tempore providing educational resources the kids were not receiving their classrooms. the young conservatives movement promotes the idea that limited government free to present a strong national -- for the next generation. young america programs are shaped in great part by the leading conservatives to give their time talented resources. our guest is one such key leader who has played a critical role in our program for nearly three decades. the speaker of the u.s. house of representatives newt gingrich has been a longtime ally

>> regularly addressing our programs and conferences during his time before -- during and after his time in congress. speaker gingrich has addressed our students in supporters at the cter in san santa barbara, d film one of the many documentaries, ronald reagan ruin day view with destiny. we're honored to host him here foe fst time at young americans foundation until a headquarters in virginia. it's no surprise that speecher gingrich understands the importance of reaching and educate ung people with the principles that make america great. he taught history and environmental tieds at west georgia college. at congressman, chris cox once see, newt gingrich is a teacher who did not stop teaching when he left campus. first ethrowing congress in 1978, representing the sixth district of georgia for 20 years. in 1995, elected to speaker of he -- of the house he

said he felt compelled to public service as an early age, note something people had to be willing to dedicate their lives to protecting life, our freedom and our people. i had an obligation to do my share of the job. and what a job he did. speaker gingrich is well known as the architect of the contract with america which led conservatives to victory in 1994, casting the majority in the u.s. of house of representatives for the first anytime four decades. the passed welfare reform, the first balanced budget in a generation and the first tax cut in 16 years. iring and educating young people. in 1997 he addressed -- held a press conference in front of 400 students on capitol hill, covered by every major news network and broadcast live on c-span. he launched the center for --

and served as general chairman of american solutions for winning the future until his 2012 presidential bid. he has pressured 36 books include 15 knicks and nonfictio "new york times" best sellers and his baitest book is "trump's america." he a fox news contribute job. "time magazine" named him man of the year for 1995 and said liters make thing possibles. exceptional leaders make things inevitable. we agree. join me in welcoming, 50th 50th speak of the house of representatives, newt gingrich. >> thank you very, very much. i'm glad you're here so she's also an intern with us at gingrich productions so we're delighted to have him here today to cover the things we talk about. i'm delighted to have a chance to talk with you.

i think that the young americans foundation plays a very important role. let me ask you a question just as a test case. for those who are students at the present time. how many of you would say that there's a liberal bias on your campus? [laughter] anybody here who would say there's not a liberal bias? >> that's a great school. i like that school. >> [inaudible] >> hillsdale. >> [inaudible] >> th's they largest school i've heard from that doesn't have a bias. that's great. well, i think anybody wating ill have some sense of what this is all about and why young america's foundation matters. we are the -- part of the ron i wrote this book is that we are in a long-term struggle that is literally a cultural civil war. and those who are right now in the middle of classes where -- how many of you eave professor

who if you gave a directly conservative answer on your test would give you a lower grade? do any of -- raise you hand if you have had professors who would literally mark you down for the form of giving the wrong answer by definition. i think that if you look at the -- the news yesterday is an outsource of the universitys the universes became more liberal, the news media followed that pattern and that's why you end up with the kind of news media we have today. although the intensity relates to trump is different. i'll include the post student group also. how many of you on election day in 2016 thought hillary would probably win? raise your hand. okay. this is a conservative audience and yet 90% of the hand win up. how many of you were confident

trump would win? one. okay, two. about three of you. so, from the start -- this is part of why i wrote "trump's america" because i hat where last yr a book called "understanding trump," which really was because he is so different that all sorts of people saying, i don't understand what he is doing, i don't understand how he does it and that book focused on trump and i think frankly weathered president well over the last year, still has -- very relevant because large parts of who his have not changed. i realize is a watched what was going on that a great deal of what we are living through isn't trump as a personality, but it's things happening in america. and you have to look at the larger picture of the america that trump is president of in order to fully understand the trump presidency. that's why trump's america is different. i have a theory about why the

left is so hostile. and it goes back to election day. think about all of your friends who are liberals who about 8:00 on election evening, were about to pop the champagne. hillary was growing to break the glass ceiling, they were going to get a left wing supreme court justice, they were going have policies on the left, they were going to have weakness overseas, going raise taxes, you know, life was good. and two hours later, -- some of you a may have seen is in in whatever room you were -- their suddenly staring at each other, beginning to realize that not only is she not going to be president, but that means that donald j. trump is going to be president. and i believe what happened was a traumatic event comparable to a sigh cozies, that the --

