Earlier this week, the editors of the New Yorker, probably to no one's surprise, endorsed the Democrat, Vice President Kamala Harris for president. The long editorial published in the magazine and on newyorker.com, in addition to reviewing Harris's virtues and promise, made the case that Donald Trump is simply morally unfit to hold the office. If Trump is elected once more, he'd come to the White House in a spirit of vengeance. That's his word.

His economic policies, his tariffs, and tax cuts for the wealthy, they'd hammer the middle class with inflation and aggravate the inequality in this country, which is already extremely severe. He'd go on belittling the climate emergency and leave the people of Ukraine to the tender mercies of Vladimir Putin. In short, he'd be Trump Unbound, a threat to the constitutional order and the national security of the United States.

Recently, I spoke on the program with Sarah Longwell, a leader of the Never-Trump Republicans. Longwell sees the MAGA movement as an aberration, even a betrayal of conservative values, but thats a fringe view now in the Republican Party. The most influential Republicans see Trump still as their champion. A key figure here is former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Long before Trump got serious about politics, Gingrich was the revolutionary who wanted to break Washington.

He went to battle with Democrats not as an opposing team, but as an alien force, cultural elites out to destroy America unless he destroyed them first. Gingrich has written no fewer than five admiring books about Donald Trump. Right now, hundreds of establishment Republicans and many former Trump officials have come out against his candidacy. Newt Gingrich has held absolutely firm. I wanted to know why and what it is he's hoping for in a second Trump term.

Mister Speaker, let's just get right to it. In 1978, June 24th, you gave a speech to a group of college Republicans, and you said that one of the great problems that we have in the Republican Party is that we don't encourage you to be nasty. We encourage you to be obedient, neat, loyal, faithful, all those Boy Scout words which would be great around the campfire but are lousy in politics. Now it's 2024, and just last week, the Republican standard bearer, Donald Trump, said more than once in his speech that Kamala Harris is mentally disabled.

This is not the first time that he's made such remarks. I wonder, is that what you had in mind, and do you support him because of that kind of style, that kind of rhetoric, or in spite of it?

Newt Gingrich: We'd been the minority party for 40 years, and part of the reason we were the minority party was we weren't prepared to be direct and tough and explicit. We were up against a democratic majority leading back to Franklin Roosevelt. They were quite happy to have a weak, confused, and incompetent Republican opposition because it enabled them to stay in power. If you were trying to figure out a way to dislodge a machine that had been around for a long time, you had to be much tougher and much more explicit than we'd been.

I would not have used the language Trump used last week, partly because I think that it doesn't further his cause. I'm very happy to be tough and direct about Kamala Harris, but I think you can do that in ways that are more effective. I've been very clear that I think that they are out of touch with reality and that their programs are very destructive and represent a value system that I think most Americans don't agree with.

David Remnick: I wonder if you agree with some of the people in the Trump campaign that think this is hurting Trump very badly. In other words, his emphasis on that kind of rhetoric, his sense of resentment in speeches that go on for quite a long time, cats and dogs being eaten in Ohio, and all that kind of thing, as opposed to a critique of Harris and Walz in ideological terms, that thats really hurting the campaign. Do you agree with that?

Newt Gingrich: I think that to the degree that Trump remains focused on big ideas and big issues and big contrast, he gets more votes. I think that some of these things are a distraction from that. I think that that's always been a part of who he is. If you go back and look at various tweets over the years-- there's a German poet who said once, "If my demons flee, will my angel flee also?" Trump is an enormously complicated, very powerful personality.

He came out of nowhere to beat 15 other Republicans, pivoted and won the Electoral College against Hillary Clinton when virtually no one thought he could, and survived and came back to completely dominate his own party. They have a reasonably good chance, I think, a probability, that he'll be the next president. As a part of that makeup, he has an aggressive personality, which at times does 10% more than it should.

David Remnick: What are Donald Trump's demons so far as you can tell? You've known him for quite a while.

Newt Gingrich: I don't know. First of all, I'm not in the business of psychoanalyzing the candidate I support. I would simply say that he is a very intense personality. He has an ability to work that's astonishing and I can't figure out how he has that much energy. Occasionally, he has to explode, so he does. That's just part of his personality.

