Understanding Trump

by Newt Gingrich

  Trump’s predilection for meritocracy—his belief that success should be earned and celebrated—is anathema to the crony capitalism and favoritism that is inevitable whenever a ruling class has too much power.

  In fact, Trump has been arguing for decades that the members of the ruling class don’t know what they’re doing.

  Here is an interview, for example, that Donald Trump did with Oprah Winfrey in 1988, where she asked him if he would ever run for president:

  I would say that I would have a hell of a chance of winning, because I think people, I don’t know how your audience feels, but I think people are tired of seeing the United States ripped off.

  Trump’s campaign was a rejection of the ruling class of both parties, not just that of the Democrats. And because he was an outsider, he was automatically seen as the most anti–ruling class candidate in the race. This immediately made him, by definition, the most anti-Left candidate, which was precisely what Republican voters were looking for after eight years of the Obama administration’s radicalism.

  Trump’s outsider status not only won him the primary but also enabled him to win the general election by breaking through the “blue wall” of states such as Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, which hadn’t voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 1988. He united traditional Republican voters who believe in free markets, smaller government, and traditional morality with a newly energized group of blue-collar Democrats and disaffected rural voters who were just plain sick of the elites of both parties.

  AN ANTI-LEFT PRESIDENT IN ACTION

  Trump recognizes that it was voters’ frustration with the ruling class that got him elected, which is why he has governed as the anti-Left president he promised to be.

  Over vehement opposition from Democrats and the liberally aligned teachers’ unions, Trump tapped Betsy DeVos to be his education secretary. This of course enraged the Left, because DeVos has spent nearly her entire adult life—and millions of her own dollars—advocating against the status quo in education as a twenty-year proponent for school choice and other programs that offer children better opportunities to learn.

  Trump has also vowed to eradicate the so-called Johnson Amendment, which prohibits tax-exempt religious institutions from endorsing political candidates. The Left hates the idea of repealing the amendment because its members want to silence the voice of as many Americans with traditional moral values as possible. Trump believes that the First Amendment’s protections of freedom of speech and freedom of religion are not mutually exclusive.

  Finally, the steps he has taken to clamp down on illegal immigration and move the United States toward a merit-based immigration system is a direct assault on the proglobalism worldview that urban elites, academia, and Hollywood have nurtured for the last two decades. Trump’s belief that a nation without borders loses its authority to protect itself flies in the face of those who would like to see national identity diminished in favor of an international order based on centralized bureaucracy and a “World Court.”

  Trump also took a big first step at draining the swamp when he strengthened lobbying rules in his administration’s ethics policy. Trump’s ban bars political appointees from lobbying the departments they lead for five years after leaving their posts with the administration. Further, it bars any appointee from lobbying the Trump administration, and it disallows officials from ever lobbying on behalf of a foreign government. As he sat among many of his appointees before he signed the policy, Trump said, “Most of the people standing behind me will not be able to go to work” after leaving his administration.2

  Hopefully, Donald Trump is just warming up. There is a lot of swamp to drain.

  ANTI-STUPID

  Trump’s hostility to the left-wing ruling class is closely connected to the second side of the four-sided table illustration: anti-stupid.

  The members of the ruling class justifies their power and station by claiming they are experts, that modern life is too complicated for ordinary citizens, and that a technocratic class operating bureaucratically needs to be given great power to manage the economy and almost every aspect of our lives.

  Trump understands that the most effective way to attack the ruling class is to puncture its justification for power. So, one of his favorite tactics is to accuse the ruling class of stupidity. And the fact that Trump is an executive and has decades of experience finding and fixing instances of stupidity in large operations gives him the legitimacy to do so.

  Here is Trump in his announcement speech discussing bad trade deals and economic policies:

  Right now, think of this: We owe China $1.3 trillion. We owe Japan more than that. So, they come in, they take our jobs, they take our money, and then they loan us back the money, and we pay them interest, and then the dollar goes up so their deal’s even better.

  How stupid are our leaders? How stupid are these politicians to allow this to happen? How stupid are they?3

  And later:

  Free trade can be wonderful if you have smart people, but we have people that are stupid. We have people that aren’t smart. And we have people that are controlled by special interests. And it’s just not going to work.

  Here he is at a rally in Washington, DC, opposing the Iran deal: “We are led by very, very stupid people.… We cannot let it continue.”4

  And here is how he described past US relations with Russia at a press conference in February 2017:

  Hillary Clinton did a reset, remember? With the stupid plastic button that made us all look like a bunch of jerks. Here, take a look. [The Russian Foreign Minister] looked at her like, What the hell is she doing with that cheap plastic button?

  In addition to using an anti-stupid posture on offense, he uses it on defense to parry attacks against him from the ruling class.

