On this episode of News World, I felt that there were so many different things going on that talking about President Trump's five biggest challenges would really be helpful in framing everything the White House is trying to deal with. And I got there because it occurred to me. When they get up in the morning and they're looking at all these different things, they have to keep all these balls in the air. They have to remember what they are. So the five challenges I want to talk about are,
first of all, the domestic crisis of who governs. Second, the Israeli Iranian War. Third, getting to the big beautiful Bill and getting it signed. Fourth, dealing with the Russia Ukraine fight, which continues to go on, and five the challenge of reshaping the entire world trade system through tariffs. And I think if you look at the five and you think, you know, President Trump has to keep all five of these in mind all day, it'll give you some sense of how much change is underway and how
really complicated it is. Let me start with what I think is going to be a growing domestic crisis. And while you might say that it comes out of the Los Angeles riots, it's really much bigger than that. There have been organized groups who were determined to take on the President and the United States government in a direct confrontation.
You're going to see continued efforts at direct confrontation. And you can tell how determined some Democrats are to force the confrontation when you watch Senator Padilla try to interrupt the Secretary of Homeland Securities press conference to such a degree that he gets arrested, handcuffed, and taken out. This is a United States senator who deliberately is forcing a confrontation.
You see this in the calculated strategic decision of Governor Newsom of California, who has decided that being the anti Trump is his road to get to be the Democratic presidential nominee. And there's this very odd coalition of illegal immigrants who don't want to be deported, radical groups, and a bitterly anti Trump wing of the Democratic Party. And if you see those three as a coalition, that's what's coming together is that constant sense that each of them
has a common enemy and it's the Trump administration. And that because in their world the Trump administration is seen is so bad, anything they do to stop it, or disrupt it, or cause a confrontation is to their advantage. Now, it's an interesting strategy. It was tried in the nineteen sixties, and people tend to forget this, But the period of the late nineteen sixties was the largest left wing insurgency in modern American history. There were twenty five hundred bombs
set off. There were a million people surrounding the Pentagon at one point. There were police riots in Chicago at
the Democratic Convention in nineteen sixty eight. There was a huge fight at Berkeley where radical students tried to take over the campus and literally was an open fight with the California State Police, the California National Guard, and at one point Governor Reagan, who we now think of as a positive, friendly person, but at one point he got so angry he said in a speech, it's going to
take bloodshed. Let's get it over with. There was a huge confrontation between all the different elements of the left, the anti war left, the anti racism left, the.
Pro gay rights left.
All of them came together in the late nineteen sixties early nineteen seventies, and the result was the American people, when forced to choose, gave President Nexon one of the largest majorities in American history. They carried to every state except Massachusetts. Again, Reagan, having been very tough with the students, ended up getting re elected by a seven point margin
over the Democrat. So, when forced to choose the American people prefer orderly structured government, I think you're going to see a continued effort here. And if you think about it, it makes perfect sense because when you're dealing with the disaster of the Biden immigration policy, which essentially was an open.
Border, and you have millions and millions.
Of people here, why would you expect all of them to go cheerfully and pleasantly they want to stay here. They already broke the law to get here. Why wouldn't they break the law to stay here? And if you combine that with the radicals, people like Antifa, who had kept the city of Portland in turmoil for three years, the radicals are always looking for an excuse to be
out there fighting. They were the people who in many ways were very helpful, both in Ferguson were clearly people were being bussed in during the riots and Ferguson clearly during the summer of twenty twenty, there was a nationwide network of people eager to cause trouble, riot and burn
things down. We do have as an additional point here that the Democratic Party, I would say probably sixty percent of it, of the elected Democrats, are now so radically alienated by Trump that causing confrontation strikes them as reasonable because they can't beat him any other way. They're not going to beat him in the Senate, They're not going to beat him in the House. He's gradually taking over the executive branch, which they have dominated for ninety years.
You see this floundering around. So President Trump's first great challenge is to communicate with the country, much like President Eisenhower did in the fifties when he sent troops into Little Rock, Arkansas, much like President Johnson did when he
sent troops into Detroit during a riot. He simply has to communicate to the country that this this is a struggle between the legitimate, constitutional, elected forces of law and people who in fact want to seat usurp and take over governing America for totally different values and totally different reasons.
