Transcript:
Mornings with Maria
August 19, 2020
NEWT:
Look I think first of all it’s ironic that Bill Clinton is promising us a president who will go to work, and we can barely get Biden out of the basement. He certainly doesn’t behave like somebody who is eager to go to work. Second, I think the most important characteristic is the collapse of the viewership. They are down 25 or 30% and my guess is it’s going to keep getting worse because it turns out that a virtual convention is fairly boring and that frankly there are not that many people excited by Joe Biden. I think that the Democrats have not yet come to grips with the reality that they may have picked a ticket with Biden and Harris that has no popular appeal it’s only battle cries to defeat Trump and people just, I think, are going to find very, very low turnout on the democratic side this fall and you’re seeing that not just at Fox News but across the board, every single network has had a substantial drop in the number of people compared to 2016.
NEWT:
I think Trump is a disruptive president who has profoundly changed American policies and I think if you’re part of a traditional foreign policy establishment as secretary Powell is, you find this very difficult because this is, in fact, a repudiation of 18 years of fighting in Afghanistan, it is a repudiation of how many young Americans have died and have been severely wounded without victory in Iraq and elsewhere and it’s a very different approach, a much tougher approach, so I think that that explains the sort of nationalist policy establishment. I think Kasich is just sad. Kasich was a great contributor to getting balanced budget. He was a good governor of Ohio, but he got very bitter when he suddenly discovered that voters didn’t hold him in the same esteem that he held himself. So, he sort of in the Bill Crystal wing of you don’t love me so I’m going to hate you. I thought having Kasich on actually probably reduced Kasich’s standing more than it helped Biden.
NEWT:
Look I think there’s several books coming out now that outline the scale of the plot against the president and it clearly goes up to president Obama and vice president Biden and if you think about the idea that the president of the United States and the vice president with the head of the CIA, with top people at the FBI were consciously engaged in spying against the new president and trying to disrupt and discredit his administration, it’s a much bigger scandal than Watergate was and I think it had taken every effort from the anti-Trump media to try to tone this down and calm this down, but the evidence and Yates is a good example of this. The evidence is coming in that there were meetings in the oval office where this was being discussed and that they were consciously looking for ways to trap and destroy General Flynn as first step towards trapping and destroying the president and it’s astonishing that people have not seen how deep a threat this is to our democracy and the rule of law and I suspect now as Durham continues to dig this stuff out, that we are going to find a number of people just plain broke the law and I hope that the justice department will have the courage to go after people no matter who they and I do think that both president Obama and vice president Biden bear substantial responsibility for this and I think it’s a real problem.
NEWT:
What you have seen is the collapse of facts and their replacement by fairly insane beliefs. You look, for example, at the whole postal service thing, it was a mass hysteria. I interviewed the author of a book on the Madness of the Crowd and it’s amazing how you see people do things that are hysteria, they have nothing to do with facts and on the left, they are so hysterical about Trump that they believe things that are crazy and this postal thing is the most recent example but it’s been going on month after month after month and it’s part of why the country has a, I think, a real feeling of polarization and almost derangement on the left where facts literally have no meaning what matters is the latest crazy thing you want to believe.
