On this episode of Newtsworld. President Trump marked his first hundred days in office this week, and it's been one of the most remarkable one hundred days in any modern American presidency. From securing the border to taking on inflation to challenging unfair tarishs from countries around the globe, President Trump has had a monumental impact in a very short period of time. Here to discuss the first hundred days, I'm really pleased to welcome my guest, doctor Kevin Roberts,
President of the Heritage Foundation and Heritage Action for America. Kevin, welcome, and thank you for joining me on Newtsworld.
Newt Gingrich, I am not just being polite as a fellow Southerner when I say it's heartfelt. You are one of my political heroes and mentors. It is a leisure to be with you, sir.
Well, You've been doing an amazing job at Heritage, and I'm just delighted to have this chance to talk to you because I know you have a remarkably broad view of everything that goes on with government and that Heritage does an astonishing job as one of the great centers of conservative thought in America. Let's start with the border where I have to confess. Much as I support Trump admire him, the achievement on the border crossing is like unbelievable.
I think the drop last month from one hundred and eighty nine thousand under Biden for the same period to about eleven thousand under Trump, and it's continued to go down. They've dropped from about fifteen thousand illegal entries into ander Biden to about one hundred and seventy eight. You've seen the collapse in the number of people trying to get in because they figured out that they're not going to Are you surprised by the scale of change?
Like you, I had very high expts because you and I both know President Trump. When we know that, especially this time around, he's assembled what I think is the greatest cabinet in modern political history. It has the potential to be the greatest ever. And so with those two dynamics, our expectations were really high.
As you said, Newt.
And yet particularly when you look at the number of border crossings that is the minuscule number, now you realize they're ahead of schedule. And then I started thinking about it, Newt.
One last important point on this, Tom Homan who was a fellow here at Heritage, a friend to us both I spoke with recently, and Tom was not surprised at all because he thought that the combination of the rhetoric after the election day by him and by the President, and obviously all of the key figures, including Secretary Nome, would create this process of deflating the numbers, that is, people who would be willing to cross the border would
start to decline. But what the precise thing that they've done a really good job of is at the order interdicting these people who are crossing illegally. And then finally they're really gaining some momentum on the interior enforcement, which of course is where you and I and other normal Americans just going about our daily lives encounter these illegal aliens.
So hats off to the administration. In fact, they might even already be victims of their quick success because Americans are starting to get used to having operational control of the southern border.
That's right. The reality is when you solve something, it drops off their list. Tim Hammer said something on April twenty eighth and a White House briefing that I thought was astonishing. He said, last year one hundred and eighty four thousand illegal aliens were released into the United States under Biden. In the same time period this year, the number was nine. Now, to go from one hundred and eighty four thousand to nine, I would have thought that was technically impossible.
You would think it would be impossible to get the number that low, and yet it just shows you. As President Trump said on the media, you know, the corporate media thought he was just being flipped. You didn't need really new policies. You needed a new president to enforce the law in the books. And obviously, as you know better than anyone, Congress needs to take some action and
they will. But ultimately President Trump has delivered practically immediately on the single most important part that drove the outcome of this election, and that was the lawlessness at the southern border that Americans all across the political spectrum, from the left to the right thought was absurd.
You know, I think that that was one of the two great things, along with the economy, that drove people to decide that they had to replace Biden and led them to support President Trump as strongly as they did. But there are a number of other pieces of this whole safety issue, which is, in my mind, you have domestic safety from crime, you have safety from the cartels and others who want to penetrate our country illegally, and then you have national relations in the whole national security issue.
As Heritage looks at all this, what's your sense of how they are doing and whether or not they're moving in the right direction.
Well, the bottom line up front is they're one percent moving in the right direction. And there are a few reasons for that. The first is they're not committing the problem of failing to.
See the forest through the trees.
That is to say, it would be very common in the first days of a presidency, first weeks of a presidency to home in on one discrete issue and see some policy progress, some good outcomes in that one discreet part, but sort of like you know, a really complex engine, if you get one part of it right, maybe it
affects the running of the rest of it. Instead, I think because of the experience of the individuals who have control of the respective parts of the government, as well as the wisdom experience, and very importantly the gut instincts of Donald Trump, which may be the best in the history of the presidency, they actually have a strategic view about how all of these discrete parts fit into the
outcome that they want. And because the outcome that they want ultimately is the restoration of the American dream, the revitalization of self governance, and that requires Washington to get the hell out of the way of the everyday, hardworking American. They're doing really well. In short, what they're doing, I think in every policy area is connecting the daily tactical steps that have to be accrued day by day, week by week, month by month that lead to this strategic objective.
