cover of episode Speaker Newt Gingrich's March To The Majority

Speaker Newt Gingrich's March To The Majority

2023/6/14
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Jason Chaffetz discusses the inconsistencies and failures in the Biden-Harris administration's immigration policies, highlighting the human and economic toll on border states and criticizing the White House's shifting narratives on the issue.

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All right, welcome to the Jason in the House podcast. I'm Jason Chaffetz, and thanks for joining us. We're going to have a good show because we're going to talk briefly about the news, highlight the stupid because, you know, there's always somebody doing something stupid somewhere. But then I'm very honored because we have Speaker Newt Gingrich who's going to join me. We're going to sit side by side. The former Speaker of the House, he's got a new book out. It's called March to the Majority.

I got a new book that just came out, The Puppeteers, The People Who Control, The People Who Control America. And he's got a book out, The March to the Majority. So I highly recommend both. But let's talk a little bit about the news. And like I said, there's some really important stuff that's happening here. But I do want to highlight –

But what the White House is now saying, their story keeps changing about the migrant patterns. Now, if you recall through the years, the Biden-Harris administration on immigration basically gave a tacit approval. They signaled even before they took office that if Joe Biden were to become the president, the borders would be wide open and come here. And that's why millions of people did.

They took their lives on the line. So many of it, countless number of people were raped and trafficked moving across the border.

And the drug cartels, the so-called coyotes, the money, the thousands of dollars that's paid per person in order to move them across the border, not just from Mexico, not from Central America, but from literally more than 150 countries across the country. They're moved here, putting extreme pressure, particularly on Texas, Arizona, and obviously New Mexico and California. Right.

but really into Texas and Arizona where the migrant patterns and the illegal immigration patterns have the biggest challenges.

Well, a couple of days ago, the White House press secretary, she came out and condemned the practice of transporting migrants because of the, quote, pressure it puts on non-border states and cities. The way it was described is it kicked over a beehive of criticism online. That's an understatement.

For her to criticize the pressure that it's put on cities that aren't actually physically touching the southern border, boy, isn't that rich? You know, it's the Biden policies. And what's driving me nuts here is you hear the Democrats time and time again say we need comprehensive immigration reform.

I think there are some things that are worthy of immigration reform. But why not enforce the current law? That's the problem is they don't enforce the current law. If they enforce the current law, guess what? We wouldn't have the problem that we have. But we do have it because they don't enforce the current law. And then the White House gets up and complains about the pressure that it's putting on non-border states and cities. That is just so fundamentally wrong, top to bottom.

All right, let's highlight the stupid because you know what? There's always somebody doing something stupid somewhere. All right, Jesse Waters, primetime. He had this good interview. And Olivia, I don't know how to pronounce her name. Crawls like Zach, something like that. My apologies to Olivia. But she said her gender studies teacher gave her a zero on an essay about transgender athletes saying,

because she referred to some as biological women. The feedback read, quote, Olivia, this is a solid proposal. However, the terms biological woman are exclusionary and are not allowed in this course as they further reinforce heteronormativity. Heteronormativity, not a word I always say every day.

Please reassess your topic and edit to focus on women's rights, not just females, and I will regrade. So she gets a zero by saying biological women. That's how absurd the argument on the left has become. That is just absolutely stupid. All right, the second thing I've got on our list here of stupid stuff is you've got to go and look at the gaffes that are made

by Joe Biden. They are frequent. They are consistent. They are almost on a daily basis. But the New York Times in its infinite wisdom and its objective reporting came out and described the president as sharp, fit, and having, quote, I can't tell you how hard it is to even say it with a straight face, striking stamina. Are you kidding me, New York Times? Talk about a puff piece like we've never seen before.

That is just a disgusting display of so-called journalism. I don't care if it's an opinion piece. Nobody is accusing Joe Biden of having striking stamina, sharp and being fit. This is after the president fell yet again at the Air Force Academy graduation. That to me is just stupid, New York Times.