David Remnick: Is it part of his character? In other words, a lot of people who are opponents of Trump, they see him as somebody who is not a decent person, Mister Speaker. Somebody who is willing to mock the mentally disabled, say racist things, misogynist things. It's not a matter of political correctness or anything like that. You hear it. Is this somebody that you've, in a sense, made a bargain with, that you agree with, and you swallow the fact that his character is deficient? Is that wrong to say?

Newt Gingrich: I don't know, but in my lifetime, you could go back through what we learned later about John F. Kennedy. We could go back through what we learned ultimately about Lyndon Johnson. You could go back through Teddy Kennedy, just to take three examples. I'm not very much in the business of worrying about that sort of thing. Trump came out of a different world in a remarkable way. He has never tried to communicate that he was somehow a paragon of something other than who he really is. I think it's that authenticity that probably was uniquely effective.

The reason I am for Trump is I think the system is stunningly and dangerously corrupt. I think that it desperately needs somebody of almost an Andrew Jackson kind of aggressiveness, who is willing to take on the entire establishment and to fight for very profound changes. Those kind of personalities very often have great strengths and great weaknesses. Drucker used to talk about that, that you could find people who were mountains, but then mountains have valleys, but those are the kind of people who get real things done.

If you look for people who are plateaus, they very seldom get things done. I'm pretty happy to have the totality of Trump if you will. Are there other things I wish he did differently? Sure, but I think that would be true of anybody I supported.

David Remnick: Mister Speaker, you call yourself a genuine populist. How does that jive with Trumpism?

Newt Gingrich: Oh, I think that Trump's greatest support comes from people who believe that they have been misgoverned by an elite which seeks to impose its values on them. I think that's why we're in the middle of this amazing revolution where the Republicans are becoming the party of the working class and the Democrats are becoming the party of the literati.

David Remnick: Of the literati?

Newt Gingrich: The educated elite, PhDs.

David Remnick: I see. What do you make of the fact that so many people who have worked with Donald Trump in his first administration from 2016 to 2020 are now in opposition to him? His vice president, national security advisor, secretary of state, defense secretary, chiefs of staff, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, all of whom think that he is a threat to national security.

I think that we are in the middle of a profound cultural fight in which the old order, most of the people you described ultimately are in the old order, correctly identify Trump as a threat.

David Remnick: A threat to national security?

Newt Gingrich: A threat to their security.

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David Remnick: I'm speaking today with Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the House. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour with more to come.

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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and I'm speaking today with Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House. When Donald Trump came along as a contender in 2015, he ditched some of the central concerns of traditional conservatism like free trade and low deficits. Despite that, Newt Gingrich supported his presidency to the very end, and he was involved with pushing the idea of a stolen election in 2020. I spoke with Gingrich last week, and it was just before new evidence in the January 6th case against Donald Trump was unsealed. We'll continue our conversation.

Trump was asked at the debate a very simple question. He was asked at the debate whether he wanted Ukraine to prevail after being invaded by Russia. He avoided that answer and expressed great admiration for Vladimir Putin. Recently, he met with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine, and the day after expressed nothing but contempt for Zelenskyy. Do you agree with him on that?

Newt Gingrich: I think that it is very hard to imagine without direct use of American and other forces how Ukraine is going to "win" this war. I can imagine, and I suspect that there could be a truce and that Ukraine could have a future, but it's not going to have a future fighting a war of attrition against a country dramatically bigger than it is. The russian army in Ukraine is larger than the entire American army. I think that part of what you're seeing is a reaction to the idea that we just routinely commit more and more money to a fight for which no one has a strategy for success.

David Remnick: You're okay and Trump is okay with an end result in which a large part of Ukrainian territory remains in Russian hands?

Newt Gingrich: I'm not okay with it, but I'd like someone to show me a strategic plan that is a reasonable risk that alters that.

David Remnick: The biggest and I think the most galvanizing campaigned subject for Donald Trump has been immigration. There's no question about it. What do you make of the Senate Republicans torpedoing the immigration bill back in February of this year, largely at the urging of Donald Trump?

Newt Gingrich: As it has been explained to me, and I'm not an expert on that bill, the bill would, in fact, have locked into law a series of steps which would actually have limited Trump's ability to change immigration policy when he got elected.

David Remnick: In other words, they torpedoed it in his electoral interest, not in the interests of the subject itself.

Newt Gingrich: No, they torpedoed it in the interest of his presidential power if he does win the election. It wasn't about the immediate campaign. It was about a bill which had been drafted in a way that had locked into law a series of provisions which are currently executive orders, which he can currently change with the stroke of a pen, and which he would have to get Congress to agree to dismantle once the bill was passed and signed into law. The people who know the most about immigration on our side all agreed that it was a bad deal.

