- Hi, I'm Marc Rotterman.

Coming up, a conversation with former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, next.

- [Announcer] Major funding for Front Row with Marc Rotterman is provided by Robert L. Luddy, additional funding provided by Patricia and Koo Yuen through the Yuen Foundation.

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A.E.

Finley Foundation, NC Realtors, Rifenburg Construction, Stefan Gleason.

[dramatic music] A complete list of funders can be found at pbsnc.org/frontrow.

[dramatic music] ♪ - Welcome back, Mr. Speaker, thanks for joining us.

- Glad to be with you, Marc.

- Why don't we begin with your thoughts on the midterm elections?

- Well, I think that to the degree Republicans tie Biden into the election, so it becomes a Biden/Beasley ticket, for example, in North Carolina, or a Biden/Kelly ticket in Arizona, I think Democrats are vulnerable in virtually every Senate race except a handful, and they're vulnerable in probably 180 House races.

You look at the price of food, which is gonna go up in September and October, the price of gasoline which is still dramatically higher than it was under Trump, you look at the rising murder rate and crime rate in general, you look at the wave after wave of illegal immigration, [clears throat] there's just a lot of reasons for people to be unhappy, and then you look at, you know, everyday people who work for a living who are now being told their money's gonna go to pay off people who went to Harvard and Yale, over 300 White House staff are gonna get 10,000 or $20,000 each, of your money, and I think you're gonna find a lot more people aren't getting the Biden payoff than are, and I think that's gonna result in additional votes against the Democrats.

- Well, you know, the spin out of DC is that the red wave has stalled, do you think it's stalled?

- No, I think it's August.

I think, every campaign, and you and I know, we go back a long way together, every campaign I've been involved in, in August the media publishes phony polls, they reassure each other everything is fine.

I mean, a good example is abortion, abortion, as seen by Washington, is totally a pro-Democrat issue, but I just saw a Blake Master's ad in Arizona which was brilliant, in which he pointed out that he's opposed to partial-birth abortion, he's opposed to abortion in the ninth month, but that his opponent [clears throat] is for tax-paid abortion up to the day the baby is born.

Now, if the Democrats become the party of extremism on abortion, they're gonna lose seats, not gain seats, and that's just a typical example of the gap between Washington thinking and what's happening out in the country.

- What's the Trump impact on the election, my friend?

And by the way, is Mar-a-Lago, the raid on Mar-a-Lago, is that stepping on the GOP message?

- Well, I think it diverts a little bit, and the Democrats were hoping that it would enable them to somehow have a topic other than Biden's complete failure on the economy, his failure in foreign policy, his failure on crime, you know, his failure on the border.

They have two problems, the first is what Mar-a-Lago did do was it dramatically mobilized Trump's base.

He went up, as you know, because you, in fact, sent me a note the other day, he went up in likelihood of being the nominee, he had the biggest fundraising day in his entire history.

So I think that, and I think we just had another story about Zuckerberg that had a Facebook saying that the FBI asked him to censor the information about hunter Biden's computer before the 2020 election.

I mean, every time we turn around, you see a corrupt Justice Department, and I think that actually is a net negative for the Democrats, not a net positive.

And by the way, you had, with Liz Cheney getting 29% of the vote, look, I mean, you're an old pro, you know this business, you have an incumbent who gets 29%, that is a total repudiation.

- Quick lightning round, handicap the key Senate races for me.

- Well, I look, I think we're in the fight for all of them.

You know, I think- - How about Ohio and Pennsylvania?

- Well, JD Vance is doing well, he's now up, according to the Trafalgar poll, Ohio's been coming our way very dramatically, and I think that JD will be fine.

Dr. Oz had a rugged start, you know, he had $50 million in negative ads spent against him by his opponent in the Republican primary, so he came outta that primary pretty battered, and the Democrat Lieutenant Governor Fetterman ran a very clever campaign for about six weeks, Fetterman's problem, as I said in a newsletter at Gingrich 360 this week, Fetterman's problem is he is the most radical candidate in the country, he wants to release murderers, he wants to allow people to have heroin and get it delivered by the city, he is in favor of basically killing the natural gas industry in Western Pennsylvania, which is about 600,000 jobs.