So I'm thrilled to have the Speaker of the House, the former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, sitting side by side. Mr. Speaker, thanks for being here. Jason, it's great to be back with you. Yeah, no, look, I have watched from afar. I've gotten to know you since my time in Congress and with Fox News. But to sit down and have this kind of discussion, I really do appreciate it because you've been there, you've done that, you've seen things.

And you got this new book come out, March to the Majority. I think you were just telling me it's your 45th book. Something like that, yeah. Yeah. The March to Majority. But I want to talk about you and your background and kind of how we came to be sitting here. But I want to also hear about the book. So...

Let's start with that because we're at a unique part of time. I mean, here we are. All these presidential candidates are lining up, getting ready to run. They've just started bantering back and forth. But that's really going to drive what happens in the 2024 race. I mean, all these down ballot issues, the Senate, the House. But you've got to have a working majority, right? You've got to have a mandate from the American people to actually get stuff done. Well, I think there's an opportunity there.

in the 2024 election to set up a choice so decisively that you actually have a governing majority in the House, the Senate, and the presidency in '25.

A major reason I wrote March to the Majority was to take the lessons we'd learned both working with Ronald Reagan and then on our own. It took us 16 years to grow a majority. And then for four years, we negotiated with Bill Clinton and got him to sign conservative reforms like welfare turning into work, a tax cut that led to economic growth, and four consecutive balanced budgets. And so I wanted to lay out sort of a playbook

that this can be done. We have a chance, I think, because Biden and the Democrats have gone so far to the left that I think they're leaving a huge vacuum where a Republican alternative candidate

that is explained in positive terms, things like parental rights, for example, that's an 84% issue. And so you can imagine a situation growing where a large number of independents and Democrats decide they just can't stay with the radical left. And they'll end up in a kind of large, the kind of election that Nixon won against McGovern and that Reagan won against Mondale.

Now, if you're on the left, you're looking at this equation and you're thinking that the right to life issue is going to drive you to the finish line and their superiority in terms of organizing and getting out the vote. Would I be wrong in that, that that's how they view this election? Yeah, I think that's their view. And I think, first of all, on abortion, the challenge for them is that they are so much more radical voters.

than the American people. Most Americans believe you have to have an exception for rape, for incest, and for life of the mother, but they also believe that there's some reasonable limit around 15 weeks.

The Democrats have gotten stuck on, you know, anytime you want up through the ninth month, including in some states proposals for infanticide up to 30 days after the baby's born. Well, most Americans think that's very radical. That's brutal. And so the question becomes, in a sense, who's the more radical? If you are a...

hardline, no exceptions person, you're probably going to lose an election. That's what happened, for example, to the gubernatorial candidate in Pennsylvania because people say, wait a second, that's too radical. So in a sense, on the abortion issue, it's an argument over who's more radical. And I think what Trump did recently in talking about really dramatically expanding adoption opportunities and creating almost an adoption core of people who want to be parents is

is a step in the right direction because it expresses concern both for the mother and the baby and doesn't pit one against the other. When I was speaker, we passed a $5,000 tax credit for adoption to encourage people to be able to afford to go through the adoption process. And that was part of our answer on the abortion issue. So in the book, March to the Majority,

What's the premise then that Republicans can get? It's those true independents, right? The people in the middle. That last 5% that will sway an election one direction or another. What are the issues or what are the tactics that can actually get that march moving to the majority? Well, we created with Bernie Marcus' help in –

2018, a program called America's New Majority Project, which people can see if they go to americasnewmajorityproject.com. And we began very extensive testing. I mentioned earlier parental rights, for example, which is an 84 to 11 issue.