So at Heritage, where's part of our job, informally on the outside to take a sort of holistic view of how all of this is going.
Even accounting for.
Our really high expectations, we believe the administration is surpassing them.
You played a major role in developing a whole range of opportunities and executive orders, and were you surprised at the speed of the first hundred days. I think he beat Franklin Roosevelt's record for executive orders issued in the first hundred days and did it across the board. Clearly an men's amount of work. Between Heritage and the America First policy Institute. This was the richest period of development for transition in American history.
I'm so proud of everyone who had anything to do with the outcomes that we're seeing up to this point. Obviously, President Trump, Vice President Advance, the Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, who's doing a remarkable job, the whole cabinet deserve all of the credit. Right those of us who have the privilege of helping out on the outside and who do that in between. Conservative presidencies have this privilege of being
able to cultivate these ideas the specific policy proposals. But what Heritage and AFPI and one hundred and ten groups across the conservative movement got right was that the courage and instincts of Donald Trump, which are unique in modern American political history, when paired with a set of policy preparations, personnel recommendations, all of us doing that for the sake of the country, for any other purpose, would be a
really special recipe. And therefore, when you ask about the pace of the first hundred days, you and I are both historians, we both immediately think about what FDR did.
I mentioned to a group of these conservative coalition folks in the last couple of days that the American people should be taking a victory lap because, for the first time in my lifetime, but really the first time since FDR left office, the Conservative movement as a president who is willing to move with the vigor and pace that FDR did for the New Deal, not even Ronald Reagan, one of our heroes, move with that kind of pace.
And the reason that this is important Newt is that so much of this large strategic objective is about scaling back the worst rotten fruit that came out of the New Deal, the misnomer the Great Society thirty years later, and obviously the aggravation of those ridiculous policies under Obama and Biden. In short, President Trump has to move this quickly if in fact we have a chance at getting this Republic back on track.
I was a big fan of Reagan's I worked with Reagan, and what he did with the Soviet Empire was astonishing. I mean, a grand strategic defeat without a war. But while he moved the country to the right, and he relaunched the American economy and he rebuilt a sense of American morale, I don't think President Reagan ever saw it as plausible that he could take on the entire establishment, And of course, in the thirty years since then, the system has evolved and gotten much sicker, much more corrupt,
much bigger. And Trump came along, and I think that the four years that he was out of office allowed him to really think about how bad the system had become. And ironic from the standpoint of the left having blocked him in twenty twenty, they gave him the chance to really develop a level of boldness that I think if he can sustain this, and if he can win the twenty twenty sixth election, this will be the fifth great
change agent presidency after Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln and FDR. And frankly, I don't think I was fully ready for that scale of change. And you see it in the economy where we shifted from the Biden system, which was creating mostly government jobs, were almost no private sector jobs, and all of a sudden, with Trump, you have a huge increase
in private sector jobs. You have jobs in mining and logging, you have jobs in construction, you have jobs in manufacturing, and there we gained nine thousand manufacturing jobs, while under Biden we were losing six thousand manufacturing jobs every month
from January twenty three to twenty four. I mean, don't you think in this sense, so we are right on the edge of, potentially, if we can pass the one big, beautiful bill on top of all of the investments people are announcing, we could really have a Trump boom by next summer.
We could, and two things, the first a near term comment and then one much longer term to your point about Trump being already or on the brink of one of our five great change agent presidents. The first near term comment is, if Congress can get the reconciliation bill passed, hopefully by the beginning of the summer, not let this
slide until September. Is you so rightly observed, given your experience, then what I think is likely is that you're going to see not just an economic recovery from a little bit of uncertainty choppiness right now, but an economic boom just in time for the midterm elections, especially if Trump is out there, as you have recommended, doing whistle stop tours and getting Americans to understand that even if he's not on the ballot, his agenda is on the ballot.
And that leads me directly to the second long term comment. What I think we're in the first month newt is a presidency that is going to redirect the trajectory of the United States future. And by that I mean it does a compliment because I think what we have been doing, even on the right, is managing decline, and we ad heritage you know as well have said we lament that that's reality, but we also don't believe that that decline
is irreversible. And obviously that's what makes Trump tick, is making America great again, to use his motto.
But all of that to lead to this point.
