Munk Debate on the US Election

September 30, 2016

Rudyard Griffiths: This is the heart of downtown Toronto, a city that is home to more than six million people, the skyline carved in the waters of Lake Ontario and here we are, everyone, at Roy Thomson Hall. Its distinctive exterior design, we know it well, reflective by day, transparent by night. This is Toronto’s premier concert hall. It’s a venue usually for the biggest names in entertainment, but tonight before 3,000 people the latest in a series of Munk Debates, a clash of ideas over the US presidential election.

Good evening, my name is Rudyard Griffiths and it is once again my pleasure to be your moderator tonight for this debate, this important debate. I want to start by welcoming the North American wide television audience tuning in right now C-SPAN across the continental US and here in Canada coast to coast on CPAC. A warm hello also to the online audience watching right now; Facebook Live streaming this debate over facebook.com, our social media partner, on the websites of our digital and print partner theglobeandmail.com and, of course, on our own website themunkdebates.com and a hello to all of you, the 3,000 people who have once again filled Roy Thomson Hall to capacity. Bravo.

Our ability year in and year out, debate in and debate out to bring to you some of the world’s best debaters, some of the brightest minds, the sharpest thinkers to weigh in on the big global challenges, issues and problems facing the world would not be possible without the generosity, the foresight and the commitment of our host tonight. So join me in a warm appreciation of Munk Debate founders Peter and Melanie Munk. Bravo, you guys. Thank you.

It’s a real treat to be able to host these debates in Toronto and let’s do that right now. Let’s get our two teams of debaters out here

- 1 - centre stage and our debate underway. We’ve got a controversial motion. It’s designed to fire up our participants and fire up the online television and in auditorium audience. That resolution: “Be it resolved, Donald Trump can make America great again...” Speaking for the motion, our first debater tonight, please welcome the former speaker of the US House of Representatives and an advisor to the Trump campaign, Newt Gingrich.

Speaker Gingrich’s teammate is a bestselling author, renowned radio broadcaster with over five million daily listeners coast to coast in the United States and she’s a force of nature in the American conservative movement, ladies and gentlemen, Laura Ingraham.

Wow, one great team of debaters deserves another and we have not disappointed you tonight. Speaking against the resolution “Be it resolved, Donald Trump can make America great again...” is the former US Labour Secretary, acclaimed Berkley professor, filmmaker, author and one of the most formidable debaters of his time, Robert Reich.

Robert’s debating partner, Canadian born, two-time governor of the State of Michigan and the co-chair of Hillary Clinton’s White House transition team, please join me in a warm Canadian welcome to Jennifer Granholm.

Let’s go through a very quick pre-debate checklist before we go to our opening statements. First, we’ve got a hashtag going tonight. Those in the hall, those watching online, hashtag Munk Debate. Let us know what you think. Join the debate, join the conversation, take part in our rolling poll also at munkdebates.com\vote and, of course, our countdown clock for those of you who are regulars of the debate this is how we keep our debaters on their toes and our debates on time. We have a clock that will appear as the debaters’ opening and closing remarks count down to zero join me in a round of applause

- 2 - and that will let them know that it’s time to move on. We like to do that here and we like to keep our proceedings moving quickly.

Let’s finally review how this audience of 3,000 people here in Roy Thomson Hall voted on tonight’s resolution coming into the debate. It’s downtown Toronto, Canada. I’m curious here. There are some closet Trump supporters. Let’s find out. “Be it resolved, Donald Trump can make America great again …” Do you agree or disagree? Let’s see those numbers up on the screen now. Okay. Fourteen percent. Fourteen percent agree, 86 percent disagree.

Now, as we ask at every vote because hey, look, you can change your mind, you’re going to hear a lot in the next hour and a half, there’s some compelling arguments here back and forth so depending on what you hear are you likely to change your vote over the next hour and a half. Let’s have those numbers now please. Okay, look at that. This debate’s in play; 46 percent of you could change your mind, 54 percent are decided, but let’s just see how decided you are. We’re going to begin with our opening statements now. I’m going to call on Speaker Gingrich. Your six minutes begins now.

Newt Gingrich: Well, first of all, thank you all for coming out and I want to thank Peter Munk for creating a remarkable institution. I was here a few years ago with Secretary Rice to debate economics and it was really a great experience. This is one of the great debates in the entire North America and so I’m delighted to be back and have a chance to talk with you.

Now, you might have thought that Laura and I would be put on edge by an 86 to 14 vote, but actually if you operated as a conservative, even the Washington media, that would be actually a reasonably good ratio. So it doesn’t particularly affect us. And I also want to draw a distinction. I would not have agreed to come here if the

- 3 - question had been resolved that Canadians should relax and not worry about a Donald Trump presidency.

I think Trump represents very real change. I think he will aggressively put America’s interest first and I think, frankly, from the standpoint of any other country that has to raise issues because that’s a very different frame of reference than the way we’ve negotiated over the last couple of generations and sets up a lot of questions which aren’t answered and can’t be answered until we live through it. But what I would suggest to you is in the long run a very dynamic America that regains a Reagan level of economic growth, four, five, six percent a year. An America that is generating jobs and generating rapidly advancing income and an America which overhauls its infrastructure and an America which fundamentally reforms its civil service is in fact a better neighbour, a better customer, a better market to sell into and a better support for national security than an America which continues to decay. And I think part of what you don’t feel in Canada is the degree to which the American central government system is decaying.

Example: We learned last week that in the veteran’s administration one-third of the calls to the suicide line go to call waiting so you can leave a message. Now just think about that. You’re a veteran. You’re depressed. You’re literally thinking about suicide. It’s two in the morning. You call a number you’ve been told will help you and one out of three times you get a tape recording. I mean this is a government level of incompetence that is beyond breathtaking and you see it again and again in our system.