psychosis that the intensity and speed of the change was so that most leralle toyduffer from political variance of ptsd. and the part of trump's genius is he tweets every morning, and so these people who go to bed and they spend the night trying not to think of the nightmare that is occurring and they wake up in the morning and they're about to begin a happy new day, and they see a trump tweet and realize, oh, my god, he's still president. so they can't get over it. it's like watching groundhog day as a political film. it has come back to it again and again and again and that's a big part of why you have this extraordinary level of anger. it's one thing to sigh we're political eye opinion anyone order ideaolal opponents but there's a deep, personal part of this, and it's because he -- almost like in the middle ages,

guy who usurped the kingship and shouldn't be there legitimately. well, trump, of course, basically ignored all that and when people don't really appreciate about him is trump grew up in the new york media market which is the toughest, nsaest, most competitive media market in the country, and trump learned by 1985 or so that if he was willing to fight, he would get coverage every day. and trump likes coverage. so he has spend the last 33 years fighting, and when people say, oh, is he going to get worn out? no. he wakes up in the morning looking for a fight. hen is. >> it. gains energy from it. and so that's part of why you have this noise level up here. but under the noise level there are huge things happening. a couple of examples that are obvious. we now have the lowest black up employment rate in american history. you think liberal wood be

thrilled because after all that's means that a group who they expressed deep concernor, they're now more job opportunities unanimous ever. in fact two diedays ago there was a report that came out that said there are now more vacancies than there are people looking for work. you would think that's good. the federal reserve in atlanta estimates that this quarter the economy is going to grow at 4.8%. if that happens, that's not only more than twice as fast as ever under obama, but that begins to move back so into the reagan range of having a boom and that is signaling dish talked to steve miller at the heritage foundation -- a very, very good professional economist who said the size of the investment structure that's coming down the road, the number of companies that are now investing is stunning. i was at a canadian firm two weeks ago, and they said virtually every company in

canada is looking at moving people to the united states because the new tax code makes us the most competitive country in the world. so you're better off taxwise to be here than anywhere else in the worl which is an enormous shift. which means you are going to see a huge amount of money coming into the u.s. to build factories and create jobs and found companies. he same time, you have the deregulation process. the trump team has deregulated, cut red tape, more than all the other presidents since world war ii combined. what does that do? lib raise businesses to invest. you actually were seeing the economy start to take off before the tax cuts because the deregulation process was sending signals that said, you ought to go out and increase your business, hire more people, do more things, government is not going to harass you, and try to put you out of business, and so they already starting down the road that is changing.

but it's not -- notice the book is not called "trump's government. "putt it's" trump's america." the reason is there are very interesting things happening outside of government that are actually going to compel dramatic change in government. my favorite -- we have a whole chapter on space because i really have a passion about space. i think it is our future. how many of you would be interested if there was an opportunity to go into space? how many of you would be willing to do it? just curious. there's -- the people that talk but risk. we lose 15 people a year at yosemite. because the hiking on various trails and there are i think 200 people now on mt. everest who are froze because they can get off because you climb mt. if he rest, it's dangerous, and yet eve year, people show up. what you have is that we're

right at the opening stages of moving from space as a very rare thing, done by a very small number of very specialized people, to space as a zone of pioneering colonization, and against, large part -- this where is trump as entrepreneur fits in but it's not government per se. there's a book called "space barons," right after you finish reading "trump's america." but it takes four billionaires and we have really not adjusted yet to the fact that there are people on this planet who are wealthy enough that they're the equivalent of a country. they have that many assets. so, in a way the most epeople -- richard branson who runs virgin america, which has been sold to virgin atlantic a others. has a firm called virgin good lat tick and have a spaceship,

fashion it's now successfully complete two flights and is designed to take six passengers and a pilot and copilot up to 60 miles which is at the edge of space so you would ride up in it and you'd have 15 minutes of being weighless and taking pictures pictures of the earth as seen from 60 miles up. he's put a fair amount of money into this thing he had hundreds of people who have put down $250,000 to reserve a seat on one of these flights. the second person who is doing this is paul allen. paul allen was the coast founder of microsoft. worth about $46 billion. allen decided to go a totally different route. he is building a -- he largest airplane in the world, basically two 747s that are joined together at the middle, and it's designed to carry a rocket up to about 50,000 feet, and then