In the short run, it's going to be a mess, and the long run, it's almost certain that the American people who will believe in support some process of enforcing the law in some process of having people who are here illegally leave the country. So that's the first great challenge and has to spend some time every single day dealing with that, because it doesn't go away. They don't say, oh, we know you're busy, why don't we come back Thursday.
Every single day from here until it ends, you're going to see some kind of challenge somewhere in America, and you're going to see an entire network, some of it being the news media. You may remember the reporter in Los Angeles who's talking about how happy and friendly people looked as cars were burning, which, if you think about it's pretty weird. So you're going to have news media on the other side, you're going to have an effort to paint this and to use it as a device
to disrupt the momentum of the Trump administration. Momentum which I have reported recently in a newsletter means that since the election, over a million people have shifted from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, and as of this week, a Quinnipiac poll showed the Democrats in the House are down to twenty one percent approval, so from their perspective.
They're desperate to find a way to change the momentum, and that has to be ultimately the number one challenge, because the president has to be able to govern the country in order to have an effective presidency. The second big challenge frankly blew up, although people could see it coming for months now. President Trump has said to the Iranians, why don't we arrange a deal where you give up
your nuclear weapons program and we'll drop the sanctions. You re enter the world of prosperity, you have a great future. We don't have any particular reason to fight with you. And for months the Iranians have said no, that their bottom line is they have to have an ability to build nuclear weapons. Well, what that means is that you are dealing with a genuine crisis, because remember that this particular Iranian dictatorship says publicly that they want to destroy
Israel and destroy the United States. And the Ayatola Hamenis actually gone to national television and reassured the Iranian people that these are not just slogans, that their policy is to destroy Israel and destroy the United States. So Prime Minister Netnahu is the longest serving prime minister in Israeli history. He was very patient, watched this for months, and the Iranians clearly refused to give up their nuclear program. And so the Israelis, who had very long time had a
plan to do this, had a combined operation. Remember that Mussad, which is the Israeli intelligence service, focuses pretty narrowly on the survival of Israel, and at that job, it is probably the best intelligence service in the world. They perform
astonishing things. And in the last couple of days we now know they infiltrated weapons into Iran so that they could take out a variety of missiles, of aircraft, defense systems and other things, and they could identify where scientists and generals were, so that when some two hundred Israeli fighter planes crossed into Iranian airspace, they knew exactly where they're going, exactly what they.
Were going to hit.
And Prime Minister Netniel who has said publicly and explicitly they're going to continue this air campaign until they completely destroy any possible nuclear program. So that is an enormous shift.
You know, Israel has now I think really spurred on by the massacres in October two years ago, where they were so stunned to realize how vulnerable they were, and they were so horrified by the number of people, including children and babies, who were killed, and the grotesque hostility of women being drag naked through the streets, people behaving, rockstrown at them. They methodically set out to destroy Amas,
which they're still in the process of doing. They broke the back of Hezbollah with a series of brilliant intelligence operations. So AMAS is on their south, Hesblas in the north in Lebanon, and by the way, now that has Bela has been shattered, the Lebanese government announced publicly that they would not in any way participate in an effort to attack Israel. Over this assault in Iran, then the Syrian
government collapsed. The replacement government, although it's led by somebody who we've defined as a terrorist for years, has said very clearly they don't want to fight anybody. They just want to find a way to rebuild Syria, which has been damaged now for almost twenty years by an internal civil war. So that front now has been solved, and so the great opponent is Iran. Iran is a very
big country, about twice the size of Texas. Israel's a relatively small country, I think about the size of New Jersey.