You look at your infrastructure. We are now $19 trillion in debt and large parts of infrastructure don’t work and there has to be a profound overhaul of our ability to compete in the world market. The director of national intelligence reported – staff report earlier this year that the Chinese last year stole $360 billion in intellectual property from the United States. We have an $800 billion trade

- 4 - deficit. You can’t sustain that. And you also can’t talk about free trade when your largest trading partner or your second largest trading partner is stealing a third of a trillion dollars a year intellectual properties. And so the requirement to rethink and restructure.

Finally, the whole issue of the war in the Middle East. It has been 37 years since the Ayatollah Khomeini illegally seized the American Embassy beginning Iran’s campaign against the United States. It has been 15 years since 9/11 when Islamic supremacists killed 3,000 people in the United States. We’re not winning. We have spent trillions of dollars, lost thousands of young men and women, had tens of thousands of severe wounds and no serious person can argue we’re winning. And so when Trump says we need to rethink these things, I would argue that he’s not glib. He’s not a Yale trained lawyer. He hasn’t spent 46 years in public life like Secretary Clinton, but as a crude, rough and tumble businessman who had a habit of actually building things and making them work and having projects. I think he has the entrepreneurial drive. I think he has the courage and I think he has the force of originality that will enable us to start to break through and to literally make America great again. And I think in the absence of very profound change, the United States is going to continue decaying.

We’re going to become a weaker partner for you and it’s going to have bad implications for both of our economies. It’s going to have bad implications for both of our national security and in the long run an America where, for example, this year there have been over 3,000 people shot in Chicago, there have been over 500 killed – somebody’s shot in Chicago every two hours. Now, that requires profound, fundamental rethinking. We’ve lost more Americans in Chicago since 2009 than we’ve lost in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. And if that means we’ve got a rough and tumble guy who at the edges is, frankly, not a very subtle, not a very glib, not a very sophisticated person, but he may just be like Andrew Jackson,

- 5 - the kind of person you need to break through and actually get the system to work again. And I would argue that’s a better gamble for the future than to continue the current system, the current policies, the current bureaucracies, the current mess in Washington and that’s why I think we have a much better chance of making America great again with Donald Trump.

Rudyard Griffiths: Thank you, Speaker Gingrich. Robert Reich, you’re up next with your opening statement. Six minutes on the clock.

Robert Reich: Thank you. I love to debate Newt Gingrich because we agree on nothing, but in a very good natured way. I’ve been in Canada now on this trip just for about 24 hours and I am so reassured to learn that contrary to my fears the Canadians are not contemplating building a wall between the United States and Canada on the off chance that Donald Trump becomes president and most of us want to come north. But let me just say this, on a proposition and the fact that 86 percent of you are with Governor Granholm and me kind of is something of a challenge. We want to get you up to 88 or 90 percent. But the difficulty of arguing this proposition is knowing where to begin, honestly.

Let me just say something here and it’s very sincere. When you have a lot of people in a society who feel economically stressed and in the United States, to a lesser extent in Canada – you have a much, much better safety net in Canada. In the United States we have a lot of the old working class, a lot of the middle class, lower middle class people who are and have been on a downward escalator for years and part of that’s – I don’t want to cast dispersions, but part of it I remember because I was labour secretary when Speaker Gingrich was speaker and one of the frustrations I had – now again, no dispersions at all – is trying to get job training and trying to get more education spending and trying to get infrastructure spending and widening the earned income tax credit which is a subsidy, a wage subsidy for people at the bottom and getting a lot of

- 6 - opportunities and recreating equal opportunity, widening the circle of prosperity, but the Republican congress and the Republicans wouldn’t do it. All they wanted was trickledown economics.

The trickledown economics you give tax cuts to the rich and you pretend that it trickles down to everybody else. It didn’t. It doesn’t. It is a cruel hoax. And the net result of those years, of all of those years – in fact we’ve seen basically the standoff now for about 25 years. The net result is that you’ve got a large and growing percent of Americans who feel with some justification that the game is rigged against them. And my friends, you know as well as I do what happens when you have a large percentage of your population feeling like the game is rigged against them. I mean we can see a lot of the same stresses occurring in Europe. We can see it elsewhere around the world. You create the conditions in which demagoguery is ripe. You almost invite authoritarian populism.

Now, there is in history two different forms of populism. One I will call authoritarian. Those are the demagogues that want to channel that anger and anxiety and fear and channel it toward scapegoats and want to blame foreigners or immigrants or minority groups and we’ve seen in history – this is nothing new – the tragedy of what happened 70, 80, 90 years ago in Europe is still within at least living memory or at least the minds of many of us. But the alternative to that is genuine reform. You reform your political and economic system. You do invest in people. You make equal opportunity a reality. And that’s the only alternative when people are stressed. In other words, it really is a choice between authoritarian populism or reform populism and that’s what we face right now in the United States and that’s why Donald Trump is, in the words of the Cincinnati Enquirer, for example – the Cincinnati Enquirer if you don’t know is a Republican publication or has been that in 100 years has not endorsed a Democrat. Well, what did it do a few weeks ago? It endorsed Hillary Clinton because it said, quote, “Donald Trump

- 7 - is a clear and present danger to the United States and also to the world.”

Now, I don’t have to do this, in fact I have about a minute left, but let me just – you know this. You know this. This is a man who denies climate change is caused by humans, who vows to cancel the Paris Agreement, who calls Vladimir Putin a stronger leader than President Obama, who says that President Obama invented ISIS, who for years has claimed that President Obama was not even born in the United States, who – I mean it’s an – ironically, it’s an embarrassment of riches here. You know, or suggested that the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was part of plot. He refers to women he doesn’t like as fat pigs and slobs and called a former Miss Universe Miss Piggy. He says thousands and thousands of Muslims in New Jersey celebrated the Twin Towers collapsing, wants to ban and restrict Muslims from entering, says a federal judge has a conflict of interest in considering a case against Trump University because he’s of Mexican heritage and I could go on and on and on. You get the point. This is demagoguery. This is wielding anxiety and frustration and pointing it at them. This is hate mongering. This is undermining the social fabric of the United States.