launch it. and his goal is to make going into space the same convenience as getting on a domestic airliner. literally would call ahead and say i'd like to go up thursday at:00, and you just do it and wouldn't have to go through training and wouldn't good down to houston and so, again, that's a near space example. the third examplesn musk, who is a south african who has become an american who invented tesla. one of his projects is called spacex. spacex -- he says openly, publicly, his goal is to colonize mars. which is very different from the nasa model the nasa model is to halve a handful of astronauts who are trained go visit mars for a little bit. he is talking but a lot of people like us, just showing up one morning as pioneers. so, he figured out early on that

the biggest single problem of getting to space was cost and the biggs problem with cost was simple. you use rockets once. imagine if every time you took off in an airplane, it was the only flight that airplane would make. how expensive commercial flying would be. because of course you reduce costs radically the more often you -- he has been designing his rockets so that they will take off and then return. suddenly you may have seen the youtube video of the two rockets that look like a ballet. they come back down parallel to each other and land, and his goal is to have every rocket used at least ten times. well, he will take at least 40% out of the cost of getting into space. so suddenly you have a different cost structure, you can do different things and different opportunities the person who is the real example of the wright brothers and henry ford is jeff bezos. bezos has been a space fanatic

sin he was 12. got rich for the purpose of going into space. amazon worked better than expected and he is now the wealthiest man the world, ate least for the present. so, as i sat with bezos a couple of months ago he writes a personal check for a billion dollars every year, and no federal hearings, no government regulations, no congressional investigations, just he hires engineers. no long term manage or the mass bureaucracy. he just highs engineers. either by next year or the year after they'll have a rocket called the john glenn, heavy lift rocket, which i reusable, which will lat literately put 5500 pounds into space then the rocket comes back down, get refueled, take another 5500-points into space and the goal is to do it every day. that's one flight per day per

rocket. this is a revolution in capability and it's -- the reason i use this example is it's happening around the government, not because of the government. gnat nasa provides certain facilities and nasa has a long track record as the biggest -- but the truth is these four entrepreneurs are just doing it. they're not asking permission, not sitting ring f long planning sessions. have varying levels of government support, musk has gotten the most government support. this is what you see happening everywhere. there's a firm you can look up called udacity. audacity wife the a. it's an online learning system that was invent by the guy, sebastian -- forgive me -- who invented the google self-driving car. and invent google's earth view, and taught at stanford and offer

a cores on advanced computing and offered online. and he had 400 students who are registered at stanford and 53,000 people who signed up online. which frankly made the stanford faculty pretty mad bse they weren't paying tuition. out of the -- considerable number of them finished the course. when he did the final, the top stanford student was number 400 in the final exam. there were 99 other people online who did better -- 399 other people online who did better. he had a sobering realization that as much as he liked the electric toward they weren't the most effective way to learn. he most fee effective was was to have a relationship where you asking the computer over and over if you didn't get it because the computer never got bored. very, very hard. very hard to ask a professor three, four, five times, the same question. you just -- you get intimidate

by yourself, and even professors willing, you're not willing to but the computer doesn't care. and so he thought, he wanted to go and experiment with so it he built udacity, an ongoing learning system and promptly found the university of california faculty hated it because it was a threat. i mean, i once read a book the subtitle was pioneers of the prison and prison guards of the past. every one of these things, just like the transcontinental railroad versus the stage don't. whoever was the last cycle doesn't get that excited win the next soil started to make them obsolete. so he had the courage, when shape literally said you could not offer his material at the university of california system. so he said, fine, i'm not even going to try to get accredited and started signing contracts with places like google, apple, amazon, facebook, that you take courses, and you pass them, for the purpose of hiring you,

they're certified by those companies. and he discovered that as amazing number of people said, let me get this straight. i can get a normal degree, or i can gate degree that google recognizes for the purposes of hiring me. i think i'll try that. and so, again, it's an example of the beginning of the future, of -- because if we're going to go through artificial intelligence and going through robotics, we'll have so many jobs where people need to be reeducated. we need think of new and creative and better ways of learning so people can upgrade marketable skills, otherwise the system doesn't work. from my privilege you see a lot of changes coming down the road. there are 90 drugs in process for dealing with alzheimer'sment up in of them work yet but their 90 different efforts to develop something -- and alzheimer's is the biggest public health cost we have.

