Copyright
Copyright © 2018 by Newt Gingrich
Cover copyright © 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
Center Street
Hachette Book Group
1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104
centerstreet.com
twitter.com/centerstreet
First Edition: June 2018
Center Street is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Center Street name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
The Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out more, go to www.HachetteSpeakersBureau.com or call (866) 376-6591.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
ISBNs: 978-1-5460-7706-0 (hardcover), 978-1-5460-7705-3 (ebook)
E3-20180420-JV-NF
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
PART I: THE GREAT COMEBACK Chapter One: The Fight for Trump’s America The Anti-Trump Coalition
Trump’s America
The Trump Path to Exceptionalism
Learning from the Past
In a Fight Over Identity, Only One Side Can Win
Chapter Two: The Comeback of “One Nation” The Melting Pot
Reasserting the Traditional American Model
Assimilation Is Necessary
The Salad Bowl
Post-Melting-Pot Immigration
Multicultural Division
Segregating the Melting Pot
Securing the Borders
Chapter Three: The Comeback of “Under God” The Judicial Assault
Faith as the Foundational Basis for Freedom
Essential Morality
America’s Guiding Light
The Trump Revival
Chapter Four: The Comeback of Sovereignty, Ending the New World Order A National Security Strategy Focused on Winning Again
The Trans-Pacific Partnership
The Paris Agreement
The North American Free Trade Agreement
A Dangerous Deal for America: The Iran Deal
Holding International Organizations Accountable
Competition with China
Going Forward
Chapter Five: The Comeback of Free Speech Rejecting Political Correctness
Fact versus Ideology
Academic Attacks on Free Speech
Sticks and Stones
The Thought Police, Killing Innovation
No Legislative Answer
Chapter Six: The Comeback of the American Economy, Part 1—Cutting Red Tape A Daunting Task
One-In, Two-Out
Energy and Environment
Economy and Business
Education
Only the Beginning
Chapter Seven: The Comeback of the American Economy, Part 2—The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 Historic Tax Relief
Left-Wing Lies
The Political Impact
Chapter Eight: The Comeback of the Constitutional Judiciary Justice Neil Gorsuch
Lower-Appellate Court Judges
The Potential Trump Impact
Chapter Nine: The Comeback of American Health Care Repealing Obamacare One Step at a Time
Expanding Association Health Plans
Lowering Prescription Drug Prices
The Left’s Single-Payer Disaster
Principles for Continuing the Health Reform Journey
Next Steps
Increase Transparency
Fight Fraud in Health Care
From Disabilities to Capabilities
Value-Based Purchasing
Medical Liability Reform
Create High-Risk Pools
Curing Diseases by Dramatically Increasing Funding for Scientific Research
New Methods of Paying for Expensive Drugs
Accelerate the Approval Process for Breakthrough Drugs
PART II: CHALLENGES Chapter Ten: Fighting Fake News Lying about the Trump Economy
Reporting Gossip, Ignoring Substance
Permanent Opposition
Trump Owes Them Nothing
Chapter Eleven: The Rule of Law versus the Rule of Mueller The Sessions Recusal and Mueller’s Blank Check
No End in Sight
The Special Investigation Setup
Built-In Bias
The Page-Strzok Affair
Real Collusion
Going Forward
Chapter Twelve: Draining the Swamp The Fourth Branch of Government
The Constitutional Model
The Failure of the Bureaucracy
Trumping the Bureaucrats and Draining the Swamp
Chapter Thirteen: Let’s Trump Addiction The Gathering Storm in America
The Medicaid Problem
Opioid Addiction Is Unique
Medication-Assisted Treatment, Fighting Bias
Trumping Addiction with Medication-Assisted Treatment
The Parity Problem
Decriminalize Addiction: More Patients, Fewer Prisoners
Dollars and Sense
Chapter Fourteen: Helping Americans Return to Work Why Infrastructure Now?
Bridging the Skills Gap
Welfare Reform
Criminal Justice Reform
Chapter Fifteen: Reaching Beyond the Stars Meeting the Trump-Pence Standard
Empowering Industry and Defense
Modern Space Regulations
Executing Clear Strategic Vision
Chapter Sixteen: The Comeback Is Not Guaranteed
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Appendix
Endnotes
Newsletters
This book is dedicated to the United States Ambassador to the Holy See, my wife Callista; our invaluable and irreplaceable associate, Bess Kelly; and to my grandchildren, Maggie and Robert Cushman, who will inherit the America that is evolving.