David Remnick: You mean Stephen Miller or who do you mean?

Newt Gingrich: Stephen Miller, but also people I work with at the American First Policy Institute who had been actively involved, for example, in controlling the border.

David Remnick: In a profile written in 2016, when you were still being considered by Trump for vice president, your longtime colleague and friend, former Minnesota representative Vin Weber, said that you and Trump shared a lot of the same attributes. How much of yourself do you see in Trump? Where do you think you influenced him and where do you overlap, do you think?

Newt Gingrich: I don't know how much I've influenced him. I would say, first of all, I don't think he was ever seriously thinking about me for vice president.

David Remnick: No?

Newt Gingrich: I think that was a game designed to keep the news media amused.

David Remnick: Were you onto it right away?

Newt Gingrich: Look, I always strongly supported Mike Pence for a practical reason.

David Remnick: What was the practical reason?

Newt Gingrich: I told Trump at one point that he was a pirate and I'm a pirate, and you can't have a two-pirate ticket because there's no one for normal people to identify with, and that Pence would, in fact, be really good because he could reach out to the Paul Ryan's and to the regular members of the party in a way that Trump and I couldn't.

David Remnick: Do you think his second administration would be all pirates?

Newt Gingrich: No, but I think it will actually be a lot of technically very, very smart people who have achieved a great deal and who understand how tough the fight is and how determined they are to profoundly change Washington.

Newt Gingrich: Meaning what? What kind of politician that was in power in 2016 would no longer find a place in the second Trump administration? What has Trump learned? How has he changed that would influence his appointments?

Newt Gingrich: They're totally different circumstances. Trump in 2016 was on a wild roller coaster ride from going down that big escalator in June of 2015, defeating 15 opponents, defeating Hillary, and they put together the entire project on the run because when you come from that far behind and from that far outside the normal process, you spend all day, every day learning, and all day, every day trying to execute a campaign capable of winning.

I think it's almost providential. He's had four years to think about what he's learned, and he is a very smart guy. He's dealt with all the world's major leaders, and he has dealt with large parts of American society, and he has a much deeper grasp of what has to be done and how to do it. He has allies, many of whom were second and third-level people in the administration, but very substantial people. The director of OMB, for example, or the person in charge of FEMA, people who were in a position now to have thought through, "What went right? What went wrong? What do we learn from it? What's it going to take to be successful?" I think you'll see a dramatically more managerial and practical administration this time.

David Remnick: Oriented toward doing what? In other words, what do you think would be the real goals of a second Trump administration? Would NATO survive it, for example?

Newt Gingrich: Oh, sure. Look, Trump said exactly the right things to NATO, and the head of NATO, the secretary general, said Trump had been enormously helpful in forcing the weaker allies to understand that they had an obligation. Trump has never suggested that he was anti-NATO. He just wanted a NATO that actually collectively defended itself. I would say that the primary goal will be a very practical focus on making things work.

David Remnick: Do you think we're going to see a lot of tax cuts for the wealthy?

Newt Gingrich: No, not particularly. I think you're likely to see tax cuts for senior citizens. You're likely to see tax cuts for people who have tips. You're likely to see substantial middle-class tax cuts, and I suspect, but I don't know this so I suspect, that if he goes down a route of raising tariffs, that they will probably, much like the Alaska Oil Fund, find a way to return the tariffs to the American people as reductions in taxation.

David Remnick: Do you think a 20% tariff is a good idea?

Newt Gingrich: I'm not sure what the specific number is. I am fairly comfortable, much more so than most of my colleagues, with the basically McKinley strategy, which between 1865 and 1928 made us the most consistently growing industrial power in the world. That's a strategy which is not a theoretical free trade strategy in a world that doesn't have free trade. I think in Trump's case, he really likes tariffs because they give him leverage. He recognizes as the largest market in the world that people have a greater desire to access us than we do to access them.

David Remnick: Yet every economist across the board, just about, I'm not saying it's unanimous, thinks that this is a terribly inflationary idea and a terrible idea in general.

Newt Gingrich: It's not inflationary if the money is returned to the American people as tax cuts. As Ronald Reagan once said, if every economist in the country was laid end to end, that would be a good thing.

David Remnick: Which is a nice little saying, but it doesn't mean much.