And I was enough of a student of Reagan that I believe if you find a 70 or 80 percent issue, stand next to it and smile. You're probably going to win. And I would start with issues where the American people have reached a consensus. We just saw this in a sense in the fight over the debt ceiling because only 24 percent of the country –

favored a debt ceiling with no spending cuts. So Biden's position was one out of every four Americans. Three out of four Americans didn't agree with him. And that's the kind of thing where if you listen to the American people, Lincoln once said-

With popular sentiment, anything is possible. Without popular sentiment, nothing is possible. And if you read Reagan's farewell address in January of 1989, he says, all these victories I won, actually you won, that it was the American people who got Congress to do what it had to do. And I think that this sense of a Republican Party that has solid conservative values but that listens carefully to the American people can in fact –

grow a very substantial and very stable majority. Yeah, you mentioned...

I've always – I really tried to study as much as I could Margaret Thatcher, and I love her quote when she starts talking about first you got to go out and win the argument. Then you can go win the vote. Right, exactly. And it's the same premise, right? It was very interesting that you had Prime Minister Thatcher, President Reagan, and Pope John Paul II all in the same period.

all understood the power of argument and all understood the use of words. And they really changed the world. I mean, Thatcher changed British culture about entrepreneurship and the work ethic to a degree which is still largely true even though the Conservative Party disintegrated after she left. I mean, it's fascinating.

Reagan understood very similar values to Thatcher. Unfortunately, George H.W. Bush didn't understand anything about Reagan despite having served with him for eight years and didn't understand that breaking his word on no new taxes would shatter his coalition, which it did. But I think that you do have – and this is part of my point in the book March to the Majority –

Understanding where the American people are, understanding the language they talk in, not the language of think tanks in Washington or the language of the New York Times, but the everyday way normal people would talk with each other and communicating that level. And again, I tell people, go to YouTube and pull up Ronald Reagan's October 1964 speech. It's called A Time for Choosing.

which he gave on national television for Barry Goldwater. It is the heart of the Reagan message. It never changes. As he once said, he kept saying the same things and the world came around. And people forget –

Reagan won the largest electoral college vote victory over an incumbent president in American history. And it could have been bigger. If he had spent some time in Minnesota, he probably could have pushed it even bigger, right? Right. All right, let's go back. Mr. Speaker, let's go back for a little. I want to talk about Little Newt. You know, we've seen you. You're an iconic figure. But that early childhood, the development, the –

The little pivots or changes in your alterations in your life, those small things that maybe change the direction. Walk us through that a little bit, kind of where you grew up. I was born in and walk us through that a little bit. I actually described part of this in March for the majority because it explains part of my political activism. I was born in Harrisburg. My mother divorced and remarried. My stepfather was a career soldier.

He went off to Korea. And when I was 11, my mother let me—this was a much safer and calmer time. So she let me go by myself to a movie theater one afternoon in August. And I saw two African animal movies, and I got all excited because I love animals. And as I walked out of the theater, there was a sign next to the theater pointing through an alleyway that said City Hall.

And my grandmother had been very big on teaching about doing your duty and being a citizen. And so at 11, I made the decision. I was supposed to go catch a trolley car home. This was back when Harrisburg still had trolleys. But instead, I thought I should go. So I go over to City Hall, and I walk up. It was an 11-year-old kid. And I asked the receptionist, I said, I want to talk to somebody about a zoo. And she said, well, I guess that's the Parks Department. So she sent me upstairs.

And I walk in and this is part of why I'm a historian and not a social scientist because I don't think anything occurs with lines. There's too many complexities. So I walk in and the lady in charge, the receptionist says, well, the head of the parks department isn't here today but his assistant is. And his assistant was a career civil servant.

And so I go in and he says, I say, I want to talk about a zoo. And he actually, Harrisburg had had a zoo before World War II and closed it during rationing in World War II and never reopened it. So he pulled out all the records of this is what it costs to feed the lion and this is what it costs to feed the zebra. And he talked to me for a while and he said, now, your job is to come back next Tuesday and talk to the city council.

And I said, okay. Now, how old are you at this point? I'm 11. 11. Okay. And this is why I think history is important. He then picks up the phone, calls my grandmother, who he had dated 40 years earlier, and says, Nudy's here in my office. I'm sending him home in a cab, but he has to come back Tuesday. Right. So Tuesday I show up because I'm doing what I'm supposed to do.

