This is Gavin Newsom and Newke Gingridge continues, you worked on this book, which again is you know, it's very much in the spirit of Reagan to you talk about his last speech. I mean, I mean that's where he talked about Lady Liberty's torch. And you know, we talked about that life force of New Americans, et cetera, and
and and and again. My my fundamental concern about this assault on higher education is the impact that we'll have in terms of our capacity to get these pH ds and stem folks and and to be able to pull uh that chill it's already I think having around the rest of the world, but pull the best in the brightest minds and and and keep them as part of
that innovation cycle. But you you specifically, I'm you brought up in the book, which I loved, the Chinese Exclusion Act, and you know, so much of that comes from you know, the embers of that are very familiar folks out here in the Bay Area. You know, I remember what I would refer to unfairly. I would admit this guy Dennis Kerney, who was sort of the original Trump, and he began and ended every speech by saying, whatever else we do.
The Chinese must go, and they were building virtual walls to keep the Chinese out, and of course the beginning of the Chinese Exclusion Act ultimately came out of the Bay Area and some of those movements. But interesting to me is we're now close to peak immigration. Again. We dropped very low in nineteen seventy I think it was four point eight percent, don't quote me, and now we're closer to fourteen fourteen point eight wherever it is, again,
don't quote me, but it's significantly grown. How concerned are you talk about assimilation? You talked about the things you can't talk about from a European prism. But as you balance the journey to America and you balance this immigration debate and deal with the ish of criminal behavior and quote unquote illegal immigration as you refer to it, how do we find a balance? How do we strike that balance at peril we go back to the instincts of the eighteen eighties, or go back, frankly to well, I
mean maybe we're back there today. Curious you're assessment, I think no.
I think first of all, there were two huge challenges. One is sheer volume. I mean, you can't have six eight nine million people crossing the border illegally. The other which I began writing about in the eighties, I was
visited one of the congressmen in Georgia by vietname. He's a small business owner who said that when he came over after the fall of Saigon, he and his brother arrived and he went straight to work, and his brother got hooked up in southern California with the welfare office and learned that you could get public housing, and you could get food stamps and so forth. And so his brother never developed the kind of entrepreneurial drive because life
was adequate. And it hit me that what had worked historically in America, which was very tough, people should not kid themselves. You know. Clossa's grandmother came through all As Island. We actually went up and looked at her. Her signature and her.
From Poland, Is that right, huh Polish?
Yeah, she's her grandmother's Polish on her father's side. Ironically, since she's been nominated to the ambassador of Switzerland, her grandmother on the on the Swiss side, which is her mother, is from Burn, So she's actually gone back to her grandmother's home area. But the paternal grandmother came from Poland in nineteen o eight and you can literally track her coming in. Well, every person that came in was inspected for health, and if you had a communicable disease, you
were excluded and sent back. Everybody was checked to see if they were willing to go to work, and if you weren't prepared to work, you were sent back. I mean, it wasn't you know, It wasn't an automatic open door. It was it was a it was a controlled open door. But there was a second part which was very tough. People expected you to become American. They expected you to learn English, they expected you to go to work, they expected you to be a neighbor, expected you to pay
the law. And so there's a great deal of socialization that went into being an immigrant in the US. We went into a cycle which which was captured in a book called the Tragedy of American Compassion. UH, where starting really in the big way with the great society, it became inappropriate to suggest to people that they give up whatever wherever they came from. UH, to say that the habits and the culture you came from, aren't you know, So if you happen to come from a place which
engages in clinterectomy. Who are we to suggest as a matter of women's rights, then maybe that's not a very good habit, right. It would be like in the middle of the nineteenth century when sutti was still practiced in India and widows were expected to be burned on the with their husbands. So the question becomes, can we find a path back to work? And I voted for all this, And in nineteen eighty six we passed the Simpson Zoliac. We thought we were giving an amnesty to three hundred thousand,
turned out to be three million. And Reagan and his diary says, I signed the bill because we were going to get control of the border, and we're going to have a work permit system so we could control immigration. And of course he got neither. So is it one of the guys who voted for this thing?