$20 trillion between now and 2050. the entire national debt equivalent. so age it's a huge area am very serious effort underway to develop a nonaddictive pain kill sore you can replace all of the opioids by having a pain killer that had no addiction. and that probably will come online in two or three years because we have a pretty good understanding of the biology of doing that. but i like around and i see all of these kind of opportunities coming down the road. and then you see the left. and the left's goal is control. whether it is a government run health system, government run school system, you go down the whole list, and i think from the left's standpoint the world i'm describing is not a happy, fun, exciting, optimistic world. it's a terrifying world. what if people just had to go out and be happy? what if they didn't really need the bureaucracy? what if they could go out and find a job and didn't really

have to have somebody give them food stamps. and so in a sense, the whole trumpan world view of, can we grow fast enough, create enough new jobs, build a big enough system, is really very threatening if you're the left. and secondly, the idea of making america great again but applying it to everybody. so that you end up with any american of any background, having an opportunity to pursue happiness and rise which violates the left's model which is we should not be considered as individuals. the left's model is, al of you should broken up into groups and then we decide which group you should belong to and which group you should be mad it's. it's a mod of divisiveness and a model of taking the country apart, not putting the country back together. and those two competitions are going to be very impressive. in texas, the poll just came out

last week, senator cruz now is actually carrying the latino vote against the hispanic democrat. government abbott is tied with the latino vote. both of them get much higher percentage of the african-american vote tan they would have gotten four years ago because, again, if you have the lowest black unemployment rate in history, people talk to each other. and they start saying, gee, what if this is just working. maybe it's a good idea. and so there are a lot of things going on that really represent a profound change. let me talk about one last year. my throat is getting dry. that's understanding trump in trade and foreign policy. think it is very funny that the europeans and the canadians have been -- i have no idea how the meeting will go today but decided at the g7 they're going to gang up on trump. it's funny because the fastest growing economy in the g7 is the

united states. so you might think -- this happened to reagan. when reagan first went to his very first meeting with all these guys, they basically treated him like this kid who didn't know what he was doing, and he just sat in the corner. when he came back two years later we had the fastest growing economy in the world and they wanted to him at the center of the stage stork let's just start with that. fastest growing economy by a big margin is the united states. so you might think that the other leaders might say to him, gee, donald, what are you doing right? instead they're mad at him because he pulled out of the paris agreement on the environment, and he pulled out the iranian agreement involved in the tariff war, and i noticed trudeau and macron picked a fight with him and he came back at them. he pointed out that it think the canadians have 147% tariff on american farm goods. and he said, you want to pick a

fight? first of all the canadian economy depends on us very heavily so they can get irritate with us but can't fight. in the case of macron, the frennomy still unperforms, very high youth unemployment and macron, who is a lot like trump. tried very hard to reform france and having a hard time because the french people aren't that excite about being reformed. they were very long history of -- that the railroad workers have been striking two days a week for months, just to send a signal we're not happy. imagine the chaos that causes. and so they're not necessarily the people who are in a very good position to come and decide they'll look tour us on the economy in addition, trump understood something very profound. from world war ii until 2016, we

used the american economy to prop up worldwide alliances. so, if we needed your help, shoe you got a good deal and for a very long time it made perfect sense but a the soviet union was our major competitor and because when we came out of world war ii we were half the world's economy. remember, everybody else has been bombed. we were the one country that hat not suffered any significant wartime damage. we were a huge portion of the world and we could afford to be generous. well, over the last 25 years that's all disappeared. we had agreed to work with the chinese and to let them into the world trade organization on the hopes they would then become part of a rule-based modern system. they're not. the director of national intelligence under obama, not trump, said two years ago that the chinese stole

$460 billion in intellectual property in one year. that's more than our total sales to china. and so trump has taken the position that we're going to defend our intellectual property. that's going lead to friction. he has taken the position that 2-1/2% tariff on cars. chinese have a 25% tariff on cars. he said we're that going play a game where you charge ten times as much as we do. and so that's going to lead to friction. people need to understand nat who puts america first instead of putting some kind of vague world global system first, that's going toreate tension. first because it's a huge change from what they are used to dealing with and second because as the biggs country in the world, if we put ourselves first, we're for mid able. a little frightening because nobody else -- even the chinese, machs as they have grown, cannot possibly compete with us in a

head-to-head contest. might be able to in 30, 40, 50 years but can't right now. with go back to growing at 4% a year or more, they're not going to catch up in your lifetime. so these are the kind of changes that are underway that are amidessing. lastly, trump has -- i wrote about this in -- trump has a deep belief in his ability to learn and his ability to negotiate, and one of the things that i think people in the washington press corps don't get that makes him different, he listens to everybody. so when he was in saudi arabia, the king of saudi arabia was -- they were there three days and every time they were in public the king of saudi arabia was next to him and they were talking. and trump is listening. not just transactional, did you have nice dessert yesterday. he does this all day. pick people's brains and