And I sit in the back of the room and I listen to people talk to the city council. And the last couple before me, I still remember vividly, the last couple before me gets up and they're complaining about garbage pickup on their street. And then it's my turn. I'm the last one. And I get up and I make a pitch for a zoo. Well, you're a typical reporter. It's a boring August day. Your choice is a couple complains about garbage pickup or cute 11-year-old calls for a zoo. Guess which one made the paper? Yeah.

A couple of weeks later, my mother gets a letter from Korea where my dad's serving in the Korean War. And he says, keep him out of the newspapers. Boy, that went well. Something which didn't work very well. So that was sort of my entry point into politics. You're listening to Jason in the House. We'll be back with more of my conversation with Speaker Newt Gingrich right after this.

The Fox News Rundown, a contrast of perspectives you won't hear anywhere else. Your daily dose of news twice a day. Featuring insight from top newsmakers, reporters, and Fox News contributors. Listen and subscribe now by going to foxnewspodcasts.com. That's interesting because I remember early on, I was in high school and...

KZZP in Phoenix, Arizona promised commercial free programming for a day, brought to you by, and then they would name whoever was sponsoring it.

So I wrote a letter to the editor and I said, wait a sec, KZZP said it was going to be commercial free. But every time they promoted who's doing it, that's not commercial free. That's a commercial. Well, they ran it. And I couldn't believe it. I think my little letter made it into the newspaper. There it was in black and white. And it kind of thought, oh, I can do this again. And so-

I kept doing this type of thing, and it was one of those early things in life that kind of helped change the trajectory of my perception that I could be part of the solution and I could highlight problems. And that's interesting. It's really important to get across to people that these little steps, encouraging young people to take these little steps can lead in directions you never quite imagined. Yeah. Yeah.

So as you moved along, were you playing sports? I played football. I played baseball. I wasn't particularly – I had very bad eyesight. But I was okay in football because I played either a tackle or a fullback. You just had to know the general shape. That's right. Again, a typical example –

We were in the Army when my dad was stationed at Stuttgart and I went to the Stuttgart American High School. I could actually, you know, I could make the varsity team because it was a relatively small school.

When he was transferred to Fort Benning, I went to Baker High School, which had 2,400 students. Wow. Big school. And the two first—this was in high school—the two first string tackles weighed 220 and 250 pounds. Right, right. Okay. And it was sort of hopeless. Right. I was basically practice. Yeah. Put him out there, let them run over him for a while. But it was fine. I learned a lot playing sports. I played first base in baseball.

And particularly in football, I learned a lot just about endurance, which in later years when we were trying to create a majority, I think some of the lessons I learned playing football were really important. Now, this is why I see women's sports under attack right now. And I think they're missing out. There's so much to be learned in sport. It can be an individual sport like tennis, but it can be a team sport like football or baseball. I was a place kicker in college and

You know how valuable that skill set is, right? You know, come on, honey, let's go out and kicks a few balls after. It's kind of a worthless thing. But in dealing with pressure and being part of a team and not coming up with excuses, you got to actually do things. It was all so valuable. So, but when did, I mean, I understand the story when you're 11, but when did you kind of turn the corner and say, yeah, I think elective politics is probably right for me? Well, I decided in...

The spring and summer of 1958, between my freshman and sophomore years in high school, my dad was stationed initially in Orléans, France. And we went to visit a friend of his who was at Verdun, which was the largest battlefield on the Western Front in World War I. And we stayed with him. It was a huge battlefield. There were 600,000 people killed, Germans and French, in a nine-month period.

And we stayed a couple of days looking at the battlefield and staying with a friend of his who had been drafted and sent to the Philippines, served on the Bataan Death March and spent three and a half years in a Japanese prison camp. So during the day, you're looking at this horrendous explosion of people dying. And in the evening, you're listening to the cost of losing. A couple of weeks later, the French paratroopers came back from Algiers and killed the French Fourth Republic.

and brought General de Gaulle back from his home at Colombele du Zéglise and said, and he created the Fifth Republic, which is still today the longest serving non-monarchical system in French history. And then we were transferred to Stuttgart, and the week we got to Stuttgart was the first Berlin crisis, and the U.S. Army went into Lebanon with tactical nuclear weapons offshore. And all that was real, and then it happened.

