Transcript:
Fox and Friends
04/13/2020
NEWT:
Well, Calista and I have participated all week with the Vatican. It’s been remarkable, first of all, to see at one point the pope was walking up Saint Peter’s Square with nobody else around, by himself. And you know, the great church itself, which holds probably 12 or 15,000 people had, I think about 15 or 16 at the various masses. It’s been very sobering. It fits what has happened in Italy where we are beginning to get the first bits of good news. For nine days in a row the number of people being hospitalized has gone down a little bit every day. So that’s encouraging. We’re not out of the woods yet. And frankly very severely locked down. In fact, they increased the police presence in the streets on Saturday and Sunday to make sure people would stay home. They are really trying to starve out the virus by eliminating its chance to leap from host to host.
NEWT:
Yeah. Let me say, first of all, I think probably it will be faster in the U.S. We have a much more robust health system. We have been very aggressive more aggressive than the Italians were initially. But the Italians followed — once they understood how bad it was. And, remember, this started in part in Italy because there are about 100,000 Chinese who work in northern Italy and they kept open the flights to Wuhan, three flights a week for several weeks after it was clear that there was an epidemic. The opposite of what President Trump did in closing off the flights to China. So, they were literally allowing the disease to continue to come in the country. It got out of control in the northern Italy area which is very important. It’s the biggest industrial center in Italy. And as a result, they had to go to very tough draconian measures of basically, locking the whole country down. You have gas stations, pharmacies, grocery stores and nothing else for the last five weeks. And they have strongly urged people to stay home. You can get a 3,000 euro fine if you are in the street without a legitimate reason and they have been enforcing it. They have fined about eight or nine thousand people in Rome. They are taking it very seriously. And I think gradually starting to win. We have played some role in that. I’m very proud of Calista who worked hard to make sure that Franklin Graham’s Samaritan’s Purse could be accepted in Italy. They literally flew in an entire field hospital in one of the most deeply hit town and had about 60 doctors and nurses in a 60-bed hospital and they have been working up there for weeks now. And saved a lot of lives as a result. The United States has announced significant aid package for Italy and I think that’s the right thing to do. This is a relatively weak economy which has now been shattered and it’s going to take a good while for them to recover.
NEWT:
I have been watching President Trump with his briefings and bringing in CEOs of companies and bringing in experts and he reminds me a lot of Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt was this very aggressive entrepreneurial personality. He created the Rough Riders to go fight in the Spanish American War. He was a great nationalist he wrote significant books on the Naval War. When he was in his 20’s he wrote what became the classic study of the Naval War of 1812. He won the Nobel Peace Prize trying to get peace between Russia and Japan in 1907. So, this is a guy who created the Panama Canal. He did all sorts of things. There is a lot of parallel between the entrepreneurial style of Trump which is part of what drives the news media and some of the academics crazy. Entrepreneurial personalities don’t fit the political science model of the presidency. And Theodore Roosevelt was probably the other great example of that. And in Teddy’s case he became so popular that the Teddy Bear was named for Theodore Roosevelt for a small baby bear he refused to shoot. And a Brooklyn toy manufacturer created a bear modeled on that baby bear and became Teddy’s Bear and that has been popular for over 100 years now. There is a lot we can learn. Part of it is do what works. Don’t assume automatically that the so-called experts are right. Keep which you saw the president doing this is the antimalaria drugs and saw him do this with refurbishing masks where all of a sudden they went from zero being refurbished to 120,000 a week. You’ve seen breakthrough in getting companies sign up contracts for production. So essentially surging aggressive personality, the downside is sometimes he can make a mistake. That’s the nature whether it was Theodore Roosevelt or Donald Trump that’s the nature of entrepreneurial personalities. But he is going to get up off the floor and go back and try the next thing.