Yeah, you were an advocate. I think what in nineteen eighty five, right even before when it was in its infancy in bill form.
So you know, I think you we're not going to deport ten or twelve or fourteen million people. No, it's not going to happen. We are going to deport most of the criminals. And if you are here without having yet been a criminal, and you become a criminal, we're
going to deport you and then once. I mean my theory of all this, which may be wrong, but it's part of what we did a journey to America is to remind people that it's okay to be against illegal immigration, but you want to be passionately for legal immigration, and you want to recognize that they're dividing lines. I'm very concerned about the Dreamers, the people who came here two three, four years of age. Tally, they should be treated differently
than they're being treated right now. It's just it's wrong to toss them in as though they're illegal in any traditional sense.
So is it just they're just a political football, then that's right.
Well, and most of them don't speak the language of their native country. They grew up in America. For all practical purposes, it is their native country. So we couldn't have that debate until we got control of the border. My guess is that by sometime in twenty seven we will begin to have a very healthy debate. People will have calmed down and will now be into how do we solve this problem as opposed as just being so rigid,
and it may even happen starting in twenty six. I mean, I thought that the speed I don't know what your reaction was, but I thought the speed with which they turned around the southern border was almost unbelievable.
Yeah, I mean directionally it had significantly declined in terms of the total number of border crossings. But unquestionably, Yeah, the acuity to which in essence is shut down is rather remarkable considering where we were two years prior. But clearly the message was delivered a little bit. In the last nine months to a year, the Biden administration starting.
To gradually shift, but then Tom came in and.
It really no no doubt. I mean, look, rhetoric matters, and I'm curious just from that perspect because I think a lot of it was rhetorical. I mean, it was substantive in terms of some of the moves that he's made, mostly rhetorical, I think in terms of the impacts even occurring before in the executive orders when in effect, and certainly no fundamental legislative shifts yet. But what are you
what about the rhetoric? What about sort of the pain a lot of our diverse communities feel about the rhetoric from the President himself. And you know, is it tactical you say he supports legal immigration. We saw that debate play out with a Bannon Musk frame, But that debate is still pretty alive in the base of the mega movement right anti immagrant legal too.
Look, the challenge for Trump's critics on this line of reasoning is that he got the highest percentage any Republicans ever gotten in the Hispanic community. He got the largest percentage of African American males of any Republican since Eisenhower, you know, seventy years ago. Right, He's the first Republican to get a majority of the Catholic vote. So an awful lot of people who are first and second generation legal immigrants who are as mad about illegal immigrants as
people whose relatives came over in seventeen hundred. I mean, there's a sense of I paid my dues, I waited, I obeyed the law on at frankly, I left these people behind. I don't want a Venezuelan gang in my neighborhood. And while that's exaggerated, it's real enough, and particularly if you look at the people you know who've been killed or the people who've been raped. You don't need many symbols. No country decide, you know, I don't. That's a risk. I don't know.
I just I miss. What I hate is how it's exploited. And as we know, I mean, we all know the stats. I mean, native born are more likely to commit crimes than forum born, legal or or without documentation. But you're right, I mean what you just said is Poe accurate. It doesn't take that many examples.
And I suspect if you limited it down to MS thirteen gang members be willing gang members. There are enough examples there. You're right, you can earn a living off of it.
Look, I get your broader point, but I'm encouraged by your core belief that Trump has the capacity, to your point, to move if he feels that we've made the progress on the border to a much more comprehensive conversation.
You said publicly that we ought to really be thinking about if you graduate in science or engineering, we give you a green card with your graduation.
Well that's been challenged by him eliminating all the foreign students at Harvard.