So it’s not just that Donald Trump is a problem. The problem is that Donald Trump has already poisoned the well and we’ve got to, all of us here tonight and elsewhere, get rid of him.

Rudyard Griffiths: Two very strong opening statements. We’ll next go to you, Laura Ingraham. Your six minutes is on the clock, please start.

Laura Ingraham: First of all, I want to thank everyone here for coming tonight. You could be doing something probably a lot more fun, no offence Newt and Bob and Jennifer. No, it’s such a great privilege to be with all of you and I can’t believe 14 percent of the people in this room actually support the proposition. I’m buying margaritas for all of

- 8 - you. The other people are totally out of it. So all of you guys are the fun people.

I am really – I’m actually thrilled to be here to support this proposition and I’d like to begin with a quote if you would indulge me from March of this year. Here it goes. “I’ve seen firsthand how effective Wall Street and big corporations are at wielding influence using lobbyists, campaign donations and subtle promises of future jobs to get the global deals they want. Global deals like the Transpacific Partnership will boost the profits of Wall Street and big corporations and make the richest one percent even richer, but they’ll contribute to the steady shrinkage of the American middle class.” That quote was posted by Robert Reich, former secretary of labour for the Clinton administration and our opposition tonight.

Next I’d like to quote a 2008 article about the decision of Electrolux – we used to have Electrolux vacuum cleaners in my house in Connecticut. We love them – to leave Greenville, Michigan. They’re going to leave Greenville, Michigan for Mexico. Governor Jennifer Granholm was bitterly disappointed by Electrolux’s decision to abandon Greenville. She had promised to persuade the company to stay, assembling a package of more than 120 million in state and local tax credits. The city offered to build a plant. The local union agreed to give up as much as $33 million a year in wages. They said, “There’s nothing you can do to compensate for the fact that we’re able to pay $1.57 an hour in Mexico”, Granholm recalled. That’s when I started to say, quoting Governor Granholm, “NAFTA and CAFTA has given us SHAFTA.” I like that line. I’m using it on my radio show on Monday.

Let me be very clear. I didn’t quote these statements to embarrass our distinguished opponents tonight, I really didn’t. I quoted them to show that we actually share common ground and I think it’s important to state that even at a debate because lots of folks in Washington complain that we don’t have enough bipartisanship and

- 9 - that people from different parties, they can’t agree on policies to make the lives of the average Americans better. But when it comes to this issue of globalization, I believe people of good faith on both sides increasingly agree that the current global trading system does not work for blue collar workers. So for years people like Governor Granholm and Secretary Reich have warned about the harm that our trade policy is doing to American workers and some of us, some of us on the Republican side, including people like Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama have done the same.

So we’re not asking for protectionism. We’re not asking for mercantilism. We’re not opposed to all trade. We’re simply asking for a system where American workers and businesses in America have a better chance to compete, where it’s easier for American businesses to grow and expand and for American workers to actually obtain higher wages. And after all, the United States is the largest and most attractive market in the world and of all countries we shouldn’t be forced in the United States to enter deals that put our people at a disadvantage but what’s happened? Absolutely nothing despite the common ground that a lot of Democrats, I mean people like Bernie Sanders, people like myself, obviously Donald Trump, at this very moment President Obama is pushing yet another massive trade deal, the Transpacific Partnership that Bob doesn’t like and this is the exact deal that he criticized in March of this year and he’s absolutely right in his criticism. But you know and I know that every – and everyone in this room knows, I would think, that Hillary Clinton if she’s elected president this country, our country, the United States will soon be bound by the Transpacific Partnership and it might happen in a lame duck session of congress and it may happen after Secretary Clinton becomes – if she becomes president makes a few minor tweaks to the deal, but it will happen.

Why are we doing this if this puts us on a path to hurt so many Americans and I’ll tell you why. Because the same people who’ve kept the same gridlock in Washington for so many years are in

- 10 - favour of it. Because they’ve always been in favour of the things that benefit them and it’s usually the top one percent in the country and it’s usually big donors and it’s usually big corporations who have really fancy lobbyists who get paid a lot of money to eat fancy dinners in Washington DC and wine and dine everybody at the capital and then along comes Donald Trump and Newt described him, I think, pretty accurately. He’s a rough and tumble guy without any political experience and he comes out and he calls everybody out on their blankety blank and he does it in a way that is off putting and I think it’s, frankly, terrifying to a lot of people because when you mess with their status quo then they start getting really serious about fighting you.

Donald Trump will not be beholding to big donors. He will not be beholding to Wall Street. Wall Street’s endorsing Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton refuses to show her transcripts at her Goldman Sachs speeches and I’d like to know why that is. We need a government that represents all the people from no matter where they come from, no matter what colour their skin and Donald Trump promises to do that. We need to break the oligarchy in Washington DC that has dominated the country, restore democracy in which the voice of all the people is respected.

Rudyard Griffiths: Okay. The final opening statement goes to Governor Granholm. You’re up next.

Jennifer Granholm: Great. Thank you so much. Thanks for the invitation to come. I know the Munk Debates wanted to get a Canadian born US politician who was against Donald Trump to come and then Ted Cruz endorsed Donald Trump a couple weeks ago so here I am.

So I want to talk in the vein of Robert Reich as an apology really. How do we start? I want to give you just in my brief six minutes a couple of reasons of the 4,365 that you might vote against this resolution for and just to wet your whistle. So for example, Donald

- 11 - Trump is so erratic that NBC has done an evaluation of his positions and where he has stood and what they have determined is that of 20 positions Donald Trump has changed his mind 124 times. On the issue of immigration he’s changed his mind 18 times alone. He would be a danger as president not just because he’s erratic. Don’t take my word for it. Take the word of the economists, their global intelligence unit. Their unit rates all of the global risks. They have determined this month that Donald Trump is the fourth highest global risk among all global risks. In fact, they have never put a politician on this list before.

