Speaker Gingrich, welcome. Good to be with you, as always.
Man, there's so much flying around. I know. First off, your reaction to, congratulations on the book, your reaction to Musk's tweets, ex-post.
He said, I'm sorry, I can't go along with this. Shame on those who voted for it. You know you did wrong.
You know it. Well, look, Musk's a brilliant guy. He really did more than anybody else to get America back in the lead in space.
And I admire him for his technical knowledge. He doesn't understand politics in government. He proved that the way he did. The way he came in with Doge, you know, and walked around with a power saw when you're talking about people's lives.
It was a horrible contrast. And I think he's left Washington in frustration. He has every right to have an opinion. I don't think any senators or House members are going to notice his opinion. They're going to say... Well, Democrats have pointed out and praised him.
Of course. I mean, look, if you're a Democrat right now, Elon Musk is your favorite person because you think he's causing a lot of things. I suspect that President Trump is saddened. I think he liked Musk genuinely. I think he's probably not deeply shocked because Musk is a guy of very strong language and very strong opinions. And candidly, given the stories that we've seen recently about how much drug use Musk was engaged in, you have to ask yourself, under what circumstance did he say these things?
Which is ketamine. But, Mr. Speaker, from what you know, it's a thousand pages, from what you know, what do you like about this bill besides the tax cuts being renewed? And what worries you about the bill? Well, look, I'm very worried that we don't have any commitment as a country right now to getting spending under control.
So you go through the... Anything you want to cut has 200 people jumping up and down screaming, that'll be horrible. And I think when I was Speaker, we balanced the budget for four straight years for the only time in a century. And we did it because we had a big goal, which was balancing the budget. And people would tolerate change because they saw the goal was so big.
Very hard to get these kind of cuts in a vacuum. That concerns me. I'm very concerned that we get the tax cuts through as early as possible. I think if it can get through this summer, and I think it will, then I think you're going to see next year a genuine Trump boom. I think the economy is going to be booming in a way that will be pretty startling. And you may have seen that the latest numbers on the gross domestic product were dramatically higher. There was much more economic growth in the last quarter than the economists expected.
So John Thune was on with us yesterday. And here's what he said about the CBO, which seems to be off quite a lot. In one, they project 1.8% growth, cut five. If you look at CBO, Brian, in the past, they have a long history of just flat being wrong. Over the past seven years, they scored the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and the economy grew 5% more than what they projected. Revenues were $1.5 trillion higher than what they projected in 2017. And when the Democrats passed their so-called Inflation Reduction Act last year, CBO missed the mark on energy provisions by about 400%.
I mean, these guys are notorious for missing on these projections. One thing we do know is if we reduce taxes and cut regulations and have an abundant energy supply in this country, the economy grows and expands. And that's where you start seeing these deficits get a lot smaller by comparison. So do you hear politics in that, or do you hear facts in that? Look, in the four years we balanced the budget, we fought with the Congressional Budget Office every day. There were about 500 liberals sitting in an office building applying their totally false understanding of how the world works. I think the Congressional Budget Office ought to be replaced.
I think it is destructive of America's future, and I think it is consistently wrong in underscoring the advantage of tax cuts and failing to score accurately the size of spending. Let's talk about the President Trump you know. You've known him when he came onto the scene. You were open to him.
You ran for president the previous cycle. So why was it a traditional conservative Republican like you were open to this outsider businessman with ideas that don't come from the conservative playbook? Look, I tell everybody, Trump is not a traditional conservative.
He didn't read National Review. He doesn't automatically fit in, but he is the most effective anti-liberal in our lifetime. And so if your opposition is to left-wing ideas, big government, huge bureaucracy, enormous amounts of deficit spending, Donald Trump's with you. If you're tired of America being taken advantage of worldwide, then Donald Trump's the right guy. He breaks out of all of the traditional mold of the national establishment, and he does it across the board, and he does it frankly with an enormous amount of courage.