But we'll see that's now let me suggest to you as somebody who's studied Trump a pharamount. There's a there's a John Wayne film where it's really mad at somebody picks up a chair, breaks it over their head and his partner turns and says, God, you get really go crazy. As several foreign governments have learned. You take Trump head on and he goes nuts, and he says, I'm going to prove to you it's classic alpha male. I now have to prove to you who's dominant. Well, Harvard decided
let's test this theory. Okay, So they now have Donald Trump about four o'clock every morning figuring out what he can do next. And he is going to beat on them and beat on them. There's nothing to do with the rest of the country. I hope not. Harvard has decided to pick a head on fight. They're a big institution, They've got a ton of money, they have great prestige,
and we'll see whether or not they can. This is a little bit like in I think it's nineteen o two, they have a huge coal mine strike and Theodore Roosevelt calls him the coal mine owners and says, this is going to it's settled, and the coal mine. Unders say, well, you don't understand, we own the coal mines. And Roosevelt says, you don't understand. I am the President of United States, and I will have the army take over all of
your minds. And they said, oh, well, let's talk. I mean, if Harvard were semi smart, you know, this is a losing fight, you know, if they win round one in court, because he's going to be there for four years. They were in one, win one round in court. The Justice Department will be there with round two, three and four, and he's not going to give up until they cawtew. It's just now he's not necessarily going to go and pick a fight with you know, uh, the Ohio State University,
partly because he likes their football team. As a general rule, this is classically Trump behaves. You saw just do it to the Europeans. The Europeans said, we don't want to talk. He said, fine, fifty percent tariff next Monday.
And then he negotiates against them.
Oh facts, you do want to talk?
Yeah, well, and then he delayed is the I mean, I by the you will you open this door? And mister free trade, I remember you back in the day I'm old enough to remember after and everything else, and that was bipartisan. It was hardly new Gingridge speaker, Gingridge. It was celebrated in my party. So you you've evolved, a lot of folks have not, just you know, including
by the way Democrats. I mean, the tariff policies were advanced and uh and increased against China in particular during the Biden administration, but not across the board, not with this fits and starts, not negotiating against ourselves. Tell me, you tell me, tell me that you find the approach to tariff's under the Trump administration full hearty uh and not necessarily productive at this stage? Or am I missing this great negotiators capacity to deliver punches like a chess master.
Five months from now? Are year four? Well?
I think I think a couple of things. One I would say, looking back, I was wrong.
Do you say that conveniently or do you I mean, no, I.
Say that because I evolved over ten I'll give you the best example. I really thought, as did most of the people who studied it, that opening up China economically was a great step towards a more open China. And I totally misunderstood Dung Challpegs Southern tour where he gave the speeches about markets and said, you know, I don't care whether it's a black cat or a white cat, as long as it catches the rat, and sounded like
he was really talking about openness. Well, a couple of years ago, I did a book called Trump and China, and I went back and did a lot of research, and I was frankly pretty embarrassed. I mean, Dung Shaopeng was one of the twenty four people in Paris who create the Chinese Commnist Party. He leaves Paris at the end of World War One, goes to Moscow and spends a year at Lenin University studying Marxism. Leninism. He is saying,
and none of us caught this. We have to have a market to create enough prosperity to strengthen the party's grip on the country, because if people stay too poor, they're going to throw the party out. So I'm not going to an open market so I can open up China. I'm going to open market so I can sustain the dictatorship. And by the way, since it is a dictatorship and since we are China, if I get to rip you off.
That's fine, now part of my education. After I left the speakership, I was approached by a former Walmart president who's going to do a deal in China, and he thought having a former speaker would help given negotiating. So my lawyer talked to the Chinese lawyers and after he looked at the proposed contract, he said, let me get this straight. You can you can define what his interest is worth on any given day, and you can buy it at your definition. They said, yeah, that's how we
do things. He's not with my client. So it's been looking at that. And then in the European case, the Europeans, and this is a genuine tragedy, and I think you have to read JD. Vans's speeches in Paris and Munich in this context. And again I'm a European historian. I've lived in four European countries and I have an enormous affection for Europe. Historically, the Europeans decided to go to litigation and regulation rather than innovation, literally the exact opposite of Silicon Valley.
That's interesting.