So why is this? Well, because they say that his language about the Muslim world is God’s gift to ISIS recruiters. In fact, Matt Olsen who’s the former head of the counterterrorism agency in the US has counted the number of times that he has been able to find that ISIS is actually rooting for Donald Trump to be president because he really is their – gives them an ability to recruit. That is a danger. He’s a danger because as Secretary Rice said because of Putin and that’s not just because he says Barack Obama – or Vladimir Putin is a better leader than Barack Obama, but for any of you who have been watching this and I’m sure you all have, you may recall that his second campaign manager, a guy named Paul Manafort that he represented for many years Yanukovych who was the head of the Russian backed Ukraine until he was kicked out. And when he was the head of Donald Trump’s campaign during the Republican convention his campaign went in and removed from the Republican platform a provision that was a standing provision that said that the United States would go in to defend Ukraine in the case of a Russian incursion. He also has said that among his foreign policy advisors is a guy named Carter Page who is a business – a US businessman who does a huge amount of business in Ukraine – in Russia and who this week it was determined by Yahoo News they reported that he is under investigation, his foreign policy advisor, Donald Trump’s foreign policy advisor is under investigation by United

- 12 - States intelligence agencies because he apparently is having conversations in Moscow about lifting the sanctions against Russia in the event of a Trump victory.

We know that Donald Trump has overtly called upon the Kremlin to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails. We know that in fact the Kremlin or at least Russian hackers have hacked into the Democratic National Committee and we also know that Mike Morell who’s the former head of the CIA has said that Donald Trump – that Vladimir Putin has recruited Donald Trump as an unwitting agent of the soviet federation. The man is a danger.

He is also incredibly deceptive and I know we’ll get into this tonight, but we know – I’m sure you have been following this, that he’s a conman, right? He’s got Trump University, Trump Mortgage, Trump you name it trying to separate the people he claims to represent, the every man, right, the little guy from his money. We know that he is a chiseler because he’s involved in 3,400 lawsuits, many of which are from contractors who sue just to get paid. People who built the basis for his slot machines in his casinos, people who served his clientele as bartenders and his waiters have had to sue him just to get paid.

So we know that. We know he’s hiding something because he’s not releasing his tax returns, a 40-year tradition of doing so in the United States that presidential candidates release their tax returns so that we can see whether there is any conflict. We know that he is a liar because the news agencies who evaluate candidates, PolitiFact, Fact Checker, these are objective entities, they’ve evaluated Donald Trump’s statements like they do everybody else’s and they have found that of all politicians that they’ve evaluated Donald Trump is by far the biggest liar. USA Today in saying don’t vote for Donald Trump, first time in USA Today’s history that they’ve taken a position in the presidential race, said he’s a serial liar. Seventy-eight percent of the statements that PolitiFact and the

- 13 - Fact Checkers have looked at were lies. The man is untrustworthy. He’s not worthy of being president. The resolution says – please, I’m begging you, vote against this resolution for Canada’s sake, for the globe’s sake.

Rudyard Griffiths: So terrific opening statements. The table is set. We’re now going to go into rebuttals and I want to hear from the pro team first, then I’m going to go to the con team. Speaker Gingrich, I’m going to start with you, put a couple of minutes on the clock. React to what you’ve heard. What’s your rebuttal so far in the debate?

Newt Gingrich: Well, I think first of all as Canadians having listened to these two you’d have to ask yourself the question how could Donald Trump be this close to winning, right? And there’s a profound reason. It’s the same reason that Brexit won in Great Britain. It’s the same reason that in Turin and in Rome – for the first time in Rome’s history, 2,800 years, there’s a female mayor and she won as part of the Five Star Movement which was founded by a comedian as an anticorruption system. In Brazil the president has been impeached for corruption. The last president has been indicted criminally for starting the corruption. The Brazilian national petroleum company has a $40 billion scandal of bribery and according to Gallup 74 percent of Brazilians believe there’s widespread corruption.

In the United States 75 percent believe there’s widespread corruption. Republicans haven’t been in charge of Chicago as it collapsed. The last Republican city councilman in Baltimore was 1942. Our inner cities are disintegrating. The schools don’t work. The kids don’t have jobs. There’s violence all over the place. These are Democratic controlled areas. And then you talk about honesty and dishonesty. Donald Trump has changed his opinion about as often as Hillary Clinton has changed her explanation of her emails.

The fact is almost 50 percent of the country right now and we’ll see by election day what percent it is, but it’s going to be a big percent

- 14 - and it may be a winning percent is totally sickened. We talk about Russian influence. It is Bill Clinton who got a million dollars from Moscow for a speech. It is the Clintons who gave 20 percent of American uranium to the Russians at about the time that the firm they were dealing with put money into the Clinton Foundation. It’s this kind of corruption which has led a very large number of Americans to say yeah, Donald Trump may be a risk, but he’s a better risk than Hillary Clinton.

Rudyard Griffiths: Interesting rebuttal. Laura Ingraham, let’s have you round out the pro side rebuttal.

Laura Ingraham: It’s really convenient for the elites to blame someone who hasn’t been in office over the past 15 years for the ruin that they’ve left behind. Syria, a massive refugee crisis. A consumer confidence crisis across western Europe. The rise of the populace movement in western Europe, Brexit. Seven in ten Americans think the government’s going in the wrong direction. The trustworthiness of Donald Trump might not be all that high, but it’s in the basement for Hillary Clinton too. She is the former Secretary of State of the United States of America who in her first trip to Russia with all of her experience could not even get the translated button when she handed it to Sergey Lavrov, the foreign minister, and Donald Trump is the incompetent person.

The incompetent people are the ones who thought it was a good idea to take missile defence out of eastern Europe with really no preconditions on Russia. And I’m just delighted, I’m thrilled – as someone who lived in the former Soviet Union for a time, I’m delighted to hear the Democrats are finally concerned about Russia. I mean in the 70s we were trying to get them all worried about Russia and it was oh, no, it’s all going to work out fine. They called President Reagan for whom I worked “Ronnie Raygun” because he was so out of control and he was – Ronald Reagan was going to bring chaos onto the world scene.