Newt Gingrich: Look, I'm a historian. I'm not a theoretical economist. I'm a historian, and I think that it's as useful to read Lintz and his work in the 1830s as it is to read Adam Smith. By the way, Smith also said there are circumstances where you need to restrict trade. Smith was not an automatic free trader.

David Remnick: The Heritage Foundation has been working for quite a long time on a very detailed report for Trump's election. In fact, the preface for that report is written by his vice presidential nominee. Yet, at a certain point, Donald Trump immediately distanced himself from that plan for 2025. Why is that?

Newt Gingrich: I think there are some parts of that report which are politically totally unsustainable, and that Trump instinctively understood that.

David Remnick: What was unsustainable there?

Newt Gingrich: I think there were things particularly involving, for example, Social Security and the kind of issues that would blow up and cause you to lose the campaign and

would make perfect sense in a think tank and no sense in a political operation.

David Remnick: Another thing in the Project 2025, abortion is mention around 200 times. While it doesn't call for an outright national ban, it does state that the Department of Health and Human Services should maintain a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family. Where do you exactly think Donald Trump is on abortion? He put in place Supreme Court justices who voted the way they did, and now he seems to be waffling here and there because of the election. Where does he actually stand, and where do you stand with him?

Newt Gingrich: Let me first of all say that the idea of returning power back to the states is something which then Judge later, Justice Ginsburg, gave a speech about in 19-- I think it was 1993. She said she thought that Roe v. Wade was wrong. It was wrong in the way in which it politicized abortion, and it was wrong to have nine lawyers make a decision that the country should make. In that sense, the question about Roe v. Wade is different than a question about, "Therefore, what about abortion?"

My personal belief is-- look, I'm very deeply affected by Lincoln's provision that with public sentiment, anything is possible, and without public sentiment, nothing is possible. I believe deeply in government of the people, by the people, and for the people. I believe that on the issue of abortion, while at a personal level I would hope there'd be as few as possible, I think at a practical level, the country would sustain a 15-week limit on abortions with exceptions for rape, life of the mother, and incest.

I think the country would be as appalled by the eight babies who've been allowed to die in Tim Waltz's Minnesota under an extreme pro-abortion position, as they would by having zero abortions. I think the country will come to a general consensus over time, and it will be something on the order of 15 weeks, with the three exceptions.

David Remnick: How do you analyze Donald Trump's behavior leading up to and on January 6th?

Newt Gingrich: I think that he was convinced that the election was not valid. I think he did everything he could to represent his interests.

David Remnick: Do you agree with him on that?

Newt Gingrich: Look, I don't think the election was stolen, but I think it was rigged.

David Remnick: What's the difference?

Newt Gingrich: I have zero doubt that it was rigged.

David Remnick: You have zero doubt?

Newt Gingrich: Zero doubt. Starting with the $420 million that the founder of Facebook put into selective turnout, $420 million, going to the major social media, deliberately suppressing the New York Post, and the Hunter-Biden story. Just go down the list. Look, as a historian, I thought this was a legitimate all-out effort by the national establishment to get rid of the guy who they felt was a direct threat to them, and they did everything they could, but it certainly made it a very weird election.

I would also point out that he asked before January 6th that they send the National Guard and said he would authorize sending National Guard to the Capitol because he did think it could become tumultuous. In addition, if you actually look at the speech he gave, he talked about peaceful demonstration.

David Remnick: That was the import of his performance before the rally on Capitol Hill and the violence on Capitol Hill. That was the key takeaway, for you was peaceful. That was the sum total of the rhetoric there? Not, "Fight like hell?" Not, "We're going to march on the Hill?" Not his refusal to call on his supporters to stand down. It went on and on, hour after hour.

Newt Gingrich: It did. Look, I think it's probably the worst single day of his presidency.

David Remnick: Isn't it disqualifying?

Newt Gingrich: No.

David Remnick: Really?

Newt Gingrich: I'm sure that this is probably the great cultural divide we live in.

David Remnick: No, I know. I'm getting blamed for being literati, but isn't that disqualifying from holding the highest office in the land again, that kind of behavior?

Newt Gingrich: By definition, not.

David Remnick: No, not by definition, but in your view, from a moral point of view.

Newt Gingrich: I would say that with all of his weaknesses, Donald Trump is better for America's future than his opponent and better for America's future than Hillary Clinton.

David Remnick: Is there anything morally-- independent of your stand on this political position or not, is there nothing that's morally disqualifying?