So you have a David and Goliath moment. But the fact is that the Israelis have extraordinarily competent military in an even more competent intelligence service, and my guess is that they'll keep pounding on the Iranians, certainly until they've destroyed the nuclear program and potentially until they've destroyed the regime and allowed the Iranian people to reclaim their own country. Every poll I've seen says over eighty percent of the
Iranian people dislike the regime. But it's a police state, and it's ruthless and it will kill you, and so they're not able to get rid of it. But I suspect if it's weakened enough that in fact it may fall and you may see sort of a post Byatola Iran in the not distant future. But that's again, that means every single day President Trump has to get up and get a briefing on his exactly what's going on and who's getting involved? Are the Russians going to try
to get involved? On many ways, Iran has been a client state of Russian and the Iranians have sold the Russians a huge number of weapons to fight in the Ukraine War. Are the Chinese going to try to get involved? And pretty hard for them to do. It's a long way off and they don't have the kind of deep sea naval power we do. Over the next few days, we'll see how things evolve. What's impressive is that all
of the Arab states, there's nobody defending Iran. The Saudis are terrified of the Iranians, the UAE is terrified of the Iranians. They probably deep down are pretty happy and hope these willies will finish the job. But that's the second challenge. So on the one sound front, President Trump has to look at home and deal with real opposition and real hostility. On a second front, he has to try to manage what's going on in the Middle East, and one try to keep the Americans out of it,
which they've done a good job so far. Secretary Marco Rubio has a Secretary of State, has been very clear that we're not going to pick a fight with Iran unless the Iranians pick a fight with us.
So that's a second challenge.
The third challenge, in some ways, the definition of the success of this administration is the big beautiful bill that's currently in the Senate that passed the House, and you probably notice that as a second step, they passed in the House the Recision Bill to cut nine billion dollars in spending, which was a very direct, very specific cut they are now negotiating. There are a number of people
who want really deep cuts. The fact is they can't get really deep cuts beyond what's in the current build that came out of the House because the House majority is so narrow that they'll lose the Moderates and the Water simply won't vote for really really deep cuts. On the other hand, if you think of this as the first in a series of bills, and I try to remind everyone that when we balance the budget, will I have a speaker. We didn't do it in one bill. Took us four years of constant work to get to
a balanced budget. So I think there's going to be a very big effort made, particularly by Speaker Mike Johnson, to figure out a formula so that the people who want real deep cuts are going to have a chance to get them, but not in this bill. This bill has to remain pretty close I would say ninety five ninety six percent of what came out of the House, because it has to go back through the House again,
and they simply don't have the margin. Something as simple as passing the recision cuts about nine point two billion dollars. They only passed it by a two vote margin. So I think it's really important to recognize that this is going to be a continuing challenge. If I were betting the bill will pass, it will be signed into law, it'll be a huge tax cut, a huge deregulation bill,
and a modest cut in spending. But it will only happen because the President personally gets involved, listen to everybody, and gradually helps hammer out an agreement that everybody can vote for. So here you have the president who already has to pay attention to the domestic challenge of people
who want to take on the American government. He has to deal with what's happening between Israel and Iran, and then he has to find the energy and the time to negotiate with Senators and then to negotiate with the House, and to find a way creatively to get to a bill everybody can vote for. I think they'll get it done, but imagine the amount of time and the level of effort. When we got to the balanced budget agreement with Bill Clinton,
we spent thirty five days face to face. Now imagine what a drain of time and energy that is for a president who already has all these other things on his plate. The fourth great challenge is the Russian Ukrainian War, and here I think President Trump has been deeply disappointed. I think he looked back on his first term when he had a good relationship with Putin and he thought, somehow they could work something out easily, and I think he honestly believed he could get to.
A peace agreement in a few days.
He's gradually learning that, in fact, Putin has decided that this is the capstone of his life, that he is the man who is going to reunify the Russian Empire, and that the key step for that is to crush Ukraine so that it in fact cannot survive as a independent country, and so much a definition of his life
that he's not backing down. And I think my sense is that President Trump has been very disappointed that the inability to get Putin to take seriously finding a way to get to a peaceful solution, and what Putin basically is gambling on is that while they talk that the Russian military, which is about four or five times bigger than the Ukrainian military, that it will gradually wear out
the Ukrainian military and win a crushing military victory. Now there's not much evidence yet that that's going to happen. Ukrainians have turned out to be very inventive. They've always been a center of manufacturing in the Soviet Union. They have lots of engineers and lots of capable people, and they've been very inventive. They drove the Russian Black Sea fleet out of the Black Sea into the Cia of Azov because they've developed a series of drones that could
sink ships. See, you have a five thousand dollars drone and a sixty million dollar cruiser, and the drone would beat the cruiser. The Russians just gave up. They pulled back to get out of range. The recent effort by the Ukrainians to hit the Russian strategic bombers, some of them thirty four hundred miles away from Kiev has amazing achievements, an achievement comparable to some of the things the Israelis have done. So that's going to.