7th Army Headquarters where we were stationed at Stuttgart, they would go out on alert like at 3 or 4 in the morning. This was before there were missiles and they were proving they could get into the field before the Soviet aircraft could arrive. And I realized one day

They were all leaving, but all the dependents were still sitting there. So I really spent a good bit of August thinking and praying about it. And I decided that countries needed leadership to survive and that I had three jobs. What do we need to do to survive as a free country? How do you explain it so the American people give you permission? And how do you implement it once you have permission?

And I would say that from August of 58 to today, that's all I've done. I mean, I still see myself as a citizen. I get up every day asking those three questions and it doesn't change. So you get into elective politics, you're in the body, but the Republicans have been in the minority for a long time, decades, right? What was the difference? I mean,

Your leadership is often credited for having the guts and the plan to actually execute it to get it done because people before that didn't believe that Republicans could be in the majority. I had run once in the middle of Watergate and lost with 48.5% against the dean of the delegation. I came back and ran a second time with Jimmy Carter at the head of the Democratic ticket office.

Georgia and lost with 48.3%. I came back a third time. Carter now had lost some of his popularity and the incumbent retired. He'd beaten me twice and he'd proven his point and decided that was it. So I won in 1978. When I got there in December of 78, before I was sworn in, I said to the leadership, we've been in a minority for 24 years.

Don't you think we ought to have a plan to get to be in a majority? Now, the leadership at that point was totally exhausted. They'd been through Watergate. They'd been through the Reagan-Ford primary fight in 76. And they were exhausted and defeated. They lost about a third of their friends had been defeated, which was almost like a death in the family. And so they didn't have it. They didn't believe they could be a majority. They didn't have any energy to try to be a majority. They expected to lose to the Democrats. Right.

But we were a younger, newer group. And we said, we didn't come here to spend our lives. So Guy Vanderjack, who was the chairman of the Congressional Campaign Committee from Michigan, said, I really believe in Newt. Why don't we establish a committee to plan a majority and make Newt chairman? Now, I hadn't been sworn in yet. So this was all brand new. You're listening to Jason in the House. We'll be back with more of my conversation with Speaker Newt Gingrich right after this.

That's amazing because – I underestimated how hard it would be. I remind people we lost in 80, 82, 84, 86, 88, 90, and 92. And we finally won in 94. People always forget about that when you win. Well, we coined the term cheerful persistence because about a third of the Republicans were mad at us because we were making noise.

And we were making their life harder. And all of the Democrats were mad at us. And so when people would come in, newly elected people say, oh, I want to be part of getting to be a majority. We'd say, that's great. Understand this is what it's going to be like. And you have to have cheerful persistence. So we were trying every two. It wasn't like we were rope-a-doping. We were trying every two years. And we would learn out of every election things that hadn't worked.

And part of the point of writing March to the Majority is to be sort of a playbook. It shows you this is what worked. This is what didn't work. We clearly stood on Reagan's shoulders. I helped organize in 1980. I was still a freshman. I helped organize the first Capitol Steps event. And Reagan and David Broderick at the time wrote a column saying this was really courageous. Most Republican presidential candidates ran away from the party because they needed the independence and the Republicans were such a minority. Right.

Reagan believed that he had to lead a team in order to get anything done. And so Reagan was willing to come to the Capitol, stand there with every House and Senate candidate, and he called it a contract. He had five big ideas. And so there's an interesting substory here. So we had put this all together.

It had actually been an idea that Bill Brock, the Republican National Committee chairman, brought to me. And we were about to get this all done. And the theory was everybody would come in, House and Senate candidates. They would all pledge to do this. And I had helped invent it in part because I was sure that my good friend Mack Mattingly, who was running for the Senate, would get about 48 or 49 percent. But we needed something to break through.