So in the end, I think Oz will carry Pennsylvania by the sheer weight of how bad Fetterman is.

- Let's change gears, talk about the economy.

How would you characterize America's economy right now?

- Well, it's a weak economy because you have the government printing more and more paper money, that's the real net effect of this student loan bailout that Biden wants to do, is just more paper money, unpaid for, bigger deficits, that means you have more paper chasing fewer goods and services, and a lot of the side effects of the COVID epidemic and the way we handled it has been to dramatically reduce the workforce, plus, you know, you and I have been around a long time, people have not yet taken into account, this is an older workforce than it used to be, we don't have a flood of young people coming in and the result is that it's gonna be harder to get people to work, it's gonna be harder to get things, the supply chain is a disaster, everyone I talk to says it could take six months to a year or more than a year even to buy an appliance, so I think this is a weak economy, and I think that it's gonna remain a weak economy as long as you have Biden and the Democrats in charge.

- Are Biden's energy policies driving this inflationary problem?

- Well, they're a big part of it.

I mean, here you have what Trump had achieved which was energy independence.

You had an America which was producing a surplus of energy, we could easily have replaced Russia as the supplier of natural gas.

- In Europe instead, what you're seeing... And by the way, a recent article in the New York Post.

20 million families are in danger of having their electricity cut off because they're behind in paying for the utilities.

Electricity prices have gone up 15% because the price of natural gas has gone up.

- Natural gas has gone up 10%?

- Something like that.

So, and what you have is a continual pressure across the system and you have a radical left Biden administration and Democratic Party that wants to follow policies that are just gonna continue to crush average every day working Americans with higher and higher prices and fewer and fewer choices.

- What struck you about the Inflation Reduction Act, my friend?

- Well, two things.

I got diverted 'cause I thought the 87,000 IRS agents they wanted to add, was so outrageous.

And in fact, I've said that in Arizona for example, Kelly couldn't vote for a single additional border patrol agent, but he could find the time to vote for 87,000 IRS agents.

If you think about it, I think that they're probably being, wanna hire them, not so much to audit for tax purposes, but to audit for the purpose of this whole new ESG model where you're supposed to... Companies are supposed to be woke.

And if they're not woke, they could be punished by the government.

And I think that you're looking at...

This is a Democratic Party which does not want to enforce the border, but wants to hire enough IRA agents to enforce you.

So it's a party that wants control over America and over Americans.

Secondly of course, it's one more huge, additional spending which further drives inflation.

Government spending is the biggest cause of inflation in America today and the Democrats seem addicted to higher and higher inflation and more and more deficits.

- But aren't both parties responsible for some of this large spending?

I mean, some of the Republicans - Sure.

- went along with a lot of this.

Last time we had a balanced budget, you were speaker.

- Right.

I mean the only time in your lifetime that we've had four consecutive balanced budgets came because I was Speaker of the House and the House Republicans in that period were very serious.

My hope is, as Kevin McCarthy develops his commitment to America, that he's gonna have a commitment to getting back to a balanced budget.

I think it's important morally.

I think it's important economically.

And I think it's important as a step towards getting control of government.

And it's clearly doable.

You look at the amount of corruption in the way money has been spent.

$20 billion stolen in California from the Unemployment Compensation Fund alone.

Now think about that.

$20 billion stolen in one state.

- You know, I wanna circle back as Jen Psaki would say and talk to you a little bit about the student loan bailout.

Is that constitutional?

Isn't that Congress's business to cancel a debt like that?

- Well, I mean, I think the idea that a President of the United States can wave a wand and pay off $300-500 billion or who knows.

I mean, if he wanted to, he could come back and claim that he could write off all the debt for $2 or $3 or $4 trillion.

I don't understand under our Constitution.

The power of the purse is supposed to be in the Congress.

It is supposed to be Congress that makes these decisions.

I think they have stretched a post-911 anti-terrorism law to give this President a level of power that is totally unsustainable.