When he was sitting in that courtroom in May and the jury's deciding whether he's going to be convicted or not become a felon, if I went up to Newt Gingrich and I said, Newt, what is the chance this guy's going to get the nomination to be the next president, what would you have told me? A hundred percent. Look, the country got it. The country understood. Even at the time you thought that?
Yeah. I mean, look, I started writing Trump's Triumph in October because I was convinced he was going to win, but I always thought he'd win because he personifies for about half the country the courage and the drive and the intelligence to break up the establishment. And there was a movement. This is part of why the book's called both Trump's Triumph and the secondary thing is America's Greatest Comeback. The American people were carrying Donald Trump. I mean, the American people helped him beat the president and then helped him beat the vice president.
Nobody had ever done this in history. And I think Trump gains enormous strength when he goes to these big rallies and realizes that the New York Times may not like him, Harvard may hate him, the Democrats may be nasty, but there are millions of Americans who believe he is the one guy who can save this country. How did he lose in 2020? The whole election was rigged all the way through. I mean, when none of the Internet companies would carry the New York Post for the last three weeks, as the New York Post accurately reported on the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, when 51 intelligence officers sign a totally false letter saying that the Biden laptop is a Russian.
From Leon Panetta, guys with respect to Mike Morrell, who was Bush's former deputy. They betrayed their trust to the nation. When you have Zuckerberg at Facebook, and now Mehta, putting in, I think, $420 million to turn out the vote in Democratic precincts, $420 million. You add up every single thing, and what you had was the last stand of the old order doing everything it could to beat Donald Trump. And you think that was part of it, but he did get more votes than anybody else in Republican history, but it's Joe Biden got 82, but 82 million. I don't say it was stolen Election Day, but I say it was rigged for months and months and months. And they did everything they could to make sure he couldn't win.
Do you ever get, sometimes we forget. President Trump was president, and yet people on the outside seem to be undermining him with more power. It's like the Biden team and Democrats seem to have had more power because they had a cooperative media than the sitting president. So instead of using the power of the president, he was like, well, what happened? How did we lose all this influence? What was going on on social media? And I feel like that's been broken.
The things you described have been broken. The opposition, I mean. Look, that's why Trump's triumph is so important, because when they did everything they could, investigations to impeachments, four efforts to put him in jail, two assassination attempts, and he's still standing, and he clearly has more votes than Kamala Harris, and he carries all seven of the swing states, I think it sort of broke morally the rational wing of the left. And they said, you know, the country's sending us a really big signal here.
Now, the emotional, religious wing of the left, the AOCs, are just going to double down because they have a religious belief system, not a political belief system. So the president of the United States also is a situation where I think he thoroughly understands the job. He went from the least experienced president to the most experienced president. You know, it was very, I think historians will look back and say that it was remarkably helpful that he got four years in the wilderness. Because if he had gotten re-elected, he wouldn't have had the time to think through everything that he had learned, to think through what worked, what didn't work. It made him dramatically more— Who to use, who not to use.
Yeah. I mean, so he's been much tougher about who's in the administration, and he's been much more thoughtful about realizing he's building a team. And I think he picked J.D. Vance in that sense. Vance is a year younger than Richard Nixon when Eisenhower picked Nixon, and Vance is now the youngest vice president in American history.
And that was deliberate because he felt that Vance understood MAGA, and Vance would be in fact a continuation of Trump after the 2008 election. What's also underappreciated, but not by you and your book, is that for a 78-year-old guy, he's remarkably open to 20- and 30-year-olds. And number two is to something brand new. As much as he likes tradition, AI, tell me about it. Crypto, let's learn more about it. So I'm open to it.
And the fact that he's open to it doesn't come off as an expert. David Sachs, come on in here. Maybe you want to be my czar for this.
Let's find out what these people want. And Joe Biden made it easy by saying, I want nothing to do with either one of those things. We'll go with Newt Gingrich in a moment. By the way, his book is now out.
