NEWT:
It’s great to be with you. I have to say that in a lot of ways Kevin McCarthy is following kind of the cookbook we developed with March to the Majority. Stay your position. Stick to it. Make sure members have time to read the bill. What a refreshing difference from Nancy Pelosi saying you have to vote for it to find out what’s in it which is a statement of such amazing arrogance that I’m still astonished she got away with it. But I think speaker McCarthy has the right attitude. His Congress has to know what they’re going to vote on and he’s confident that it’s going to be something they will generally like.
NEWT:
Look I don’t know what Biden thought he was accomplishing with his comments in Tokyo at that press briefing but it was nonsense. No Republican house is going to raise taxes. Period. That’s a lesson they learned in 1990 when George H W. Bush broke his no new taxes pledge. This party is deeply committed to lower taxes, not higher taxes. We’re deeply committed to lower spending, not higher spending. Speaker McCarthy has a four part plan. Part one is get this debt ceiling done in a way that begins to bend the curve and actually for the first time ever reduces spending, not just slow the growth but reduces spending. Act two is going to come up in the very near future when the budget committee reports out a budget that I believe will get to balance in 10 of years. As you remember Maria we helped balance the budget for four straight years when I was speaker. Act three is going to be continuing investigations into the entire sickness and corruption of our establishment and our bureaucracy and act four is going to be a real fight this fall over appropriations. Because I have a hunch that house Republicans will be in reshaping the executive branch and the appropriations cycle. So, McCarthy has a four part process to go to members with. This is step one and it’s a very big step towards a more effective conservatism.
NEWT:
Look, I think the people are going to be the most unhappy are AOC and the radical Democrats. Because the end everything Biden promised, he won’t negotiate, he won’t agree to this all that stuff is going to disappear as they get down to the crunch and the bill that’s going to come out of this which, again, has to have President Biden’s support, I suspect that traditional Democrats are going to vote for it. The left is going to scream, call it a sell-out. On the right I think there will be a handful of people who vote no but overall, I think when they realize this is the first step towards a balanced budget and I think that it’s clear that the budget committee chairman can literally walk them through how they’re going to get to a balanced budget within 10 years. I think most people on the right will think this is a very, very significant victory.
NEWT:
Look, Calista and I went to the grocery store this weekend and some of the prices were just astonishing. You go back and think a few years ago what you were paying, and that is what you are seeing reflected every time people turn around Biden has failed on inflation, he failed on the border, he failed with crime. You go down a whole list of things, you had an interesting report about air travel and the degree to which secretary Buttigieg is utterly, totally incompetent. President Biden has never visited East Palestine to see the damage done by the train crash for example. So, I think people look at this and they say, you know, he ain’t getting the job done. That’s not ideological. He’s just not getting the job done. And then you look at him overseas and it’s embarrassing. You compare Trump’s strength for four years to Biden’s weakness; it is an astonishing switch for the American people to see their county this weak in foreign policy.
NEWT:
It tells you Tim Scott is remarkably likable and decent human being. I’ve known him and followed his career since 1995 when he ran for county commissioner. He is a terrific person. He naturally brings people together. He’s a deeply committed Christian and thinks his job is to bring hope and opportunity and faith to people, not hostility and fighting. And I think that president Trump genuinely likes him plus candidly if you’re in Trump’s position, the more candidates, the better. He beat 15 or 16 other people to get the nomination in 2016. What’s happening to DeSantis, is he’s beginning to shrink from being one of two to being one of many which is a really dangerous position for him. And makes it easier actually for President Trump to win the presidency. I suspect in his own mind president Trump thinks it would be great if governor Tusunu ran. It would be great to see Youngkin get in the race. The more people that run, the more the anti-Trump base will be fractured, and the Trump base itself remains remarkably stable.
NEWT:
Well, first of all, I think the most interesting candidate is Vivek Ramaswamy who came out of nowhere much like Trump. I’ve done two podcasts with him, at Gingrich 360 back when he was writing books. He’s really smart. I think he’s 36 years old and already remarkably wealthy and I thinks brought a new air of interesting ideas to the race. Again, I think Tim Scott will do surprisingly well because he has such deep integrity such likability that I think he will be competitive. The challenge for DeSantis is the, he’s he’s been sliding for three months. There was a period when he was in striking distance of Trump and as you point out every recent poll shows Trump getting stronger and I think part of that is the Durham report. 300 pages that say that the FBI, the justice department, and the news media lied about Donald Trump. I’m actually writing kind of an alternative history, what would it have been like if they had been honest, what would the trump administration been like if he hadn’t been beleaguered since day one. And that is led a lot of people to give him a second look and say gee this guy has been standing after seven years of the establishment trying to destroy him.
NEWT:
Look, that’s why I think the appropriations process will be the fourth act in the process that speaker McCarthy set up. There’s no reason they shouldn’t be zeroing out large parts of the corruption. You could take the Durham office and say okay this office ought to be he defunded and makes it a straight on fight. Why are we paying for people who are crooks and who are liars and why are we empowering their efforts, starting candidly with the attorney general of the United States.
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