In the long run, that's a losing game. So what they have to do is they have to somehow tax Amazon or Apple or Google or Meta or Microsoft because they literally can't compete with them, and this isn't so they rig the game in clever ways. And for a very long time we operated within a model of somehow trying to get to a balanced world where it would
also you know, the World Trade Organization would work. I mean I was for China joining the WTO, and then you realize after a while it just this current system doesn't work. Now what Trump has done, which I don't
candidly don't think he's explained very well. Trump is a reversion to the late nineteenth century Republican model, best articulated by William McKinley, that we are going to have higher tariff walls, we're going to have higher paid workers, we're going to have huge prosperity, and in the end, because we're the largest economy, we have and I mean he loves this. Yeah, he knows in every negotiation, including China, in the end, he is the bank they're going to
have to negotiate with it. Sure, And so he's now going to have an exciting and enthusiastic six or eight months. I tell all of my friends, do not look at your stock until August, right.
Or the lack of stock in the warehouse because of all the indecision and the business chill. I mean, a lot of people that aren't going to make it five months. That's my fear and disproportionate number out here in America's largest economy, California, with all that goods movement, that dock workers and truckers, and obviously the small business supply chains.
I mean, it's being felt. It's pretty profound. I hope there's an endgame here, but time is not on the side of a lot of these small entrepreneurs.
I think that's right. Look, there's gonna be a lot of floundering around, and ultimately we may be at a better future, but the interim is going to be I tell people, this is not a beer party on a houseboat on a quiet lake. This is newing in the rapids of a wild river. And that's just a fact.
All right, Let's go back, just briefly, because I'd be remiss if we didn't talk about it. So I here's this is how I spent my Memorial Day. I somehow landed on a New Hampshire town hall that you and President Clinton conducted together. It was shockingly civil tuned in because I was expecting the opposite, and the fact that the President of the United States, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, at the peak of their differences, engaged
in a civil conversation. It makes me long for those days or wait or not, because my reflection was one of critique and constant you know, just you know, confrontation, victriol, government shutdowns. So which was it? What was your relationship like? Do you remember that day in New Hampshire? What the hell were you two thinking? And what's happened to our
country since? And how how much do you feel, mister speaker in the lunch conversation responsible for the first some of that sort of toxicity as some have described in our politics as a relations to the relationship that you had with our party, our party with you and the contract with American Oh.
Wellther you just managed to ask about three different questions.
I did, Yes.
So off, Gwen and I had a I think remarkably good personal relationship. We were about the same age group, We're both we're both inherently graduate students. We like to sit around and shoot the breeze about occasionally late at night. I go down and have a drink with him, and we just bsked. I mean it was just you know, as you know, he is one of the great Yes, it's in American history. I mean all that does relax and let him roll for a while. And so in
that sense, what happened was which was, which was? And I wrote a book on it called March to the Majority. We spent sixteen years growing on Majority. All of it's standing on Reagan's shoulders. The contract is entirely Reagan, but when we won, because we had based everything we were doing on the American people, So every single item in
the contract is seventy percent or better. There's a big fight in the White House in June of ninety five and Reagan's staff, I mean Carter Clinton's staff says, you've got to fight Gingrich. You know, you owe it to the to the party. And Clinton, Clinton, who had been beaten in nineteen eighty for reelection and knew that there wasn't fun, said to them, I do that. I want
to lose. I'm not going to fight Gingrich. I'm going to protect the things that I have to protect, and I'm going to take shots I didn't want to can but I want to work with him because if I work with him, I'll probably get reelected, and I like being in the White House. And it was a huge braw. I mean I remember one point, Leon Panetta. We were in a negotiating session and Panetta was screaming at him
and saying, you can't give that away. We had Democrats who lost their seats because they voted for that, and Clinton's long, yeah, but I don't want to lose my seat, you know, And then he turned to me and said, I guess I can't do that one. This may surprise you. We negotiated for thirty five days, face to face. We produced this.
I mean literally the two of you in the room, not outsourcing.