I suspect you're gonna see the Supreme Court knock it out.

But it's also, I think an outrage as a general principal.

You know, I had a student loan.

I had to pay it off.

My wife Callista had a student loan.

She paid it off.

70% of the American people don't go to four year colleges.

They don't have loans.

So the local waitress is gonna work extra hard in order to pay off the Harvard law degree candidate.

It's crazy.

And, and I think that it's bad policy morally and it's bad policy economically.

- So you think we'll see a middle class and blue collar backlash on this?

- Well, we are seeing it.

I mean, Joe Gaylord, who you know well, and who was a co-architect in '94 of the Contract with America said to me the other day, the greatest change in his lifetime is that if you are not a four year college graduate.

If you went to high school if you went to a vo-tech school.

You went to a junior college.

You are now increasingly likely to be Republican.

And that includes African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans.

The transition, the Franklin Roosevelt Democratic Coalition is increasingly Republican.

Now, if you went to Duke or you went to Stanford or you went to Princeton, you're probably gonna be a Democrat.

And you're gonna live in a fancy neighborhood with a high income.

And you're gonna fail to understand why the rest of us worry about crime, why we worry about illegal immigration, why we worry about inflation?

'Cause you're doing so well, you don't care.

Or you basically just sold out like AOC and you're happy playing computer games and being poor.

Most Americans are not happy at the idea that they're gonna be poor, in order for Harvard and Princeton graduates to dominate their lives.

- You know, Jeff Bush, no firebrand, called this policy reckless.

I mean believe it or not, I mean so...

I'm not sure it's gonna be able to move forward.

But I wanna change gears here, sir, and talk about the crisis at the border.

Is it a national security issue, Newt?

- Well of course it is.

We keep picking up terrorists.

The truth is, we don't test people for COVID or other diseases.

We don't test people to see what their criminal record is.

I mean, everything that had worked historically in America, and I am very pro-legal immigration.

In fact, we're making a movie about successful people who come to America legally and represent American exceptionalism in their achievements.

But illegal immigration is a core threat to the whole country.

And the degree to which, and it's not incompetence.

You have to understand.

The Biden Democrats want illegal immigration.

They want open borders.

They want to flood the country.

Just as they want to release murderers and they want to release drug dealers.

This is sort of what get...

I think crippling Fetterman in Pennsylvania, who has 25 times voted to release murderers, as the only member of a five member parole board to vote yes.

I think we have to understand that an open border in a world in which Gallup once estimated 165 million people would move to the US if they could tomorrow morning.

That's over half our population.

- What is their end game with flooding the zone like this, you think, the Democratic end game?

- I think the Democrats have become a radically left-wing party, almost a religious movement.

I think they are deeply opposed to, the Biden Democrats, are deeply opposed to America as a concept.

They're opposed to the American flag as a symbol.

They're opposed to the constitution.

It's amazing!

Their idea, they want to teach fake history.

They want to, frankly, create school systems where people don't learn anything.

And I, whether that's a clever policy on their part so that they can manipulate people, I don't know.

But I can tell you that they, the collapse of the American school system is probably the gravest national security threat we face.

And that's a huge threat to the economy.

If people don't know enough to read and write and do sophisticated jobs, we can't possibly compete with China, India, and other countries.

- Not to mention all the drugs that are coming across the border.

And the fentanyl and the people who are dying, I think, their poisoning America.

I do want to talk, I think this is a nice segue to talk about foreign policy and China.

Do you view them as an adversary or a competitor?

- Well, lemme say first that I think one of the greatest threats we have is the danger of Mexico becoming a failed country and the cartels basically running Mexico.

I think we do not appreciate how grave the danger is to the US - Great point.

- from the rise of the cartels.

And sometimes we are looking at Afghanistan or we're looking at Taiwan, we forget our southern border is right here.

It's not across the Atlantic and it's not across the Pacific.

Russia has become an adversary.

Partly, I think, as a living out of classic Russian history.

Partly as a living out of the Soviet empire.

Putin after all was a KGB agent.

He said the failure of the Soviet empire was the greatest disaster of the 20th century.