listened to them in ways where sometimes he re bell talking and watch you react and feed bag yack information, that didn't work, that's strong, that's not strong and has enormous level of energy. so, the traditional model, which is i wonder what we should do about x, leading to, five really bright staffers, three from the brookings institution and two from the american enter spice institution, wroting a papp so they feel important and fighting over the paper for seven weeks and finally giving the president the paper himself answer is i'll call the president of south korea and at the president only china and talk to prime minister of japan and see how it feels. so the volume of information he takes in is astonishing. and his willingness to be tough is astonishing. this is not a guy who is afraid. it's not necessarily has

courage. john paul ii used to say be not afraid. didn't say have courage. and trump operates a lot like that. so, i have no idea what is going to happen in singapore. i think it is possible that they wi have a very successful middle easting. i think it is also possible that morning, about breakfasttime, they'll decide it ain't going to work and walk out. i think that's the range of options. we did a movie, that we shot part of the ranch, called "rendevous of destiny." the life of ronald reagan, we went to reykjavik in iland and there's a little house where reagan and gorbachev met in 1987. the's that's great scene that we had in the movie that was straight out of the news reels where reagan was holding out for missile defense. gorbachev was offering him

everything. we can have arms limitations, this treaty and that treaty, but you have to give up your missile defense. and reagan kept saying, no, i'm not doing it. and gorbachev said i'm not going to give you anything. and reagan said, well, that's fine. i'm not doing it. so, it breaks down, they walk outside and there's a great scene where reagan, who is not normally this aggressive, is literally in gorbachev's face, poking him and saying, you did this. you made a mistake, you screwed up. you're going to regret this. and he is carhat reagan is really angry. well issue was in congress at the time, and all of the regular republicans, said this is a terrible mistake he had such a good deal. just had to give up the stupid missing defense thing. six months later, gorbachev came to washington and agreed to

every single thing reagan wanted, and gave up on trying to stop missile defense. i think trump understands that model. the most powerful nation in the world and you're applying sanctions and who can bring economic pressure to bear. you don't have to say yes. it's the a guy who has a problem and it will be very interesting to see how he gauches with kim jong-un next week. how about if i toss it open for questions. you're practicing to be journalist. here's a chance to be a journalist. >> i wonder. >> hold on, going rush if with microphones. an exciting moment. your first victim right here. >> you have to be more assertive. you grab him hundred he walks past you.

i wonder with many of the entrepreneurs you mentioned, fuel allen, elon musk, jeff bezos, they found success in the previous eight areas of the obama administration, so i wonder how correlates to trump's america. >> well, they found it because they were in zones that the government hadn't been able to screw up yet. i mean, i would argue that -- most of america is still relatively healthy despite big government but that the impact of large government the impact of high taxes slowed everything down. i think had they had the current regulatory environment and the current tax environment we rod probably be 50% further down the road than we are right now. >> right here. and then back over there. >> so when i talk to people about how black unemployment is at its lowest time in history, common response hear is, well, that's not trump's doing, it's

obama's doing. so, what -- how do you retort that? >> i would say is it's astonishing that we had eight years where they never once got the growth rate above 2%. we were being told it was impossible to get to 3%. we were told that if trump was elect thread would be a depression, and we were told that we should get used to the new normal. go back to just put in new normal search in your search engine and see how many left-wing economists show up sayingeo shouldn't be complaining. i was actually struck with this because i first on office when jimmy carter was president. and we had a really slow period of economic growth, with really high inflation separate carter went on tv one night and gave what became known as the malaise speech. but the evens essence was we feel miserable because it's our

own fold and all who are miss available blame you, and the country thought bit and reagan had a line, he said, a recession is when your brother-in-law is unemployed. a depression is when you are unemployed. and a recovery is when jimmy carter is unemployed. and that was one of his themes and it's very eerily similar. the left convinced themselves that the carter had the best economy you could get. and within a year and a half of reagan taking office, we began to explosively change everything. you have seen the sage thing here remember it's very hard to make the argument that you could say, look, we's still by at 2% growth and obama did bring is out with a long perio of one or two percent growth. fine. so what is the difference in revenue and what is the difference in job creation between 2% growth and what is currently happening? and trump claims that he is added $7 trillion, his poll sits

have add $7 trillion, although being trump you wouldn't qualify with policies because it's so much more fun to say issue added $7 trillion. and next month i'm adding five more. learned very early on as anch he entrepreneur and a s, marker. but i think it's going to be very hard to argue -- if this continues -- again, we had a lot of things to do to make this continue but if if continues, what i think what you'veing see is the kanye west reaction, what point die get to tell you that's baloney. i've confident if they work out an agreement in singapore and walk out front and they announce that the north koreans are giving up nuclear weapons by wednesday evening, the "new york times" headline will be, dramatic effort by heroic kim