Staff other people around, but the two us sitting across the table for thirty five days, and we produced the only four balanced budgets in a century. And we did it because we listened to each other and we talk with each other. Now, I was a harsh partisan for a reason you'll understand perfectly. I mean it's what you have not You haven't really had the kind of quality of opposition you should have in California that Methought goes out and spends sixteen years and gradually becomes the majority,
which is tragic. It's not good for the state.
Yeah, I hear you again. I mean I get that argument absolutely, yeah, so sincerely, Yeah, No, So I.
Had to be polarizing because I'm the minority. I mean, if I'm going to get in, I've got to make sure that people decide not to vote for the Democrats.
And so it's not your natural state. I mean it was, I mean, I mean it was. It was a very intentional strategy.
I mean, like this, because I think in some ways you'll identify my natural state is winning.
There you go, I appreciate that.
If sitting for thirty five days wins, I'm for winning fighting. If closing the government for twenty seven days is a necessary prelude negotiate, I'm for closing the government for twenty seven days. But they were It's not a personality thing. They were instrumentalities of getting something done.
And so that town Hall sort of reflected that that you guys had a civil conversation outdoors in New Hampshire. I think he said you happened to be there already he was coming down. Do you remember it at all?
Yeah, Bo Bob Dole had we had this deal. Don't wanted to run for president, and he didn't want me because I was the brand new guy on the block and I was nationally pretty popular at that time. He didn't want me to run for president. So he loaned me his entire New Hampshire organization, and I went up
and toured New Hampshire. And while we were up there, we suddenly heard, Oh, Bill Clinton's going to be here, and so we promptly said to the press, wouldn't it be great to get together and have a debate about or a dialogue about election reform. Well, the White House suddenly gets this call from the press corps. Is the President willing to sit down with new Gingrich in New Hampshire.
You can imagine what Clinton's staff said. Wow. And so they then interviewed me, and I said I'd be delighted because a great thing for America to have the two of us told, oh, I wish one. Clinton goes, oh, yeah, I guess we'll do it. And if you watch it, I mean he's very good.
Yeah, but I mean candidly, it was not I didn't enjoy it. You were. You were very good. I mean, answered tough questions. I mean a lot of seniors are there and you're talking about, you know, cuts to their programs and others. I mean, it was, it was, it was. It was a remarkably civil conversation at the highest level. And but there's not been anything like that since well.
You know, it was a tragedy. There's a book called The Pact, written by guy I think a Duke, in which he found all the papers, interviewed people. Bill and I actually had an agreement in late ninety seven that we were going to launch an effort in ninety eight to reform Medicare and social security, and he would do it in the State of the Union. I would do it in a major speech in Georgia, and we were
going to work together. And then Lewinsky occurred. Well, at that point I had to become partisan, and he had to go to the left because it was the left that was going to save him, and so boom. But the book's kind of fascinating because it's really true. We did a lot of We created the Heart Rudman Commission, which was the deepest and biggest review of national security since nineteen forty eight. And actually after I stepped down, even though I had helped him impeach him in the house.
They called him, said would you like to serve on the commission? Since you created it? She said yes, So so it just did that kind of relationship.
It's fascinating. And you reminded me of the impeachment. I mean, so what do you And it was the third part of that three legged stool question. And forgive me for
not articulating it more effectively. But and again this is not an indictment, but it was in the conversation of Lunch who said he was never more proud to be associated with anything than the Contract with America, which was fascinating to me, how quick he was to not only defend it, but how reverential he thought it was at the time, in terms of just being a communication document, how it had transparency, how it did represent, as you said, the will of the American people, at least in terms
of the seventy percent threshold, and the fact that you submitted it to the public, meaning you tested that theory. But the impeachment, the toxicity, the winning at all costs hardly new in novel and politics. So I'm not suggesting you're the OG in this space. But the tea part people connect this moment to those moments? Is that fair unfair? Did Democrats oversimplify?
