Newt Did It. He Broke Politics. w/Historian Julian Zelizer.
The Bill Press Pod
BP Pods
4.7 • 601 Ratings
🗓️ 21 July 2020
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Our politics are broken, maybe even Humpty-Dumpty broken. And Trump sure added fuel, but the fire that crippled American politics was started by Newt Gingrich in the 1980's. So says the book, Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, the Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party, by Julian Zelizer. He's a Professor of History and Public Affairs at the Princeton School of Public & International Affairs. You can buy the book at your local bookstore or here on Amazon.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, friends and neighbors. |
| 0:08.5 | It's another edition of the Bill Press Pod. |
| 0:11.4 | Thank you for joining us. |
| 0:13.5 | There's no doubt politics is broken today, badly broken, perhaps humpty dumpty broken. |
| 0:19.5 | It's easy to blame it all on Donald Trump, and for sure he deserves a lot of the blame. |
| 0:24.9 | Nobody's divided America the way he has. |
| 0:28.2 | But it didn't start with Trump. |
| 0:30.4 | For a long time, the Republican Party has moved farther and farther to the extreme, ugly, anti-government divisive right wing, |
| 0:38.9 | whose goal is not to get things done, but to tear things down, like the Tea Party. |
| 0:45.2 | But, you know, it started even before then. |
| 0:48.2 | As Princeton historian Julian Zelazar documents in his new book, |
| 0:52.7 | Burning Down the House, the hatred, the personal attacks, |
| 0:56.9 | the all-out political warfare, the political cannibalism, started in January 1979, |
| 1:04.5 | with the arrival in Congress of a newly elected smart ass from Georgia by the name of |
| 1:09.8 | Newt Gingrich. The man who destroyed American |
| 1:12.5 | politics, yes, we have found the enemy, says Professor Zelizer, and his name is Newt. |
| 1:20.8 | I caught up with Professor Zelzer this week. Professor Zelzer, good to see you. Thank you for |
| 1:26.1 | joining us here on the Bill Press Pod. |
| 1:28.1 | Thanks for having me. It's great to be with you. So there's no doubt that politics is broken in America today. |
| 1:35.4 | And, of course, a lot of people say, oh, it's Donald Trump, right? But the whole point of your book is it didn't start with Donald Trump. It started a lot earlier |
| 1:46.8 | back in the 80s, maybe, with a young guy from Georgia named Newt Gingrich. Really? |
| 1:52.9 | That's exactly right. I think if we think it all starts with Donald Trump, we have a |
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