PART ONE
THE GREAT COMEBACK
America is deeply divided along a political-cultural fault line. One side wants to see America return to prosperity, strength, and its traditional values. The other wants to fundamentally change America into a different nation that rejects many of its founding principles. Trump’s America is not just a name for the people who elected him—it describes this former group that supports the aspirant vision of America that President Trump and his supporters want us to revive. This section aims to explain the American comeback that’s underway.
CHAPTER ONE
THE FIGHT FOR TRUMP’S AMERICA
America is in the midst of a cultural-political civil war—a fight over our very identity as a people.
For decades, this conflict has been fought quietly in city halls, classrooms, school boards, courtrooms, town squares, and state houses across the country. However, the election of President Trump has clarified the battle lines in this struggle and elevated these individual fights into a united national conflict.
On one side of this conflict is a factional anti-Trump coalition—a strange amalgam of radicals, liberals, globalists, establishment elites from both p
arties, and blatantly anti-American groups loosely held together by their hostility to and disdain for the president. On the other side is Trump’s America—the millions of hardworking people who are united by respect for our foundational freedoms, traditional values, and history of limited commonsense governance.
Before the president rallied Trump’s America and gave us a national voice, the various groups that would eventually form the anti-Trump coalition were winning on their own. For decades, they have meticulously undermined our traditions through politics and courts, entertainment and news media, and liberal schools and curriculum to quietly impose new worldviews on everyday Americans that are counter to our historic principles.
Here’s the truth the mainstream media is hiding from you: Today, Trump’s America is winning.
Under President Trump, America is experiencing a great comeback. After nearly a decade of recession and tepid job creation, our economy is booming. In addition, ISIS has been effectively destroyed, illegal immigration is down, our military is being rebuilt, and our veterans are getting the health care and support they deserve. The administration is achieving success across a variety of sectors daily.
Perhaps more important than these successes, however, is the reinvigoration of America’s patriotic sense of self, which the rise of Donald Trump has awakened. Our country is being reconnected to our founding principles, the values that made America the greatest country in the world, and in doing so, is coming to understand just how destructive the last few decades of elite leadership have been to our freedom, prosperity, and safety.
Of course, the anti-Trump coalition is in complete denial about America’s comeback under Trump. For them, it is incomprehensible that someone like President Trump, and the tens of millions of so-called deplorables who fervently support him, could be on the verge of reclaiming America.
Because the news media is fully a part of the anti-Trump coalition, its members will not accurately report what is happening in America under President Trump.
This is a major reason why I wrote this book.
Trump’s America: The Truth About America’s Great Comeback is intended as a resource for Americans who want the truth about the significant accomplishments President Trump has achieved in his first year-and-a-half in office.
It is also an attempt to describe the nature of the cultural-political conflict we are in and vividly explain the differences in values and principles between Trump’s America and those who oppose us.
THE ANTI-TRUMP COALITION
At the center of the fight I’m describing is ultimately one question: Is America an exceptional country? Or more specifically, is America’s historic prosperity and power due to our nation’s unique founding principles, and is it our duty as a people to uphold those ideals?
My daughter, Jackie Cushman, touched on this notion in a column she wrote in July 2009.1 She observed that in 2008, President Obama promised us “change we could believe in,” and it turned out he wanted to change what we believed.
Jackie’s insight points out one of the few common-yet-tenuous threads that bind the members of the anti-Trump coalition together. In various ways, they all want to redefine America, and they would all be happier if the members of Trump’s America were once again ignored and forgotten.
This anti-Trump coalition encompasses an incredibly broad group of people. It includes, of course, Democrats of all stripes—from the most moderate to the most radically liberal. It includes activists who protest for niche sexual and gender issues. It includes race-focused activist groups such as Black Lives Matter and La Raza. It also includes violent radical groups, such as Antifa that oppose the American system in general.
Most of the reporters, anchors, producers, and editors of the mainstream media are active, enthusiastic members or cheerleaders of the anti-Trump coalition, as are the ivory tower academics at our elite universities and the legions serving in our government bureaucracies.
This branch of the anti-Trump coalition favors group rights over individual rights and prefers a strong dictatorial bureaucracy that imposes boundaries to freedom upon everyday Americans. They think the consent of the governed is the consent of the ignorant and the deplorable.