I think we founally mishandled the impeachment, and I think it was partly because of Kenneth Starr. In my mind, the impeachment was about committing perjury, and it actually goes back to arguments we have today about one or not whether the Supreme Court is ruled. And I suspect that the Supreme Court already ruled, we wouldn't have had a
leg to stand on. But the question was it was pretty clear that he had been convicted of committing perjury, which you know is a follow me, and in fact, he later on was barred from practicing law for five years in Arkansas. I thought it was important as a matter of constitutional record that a president should be held accountable. But when Starr came out with his report, it was so lurid and so related to sex that it poisoned
the whole project. I'll never forget that summer. I was home in August and my two daughters and I went to lunch at Okay Cafe, and and they both looked at it, and they said to me, if our four oh one case get destroyed, because of some stupid intern We're going to be really pissed off. I thought, okay, I had clearly misunderstood the American people and how they were
going to rank, how this was going to work. And in a way, Clinton's a whole behavior from ninety two on changed the whole context in which you deal with sexual issues in politics. Yeah, you couldn't imagine the Hillary Clinton Donald Trump the last debate in a pre Bill Clinton world. That's insponsible.
Well, and of course Bannon bringing out the ghosts of the past in the front row of that debate as well.
That it was Bannon who said to me, we concluded she was going to go to the basement and we were going to get there first.
Yeah, that was a look. Look in closing, give me something more optimistic. Are we get Look, I'm new scum? Yeah, mean here we are. I appreciate your book. Like June third, we got We've got Trump's triumph. But in new scum everything's scum. This, this sort of divisiveness, this everyone's longing to figure out a way to get damn back together and start to solve problems.
Says a historian, One of two things has to happen either, there has to be a very concerted effort to reach out and to try to find bipartisan ways to work together. I just did a podcast with Ted Cruz, who had worked with the Amy Kloboshar, the Democrat from Minnesota on the cour you would be very aware of just last week, jump sign that bill right, totally bipartisan. Yeah, and it's possible that you could see just enough bipartisanship on practical
things begin to reknit the system. Uh. Otherwise, what has to happen is one side of the it has to win. I mean, historically, when you're in a period where both sides think it's life and death, and both sides think they potentially could win or lose, the drive to more
and more extremism. I was right struck. Alan Gwelso is an extraordinary professor of Abraham Lincoln, and Welso wrote me at one point in the two thousand and four campaign and said, the level of vitriol against Trump resembles the level of vitriol against Lincoln among Southern slaveholders in the eighteen sixty campaign. He said, you can row almost an exact parallel, and it's because both the left in its modern form, and the slaveholders actually saw their way of
life about to be extinguished. I mean Trump is a mortal threat if you're AOC. He's not just a competitor. But if he wins, her world has shrinks radically. So you either have to get to a point where one side clearly one this is FDR in thirty four thirty six, where he wins so decisively that everybody operates within the Rooseveltian world Jefferson after eighteen hundred, I would hope you
could have a combination. That is, I encourage constantly finding ways to be bipartisan, because I think it's better for the country. It's how the founding fathers designed the system. They wanted to make it so hard that it's very, very difficult, as we just saw in the House, for a purely partisan effort to work. Yeah, and that's by design. I mean they wanted to avoid dictatorship by creating a machine so hard to work that we can't we can barely get it to work voluntarily.
I appreciate it. And you have a chapter in the book you talk about the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary, and you know, and our pride and the best of Greek democracy and the Roman Republic, three co equal branches of government. I hope that's the spirit that defines that. I have two final questions over under simple questions, Speaker Jeffreys sixty percent.
Chance, oh forty five?
Okay, Well see we're gonna have to have another episode on that. And then twenty twenty eight, President Vance.
Probably runs against Governor Newsom. Vice President Advance runs against Advance. And look at some of your other candidates. I mean, the governor, of all due respect, the governor of Illinois as a presidential can give me a break.
I'm not I'm not getting the middle, but I would not be at all shocked to have a Newsome Advance election. Well that's a hell of a way to end this podcast. By the way, I appreciate you doing this. Uh it's it's a hell of a thing, and I hope folks got a lot out of it. I certainly did. And congratulations on your forty fourth book, Trump's Triumph on sale June third, good sale. Good to see you, Thank you, sir.
It was a lot of fun. I hope you enjoyed it.