- 15 - You know what the clear and present danger is to world stability right now? America in decline. And four years or eight years of Hillary Clinton promises the same policies that we’ve seen over the same eight years, last eight years that have been nothing but flat lined US economy, a negative and pessimistic view of government coming from the people, massive trade deficits, China on the rise as America falls into despondency. You want to know a clear and present danger? It ain’t Donald Trump. It’s America in decline under Hillary Clinton.

Robert Reich: I disagree. I mean, for example, Laura, you said that Hillary Clinton is indebted to Wall Street. Well, Donald Trump is not indebted to Wall Street because Wall Street won’t give him any more loans. You know, he’s declared bankruptcy four times. Where is he getting his money? Where is he getting his money? Could it be perhaps from Russia? With regard to trade, look, I was there. I implemented the North American Free Trade Act and – thank you. And NAFTA to my way of thinking did not have adequate labour or environmental protections in it. It’s the best deal we could get, but let me tell you something else and that is that free trade is not itself bad. The problem is that if we do not have – and the United States does not have mechanisms in place to ease the adaptation of workers who get hurt by the loss of jobs because of trade or because of technological change. If you don’t have job training, if you don’t have education, if you don’t have reemployment insurance, if you don’t have anything in place then obviously those workers are going to be stranded. The problem is not trade, the problem is lack of adjustment mechanisms for the people who get hurt by trade and by technological change.

And let me say finally that trade is not and should not be considered, as Donald Trump considers, a zero-sum game in which only one side wins and the other side loses. A trade at its best should be a positive-sum game. If you don’t trade, you actually are going to condemn the rest of the world, particularly the poor in the world, to

- 16 - a life of lifetime poverty and maybe ages of poverty. That is not good for the world, it’s not good for foreign policy, it’s not good for peace. Thank you.

Jennifer Granholm: So Laura quoted my huge anxiety over the last – of Electrolux in Greenville. You got it almost right, it’s NAFTA and SHAFTA have given us – NAFTA and CAFTA have given us the SHAFTA – as they have been enforced and the question for us is – and Ontario has seen its share of lost manufacturing jobs as well and the question is who is in a better position to create industrial clusters, to go after advanced manufacturing, to really make the investments necessary to make our region irresistible to those who would create jobs here? Who is in the best position to be able to be smart enough to do the right kinds of partnering and investments? Is it somebody who said the other night at the debate that when asked why he was not revealing his taxes maybe it’s because he doesn’t pay any federal taxes and he said that’s because I’m smart? That’s because I’m smart. Somebody who is being guarded at this moment by secret service agents who were paid for by federal taxes, somebody who uses airports with his big jet that is paid for by federal taxes, whose limos drive on roads that are paid for by federal taxes, but who cannot himself see fit to contribute in any way to the comments.

This man – they talked about corruption. This man has manipulated the laws to his benefit his entire career. If you have somebody to bring jobs back to the United States you don’t rely on somebody who is outsourcing his jobs to manufacture stuff in China and in Mexico and in Turkey and everywhere else. He is not the model that we need to bring the change that we require.

Rudyard Griffiths: Thank you, Governor. Very strong opening to the debate. We’re now going to move into the moderated portion, more free flowing discussion. I want to start off by picking up, I think, the major theme of the first half hour of the debate which has been this idea, you mention it Laura, of an America in decline and Trump is a

- 17 - manifestation of this and let me start with you, Robert, which is to hear why in a sense Clinton isn’t, in your view, the status quo that Laura and Newt are condemning, therefore proposing that Trump is the solution in the absence of a disruptor on the Democratic side of the ticket.

Robert Reich: Well, disruption for the sake of disruption is not what America or the world needs. I mean Franco, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, they were all disruptors. What we need is a fundamental reformer. I’ve known Hillary Clinton, by the way, for 49 years and if you can keep it in this audience I’ll tell you something. I met her – I went out on a date with her in 1967 and I blew it because I could possibly be the first gentleman of the United States. I have known her always as a woman of extraordinary principle, a person of deep, deep commitment to social justice; a person who has worked so hard over the last, 30, 40 years to improve our society. To me even mentioning the word Donald Trump or the name Donald Trump in conjunction with Hillary Clinton is absurd.

If I may, Rupert, let me just say one other thing and that is that Hillary Clinton does not represent the status quo. Hillary Clinton is a fighter. She’s been a fighter all her life. I was there in the Whitehouse when she was fighting, for example, healthcare reform and who was she fighting? She was fighting the Republicans who she has always been fighting, I have been fighting. We have two parties in the United States. One is a party about the future and the other is a party that wants to go negative, go backward, and we cannot any longer afford to go backward.

Rudyard Griffiths: Okay. Well, let’s bring in the other side to respond to that point. Laura, you brought it up, this notion of decline, Trump being a manifestation of change, difficult change, controversial change, but you believe change is necessary regardless.

- 18 - Laura Ingraham: Well, first of all, Robert mentioned Hitler, Mussolini. Did you throw in Stalin and Pol Pot? I lost track of the –

Robert Reich: - I definitely threw in Stalin. Not to suggest –

Laura Ingraham: - Okay. We got – I got all of it.

Robert Reich: Laura, not to suggest that Donald Trump belongs in that company.

Laura Ingraham: Yeah. Well, let me talk and then you can actually get your time again. This is what happens in a substantive conversation about the future of America where substantive issues really kind of fade away in the background and the conversation just moves to personal attacks or the most outrageous adjectives or, you know, Trump’s crazy, Trump’s – and before you guffaw in the audience, I just say this. Trump could go away tomorrow and maybe you’ll all just clap and strike up the band and I understand that, but Trump could go away tomorrow and the carnage that has been left behind between the established cabal in Washington which is comprised of Democrats and Republicans, not just Democrats or not just Republicans but both of them, that status quo which has left America behind and left the working class infuriated, that’s still going to be there.