Many of these people believe traditional America is an immoral, brutal regime, which tramples on human rights and inflicts its evil upon the world. They say that the American dream does not exist—and it is in fact a racist social construction.
This branch of the anti-Trump coalition believes that some ideas should be censored, religions are oppressive, hateful, dangerous institutions—and only the government can safely guide people to live appropriately.
Ultimately, they say America is not exceptional and should be more like other countries, rather than try to live up to its founding ideals. However, these members are confused. To render America unexceptional is to eliminate the essence of America. In their effort to renounce American exceptionalism, they are in fact seeking to create a new post-American society.
This part of the anti-Trump coalition is made up of groups that typically align with the Left. However, there is another important wing of the anti-Trump coalition: the orderly institutionalists.
This branch includes so-called never Trumpers in the Republican Party. Like many bureaucrats, who are mostly apolitical, these conservatives are part of an orderly sect that simply wants the world to be neat, tidy, and predictable. They value institutional process more highly than achievement gained by risk.
They are the types of institutionalists who bitterly opposed Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, myself, and other Republicans who violated the norm.
This risk-averse group includes much of the national security establishment, which fully adheres to the “new world order” that President George H.W. Bush described on September 11, 1990, before a Joint Session of Congress.
This speech is an important marker for this group because President Bush’s concept was not an expressly American order, nor was it a traditional American-British order. It was a “world order.”
As such, these orderly institutionalists support the Paris Accord, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and other international agreements regardless of how Americans are hurt in the name of maintaining the world order. For them, American exceptionalism is a campaign phrase, not a practical doctrine.
These people bitterly oppose President Trump for two main reasons: First, President Trump clearly rejects their global order policies on trade and foreign relations. More importantly, members of this group hate Trump because he explicitly points out and repudiates their failures.
By the time President H.W. Bush’s son was in the Oval Office, the so-called new world order had degenerated into a series of wars. Trump was the first major Republican candidate to publicly acknowledge that the global market-focused, peace-through-payment approach of the new world order had utterly failed and stuck Americans with tremendous costs—in blood and in resources.
This is why the orderly institutionalist branch of the then-forming anti-Trump coalition balked at candidate Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan. It was a callback to Ronald Reagan’s similar campaign slogan from 1980. Implicit in the “Make America Great Again” theme is the belief that our country has lost what had made it great and that politicians, bureaucrats, and other elite leaders are to blame.
To many Americans, it was an uplifting, optimistic campaign call. However, for the institutional establishment it was a declaration of war against all the forces that led America through decades of failure.
So, the entire anti-Trump coalition presents a much more complicated paradigm than the typical Right-Left, conservative-liberal, or Republican-Democrat dynamic. This is why we saw a host of very different Republicans, a self-avowed socialist, and the matriarch of the Democratic establishment all declare him enemy No. 1 in 2016.
From a distance, and certainly in the daily news, it appears that Trump is
constantly facing a political coalition that seems insurmountable. The anti-Trump coalition takes comfort in this. Its members reassure themselves that his administration cannot withstand the onslaught much longer.
However, this 30,000-foot-view misses something important: Some in this varied coalition of radicals, liberals, conservatives, and elites oppose Trump because they disagree with his vision for America, some oppose his personality, and some simply oppose America.
They are not actually united on anything except their dislike for the president. Their battle cry is “resistance” because, as a coalition, they could never possibly offer a coherent shared vision for the future.
This is their greatest weakness.
TRUMP’S AMERICA
To be sure, Trump’s America is also a diverse group, with many different opinions and backgrounds. However, we are united by our national creed and our shared belief in the American dream.
At the beating heart of Trump’s America is the patriotic belief in America’s exceptional nature.
Those who are part of Trump’s America know that in our nation, the people are sovereign and are the source of power for our government—not vice versa. Despite centuries of other civilizations modernizing and becoming more democratic, this is still a unique, exceptional trait of America.
We believe that America, on balance, is morally good. We are a people of deep faith with an unsurpassed record of charity and fairness at home and across the globe. We are the nation that twice liberated Europe, contained the Soviet empire, freed Kuwait, and has championed human rights.
As President Trump said in his first address to the United Nations on September 19, 2017:
It is an eternal credit to the American character that even after we and our allies emerged victorious from the bloodiest war in history, we did not seek territorial expansion, or attempt to oppose and impose our way of life on others. Instead, we helped build institutions such as this one to defend the sovereignty, security, and prosperity for all.