And that he needed to somehow do something vivid that would associate him with Reagan, who was going to carry Georgia. And so all of a sudden, about two weeks before the event, two guys come by from the Reagan campaign and say, you know, we've discussed it and we don't think we want to do a contract. And we don't want to have all these guys pledging something. We want him to come in and then Governor Reagan will give a speech. And I said, let me get this straight.

You want every House and Senate candidate in the country to come here and stand like spear carriers in the opera while Reagan gives a speech. And I'm not going to ask them to give up a day of campaigning to do nothing. So I called Vanderjack and he said, well, look, this is your project. What do you want to do? And I said, I want to cancel it. He said, well, you're in charge. I mean, do it. So I had my staff call over the Reagan campaign and say, as of this minute, this event's closed. It's not going to happen.

But two hours later, I got the only call I got in the entire campaign from Bill Casey, who was the campaign manager, with this very deep, gravelly voice. And I got on the phone. He said, young man, I understand you want my attention. And I told him what we had done. And he said, I and I told him we have five ideas that are in Reagan's speeches. They're in the platform, you know, and we want people to sign up and be a team.

He listened to me for about three minutes. He said, I believe in a few hours you'll be very happy. Same two guys come back over. It's a great concept. We're totally for it. And we did the event. And I think partly because of the event, we won. We had a net gain of 14 Senate seats. We won control of the Senate when nobody thought we would. We carried five seats by a combined total of 75,000 votes.

And I think that the identity with Reagan, the marginal positive, the fact that it was positive, not negative, all helped us. So that was an example of the education we learned working our way to become a majority. So you've written this March to Majority, but how are things today different than then? Because, I mean, the world's changed. I mean, we didn't have the computers, the mobile phones, the social media. They're much faster paced. Yeah.

We were in the early stages of talk radio. Rush Limbaugh was already famous and was very important to us. And we had shortly after we were elected as a majority, we had Radio Day and invited all the conservative radio hosts in the country to come and broadcast from the Capitol.

But we had nothing like the Internet was in its early stages, although the day after I became speaker, we put the House information system online, which is one of our early contributions to opening up the system. And one of my proudest moments was when Bill Archer, who was chairman of Ways and Means, and had come to Congress in 72, long before there was an Internet, said,

Archer gets up and he says, we've now introduced the Tax Cut Act of 1995 and you can get it. And he read the URL for people to go. Now, for Archer, this was all magic. But that was the beginning of what we now have. And as you know, when they had the agreement –

on the debt ceiling, they posted it on Sunday night online. 99 pages. Everybody in the country could read it. And that's the opposite of Nancy Pelosi's idea. Oh, believe me. I sat through eight and a half years of...

Nancy Pelosi and literally stuff was coming out at 2, 3 o'clock in the morning and she expected, you know, she voted on it at 2 o'clock in the afternoon. Well, as she once said, you have to vote for it to find out what's in it. Yeah, I mean, there are no truer words ever spoken by anybody in D.C. than Nancy Pelosi. So I would say it's more partisan today.

That there is – I realized the other week there is no deadline. It's permanent. It's hourly. It's not like daily news or weekly news. This is a constant unending process. I would say also that the Democrats have gone much further to the left. Yeah.

This really began in the 60s. People forget this. Theodore White, in the making of the president in 1972, White says, McGovern's problem is that the liberal ideology had become a liberal theology. And we tend to forget that. We had, there were 2,500 bombings in the late 1960s. There was an active group of organized people that set out to...

Excuse me. It's spring. The literally Black Panthers who set out to assassinate police talked about we're going to assassinate police. So we've been through a cycle of left wing as in before. I think it's now come back with a vengeance and it's broadened out. It's much more anti-white. It's much more anti-Christian.