jong-un, despite trump's personality. back there. somebody right there. >> west new england -- >> i'm sorry, what? hold is christ. >> gabrielle, greenspan, in bringfield. i was just wonder -- if you look at president trump's background, he is actually been fairly liberal on a lot of issues. used to be prochoice on the abortion question, used to be in favor of socialized medicine. i believe after the 2012 presidential election, he actually accused mitt romney of being too conservative or quote unhurtless on immigration and how to you look at his approximate a staunchty pro-life, antiillegal immigration who wants to overture obama car what cares for the change in policy and change in i guess political direction on president trump's part? >> i always tell people, trump

is not a conservative. if you mean barry goldwater, ronald reagan, william buckley, what trump is the most effective antiliberal in american history. it's not because he is conservative. it's because he applies common ralism isutsnd if youmodern apply common sense, it fall as i part. i i take seriously the story he tells about the woman that he got to know who had been advised to have an abortion and her daughter was with her as she was telling him the story and that was the decisive moment. give him that one. also a story out this morning that he would contemplate legalizing marijuana. you can't assume that trump is going to walk in the room, having spent 30 years thinking this stuff through. reagan became -- reagan was an fdr democrat and aslay as 1948 made commercials for harry

truman and hubert humphrey when hubert humphrey was the anti-communityist liberal running against the pro-communist liberal and reagan became an anti-communityist and then when he married nancy, her father w very right-wing medical doctor, and gradually through a series of conversations reagan began to be more and more antitax, and then he was hired by general electric, wonderful book, all of you should read, called the education of reagan which i recommend very highly. eight years he spend at general electric and he had as mentor the head of government relation at general electric. i worked with reagan for years. when i read this book i in other words what he was doing for the first time. it's that insightful a book. he learned from this guy how to deal with people. he within around the country and gave 375 speeches to blue collar

audiences with q & a and picture taking. by the time he ran for president he had been interacting with blue collar workers and talking about idea the guy who hired him was a very conservative person and reagan wouldn't fly back then. from 1946 to 1965, reagan refused to reply. had a very bad airplane flight, got caught in a thunderstorm and just decide that was it. and in fact, he didn't fly again until in the fall of 1965, he gets a call one evening from his brother in san francisco, who says, ronnie, there are group of guys who would like to have break fast with you in the morning and talk about supporting you for governor. and he said, well, you know i don't fly and i can't get from here to san francisco that fast. he said, well, you get to decide if you want to be governor. i'll be at breakfast and hung up on him. next morning reagan goes out for

the first anytime 20 years, gets in an airplane, which tells you how ambition he was. but for the period he was working for general electric he is riding train and didn't gamble and read books and this guy keeps giving him conservative books, freedman, hayak so reagan is reading conservative economics all this period. trump didn't do any of that. trump made money, invented new things leak the apprentice and the best selling tie in america, and golf. and he doesn't drink. it's not like he was hanging around been wasteful. just h i a guy -- a business guy. not a politician. but the gap in how badly run the country was and his own ego sense he could do a better job than everybody else because the 2008 up and thought, i'm donald j. trump. of course i can do a better job.

i wouldn't be donald trump terrorism. that is what propels him. don't hold item any ideological checklist. when he makes a decision, there's a real difference. almost like two trumps. when it's a big decision, the iran agreement, which for two and a half years he said was a bad deal and i had europeans approaching me just before he finally ended the agreement and they said, what can we do? i said, you either come up with a better deal or his going to kill it. he has been saying -- you have had two and a half years here. not like a secret. cutting taxes. very stable. deregulation. conservative judges. now when you get down to little things he is totally unpredictable and he couldn't predict himself. because he is basically a free spirit on small things. and i think you have to see him that way. your observation is right. trump evolved -- it's a very

interesting question because trump evolved in part in response to an evolving reality, and he evolved in part in response to running as a republican populist in a field of -- with 16 other people. and over time, i think he -- he realized if he was going put together a base that wasn't just personality, then he had to have a frame of reference that enabled him to appeal to this large block of people and the two game together. way over here. it's a tricky -- >> thank you for coming. nolan myer. actually met for dinner with former national security advisor hr mcmaster and he wants me to send my regards to you. my question is, when you were speaker over the house you wrote

