Newt Gingrich | Fox News Channel | Faulkner Focus | July 14 2022

NEWT:

You haven’t had a president this weak this early, Biden is setting a record for that. The 9.1% inflation rate number by itself would drive Democrats and all Americans to think you need a change. The price of gasoline, the price of food. Apparently, eggs have gone up 33% in the last year. You know, all this stuff creates an environment. Plus, you just watch Biden, and you are not -- he is not going to win a second term. People are not going to watch him shuffling around cognitively confused, not sure where he is standing, asking people what he is supposed to be doing. It's getting worse, not better. With Kamala Harris's laugh she is not really a plausible replacement. So, there will be a vacuum and it will get worse pretty fast, and people will want to fill it. The only warning, I have for all of us who get involved in trying to analyze politics is if we had this conversation in 2014 and I had said I know what's going to happen, Donald Trump will come down that long escalator later and beat 15 other Republicans and win the nomination and beat Hillary Clinton you would have thought I was crazy because he was such an outsider. He didn't fit anybody's normal conversation. And I think primary conversation back then was Jeb Bush, maybe John Castic and so forth. Chris Christie and so forth. I will go out on a limb in the same pattern and suggest to you that with the amazing success of top gun maverick we may have found the most likely outsider nominee for 2024. Whether the Democrats could tolerate a pro-American, pro-defense, pro-action figure person like Tom Cruise I don't know. But my guess is I think he would beat Gavin Newsom in a primary in a heartbeat. Newsom suggesting to Floridians, that they should be more like California. You look at the crime rate and the homelessness. By every measurable standard Florida is a better place to live as is Texas than California.

NEWT:

He has the same problem. First of all, you have the crime rate in Chicago, which is horrendous. You have tax policy which is driven several of the biggest corporations in Illinois to leave the state. The problem the Democrats have is that all of the big blue states run by Democrats have very high crime rates, very high tax rates, very high unemployment rates. There is no accident that virtually all the states -- something Steve Moore has pointed out again and again in his newsletter -- almost all of the red states are doing dramatically better than almost all of the blue states. So how do they run for president saying I'll do for you what I did for Illinois? You too can have high taxes, unemployment, and crime. That's what Pritzker's problem will be.

NEWT:

The fact is there a price differential. If you take a vehicle from California to Utah, you have a big fee because there are so many going. You want to take a U haul from Idaho or Utah to California it is a very low fee because nobody is doing it. That's a very useful indicator is U haul index. You see it in Florida, for example, a tribute not just to DeSantis but to Rick Scott and a whole generation going back to Jeb Bush. Florida is so well run that they are getting 3,000 new people a day moving in. That's hardly an argument against the kind of leadership that Florida has produced.

NEWT:

There is a Florida conservative culture, it’s work oriented, it’s low taxes, it’s practical government, it’s patriotic education, it’s very strongly against crime and creates a quality of life that's amazing. California has all of the weather opportunities that Florida has but it has terrible governance. The whole point in my book on defeating big government socialism is there is no better example of big government socialists than Sacramento, California and what they produce is human feces on the street, syringes all over the place. You just had Starbucks announce that there are 16 sites that they are closing because they can't cope with the number of needles that they are getting in their bathrooms. You are seeing the decay of civilization in places like Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco and Los Angeles. And you are seeing people aggressively defend civilization in places like Texas and Florida.