So he's methodically trying to recreate a Russian empire and is prepared, obviously, to go to real extremes.

Both waging war and imposing economic problems in Europe, et cetera.

China is a long term competitor.

They're not yet an enemy, but we have to recognize that they're the one country that could be a direct competitor to be the leading country in the world.

With Xi Jinping as the dictator they have grown much more aggressive, he's much more like Mao than he is like the people who were between he and Mao.

And he, I think, also recognizes they're facing a demographic crisis.

The side effect of the One Child Policy, which they had for the last 40 or 50 years, the side effect of that is they're the most rapidly aging country in the world.

Their workforce is shrinking.

India passed them this year as the largest population in the world.

China could by, the current estimate is, that by 2070 China will be down to about 400 million, which will make it about the same population that the US will get to by then.

That's an enormous change.

And I think Xi Jinping knows he only has 10 or 15 years to try to achieve real world power.

And then they will decay so rapidly that they won't be able to make it.

And that makes China, I think, a very complicated, potential adversary.

Certainly a competitor, but not yet necessarily an enemy.

- You were the last Speaker to go to Taiwan before Pelosi.

Was Pelosi wise to go to Taiwan?

And how did the White House handle that you think?

- Well I, listen, I wrote a piece advocating that she go.

Particularly once she said she was going she could not back off and allow Xi Jinping to think that he could bully an American senior official.

We faced that in 1997.

We'd had a real crisis in the Taiwan straits.

Bill Clinton, to his credit, had sent two nuclear powered aircraft carriers through the Taiwan straits.

Not east of Taiwan, but through the straits between Taiwan and China.

I had strongly supported him.

The Chinese communists asked me to come and give speeches in Shanghai and Beijing.

I agreed to do it, only then said to them, "By the way, on the way home we're gonna go to Taiwan."

Well they went nuts.

And at one point they were saying, "You can't do both."

And Gardner Peckham, who was my National Security Advisor, said to them, I was with him in the room when he was talking to the Chinese ambassador, he said, "Look, you can't tell the Speaker of the House "what his travel schedule is.

"If you don't want him to come "he'll go to Taiwan and not China."

At which point they calmed down and said, "Well, now now."

And the compromise we reached was I gave my speeches, I met with all the senior leadership in China, then I flew to Tokyo so that I was flying to Taiwan from Japan, not flying to Taiwan from Beijing.

I thought what Pelosi did was helpful.

I think the administration, if it had any sense at all, would learn a lesson from Ukraine and we would be helping the Taiwanese build the strongest possible defense.

I think that you could think of it as a porcupine strategy, that you would have so many weapons, so many trained people, that it would be inconceivable that China could invade the island.

They could still cause some trouble with blockades or with various gimmicks, but I think you could make Taiwan unattackable.

Remember, the German army couldn't cross the English channel at 21 miles.

It's 140 miles from China to Taiwan.

- I wanna talk about the Mideast.

It looks like the Iran nuclear deal may come to fruition.

The Biden administration's really high on doing that.

Talk to us about that.

- They're crazy.

It's not complicated.

And I use this deliberately.

You're dealing with a theocratic dictatorship which openly states this desire to eliminate the state of Israel, to wipe out every Jew.

They're open about it, they say this openly.

They have openly offered rewards for killing Salman Rushdie and attacked him in the United States.

He's an author who wrote a book they disapproved of.

They currently have rewards out to kill former Secretary of State Pompeo and former National Security Advisor Bolton.

They are currently fighting with us in Syria.

I mean, the idea that this administration, following John Kerry's total failed leadership under Obama, this administration overlooks everything about the nature of that regime.

And what they're gonna do is force a situation where the Israelis are gonna basically take out the Iranian nuclear program.

I do not believe the Israelis will ever allow the Iranians to get a nuclear weapon.

And I think the morning that they think that they're right at the edge, you will see an Israeli assault of amazing proportions to eliminate their nuclear program.

That's all avoidable, and Donald Trump frankly, was avoiding it.

And now it has become, I think, a disaster, and you're right; they are so determined to do this.