the contract with america, you seemed to have an uncanny possibility 0 work with president clinton and get things down. fast forward 20 years later and it kind of seems like congress is in a perpetual state of gridlock. what changes do you think we can make to get out of this and do you think this an issue of incompetence or partisanship. >> well issue think we're not in a perpetual state of gridlock. passed the largest tax cut in american history. they passed a number of other bills. but there's very deep partisan divide. think there are at least two parts so what is going on. one is the gap between the right and the left is much bigger, as i described in the "trump's america." i think we're in the middle of a cultural civil war and i mean that literally. these are profound differences about the nature of america. and i think that makes it's real challenge. second, i think you have to have

a personality you can deal with. i personally would have had no idea how to deal with barack obama. i think he was opaque. morning knowing that they brightest person on the planet just got up and is spend all day with the brightest person on the plant which is him and he would treat you with contempt. and unless -- it was no way to through. think -- i talked to boehner when he was smoker, talked to ryan we -- if i had been speaker i don't know what i would have done because i obama, by personality, was so hard to deal with. clinton for all of his weaknesses, is an staystonnishingly open human being and you can talk with bill -- about a third of the time he'd lie but you just got used to that. just part after the process. and you could figure out after a while which ones were true and which ones weren't. often by later on which ones happened and which ones didt.

but even when -- we had a couple of occasion that were very, very angr the next day you go back again and you don't wear your feelings on your sleeve. this is the business you're in. i think the other part of that is, the democrats right now don't want to work with trump. their goal was for trump to fail. i'm delighted that mcconnell is going to keep the senate in august, i think he should have done this earlier and i think they'll cave but they they clearly have no interest in being cooperative and particularly on either the senate or house leadership. and in that case you just run over them and don't worry about it too much. what i would have done more of is -- goes back to reagan, figure out id that made it very expensive for the democrats to stay unified and bring up issues in such a way that the democratic leadership was constantly under pressure

because about a third of anybodies are saying i can't stay with you. i'll get beat back home if i vote with you. and that's the kind of psse that breaks apart that kind of partisanship, and then frankly with trump you just have to be endlessly patient. i we were a lislative leader i would recognize it, you have to spend a lot of time with him, listen to him a lot, you have to try to sort through what you're going to try to get done and you have to have a little --av to wear a seatbelt because he'll do something you didn't expect, that he didn't expect and won't have called you to tell you he is going to do and you need a seatbelt to get through the car wreck. >> fernando university of florida. i don't know if you have -- you were talking about how

deregulated the government has been going. how do you see this government being deregulated or shrinking in the next couple of years? >> well, i think -- let's stay with deregulated first. i think they will continue the pressure to reduce the total number of regulations. i think that they will continue to try to find every possible way to make government leaner and faster and more efficient. i suspect they will do some attrition by just not filling slots as people retire, but you have to handle that pretty carefully because if you in the middle of a cancer research project at the national institute of health, don't want a hiring freeze to mean you can't hire two more cancer researchers mitch guess is the government will be somewhat smaller be the time they're done with the exception that they're expanding homeland security and expanding the defense system.

and that will dish think that will continue and i think given the rise of a more dangerous world they won't have any choice. they'll have to invest more in defense. >> back here in the mdle. >> hi. joanna beckler. we are about half wear through trump's first term, there's still a substantial amount of his first term as president left. where do you see the economy going in this second phase of his presidency? >> actually i divide it, trump's america into two parts. the first half us what we have accomplished until now and the second halfs what we have to do, the challenge we have to meet. i if he continues down the road of deregulation if they continue to be very tough on trade

negotiations, that the economy will tone to grow dramatically. wouldn't be shocked to have 3-1/2 or 4-1/2% real growth of the next three or four or five years. somebody had a great line, may have been steve moor. sobody said would b a great minor pre general. if uassume the american economy historically or two 200 year averaged over 3% -- actually averages close to 3.5% growth a year compounded. and you look at the last two years of bush, and the eight years of obama, even though we were sort of slowly recovering, we were recovering at a rate below the historic glide slope. so if you figured out on a compounded basis if we had stayed at 3.35%, what would the economy look like today? it gives you the gap that we can grow into. so when people tell you, we're really close to the end because after all, we can grow much

more, well, no, actually by historic standards we're probably 15% or 20% smaller than we would have been if we had grown consistently at 3.35%. re this is what happened with an. the last three years of reagan were growing unbelievably fast and i think if bush had not come out for a tax increase, we would continue -- have continued to grow all through the early '790s in a bizarre way, it was bush coming out for a tax increase, splitting the republican party and slowing down the economy which both helped elect bill clinton and then helped elect the first republican house in 40 years. yes, ma'am. calvin college. you talked earlier about our the american intelligence me and american pork force has to bemer