If you think about the four presidents you mentioned, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, FDR. They didn't just dominate an era, but to underscore the point that you're making, they dictated the parameters of politics for a century and even beyond that. I could make a case for each of them that they put an imprint on what America, the American dream, even the identity
of Americans would be. And Trump is doing that because he's reminding us of the principles of our founding, which is that centralized power isn't just expensive and inefficient, it stands in the way of individual, hardworking Americans. Realizing their potential in the ways we put it as Americans realizing
the American dream. I think to sum up here that if we continue on this pace, and reconciliation gets passed hopefully by the House by Memorial Day and by the Senate earlier in the summer, and the Trump cabinet continues to do what they're doing, which is remarkable, that we're not only going to see success in twenty twenty six
and twenty twenty eight and in the near term. I think that people who are having this conversation when you and I are both gone in the year twenty one hundred, are going to look back and say, the twenty twenties was the decade when the United States decided it was reversing its decline, it was going to stop hating itself, it was going to tell allies, suppose it, allies in Europe, put your money where your mouth is, and then will
be your best friend. And ultimately a majority of Americans decided that they would wake up and say, this is our country again, and the American dream is alive and well for us, for our kids and for our grandkids. I know that's what motivates President Trump.
I had the feeling. In his speech to the Congress, he had a section where he talked about merit and the importance of performance, and I thought that was in some ways the most important part of the speech because it was a direct repudiation of the sort of diversity, inclusiveness, and equity model of the left, which said, you don't have to work for it, you don't have to earn it, you don't have to desire it. We somehow owe it to you, no matter how lazy you are, how incompetent
you are. The cultural part of trump Ism may in the long run be even more important than the changes in tax law or the changes in regulation, because it's getting America back to being Americans again. I mean, a good example is the country's overwhelmingly in favor of the work ethic, and the country overwhelmingly favors requiring people who get money from the government to work for it. This,
of course, is totally antagonistic to the hard left. I think that the country is going to rally to President Trump on these issues, and as a side effect of that, because he's offering a very pro free enterprise, very optimistic vision. I mean, they've been over five trillion dollars in investments announced in the US economy since you took office, think about the first hundred days, there's already been announced over five trillion dollars in various investments. I find that to be astonishing.
It is astonishing, and there's some good evidence just as we sit here that that number has become even larger
than the amount of investments. And it leads me to make this observation on top of all of the good points that you've made newt and it's this, if we continue on this path of all of these good policies by the administration and by Congress, and we initiate and win what is in essence a trade war with China, we will have prevented, in the same way that Reagan prevented a hot war with the Soviet Union, a hot
war with China. Because most really smart foreign policy people before Trump won the election in November of twenty twenty four, believed that Shi Jinping was probably telling the truth when he was signaling that by twenty twenty seven China was going to invade Taiwan. That obviously has some serious consequences on the United States, but China's ambitions You and I know full well are beyond Taiwan, the Chinese Communist Party
under She wants to dominate the world. As I travel waiving the Heritage flag internationally, the most common thing that I hear as a worry by international friends is the success politically and economically of the Belton Road initiative of China's great infrastructure program Internationally, Now, the infrastructure, the technology has up to this point been terrible, and you don't want to be doing business with She and the CCP.
But ultimately, what Trump is doing, using really sophisticated policy and great leaders like Scott Bessant, is initiating a conflict that the Chinese thought the United States no longer had the spine to initiate. But they discounted even Donald Trump, even though they knew how he operated from his first term.
And so what I'm saying in a certain extended way, even though it's early, is that even beyond the very obvious early fruits of this Trump agenda, I think We're going to reap some long term benefits from him completely upending the status quo, particularly as it relates to what has been a real cowardice towards China by both the right and left over the last several years.
When you look at the Chinese challenge, it clearly makes us come back and look at ourselves. I mean, we have to fix our education system if we're going to compete in the long run with China. We have to fix our regulatory system. You know, the Chinese have twenty nine thousand miles of high speed rail. We basically have none. And our buaqocricy in our union work rules are such that it's virtually impossible to imagine how you're going to
get there without very dramatic change. And so in that sense, I think the very act of thinking through what is it going to take not just to compete with China, but to succeed in making sure that the United States remains the leading country in the world, which is very important for the projection of freedom. A world in which China is dominant is a world in which to tolitarianism
will spread pretty darn rapidly. One of the projects you've been involved in, which I thought was very daring and fits this whole cultural change heritage, actually got IBM to commit publicly that they were going to uphold viewpoint neutrality and move away from race and gender based hiring. I mean that is an extraordinary achievement. Can you share with us how you did this?
Sure, it's a team effort.
