Newt Gingrich on Fox and Friends Fox News Channel | April 20, 2020

Transcript

Fox and Friends
04/20/2020

NEWT:

Sure. Look, the virus got to be so bad in Italy, that they had no choice except to close virtually everything. And it’s been pretty strict now for about 6 or 7 weeks. If you leave your house, you can’t go more than 200 meters even to walk your dog or whatever. You can’t be in groups of larger than two. You can be fined $3,200 if the police find you on a street without an appropriate reason. They have gas stations open, pharmacies, grocery stores. That’s it. Now, for 17 straight days, they have had a steady, slow decline in the number of people going into intensive care units. And it is beginning to be some optimism that we are very, very close to reaching a plateau and starting downward. I think they are beginning to have store open, a few things here. Tells us a lot about Italy one of the first things reopen stores that fix coffee machines. Because without express and other Italian coffees how can one truly live? So, I thought that was perfect Italian solution. But they are being very careful and slow. Two things going on. First of all, the United States is a gigantic country. It’s bigger than all of Europe. And so, what’s right for Montana or Texas or what’s right for west Texas vs. Houston, are different things. I think the president is very wise to decentralize, delegate and give the governors an assignment. Second, I think some of the governors have shown their ideological bias so that one governor, for example, said it was okay for planned parenthood to stay open for abortions, but it wasn’t okay for the churches to have services. Well, that’s clearly just an ideological abuse of the emergency. I think that’s part of what has people with their teeth on edge because they’re watching politicians abuse their power. So, I think the president is right. Go back to work slowly, carefully. Learn lessons. I mean, if South Dakota and North Dakota for example working with Sanford Health and others, decides that they’re gradually going to open up. Let’s learn from what works and doesn’t work. And every state should study every other state as they go through this process and in couple months, I think we will be dramatically further down the road.

NEWT:

Well one is Governor of Michigan truly absurd executive order suggesting for example that you couldn’t buy a child seat you couldn’t buy seeds. If you went to Walmart or you went to Home Depot the area that sold seeds to plant in your backyard had a sign up that said it’s illegal to buy these right now. Well normal people thought what is that all about? Looks at the list you sort of get some intern must have written it up because it makes so little sense. That’s an example. You had a mayor in Illinois who declared that she had the right to decide who could get food and who couldn’t get food.

The kind of things Lord Acton warn us that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. You look around the country, one of the major responsibilities right after defeating the virus and restarting the economy. The third big effort is going to be to take power back from the politicians because you cannot allow them to decide they are little petty gods who get to decide life and death for the rest of us.

NEWT:

I wrote my newsletter Friday on the job killing ice cream eating Democrats. Because I thought the whole notion of Nancy Pelosi holding up aid to small business while she stood in front of her two very expensive refrigerators and talked about how she loves to have her $11.75 a pint ice cream that comforts her. That is the most tone deaf thing I have ever seen a speaker of the house do. I served with Tip O’neill and Jim Wright and Tom Foley and of course I worked with Denny Harlet  and  John Boehner and Paul Ryan, this was goofy even by San Francisco standards. It was goofy. The fact is the president has worked very closely with Dr. Fauci and Dr. Fauci says so every time he is asked by the press. He and Dr. Birx both have very professional standards. They have been advising the president. But in the end, look, the reason you have a president is there are some decisions larger than experts. And it’s the job of the president to weigh everything. And then try to make the best possible decision. I would say overall you look at our fatality rate and you look at Europe, can you feel pretty good about what the Trump administration has done.

NEWT:

Look, to be honest, I don’t think that Schumer and Pelosi mind or that Biden minds if the economy doesn’t quite recover rapidly. I mean, they are faced with a nightmare. If the president finishes handling the coronavirus as well as I think he will. And he then pivots and uses all of his ability to create a strong economy and by September and October you can tell that we’re coming back, the election will be over, and Trump will get reelected. Well if you are Pelosi and Schumer you would like to have that come back, say, next January but not this September. And I’m not saying that they sit down in a coldly calculated way. But I don’t think that they have at any point placed putting America back to work ahead of partisan politics. And that’s why, for a week now they have screwed up the small business loans which clearly hurts because small business creates the largest number of new jobs in America and you have a lot of small businesses saying, look, I have got about a week to go if I can’t get financing. And they just sat on it. You tell me. Why that is not frankly a remarkably destructive thing they are going to be do.

NEWT:

Look, I think they are engaged in a game of chicken. They have done this now several times. And their hope is at some point that the President or Secretary Mnuchin or somebody will flinch and give them what they want. And I think that overall and I give Senator Mitch McConnell a great deal of credit for this. When he passed the very large 2.2 trillion-dollar aid package by 96 to 0. He took all of the wind out of Pelosi’s sail. It was impossible for her at that point to block anything. What they are doing is serious. Is not a game. I’ve been a speaker who negotiated with a democratic president you start out how far can I push him. And of course, with trump not very far. I think on these issues, they are so far out of sync with the country that it is very destructive to play these games. I think they have no choice. Their left will not tolerate them cooperating with Donald Trump.

NEWT:

Yes. I think this has been a stunningly eye-opening experience. I have a paper that will come out this week pointing out based really on the Hudson Institute study’s remarkable timeline, they produced a timeline all the way back to November of last year and it’s devastating. The University of South Hampton estimates that if the Chinese had been honest. 95% of the people who have died would still be alive. Now, that is — think about that. Over 160,000 dead and according to the University of South Hampton, 95% of those people died because the Chinese communist dictatorship deliberately lied and got its puppet at the World Health Organization to deliberately lie. And I think, frankly that we should take significant steps, one which would affect Italy which wrote about and I thought was brilliant. Simply move the winter Olympics in 2022 back to Italy which hosted it I think in 2002 and allow Turin, at the very center of the area that had been savaged by the Chinese to allow Turin to host the Olympics next year that would be the kind of gesture that would begin to communicate that the world is fed up with the way the dictatorship operators. There is no question the Chinese dictatorship has cost the world by the time it’s done, they will have cost the world several hundred thousand lives and many, many trillions of dollars of economic activity. And something has to be done to hold the dictatorship and Xi Jinping and his entire group accountable for the damage they have done to the human race worldwide.