It's much more against traditional sexual behaviors. I mean, a perfect example is the current fight over the Dodgers have invited a viciously hostile anti-Catholic group who wear clothing like nuns.

and say a whole series of really despicable things. Now, the idea that the Dodgers would invite them to come— Honored them. They were giving them an award. This is a—and in Sacramento, the Democratic legislature honored them. Yeah. But you look at that and you think, I mean, what is the upside of this? Why are these people—why do they think this is a good thing?

And so that's how much bigger the gap is today than it was, say, in the 1970s or 80s or even in the 90s when we were running. It is remarkably different. So the book is March to the Majority, so perfectly timed with what's going to happen here in 2024. I need to ask you a few questions about your own career.

These are rapid questions. I mean, how many times you've swung the gavel there as the speaker, but I don't know if you're properly prepared for these. You ready? We'll see what happens. All right. All right. First concert you attended? First concert was the BJ's. Very good. Who was your high school mascot? A lion. Because there were a lot of lions in Georgia, evidently. Well, I guess you have mountain lions, right? Yeah.

What was your first job? Not, hey, Newt, go take out the garbage. I mean, like, your first job where you worked for somebody else. I worked as a groundskeeper for...

In high school, I worked as a pin setter for a bowling alley. Oh, yeah, for a bowling alley, yeah. Back before this was a—it was actually a Luftwaffe pre-World War II bowling alley before they had pin setting automatic machines. Yeah. And so I used to go and set pins. I worked as a babysitter. Basically, I did it. Were you a good babysitter? Yeah. Were you a good babysitter? Yeah, because usually they were very young kids and they went to sleep. Yeah. I also delivered newspapers.

I mean, so I tried a variety of things. All right. That's good. That's good. What's the Newt Gingrich superpower? What I mean is like what is it that you can do probably better than most people realize? I think everybody has one. They just maybe can't articulate it. Probably focus intensely. Yeah. I can think about a problem for a long time. And focus determines reality.

If you could meet, if you could say, hey, honey, guess what? We've got a special guest coming over. Anybody in the course of history. They could come over and break bread with the Gingrich family and share a meal. Who would you want to have come over? Obviously, from my perspective, the first choice would be Christ. I think it would be unbelievable. Politically, the first choice would be Lincoln. Why Lincoln?

I think he's the most complex and smartest person ever to be president. I think what he did in holding the North together through four years of war.

is just an extraordinary study in leadership. And I think he really understood. He got it. Yeah. And his ability to succinctly capture an idea and share it was just one of the most tumultuous times in a nation's history. He really is amazing. I mean, probably the best writer ever to be president. And he served in the House. Communicating. So good things there. That's right. Pineapple on pizza? Yes or no?

Yeah, I like pineapple a lot. Well, I like pineapple, but not on pizza. Oh, I eat pineapple on pizza. No. Well, the judges don't like that answer. Sorry. But we'll give deference to the Speaker of the House. Last question. Best advice you ever got? Never give up. Very good. Very good. Well, congratulations. March to the majority. New book's out. It's just come out. And congratulations to you.

Thanks for your leadership. And a lot of us have learned a lot from you along the way. You've inspired a lot of us. It's great to be back with you. And I've admired you on both television and everything you're doing and wish you well and continue to do it. Well, thank you. Thanks for joining us on the Jason in the House podcast.

All right. I want to thank the speaker. He's written a number of books, a lot of wisdom there, a lot of experience, and a lot of success that we should learn from. His newest book, March to the Majority, it's out now. I just want to remind people my book's out now doing quite well. I appreciate the purchasing of it. I hope you're liking it as much as we enjoyed writing it. There's a big effort behind doing all the research to put it together.

But Puppeteers, the people who control the people who control America. I hope you enjoyed that. And for this podcast, hope you can rate it. Please do rate it. You can also subscribe to it. And I want to remind people that you can listen ad-free with a Fox News podcast plus subscription on Apple Podcasts. And Amazon Prime members can listen to the show ad-free on the Amazon Music app. I hope you join us next week. We'll have another exciting guest.

I'm Jason Chaffetz, and this has been Jason in the House.