So for all of Bob’s, you know, walk down memory lane about Hillary – I’m sure she’s a wonderful person and she was great person to know and date and all of that, but that’s not really relevant because for the last three decades almost she’s been in public life and has almost nothing to show for it. That might sound harsh and I – sorry. Her four years as secretary of state rendered America not stronger on the world scene, but weaker on the world scene. Her four years in the US Senate after promising 200,000 jobs in upstate New York guess what they got – a big goose egg.

Hillary Clinton is the celebrity of the moment for the Democrat party because Obama’s going away, but the idea that there is a

- 19 - substantive record of accomplishment in the economy or in foreign policy that is going to galvanize the whole country behind her is just – it’s obviously not playing out. If Donald Trump is the caricature that you make him out to be, she really should be ahead 60 points, Bob. She shouldn’t be struggling in Florida, in Nevada, in even states like Iowa where Trump still has a narrow lead. If he’s that outrageous then you must think half of your countrymen are just completely bonkers or more.

Rudyard Griffiths: Jennifer, you want to come in on this point? I want to stay on this topic of decline and how the candidates – let’s just stay on track here.

Jennifer Granholm: Yeah. I mean, I beg the question to begin with. I mean we are – our unemployment rate in the US is 4.9 percent. It’s less than half of what it was when Barack Obama took over. We’ve had 15 million jobs created since February of 2010 at the end of the recession. It’s been almost 80 straight months of job growth and now we are seeing wage growth as well. So this notion that we’re in decline – I mean the challenge certainly has been for Barack Obama that he has been saddled with a congress that refused to invest in a lot of the things that he would like to do to continue our progress further, but I would say this, you know. Donald Trump would shove America into the cellar of international esteem so fast, believe me.

The idea that he’s got now people on his team that have given sort of oxygen to this dark underbelly, it’s not – it’s not everybody certainly on the Republican side. It is a swath. But that swath of the electorate who is animated by this alt-right movement that where you go to Donald Trump’s rallies and they have the most horrific signs and chants, words we cannot even describe here that you would be absolutely mortified by and it’s perfectly common at his events, the idea that he and that – the people that are running his campaign who run this Breitbart news site which is the home of this alt-right which is a white nationalist movement, the fact that they

- 20 - have trumpeted this America firstism as though that’s the rise of America when that America first movement is a movement that started right during World War II to convince America not to engage against Hitler when it has been seen now as a spinoff of this white nationalist movement, that would put America into decline.

So yeah, the world is complicated and there are complicated things happening in the Middle East, but what has Donald Trump said that he would do? He said that he would contemplate disengaging from NATO for – or at least not going to the defence of countries that haven’t contributed their fair share, sort of upending the world order post World War II.

Rudyard Griffiths: I want to get to international affairs in a moment and that will be part of this debate but to come you, Speaker, just how do you respond to the governor here who’s saying look, America’s not in decline but Trump is taking us there?

Newt Gingrich: I mean there are two different parts of this. I mean one is the left wing fantasy that you have to invent some new horror in order to hide from reality. The fact is as Nick Eberstadt, a very famous demographer, reported on Labour Day, ten million men have dropped out of the job market. They’re not unemployed, they’re gone. They’re not looking for work. They don’t care about work. They’re playing computer games or whatever. The fact is right now the opioid epidemic has gotten so bad that for the first time since the development of the mass produced car there’s a new cause of death larger than automobile wrecks and it’s opioid addiction. Literally more people die today because the underclass of America, the collapse of belief in America, the whole sense of what’s going on has led to an epidemic of the combination of Mexican heroin and OxyContin which is a horrifying system.

Third, Gallup reports 25 million people have dropped out of the middle class under this administration, 25 million who were middle

- 21 - class are now dropped out. Now, this wasn’t Donald Trump’s fault. He wasn’t in charge of the presidency. He didn’t spend almost – you know, how much money was in the original, huge package in 2009? How little of it went to infrastructure? How much of it went to paying off various political allies? And finally, you talk about investments. They gave what, $557 million to Solyndra for solar power and it went bankrupt. In your home state or second home state after Canada, they invested in a battery company which went bankrupt and was promptly bought by the Chinese. You can go around case after case after case.

So I think it’s a bit much to suggest that there’s some extreme group over here on one side, that America’s going through three parallel revolutions. They’re going through all the people who are drifting towards Trump; they’re going through all the people who are drifting towards Sanders and they’re going – and there’s a Black Lives Matter rebellion among younger blacks who are sick and tired of having been lied to and having nothing happen that improves their lives. All three of those are occurring simultaneously. None of them are Donald Trump’s fault. They are manifestations of an establishment that has failed, that is corrupt and that cannot deal with reality.

Rudyard Griffiths: Now let’s give Robert a rebuttal on that.

Robert Reich: I think there is an important kernel of truth to what both of you are saying, just a kernel with regard to the hopelessness and despair and anger and anxiety and frustration faced by many people who used to be in the middle class. And even though the economy is improving and I think we have a lot to be grateful for, that underlying structural problem that started 30 years ago is still very much with us. But I think we are now reaping the whirlwind of failing to invest in people, failing to invest in education, failing to invest in infrastructure. We’re reaping the whirlwind of failing to provide the kind of security that people need in order to go on with

- 22 - their lives. We have made a fetish and that fetish has come directly – and I don’t mean to be partisan, Newt Gingrich, but it starts –

Newt Gingrich: - Rob …

Robert Reich: But I was there when you became a speaker, your contract with America; you know, that deregulation trickledown economics, that austerity economics. Do you know what has happened to America because of it? Well, a lot of the despair, a lot of the shrinkage in the middle class is at your feet and the feet of some of the people you brought in.

And so just to finish. So when Laura asks me how is it that so many people find Donald Trump to be somewhat exciting and interesting and supporting they are – because the choice that I indicated at the beginning. That when you have so many people who are so economically stressed some of them will be moved and tempted to follow an authoritarian populist who is blaming everybody else but himself and who is fundamentally as the Cincinnati Enquirer and many, many other Republican papers have said deeply flawed and deeply dangerous.