When you work at Heritage, you are able to work with a lot of smart people. And so our motivation for doing this is that we believe, at Heritage, having
been a leading public policy organization in the country. I think we're the largest conservative think tank in the world, that we have to update how we do business to reflect changing politics, to reflect a changing country, which is to say, we'll always do the academic quality research with the primary audience being policymakers in Congress and now thirty state legislatures. We've added state based work to our suite
of arenas, obviously also the presidential administration. But the point is that we've spent a lot more time thinking about other arenas where we could use the credibility we've earned over our fifty two years of existence and frankly wield
the influence that we have. And I say that without hubris, but just to say people understand that Heritage has got some influence and so corporate boardrooms, we believed was one of those frontiers that we needed to enter using not just the capital we have to invest, but being able to assemble the capital of like minded investors, whether they be individuals or organszations, and put some pressure on those corporations to remember their primary objective, which is to earn
a profit, not to implement wokeness, which of course costs money for the shareholders.
And we are.
Really really happy that the early first fruit of this partnership with Robbie Starbuck, who's been such a wonderfully effective activist along these lines, has borne this fruit with sort of the quintessentially American company IBM. And so we're not going anywhere either from the policy arena or now from corporate boardrooms. You can tell I'm really proud of my
colleagues for affecting this change. But I should say that a lot of people have tilled the soil, both at Heritage and outside Heritage over the last several years, and it.
Leads me to this conclusion. I talk often.
I wrote about it in a book that I published last year about the new Conservative movement. And the claim that I make is one that you've actually made your entire career, and that is just because you decide as a conservative to use different tactics to meet the changing landscape of the day doesn't mean that you're leaving your
principles aside. In fact, as I think Ronald Reagan would remind us if he were sitting here and having this conversation with us, you're actually being smart if you're applying those principles using some different tactics, and so getting involved selectively in some of these corporate boardrooms on behalf of common sense is something that Heritage will continue to do and we see now as a central part of how we go about affecting public policy.
Tell us about your book, Dawn's Early Light, Taking Back Washington to Save America.
Ultimately, I was trying to articulate how the conservative movement could move out of what had been an unintended decade or so maybe longer, of complacency and complacency, if I may say, with some good reason, a lot of policy success, frankly because of a role that you played as speaker in the nineteen nineties, success because of Ronald Reagan's success,
because of Heritage and other conservative groups. But when we won the Cold War, the really hard earned peace dividend actually just became an opportunity for well intentioned conservatives to
sort of celebrate successes of the past. And when I became President of Heritage three and a half years ago, I was given the charge by the wonderful board here in my colleagues to chart a path not just for this institution, but for the entire Conservative movement, a path that would be filled with a lot more energy, much
more robust agenda. And so what I talk about in the book is that just as our founders at the beginning of the revolution had to work to refound the country in the Battle of eighteen twelve, from which we get, of course the phrase dawnt early Light from our national anthem, we're having to do the same thing in the twenty first cent which is to say, the new Conservative movement has the same principles that conservatism has always had, going back to Burke and even Aristotle, but our tactics need
to be different. We need to be willing to mix it up a little bit more. We need to be willing, as Trump and Dvance have shown, to build a coalition that to working class and multi ethnic. We need to be willing to tell our allies around the world, if you want to continue to be an ally with us, you're going to have to pony up the same percentage
of your GDP as the Americans do. And finally, I will say, with tremendous credit to jd Vance, who helped me understand this during his even before his Senate campaign when we became friends, you have to look at public policy not through the lens of Washington or from Wall Street, but obviously through the lens of everyday hardworking Americans. And the more conservatives do that, the more we realize that the three legs of the conservative fusionism stool are mom, dad,
and kids. The more we realize that the most important institution is the family, The more we realize the most important part of the public square is our dinner table. The more we realize that local politics are more important than Washington because it's there that we build the power and influence to revitalize federalism, the better off conservatism will be. And none of these ideas are very few of them newt as you know well.
Are not original to me.
But what I try to do in the book is put them together in a way that is sort of a ten thousand foot view of where we can go over the next twenty five and even one hundred years in this country.
Donald Trump and JD.
Vance's election in November, of course, is providential because, as we've talked about thus far in this conversation, we're ahead of schedule when it comes to building this new conservative movement.
I think you have played an extraordinarily important role in relaunching conservatism with a new dynamism and a new excitement. I say this is some who came to Washington in the nineteen seventies. It's a great joy to me to see you modernizing, looking forward, realizing both at the most local level and at the global level, that there's a role for conservatism and that it's vital in that sense. I think you're really doing a remarkable job for heritage
and for the conservative movement. And that's part of why I was thrilled that you could discuss with us today. The first one hundred days the president has had in the country, said, a remarkable launch. As you look forward to the next hundred days, what concerns you the most.
Top of that list is Congress taking too long to pass reconciliation, not just because it would be bad policy to wait on the extension of tax cuts and attendant budget cuts, not cuts to medicaid, but cuts elsewhere to the point you made at the top of our conversation, but also because of the context in.