  One of the strangest and most dishonest lines of attack against Trump during the election and his presidency has been accusations—supported only by circumstantial evidence and innuendo—that he is somehow unduly influenced by Russia. This was yet another attempt by the Left to delegitimize his election.

  In January, before he took office, Trump was facing another barrage of criticism from his opponents in the establishment and mainstream media. They were desperately trying to create the impression that Trump’s position that the United States should pursue better relations with Russia to fight ISIS was inappropriate.

  The unspoken assumption behind those attacks was that the desire for better relations with Russia was so ridiculous or unwise that there had to be some nefarious reason for it.

  In a series of tweets, Trump punctured this conventional wisdom of the ruling class:

  Having a good relationship with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing. Only “stupid” people, or fools, would think that it is bad! We have enough problems around the world without yet another one. When I am President, Russia will respect us far more than they do now and both countries will, perhaps, work together to solve some of the many great and pressing problems and issues of the WORLD!

  REGULATIONS: THE PINNACLE OF STUPID IN DC

  Trump’s position as an outsider and an executive is also very effective when describing foolish and destructive regulations.

  Here he is, a few weeks into his presidency, describing the legal barriers to letting patients who have exhausted approved treatment options from trying drugs not yet approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA):

  One thing that’s always disturbed me, they come up with a new drug for a patient who is terminal, and the FDA says, “We can’t have this drug used on the patient.” But they say, “But the patient within four weeks will be dead.” They [FDA] say, ‘Well, we still can’t approve the drug and we don’t want to hurt the patient.” But the patient is not going to live more than four weeks.5

  Donald Trump was absolutely right to highlight the stupidity and cruelty of US drug policy with regard to terminally ill patients. Take the case of Abigail Borroughs.

  Abigail was nineteen yea
rs old when a cancerous sore developed in her mouth. She did everything right, quickly sought treatment and had the sore removed. But despite a positive prognosis from her doctor, new tumors appeared, and things got worse. After finishing her first round of chemotherapy and radiation, the doctors found that the cancer had spread into her lungs and stomach. Her doctors had done all they could, so Abigail turned to cancer specialists at Johns Hopkins.

  Doctors there knew about two drugs that could have potentially helped Abigail. They were her only real hope at defeating the cancer. The problem was, even though the drugs had cleared early trials that indicated they were safe for use, it would be years before the medicines were fully cleared by the FDA, which approves nearly every medical product in the United States for safety and effectiveness. Abigail did not have years. She was dying of cancer.

  Abigail tried to enroll in clinical trials for the drug, but her condition didn’t meet the exacting standards. Then she was turned down for “compassionate use”—a last-ditch effort in which the FDA allows a drug maker to give drugs to a patient who has no other options. In this case, the company denied the request, likely to protect the drug’s track record as it lurched through the multimillion-dollar FDA approval process.

  One of the drugs Abigail was requesting was called Erbitux. It was invented in 1983, when she was a toddler. The FDA didn’t clear the drug for late-stage head and neck cancer like Abigail’s until 2011, ten years after she died at age twenty-one. It took twenty-eight years to approve. How many Americans have died unnecessarily as a result of this one federal bureaucracy?

  The FDA and the medical treatment bureaucracy denied medicine to a young woman who was dying because it might not be safe. This is what happens when health care decisions are dictated by distant number crunchers in Washington who have never met the patient and have no personal grounds for compassion, rather than by medical professionals who know and care passionately about their patients.

  That is why President Trump called for streamlining the drug approval process at the FDA during his first address to a joint session of Congress. He told the story of his guest, Megan Crowley, who was diagnosed with Pompe disease, an illness that impairs muscle function, when she was only fifteen months old. Trump told the story of her father, who founded a company to look for a cure, which ultimately saved Megan’s life.

  “Megan’s story is about the unbounded power of a father’s love for a daughter,” Trump said.

  But our slow and burdensome approval process at the Food and Drug Administration keeps too many advances, like the one that saved Megan’s life, from reaching those in need. If we slash the restraints, not just at the FDA but across our government, then we will be blessed with far more miracles just like Megan. In fact, our children will grow up in a nation of miracles.

  The world is currently experiencing an explosion of new scientific breakthroughs and technology that could dramatically improve people’s lives. One of the biggest governing challenges we face is how to prevent bureaucracy and regulation from standing in the way of that progress. It is encouraging to see that President Trump understands this and we should expect more action is coming. In March, Trump tapped Jared Kushner to lead an “American Innovation” office at the White House, which will look at how to reorganize and streamline government for the twenty-first century.

  Because he was a builder before becoming a candidate, President Trump is also very effective at describing how irrational and destructive environmental review and permitting regulations block construction—in particular commercial infrastructure projects. This is what he said in January:

  I have people that tell me they have more people working on regulations than they have doing product and it is out of control. It has gotten out of control. I’m a very big person when it comes to the environment. I have received awards on the environment. But some of that stuff makes it impossible to get anything built.