- It's moving very fast.

- They're gonna do it no matter what.

- Let me ask you.

I wanna talk about...

I wanted to save some time, talk about your new book, "Defeating Big Government Socialism," talk to us about that.

Why this book and why now?

- Well, I thought about where we would be, and I realized that what you now have is a Democratic Party which is deeply committed to big-government socialism, and you're watching it right now in terms of the student loan write off.

You're watching it in terms of their effort to basically spend more and more money on everything.

They're trying to expand the power of the federal government.

And it occurred to me that going into this election, it isn't enough just to defeat people who are causing us pain, we've also gotta defeat the ideas.

It's a lesson I learned from Margaret Thatcher when she was prime minister.

She set out in 1975, when she became the opposition leader, to destroy socialism as an idea.

And within 10 years, she had so decisively defeated socialism as an idea that no openly left-wing British leader has become prime minister for 40 years.

Well, we gotta do the same thing.

We gotta explain to people.

These are not accidents.

- I wanna ask about the model you're talking about though.

You're not really talking about the European model, are you?

- No, well, in America, they have, I think this is actually a more aggressive and frankly, closer to fascism approach.

The power they want, their desire to control you, whether it's through big corporations like Disney, or whether it's through direct government controls, or whether it's through universities and schools.

I mean, look at the degree to which they want to impose on people; the degree to which they bitterly fight parents learning what's happening to their children in school; the degree to which they, for example, had a teacher's union sign a contract in Minneapolis which was just pure racism, which said: If we have to lay off anybody, it'll be whites first.

Now, I mean, you and I lived through the end of segregation.

We lived through a long effort to get rid of racism, and now racism has come back on the left as an anti-white phenomenon.

So I think in many ways, the American model... Look at the attitude of the Democrats and abortion; they are more radical on abortion than any European country.

And I think that we just have to recognize that's what we're up against, and that's why I wrote "Defeating Big Government Socialism."

- Well, I was reading the book, and you talked about the woke culture and how it impacts the military and education.

Tell us a little bit about that, and corporations by the way.

- Well, what's happened is the universities have gone crazy.

They teach things that are not true, but if you're gonna pass the course, you're gonna pretend they're true.

And they graduate people and, you know, people come out of Harvard, Princeton, Yale, end up working as assistants in the corporate leadership level, and they're all shaping the thinking of the corporations, of the militaries.

The military can't successfully get out of Afghanistan, but it can hold parties for people who are transgender and prove that they are deeply open to everyone.

You know, the idea, the purpose of the military, is to win wars and defend America; it's not to be a social experiment.

Similarly, in schools they teach, in one case, they were teaching seven-year-old girls that if you're white, you're inferior; you should feel guilty.

They want to ask three-year-olds: What's your real gender identity?

This stuff, and this is why I used the word crazy, this is not political; these people are crazy.

They represent a worldview that by any reasonable standard anywhere in the world would be considered nuts, and they believe it deeply.

- Mr. Speaker, any final thoughts in about 30 seconds?

- Yeah, look, I think that this is a time where every American who cares about the country, who cares about freedom, who cares about the Constitution, has to go vote, has to talk to their neighbors and their friends.

I wrote "Defeating Big Government Socialism" really as a campaign book for people to have the arguments they need whether it's at church or at lunch or at coffee in the morning or wherever, to be able to win the arguments.

The country is at stake, and your involvement is vital.

- Thanks for being with us Newt.

We've gotta roll.

Have a great weekend.

We'll see you next week on "Front Row."

[uplifting dramatic music] ♪ - [Announcer] Major funding for "Front Row with Marc Rotterman" is provided by Robert L. Luddy.

Additional funding provided by Patricia and Koo Yuen through the Yuen Foundation; committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities, and by.

Funding for the Lightning Round provided by Nicholas B. and Lucy Mayo Boddie Foundation, A.E.

Finley Foundation, NC Realtors, Rifenburg Construction, Stefan Gleason.

A complete list of funders can be found at PBSNC.org/FrontRow.

[dramatic music] ♪