
Host
Gavin Newsom
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