Newt Gingrich: We live in a real world, and in the real world, five weeks before an election, there's no possibility of my getting involved in a conversation like that. None.

David Remnick: Why is that?

Newt Gingrich: Because it'd promptly be exploited and used.

David Remnick: How do you mean? I'm not sure I understand.

Newt Gingrich: I am one of the president's most public allies, and I have been for a long time, and I very much want this president to win. I very much believe that the election of Kamala Harris will be a disaster of the first order.

David Remnick: When you see people that are close to you ideologically quit on Trump, do you think they're being cowards in a raw political sense?

Newt Gingrich: No, I think that they're drawing a different set of conclusions. I don't know of anybody else in my lifetime who's had the sheer courage to take on the national establishment as frontally and directly as Trump has, and that, to me, is worth a lot.

David Remnick: What do you think his prime motive is? What drives him?

Newt Gingrich: I think his prime motive is to try to somehow fix the country. I think that's what drives it.

David Remnick: Do you think that's why he ran for president in 2016?

Newt Gingrich: Look, he talked about it for years. I think, Oprah asked him--

David Remnick: He talked about it, and the presumption always obviously turned out to be wrong. The presumption of it is that it was a branding exercise, that it was ego, that he was a certain kind of figure, as you know, in the '80s and the '90s in New York on the page six realm of life, and that he would say that he was going to run for president in not a dissimilar spirit as Kanye West saying he was going to run for president or many of the other people in the past who would tease running for president for reasons of publicity. Something changed.

Newt Gingrich: Oprah asked him I think as early as the late '80s if he's going to run for president. One of the things that really impressed me, in the South Carolina primary in 2016, he was frontally assaulting the war in Iraq and George Bush and Dick Chetty. I called him and I said, "Bush is still like an 80% approval among Republicans in South Carolina. Is there some reason you feel like picking this fight?"

David Remnick: Because it's funny because he favored the war in the first place and then he changed, which is interesting.

Newt Gingrich: As John Maynard Keynes once said, when facts change, your opinion should change. Trump said, "A lot of people died who didn't have to, and the war was wrong, and I'm going to keep saying it." Now, that was at a point when it could have cost him the nomination.

David Remnick: He said that in what year, though?

Newt Gingrich: In probably February or March of 2016.

David Remnick: You're right. A dozen years later.

Newt Gingrich: David, let me make this point.

David Remnick: Sure.

Newt Gingrich: I think it's frankly irritating. I was for the war in Iraq because I thought we were going to be competent. I was for the war in Afghanistan because I thought we were going to be competent. I was for China entering the WTO because I thought Deng Xiaoping represented the modernization of China and I was totally wrong. I wrote a book later. I was totally wrong.

When I look at those three things, I look back, and it's a good example of why I think we need very deep, very serious discussion about how weak and how sick our system has become. We fought for 22 years and lost in Afghanistan, and no one has suggested we ought to rethink it. We went into Iraq with a plan that would have worked, and George W. Bush changed that plan without no comprehension of what he was doing and it went from being an easy victory to a disaster. Yes, I think it's okay for people to change their opinion.

David Remnick: Did you think JD Vance was a good choice for vice president?

Newt Gingrich: I thought he was a risky choice.

David Remnick: Why?

Newt Gingrich: Because he's had a long career of evolving.

David Remnick: [laughs] It sounds like you're being polite.

Newt Gingrich: No, I know. This is a guy who's changed his name five times. This is a guy who, on the one hand, comes out of a hillbilly elegy, and on the other hand is a Yale law graduate of which it's hard to find a more prestigious element of the old order.

David Remnick: It sounds like you think he was a lousy choice.

Newt Gingrich: No, no, I said risky.

David Remnick: If Trump loses in November, and the race is extremely close, do you think Trumpism survives, and how does it evolve?

Newt Gingrich: Yes, Trumpism survives for the same reason that you just saw conservative parties winning in France, Germany, Austria, Italy. Maloney is, in a sense, an example of Trumpism and I think it's because there's an increasing belief by a very large number of people that the old deal doesn't work, that it's rigged against them, and that it's trying to impose values on them that they don't believe in.

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David Remnick: Newt Gingrich, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time. Be well.

Newt Gingrich: Glad to do it.

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David Remnick: Newt Gingrich was speaker of the House, representing Georgia in Congress. He's the author of many books, host of a podcast, and runs a political consulting firm.

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