Continue to go on. The question.
In my mind, the Europeans are going to stand firm because the Europeans genuinely do believe that Ukraine is the barrier that protects them from Putin and protects them from Russia. It's not clear to meident Trump comes down in this. He wants peace. He's also very worried about nuclear war. Somehow people convinced him in this first term just how
truly horrible a nuclear war would be. Putin does have six thousand nuclear weapons, and so I think the president, while he's more aggressive than Joe Biden was, he's still careful because he doesn't want to push Putin into a corner where he decides that tactical nuclear weapons are better than being defeated. I think that this will go on for a while. I think it's a great disappointment to President Trump. I think he really did, sincerely believe he could get to a truce and it just didn't quite
work out. So that's the fourth problem. Again. Put yourself in President Trump's position. You wake up in the morning, you look at home to see what's happening in terms of unrest. Then you look to Israel Iran to see how that campaign's going. Then you come back and look at the Congress to see what has to get done to move towards passing this huge important legislation. Then you
pivot and you're looking at Russia and Ukraine. And then finally, the fifth grade challenge is fundamental effort by President Trump
to reorder the entire world trading system. The trading system had grown up as a global system in which the United States sacrificed a great deal economically in order to sustain an open trading system around the whole planet, and other countries learned to take enormous advantage of this, and so over a period of about thirty years, the system became more and more destructive for the United States and
more and more positive for Europe and particularly China. And Trump came along, and he had talked about this a lot back when he was a businessman, so this was not some new theme to him. But he came along and said, look, we're going to simply have to change the agreement. We're the largest market in the world. We ought to have the most leverage. People ought to in fact be paying us for access to our market, and we should not be allowing ourselves to be taken advantage of.
So he has begun to build a tariff Bay East system, which ultimately leads to bilateral that is, one country to one country agreements across the whole planet. It is an enormous undertaking. The truth is virtually every country wants to get into the American market. You're seeing a huge increase in manufacturing in the US by countries where their companies have just decided in order to be able to be productive,
they've got to be in the United States. And you're going to see every country negotiate a unique, separate deal. It's a very large change from the multinational system that had grown up and that had been kind of a global trading system, but one in which everybody else took advantage the United States. Working all that out is going
to take several years. So again you have President has to meet with Secretary Treasury Vessent and others, sit down and look at each of these agreements, decide, you know, what happens with the European Union, what happens with Japan, what happens with China, on and on for about one hundred and ninety countries.
So to wrap all of this up.
I think the five biggest challenges present and Trump faces right now, and the way he has to balance his energy and his focus are first, re establishing domestic order while we in fact do solve the problem of illegal immigration. Second, ensuring that Israel wins the war with Iran and ideally that we help the Iranian people take control of their
government again. Third, getting the big beautiful bill through the House and Senate and signed into law this summer so that the American people have money in their pocket so
the economy starts booming by early next year. Fourth, sustaining the Ukrainians, pressuring putin potentially going towards something like Senator Lindsey Graham's sanctions bill, which has eighty five sponsors in the Senate and which would be imposed very very harsh sanctions on Russia, and try to basically bankrupt the government. And then finally continue day by day negotiate the tariff agreements with Fortunately somebody is smart and as capable as
Secretary Bessen taking the lead. It is a big agenda, It is an exhausting agenda, and I think, frankly, I don't know of any other president who could carry simultaneously as many different challenges as President Trump, and I think it will be fascinating to see how it evolves, and in future weeks I'll report again on how I see this whole process evolving.
Thank you for listening.
Newtsworld is produced by Gangris Street sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producers guard Zie 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 Podcast and both rate us with five stars and give us a review so others can learn what it's all about.
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I'm newt Gingrich. This is Newtsworld.