  During his first week in office, President Trump expedited unending environmental reviews for important government and commercial infrastructure projects, which allowed bridge and highway builders to hire workers sooner and complete projects more quickly for less money—a perfectly Trumpian concept that is completely the opposite of business as usual in Washington.

  But Trump clearly plans to be much more aggressive. In April, at a town hall event with CEOs, President Trump pulled out a chart that was taller than he was, to explain the ten- to twenty-year process of interacting with the seventeen different federal agencies it requires to build a highway. He is setting the stage for his proposed $1 trillion infrastructure bill to have a major deregulation component.

  ANTI–POLITICAL CORRECTNESS

  Part of being anti-Left and anti-stupid means opposing political correctness—the third side of the Trump four-sided table illustration.

  Certainly, it is important to be polite, and nobody should think that using racial or ethnic slurs is acceptable. But political correctness has morphed from a desire to avoid needlessly offending people to a tool of the Left to marginalize and vilify reasonable Americans who disagree with the elite liberal agenda.

  No issue better illustrates the Left’s bullying tactics than that of President Trump’s effort to enact a pause in immigration from certain unstable, war-torn Muslim countries until a security review could be completed. This sensible policy, put in place after high-profile terrorist attacks in Europe had been carried out by recent immigrants from these areas, could not be debated on the merits by those on the Left, so they resorted to slander, and accused its supporters of bigotry.

  Keep in mind that the Obama administration first said these nations were dangerous. But the propagandists in the media had already decided the order was a ban on Muslims. For days, the only stories you saw on TV or in print were about downtrodden refugees or travelers who were enormously inconvenienced because they had to stay at airports or cancel plans.

  Here were the problems with the media’s logic: First, given the choice of inconveniencing a noncitizen or endangering an American, Trump—and most Americans—would favor inconvenience every time.

  Second, it simply was not a Muslim ban. This was a perfect example of the media not allowing the facts to get in the way of a good story. The largest Muslim population in the world is in Indonesia. Pakistan and India have the next-largest Muslim populations. So, the three largest Muslim-majority countries in the world are not on the list—nor are other Middle Eastern Muslim-majority countries.

  Still, a federal court in Seattle put a hold on the ban while the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments from the Trump administration and opponents. Then, after the Trump administration revised the order, a judge in Hawaii again blocked the national security effort. It will be interesting to see how President Trump responds.

  In this environment, it is easy to see why Donald Trump’s rejection of political correctness is appealing to so many Americans. The backlash has been brewing for decades.

  The term “political correctness” came into popular use in America in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as we realized the liberal academic elite at many of our colleges and universities were indoctrinating a generation of young adults with left-wing ideals.

  The author and academic Allan Bloom discussed this in his 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind.

  Bloom explained that the education system once taught students the meaning of being American by focusing on accepting each person’s natural rights—those inalienable human rights bestowed by God. In doing that, we “found a fundamental basis of unity and sameness” because race, class, religion, and other cultural differences “dim when bathed in the light of natural rights, which give men common interests and make them truly brothers.”

  Bloom warned that this natural rights–focused education was being replaced by a doctrine of openness, which abandons the idea that natural rights unify communities. The openness doctrine dictates everyone must accept all cultures, and “there is no enemy other than the man who is not
open to everything.”

  Of course, learning about other cultures and ideas is an important hallmark of education, but as George H. W. Bush said to students at the University of Michigan in 1991, “although the movement arises from the laudable desire to sweep away the debris of racism and sexism and hatred, it replaces old prejudices with new ones. It declared certain topics off-limits, certain expression off-limits, even certain gestures off-limits.”

  Americans don’t like being told what they are allowed to say, think, and do. Frustration with political correctness was part of the political environment in 1994, which led to the first Republican majority in the House of Representatives in forty years, and my becoming Speaker of the House.

  I would argue that a similar event has just happened with the election of Donald Trump. The Left, the media, and the political establishment were horrified by the results of the 1994 and 2016 elections. They should examine their role in creating a politically correct bullying culture that helped lead to those results.

  PC AND CONVENTIONAL WISDOM

  There is also another form of political correctness that is just as insidious, and that is adhering to groupthink and never bucking the conventional wisdom.

  As an outsider in politics, Donald Trump is especially effective at busting up conventional wisdom. The most obvious example is how he ran his campaign. Despite having enormous resources to bring to bear, Trump never went the typical consultant-dominated route of hiring a huge staff and buying lots of television time. Instead, Trump kept a very lean staff and relied on earned media to drown out all the television attack ads aimed at him. Trump believed that seeing him personally and unedited on television would wipe out most of the damage from negative attack ads. He turned out to be right.