Newt Gingrich: Let me – can I respond?

Rudyard Griffiths: Okay. And I want to bring Laura on this because Robert’s –

Newt Gingrich: Let me just say two things. We just did a conference of the Brookings Institution on the 20th anniversary of the Welfare Reform Bill. The largest decline in children in poverty, the largest taking children out of poverty occurred after the Welfare Reform Bill moved people from dependency to work and the fact is – and Bill Clinton, of course, will claim credit for it which is fine. But in that period we moved more people out of poverty in childhood than any other time in American history, that’s part one.

Second, I think that this whole – you know, we … This is the tragedy of American liberals. Yes, it would be great to invest, for

- 23 - example, in education which I believe in passionately. Robert and I share a passion. In Detroit nine percent of the third graders can read. In Baltimore 13 percent of the eighth graders can pass their math exam. The Baltimore system is a billion, 400 million dollar system which is brilliant at paying incompetent bureaucrats and absolutely fails the children. We have been going through this now for 30 years. Those of us who believe in choice and allowing parents to pick a school that works are defeated consistently by the power of the labour unions who own the Democratic party lock, stock and barrel.

So when you talk about investing don’t you also have to reform the system so you actually have something positive happen with the money?

Robert Reich: I’d like to report something very quickly. Look, it is very, very important for us to acknowledge that money is not the only thing that is necessary, but without money you can’t do anything and the United States is only one of two OECD countries, two advanced countries that actually provides less funding per poor child than funding on average for middle class children. That to me is a scandal.

Rudyard Griffiths: Laura, I want to bring this debate back to its resolution which is, you know, “Be it resolved, Donald Trump can make America great again…” So these are big problems that we’re talking about, inner cities, failed education, suicide, drug addiction. What are the characteristics that you think that Trump has that can address these complicated, entrenched problems that you’re saying that this informed, educated elite were unable to fix over the last 15 years?

Laura Ingraham: I think he has the courage to be called every name in the book and still hold onto the idea that what’s happened over the last really couple of decades has been maybe great intentions but it just hasn’t worked for the average person and it’s really unpleasant to be

- 24 - walking through that fire every day. I mean Newt and I have been – and I know both Jennifer and Bob face the same thing. I mean when you’re in public life you deal with a lot and you have to take it if you dish it out. It’s not pleasant. And it’s not pleasant to take on in many ways both parties that agree on a lot.

There’s a reason that the Bushs are – you know, at least probably a couple of them are supporting Hillary Clinton. I mean they agree on a lot of issues. They agree on globalization. They probably agree on immigration. They agree on a lot of foreign policy and Trump has – I would submit that Trump has a much – is much closer in many ways than Reagan – to Reagan than he is to George W. Bush, the more interventionist foreign policy. And look, I’m someone who is for the war in Iraq and it’s something that I’ve had to re-examine personally and I did a broadcast over at Bagdad and I love our troops, but I think right now we’re seeing America stretched every which way financially –we’re structured culturally.

We’re stretched in every way and Donald Trump’s basically saying guys, it’s not 1984 and it’s not even 1994. We’re $19 trillion in debt and we can’t do this to the next generation. We can’t pile this on their shoulders because America will cease to exist if we keep doing what we’re doing. I have a new way forward and it’s not going to – it is not going to be easy. So when he says that, you know, it can happen, you know, relative – of course it can’t happen fast, but it’s certainly not going to happen if we keep just saying oh, let’s just spend our way out of this or if we have a foreign policy that is so confused and so muddled that our adversaries take advantage of our weakness and our friends don’t really trust us.

So Trump comes along and says we’re going to lay off some of these heavy regulations; we’re going to lower our corporate tax rate; we’re going to try to simplify the life of the small business owner in America which is tethered to environment regulations, to labour regulations, to – and I know some of them are necessary, but not all

- 25 - of them are necessary. And he’s trying to streamline that with a little bit of common sense and I don’t think is as partisan as a lot of people would make him out to be. I think he’s much more kind of a common sense kind of pragmatist guy and frankly, if he gets into the White House and he fails they’ll throw him out in four years because the people are very impatient right now for real change.

Rudyard Griffiths: I want Jennifer to come in on this. We haven’t heard from her in a little while.

Jennifer Granholm: Because I totally get the deficit issue, but what he has proposed according to objective evaluators like the Tax Foundation would increase the deficit by $5.3 trillion because of the tax cuts to the rich that he is proposing. And to your point about doing something about OxyContin or about investment in schools, on his website the policy that he has about education is basically to cut 70 percent of funds from public schools across the country, 30 percent from the department of education and put it all into vouchers which help the private institutions but the public institutions, of course, are left wanting. You put at risk the 22 million students as a result.

So my point in saying this is that I totally understand what you’re saying and I understand from a Republican point of view why you would say that those are the intellectual arguments that you guys have been making, the problem is the policies that he is proposing do not address the issues that you are raising.

Robert Reich: Not only do they not address the policies you are raising, but actually they take us in the opposite direction. Jennifer mentioned the independent Tax Foundation which did an analysis and they found that Donald Trump’s plan would boost the after tax incomes of the top one percent by $122,400.00 per year. That is if you’re in the top one percent in the United States you would get an additional $122,400.00 because your taxes would be reduced so much by Donald Trump. The middle class, on average, would get less than

- 26 - $500.00 a year and on top of that you get a huge budget deficit. This is what has happened every time we have tried supply side economics.

Rudyard Griffiths: And let’s have Speaker Gingrich come in on this because I think you maybe got an argument why that could work and why that’s good for the American economy. Let’s hear it, make the case.