You should go grab it. Trump's Triumph, America's Greatest Comeback. You'll listen to the Brian Kilmeach show. Newsmakers and newsbreakers, hear it first on the Brian Kilmeach show, the talk show that's getting you talking.
You're with Brian Kilmeade. Hey, we are back a few more minutes with Newt Gingrich, whose book is now out. It's called Trump's Triumph, America's Greatest Comeback. Newt, you mentioned you finished in October. You thought for sure he was going to win. Yeah, we began writing in October because we were confident that Trump was going to be president again.
And you could just see it coming. I mean, you knew that this is why I wrote the book is both Trump's Triumph and America's Greatest Comeback. You knew that the American people were not going to accept Kamala Harris. They hadn't accepted Biden. And in a sense, this is the end of the Obama-Biden cycle. And you can think of this as Clinton, too. Yeah, it's sort of like Obama's third term.
Yeah. When you look at the civil war going on with the Democratic Party, I know you're such a student of history and you lived a lot of it in modern times. But we are looking at a situation now with the Democrats where if you were by Joe Biden and didn't say anything, I'm running against you.
And I'm pointing that out. I'm not waiting for a Republican. So does that mean that you could get rid of the vice president as governor when Bill LaGorosa goes after him? Does that mean that you could just say that Pete Buttigieg, Mr. Secretary, you ignore the American people, you let a failing president there?
And does that marginalize all these people's political future? I think anybody who was close to Biden is going to have a very hard time getting through the next cycle of primaries. Because their competitors are going to say, you know, you were part of lying to the American people.
Why should we believe you now? I get the sense that Trump has changed over the last couple of days where he's like, I am blaming Biden less and his people more. He wants to get to the end because he can't figure out why anyone would let the border, for example, go down like that. How you leave Afghanistan the way you did. How does that make sense? Well, and look, I think you can almost stipulate that sometime, maybe by 23, Biden wasn't there. I mean, what you have to then say is, so who are the people who took over the power constitutionally of the president?
My favorite example is in early January after the after the election, there are twenty four hundred commutation signed in one day. Now, how do you do that? Somebody somewhere put that list together. Why? Why is each name on there? What's the deal? They then instructed the auto pen operator on behalf of the president, who had no idea what they were doing. And I just think it's crazy.
I'm wondering, do you have twenty four hundred commutations? And did someone get paid on that? People say, give me some money. My murdering uncle needs to get out of prison. You have to wonder what the deal was in each one of those cases.
And that's one that's only one day. But then you have to look at all the money that they were dumping out of the Department of Energy. I think ninety three billion dollars. Secretary Wright called it shoveling it out. So who was making those kind of decisions? And I think what you're going to find is this is the largest scandal in American history, much bigger than anything we've ever seen before. There were more people breaking the law and behaving as though they were president than we've ever seen.
How do you ever get someone to admit that? Put them under oath. And as I've heard Chairman Comer say just like last night, if they lie under oath, it is a felony. And this administration will prosecute. Do you think they're too slow to hit him with subpoenas? I think they're going through a process which is sort of built into the law that we have to we have to compensate you pretty please. You have to have a chance to get a lawyer.
And then when that's up, we can then subpoena you if you refuse to come in voluntarily. We lived through Trump's comeback. What do we see in your book that you wouldn't get unless you had the view of Newt Gingrich? Well, I think the whole understanding of really sort of a dance between the American people who were determined to stop this left wing system and an extraordinarily charismatic leader who was able to become the symbol of that change and to become, particularly after Butler, when he was shot and he stood up and put his fist up in the air and chanted fight, fight, fight. I mean, at that point, he became an iconic leader in a way that's almost like the middle ages. This is an astonishing moment. And he's in a rush to get things done. I think we're all going to benefit from it. Speaker Gingrich, thanks so much. Pick up his book, Trump's Triumph. We'll see you next time.