Which reconciliation exists.
That context right now is being dominated by this rightly intentioned, largely good tariff regime, one in which tariffs are going to be, as I see it, a short term tool of state craft in order to isolate the Chinese Communist Party and re establish truly fair trade, which of course is what conservatives believe in. But that has created fairly
or unfairly market uncertainty. But even beyond the market uncertainty, it is created because heritage is very much in touch with main street conservatives before we're in touch with Wall Street conservatives. Uncertainty by small capital and it's small businesses, as you know well, who are the engines of this economy.
And so the longer to get to the punchline here, the longer Congress takes to introduce more certainty on tax cuts and on reducing government spending in the near term and midterm, the longer the market and the media, corporate media have to sort of undermine the certainty that they have that Trump and his economic agenda are going to be right for this country. You and I both know that that's the case. Trump's economic agenda is a very
important reset that's long overdue. But if Congress fails to act soon enough, then I think they're going to miss the opportunity, to say the least, to accentuate the momentum the president has. And if you fast forward a year from September of this year, if in fact Congress waits that long to pass reconciliation, then, as you have said in recent media interviews, the economy will not have the opportunity.
Americans will not have the opportunity to invest the capital in the economy for us to see what will be a Trump economic boom. This is one of the lessons, as you no doubt remember that Ronald Reagan took from early in his presidency in not acting soon enough to make the changes so that in nineteen eighty two midterms there wouldn't be the blood letting.
Politically, that's what we have to avoid because.
If in fact there is a blue wave election in twenty twenty six, besides the fact that that would be terrible and include a lot of goofy Democrats who are looney liberals, they're going to impeach Trump. They're going to decap what is so promising, not just for the next four years, but as we've talked about in this conversation Newt potentially the next century.
I think that's right. I think the twenty twenty sixth election is the critical moment because if we can keep the House and pick up a few seats in the Senate, President Trump will have an additional wave of momentum which will lead us I think, to keeping the presidency in twenty eight But if, on the other hand, because we fail to act promptly, we could end up in a
situation where the economy is not strong enough. And I do think it's going to come down to a very simple question, do you think it's working, whatever it is in your particular list. If you think it's working, we're going to win. If you think it's not working, we're going to lose. It's not complicated, it's just hard. And I think in that sense getting this done, and of course you know full well and you have considerable ability
to help with this. We have two wings. We have a very hardline fiscal conservative wing, which is always going to explain that we're not cutting enough. And then you have very vulnerable moderates who are looking back at their district worried about losing any votes because they are among the most vulnerable people somehow, And here I have enormous admiration for Speaker Johnson finding a way to balance those two get a package everybody agrees to vote on, and
doing it in a timely way. And I agree with Speaker Johnson that you get it through the House before Memorial Day, get it through the Senate in June, get it signed by the President by the fourth of July. That's the ticket that'll get us the kind of boom that we need, and I think Heritage will play a significant role in shaping the environment in which that can happen.
We're certainly trying.
As I mentioned to a friend of mine who's an investment capital he lives outside DC. He was asking how optimistic I was about what you just described according to that timeline, I would be, and I said, actually, cautiously optimistic. I would be less optimistic if Speaker Johnson, with whom I'm very close had not shown over the last eighteen months and ability in spite of that thin majority to
get good policy done. And if I think about his ability what seems to be almost all but one of the House Republicans being willing to row in the same direction, even accounting for different priorities that they have, and accounting for the fact that the Senate almost always wants to move more slowly that because President Trump himself is so involved directly in this, and with those of us on the outside at Heritage and Heritage Action really just wasting
no resources and trying to make sure that we can be helpful from the outside. I think this will be a great independence stay gift to the American people, not just this year, but for many years to come. If they get that bill passed, it is all systems go for us to get that done and to aid these great leaders on the inside, like Mike Johnson.
I want to thank you. You're doing a great job. You have certainly brought a level of energy and drive and a historic perspective to Heritage, and I know that you with your leadership, Heritage is going to continue. They have an enormous impact. So I want to thank you for joining me in. I want to tell our listeners they can learn more about the Heritage Foundation and Heritage Action from America at Heritage dot Org. Thank you Kevin very much.
Newt You are terrific. I enjoyed the conversation. God bless you.
Thank you to my guest doctor, Kevin Roberts. You can learn more about the Heritage Foundation on our show page at newtsworld dot com. Newtsworld is produced by Gagishtree sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guarnsey Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team at Gingrishtree sixty.
If you've been enjoying Newtsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcasts and both rate us with five stars and give us a review so others can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of Newtsworld concern my three free weekly columns at ginglishree sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm newt Gannglish. This is Newtsworld.