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Guy Benson: We’re pleased to welcome back to the show former Speaker of the House and Fox News contributor Newt Gingrich, who’s out with a brand-new book, America’s Golden Age: Trumpism and an Era of Limitless Possibilities. Mr. Speaker, welcome back.
Newt Gingrich: Well, it’s great to be back with you.
Guy Benson: Let’s start with the book. Tell us all about it.
Newt Gingrich: I wanted to bring together all of the positive things that are happening and make the case that we ought to be optimistic. We ought to have a sense that the future has great potential, whether you’re talking about health care, space, artificial intelligence, or a variety of other things.
We’ve gotten ourselves into a cycle where everything is negative, everything is pessimistic, and everything has to be a fight. But underneath all that, we are building a dramatically better, wealthier, healthier, and safer society.
That really is what America’s Golden Age is about. I looked ahead 50 years, to the 300th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and tried to lay out the remarkable things I think are virtually inevitable over the next half-century. Barring a nuclear war, I think civilization is just going to keep moving forward.
Guy Benson: I want to come back to one element of that in a second, but President Trump has talked about this golden era for the country. Based on a lot of the polling and public sentiment, obviously, many Americans don’t agree with that. Why is that? Some of the metrics are tough and challenging right now, but there is also this broader negativity. The electorate seems to have been dissatisfied for years. What explains that, in your mind?
Newt Gingrich: Part of it is the news media. I always tell people that if Thomas Edison invented the electric light today, it would be reported in a story that began, “The candle-making industry was threatened,” because they just couldn’t report it in a positive way.
Similarly, I think our politics have become toxic. People run millions of dollars’ worth of negative ads that don’t involve issues or a better future. They just focus on whether they can destroy their opponent more than their opponent is going to try to destroy them.
All of that leads to a pessimistic attitude. And, frankly, there have been some performance problems. We’ve had COVID, the riots that grew out of the killing in Minnesota, and people looking at prices and realizing that things are too expensive. They don’t necessarily see the system working.
A lot of these things are swirling around, but underneath them, the long-term trends and patterns are amazingly good. They’re going to give us a dramatically more exciting, dynamic, wealthier, and, I believe, safer United States.
When I wrote America’s Golden Age, I was trying to pull people out of that negativity and get them to think about how positive the future could be.
Guy Benson: You mentioned artificial intelligence. Let’s come back to that, because I’m somewhere in the middle on this. I don’t know what’s coming. I’m extremely hopeful and optimistic about AI on numerous fronts, but apprehensive about others.
We’ve seen political opposition to AI from Democrats and, to some extent, both parties. People don’t like the idea of AI and certainly don’t like the data centers required to run it. Yet those facilities are necessary if we’re going to compete with China in this race. That seems to be an emerging consensus, or at least a solid majority position, in this country.
What do you make of AI? How does it fit into the vision you’re describing?
Newt Gingrich: Let’s think about data centers first. Most of the arguments against them are nonsense. The specific problems aren’t that hard to solve.
You could require, for example, that a data center have its own electricity production. You could go a step further and do what the French used to do with their nuclear plants: say that anybody who lives within 30 or 40 miles of a data center will receive subsidized, less expensive electricity from the same source that provides power to the facility.
You can solve each of these individual problems. Data centers will also provide jobs. The idea that we’re going to cripple the United States and guarantee that the Chinese Communist Party dominates artificial intelligence strikes me as the worst possible solution.
At least in the United States, you have the rule of law, the Constitution, and some ability to exercise control. If you let a totalitarian dictatorship dominate the most important technology of the next half-century, you’ve virtually guaranteed the defeat of the United States. We would become subordinate to China.
There are practical issues to address, but I want to go a step further. I ask every audience how many people now use some form of artificial intelligence, and about two-thirds raise their hands.
In my case, I use ChatGPT. I’m not arguing for it over alternatives, but I find it very helpful. The more I’ve worked with it, the more it understands and anticipates what I’m trying to do. It even tries to find things I haven’t thought of yet.
People get into a car, turn on their GPS, enter an address, and have no idea where it is. Then they listen to a voice giving them directions. If you think about it, that’s an astonishing worldwide achievement that we now take for granted. But nobody says, “Oh, my God, is the GPS going to take over my car and make me go places I don’t want to go?”
Guy Benson: Let’s talk about the midterms. We’re less than two weeks out. You know a wave when you see one. Famously, you engineered one in 1994 for Republicans during President Clinton’s first term. As you survey the political landscape right now, what are you anticipating on November 3?
Newt Gingrich: I think that if the Democrats had nominated normal people, they might have had a surprisingly good year. On policy grounds, particularly when it comes to prices, Republicans have a problem.
I filled up my car on Saturday, and as I stood there watching the price climb, I realized why everybody is so irritated. There are things Republicans haven’t delivered on. If you want to vote based on how you feel about today, I think Republicans have a problem.
On the other hand, when you see the more unusual Democratic candidates and ask yourself whether you’re irritated enough to turn power over to them, suddenly the Democrats have a problem.
I think the tension between how irritated people are right now and how concerned they are about the Democrats has pretty well guaranteed there won’t be a wave.
My current guess is that Republicans will keep the Senate and may actually add one or two seats. The House is going to be very close. Democrats have the natural advantage in an off-year election, and the margin is very narrow. But even there, I wouldn’t argue that it’s guaranteed they’ll win control.
Guy Benson: You mentioned how elections are a choice, and that was part of the analysis you just offered. They can also be a referendum on the party in power and the president. That’s what you often see in midterm elections. Certainly, 1994 comes to mind, as do 2006, 2010, 2014 to an extent, and 2018. Midterms are often a pressure valve in our politics.