agile. what step does we have to take to become more agile. >> let me point out, if you went back to, say, 1800, you would have a substantial number of people actually engageed in fur trapping the majority of the population engage inside farming and if you've said to them, we'll be down to -- somebody may know the real number -- 3.5 or 4 % of the countries farming and we produce a massive surplus which we have to sell because we just are -- our farmers are so productive. the average person in 1800 would have thought your crazy the same thing is true today. humans have a knack of investing the next cycle of desirable things at a rate slightly faster than unemployment, and so over time -- most of the jobs they invent are better jobs with better salaries and better

commission. also believe that humans are right at the edge -- your generation will probably on average live to be over 100 and you'll be much healthier. 100 for your generation will be 60 for your grandparents. that big of a difference, partly because historically people were worn out physically. you no, a steel mill you plow behind a mule, you just physically are worn down. most of us nowdays, you may exercise but that's a volitional thing. you're not being burned out. and so people are going to live longer. was with hen hen henry kissinger who is 39 and works full time and would be bored to death. if you said we'll make you retire, he would just be bored to death. think we were crazy. so, you are going to have people who live longer. they're going to have greater range of options, and i think it requires really rethinking two profound things.

one is how do we build -- this is why i like udacity as a model. we have to build online convenient learning systems sysd mentoring s they allow you to learn conveniently. i if you want to go to bali for six weeks, and take your courses online, i don't care. i don't think you have to go to campus somewhere, be tribal two hours a week the professor is available. think about how inefficient the current structures are. and then second i think you have to rethink the finances. i was talking to relative of mine who is thinking about he ma r the company he has been with for 25 years and i stayed do you have a pension? said no, never had a pension. they're system is a 401(k) they match. so we actually has pretty large amount of money in his 401(k) and i think you have -- he'll have to think in terms of each of you on average will have five to seven or more jobs in your

lifetime. career kind of jobs. don't just mean internships. so you have to think but how to change, evolve, and i've re-invented myself four or five times. and people will just lrn to do that. that's my guess. yes, sir. >> okay. i have an idea for your next book. i think you were probably the most qualified to handle this, but it could be donald trump's guide to creatively handling the everchanging nature of world events, and you could use a system of computers to have all the infinite number of possibilities of events that can be taking place at any given time, and you are given problem and it's your -- this is a reader participationing in thing -- it's your job as a

reader to come up with the most viable way of handling this problem, and have a system of grading so it that you can weed out all those who could -- should never run for president. ... operation and put students in situation room and those you

will get the information that god and you have to think it through and it is a pretty good envelope. i think i got a signal. >> mitchell sanders, you touched a bit on conservative fiscal policy and conservative attitude and regulation. and a lot will agree with you. and the social policy and my generation, they consider themselves conservatives fiscally, and what conservatism needs to do to adapt to that. >> it works itself out in

different ways. the whole question of gay marriage has moved particularly in your generation towards what we call the left. on the other hand i suggest to you that abortion has moved to the right and the development of technologies that allow you to see the baby at an earlier and earlier date has had a devastating effect on the acceptability of abortion particularly after the first 20 weeks. these things, it is more complicated pattern. i also think sometimes you build a majority around the issues you can reality a majority. part of the art of politics is to focus on the ones you win on and not the ones you lose on. one that i am proud of is the speaker helped write the only four balanced budgets in your lifetime. we will get that, there are ways to do it that are very real and a series of online short courses on how to balance the budget. the country, reclaiming control of its destiny and to be honest

about what we have to get done. let me just go back to where we started, the young americans foundation is important. it is important because you badly need people like yourselves who are willing to learn conservatism, debate conservatism and stand up on campuses and later stain nd up newsrooms, stand up in other settings. in the long run i think reality, high likelihood of winning this argument with the left but takes people like yourselves who are willing to do the work, make the arguments. i am honored to be here and thank you for letting me talk. [applause] >> thank you for being here

today and watching on c-span. for more information on young americans foundation go to our website, the speaker will be taking photos, we ask tyou exit that way and line up. there is food in the kitchen if you would like to help yourself and i know you have to get back for your next session. you all have a copy of the book. we will do a photo line. if you want an extra book, ask our staff, we have some. thank you for joining us, we can't wait to see you again. [inaudible conversations] >> next on booktv, pen america's literary gala, it was founded