How can Republicans effectively make these elections a choice rather than simply a referendum? Time is running out, but I think Republicans have a fighting chance of doing decently well in a choice election for the reasons you cited. In a referendum election, not so much. How do Republicans pull that off?
Newt Gingrich: I think you have to be very issue-oriented and draw clear contrasts.
When I look at the Democratic Senate candidate in Texas, who says that God is nonbinary–a term my staff had to explain to me because it’s not something I use very often–I think about the average Texan. You’re going to tell them that instead of saying “Our Father, who art in heaven,” we’re going to say something else? It makes a relatively attractive Democratic candidate look strange.
Then he comes back and says there are actually six genders. Again, it makes people uncomfortable.
You look at Medicare for All, which I would argue is actually Medicare for no one. Bernie Sanders’s bill, for example, would have taxpayers pay for health care for illegal immigrants. By better than two to one, Americans don’t want that.
You have to take these issues one by one and make the case. And again, El-Sayed is an extraordinary example. Do you really want somebody whose sister was twice on the terrorist watch list and whose mother was actively involved in the Muslim Brotherhood, which is a radical anti-Western movement?
In some ways, El-Sayed is an attractive candidate until you listen to him for a while. Then you may realize that he is one of the most radical candidates running in the country this year.
Guy Benson: He said on tape–and we played some of it yesterday–that he supports Medicare for All. He’s pretending to hedge a little now, but that’s been his position for years. He’s described it bluntly as a government takeover in which the private sector goes away.
He also made clear that his proposal would pay for gender-transition surgeries for illegal immigrants, with U.S. taxpayers footing the bill. That’s not exactly a mainstream value in Michigan. But if it’s a blue wave, maybe those things get swept away or go unnoticed.
I noticed you recently said the Republican Party seems to be “dedicated to being inarticulate.” Expand on that.
Newt Gingrich: We are. Look, the two greatest communicators in the Republican Party in my lifetime are Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. They were both Democrats. They both grew up thinking it was okay to go out and win arguments.
The average Republican, partly because they’re faced with a hostile news media and partly because of the party’s culture, tends to approach things differently. It’s a party that raises a lot of money to hire consultants and run ads, but ultimately, the candidate is what matters.
That’s why we spent several years preparing for the 1994 election, making sure all our candidates had a very simple message.
I just gave you a good example. Every Republican in the country ought to be taking on Medicare for All and dismantling its arguments. It’s a $4 trillion tax increase.
I hadn’t heard the exact language of the proposal before, so I went to find it. It’s so outrageous that it’s hard for me to believe someone would actually say taxpayers should pay for gender-transition surgeries for illegal immigrants.
Guy Benson: He called them “Latinx” and “undocumented,” but that is what he said.
Newt Gingrich: Well, an undocumented person is an illegal immigrant. Exactly.
My point is that the idea that the Henry Ford Clinic in Detroit should become the leading center for gender-transition surgeries for the entire planet is extraordinary. Anybody who wants such a procedure would just need to find a way to get to America illegally, show up in an El-Sayed state, and say, “I want to claim the El-Sayed gender-transition program.”
You can’t make this up. It’s like Saturday Night Live being performed as a real show.
I’m going to check the details as soon as we’re done talking, because El-Sayed is, in my judgment–maybe I’m too out of touch, too conservative, or too traditional–a candidate who is effectively promising that taxpayers will pay for these procedures for people who enter the United States illegally.
That would mean people all over the world could be told, “If you feel you need to change who you are, why don’t you get to America? El-Sayed is going to have a program for you.”
That’s insane. Literally, you couldn’t do this on Saturday Night Live.
Guy Benson: He would probably argue that he’s not running on that. I think he’s keeping that position mostly under wraps, but it was his stated position on a podcast, in his own voice. We played it yesterday, and people can look it up.
Mr. Speaker, you famously battled President Clinton politically for years. He was a very talented politician. I know this was decades ago, but reflect on the difference between Clinton-era Democratic politics and what we’re seeing today. The Democratic Socialists of America seem to be trying to complete a takeover of the party over time. How has the Democratic Party changed during your time in politics?
Newt Gingrich: You have to understand that Clinton was from Arkansas, which is a very conservative state. In the late 1980s, Clinton was part of a group organized specifically to move the Democratic Party away from the ideology that had led to the McGovern disaster, the Mondale disaster, and ultimately the Dukakis disaster.
He was openly part of a centrist, traditional Democratic movement that Franklin Roosevelt would have understood.
That’s part of the reason the left hated his wife. In their judgment, when we passed welfare reform and Clinton signed it, and when we balanced the budget for four straight years and he signed those budgets, he had betrayed the true faith.
Clinton was sufficiently centrist and conventional that he was alien to the left wing of the Democratic Party. I think that’s how significant the change has been.
Since he left office, Democrats have methodically been getting rid of people who represented that tradition.
The truth is that Barack Obama was the most radical president in American history. He just had a really good smile all the time. But if you look at his policies, the people he appointed, and where he went, I believe he did more to reestablish racial conflict than anybody else in modern times.
Guy Benson: And even Obama might look relatively moderate, depending on whom Democrats nominate in the future, given the overall direction of the party.
Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House and Fox News contributor, is out with a brand-new book, America’s Golden Age: Trumpism and an Era of Limitless Possibilities. Mr. Speaker, thanks so much.
Newt Gingrich: Thank you. Good to talk to you.