Newt Gingrich: I’ve gone through two cycles of this. In the late 70s we had a Keynesian effort to somehow prime the American pump under Jimmy Carter. It collapsed totally. We ended up with 13 percent inflation, 21, 22 percent interest rates, rising unemployment. Ronald Reagan had a very simple model of saying to people, are you better off than you were four years ago. He won the largest Electoral College victory in American history against the incumbent and the process he campaigned what George W. Bush – to make your point, George W. Bush called voodoo economics because it was a very bold approach that said if you cut regulations and you cut taxes you stimulate the American economy and you get dramatic growth. Well, the truth is we came out of a very deep recession very fast and we got a tremendous amount of economic growth in the last five or six years of the Reagan administration and leading into the first two years of the Bush administration.

So I’ve been through phase one. In 1994 we campaigned on balancing the federal budget. I have – I think it’s fair to say, Robert, I have some expertise as the only speaker of the house in your lifetime to have produced four consecutive balanced budgets. I believe if you just quit paying the crooks you can save at least $140 billion a year in the federal budget literally. I believe that if you open America for national resource development you’d probably generate $7 trillion over a ten or 12 year period. I believe if you went through, for example, all the properties owned by HUD and got rid of the empty houses that are currently sitting blighting many of our cities – again, you go through these cycles. Now having done

- 27 - it once and it took four years – we took actually four years. We thought it would take seven. I think within five to seven years a very aggressive – and this is the key to Trump. A very aggressive entrepreneur who walks in every morning and says what do we have to get done? Not what’s our theory? Not what’s my next speech? What are the seven glib answers for the press conferences, but what do we have to get done in order to achieve this? I think we can in fact get radical economic growth and do things and one of the pieces would be to go to a business transfer tax, eliminate the corporate income tax, rebate the tax on leaving the country and charge it for imports coming in. That differential alone would create a tremendous number of jobs in the United States.

Rudyard Griffiths: I think what we’re hearing here is an appetite for blowing it up. The status quo hasn’t worked. Median incomes of Americans what, have been frozen since the late 90s through to today. It’s time for radical change.

Robert Reich: Well, the question is radical change of what sort? That’s what we’re really debating here. I mean everybody wants change. I want change. I agree with Newt Gingrich entirely that we should not pay crooks. The federal government should not. Can we agree on that?

Newt Gingrich: A bipartisan moment.

Robert Reich: A bipartisan moment of agreement. But the real issue here is exactly what you do and we can debate supply side economics until we are both bored to tears and –

Newt Gingrich: - Come back and do it here.

Robert Reich: - but I can, but I can – I can show you because I was there in the Clinton administration. I know when the budget was balanced and I know what happened in the George W. Bush administration in terms of creating a $5 trillion debt that then Barack Obama had to deal with and work himself and then we also had deregulation under

- 28 - George W. Bush that created and contributed to one of the worst meltdowns and near meltdowns of Wall Street and the economy we have had.

So we can – you know, there’s a lot we can talk about here, but I think the essential issue is Donald Trump, his experience, his credibility. You say he’s a great businessman. Well, I know that he alleged in 1976 that he had a net worth of $200 million, that’s what he said. Let’s take him at his word. He now says he has a net worth of $8 billion. Let’s take him at his word. If he had in two – in 1976 just taken that $200 million and put it into an index fund and reinvested the dividend and done nothing he would now have $12 billion. That’s not what I call a great businessman.

Laura Ingraham: I think of it this way sometimes and you think of Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton when President Clinton left office and Hillary Clinton decided she was going to run for senate. They said – they famously said they left the White House broke which, of course, wasn’t true, but they said they left essentially broke. In a relatively short period of time Hillary and Bill Clinton made I guess what is it, close to $150 million and that’s great. I’m all for people making as much money as they can, that’s awesome, but what did they do for $150 million? What did they do? To whom did they speak? What type of access did they get to the levers of power in Washington DC? What type of regimes paid them to speak and how is it, hmm, that Bill Clinton’s speaking fees, I believe, tripled when Hillary Clinton decided to run for the presidency? I wonder why that is that he’s – suddenly all these countries wanted to hear from Bill Clinton and pay him three times the going rate?

Now, that might seem like a small point, but I would say it this way. Donald Trump didn’t bat 1,000 in business, absolutely not. I don’t know all that many businessmen – maybe some in this room have, but I don’t know many who have. So he’s had some – he’s had some things that have not been all that successful. However, he has

- 29 - employed and created economic opportunity for at least 14,000 workers across the globe and those are real human beings with real families and children and kids to send to college and dreams and hopes and that’s something. And to create a job and to make a payroll – and I have maybe 50 employees. It’s – you know, that’s small. It’s not easy. I’m just a small businessperson. To employ thousands of people and to start a company and to keep it going with the government and with all the competing interest of your competitors – I love how people just blow all that off and say oh, there’s nothing there, he just – you know, he just exaggerates anything. How many people have the Clintons ever employed in the private sector? Zero.

Jennifer Granholm: So it is true that Donald Trump has created a global business and I think it’s terrific to talk about people who are employed across the globe with compassion like that. Five hundred businesses are under the umbrella of the Trump organization all over the globe and Newsweek did a story last week which talked about the kinds of businesses and in what countries that the Trump organization invests. For those of you who saw it you know he has got – he’s got investments or investors in Russia, in Azerbaijan, in the United Arab Emirates, in Turkey, in India, all over the globe. The question is – because he says well, I won’t be running my company when I am president, I’ll just hand it over to the kids to run. Any ethics expert will tell you that’s not a blind trust. That doesn’t remove the conflict of interest when your immediate family is running this global operation and the question is when he makes a foreign policy if he did as president that happened to benefit one of his companies wouldn’t everybody be wondering did he make that decision because he was going to line his children or his own pockets in the future? Would our foreign policy as a country be for sale? And that is another element of the dangerousness of Donald Trump. And I just want to pair it with this – pair that with the idea about him being a compassionate business owner.

- 30 - I mean here’s a guy who at Mar-a-Lago, his resort in Florida, always has international workers coming because he says he can’t hire people locally. He, in Trump modelling, recruited a bunch of international models to come and work in the United States and his organization coached them on how to lie to the immigration officials. This is a guy who is a steadfast, put up a wall, send them out guy and yet his personal life and existence has completely gone in the other direction. So to this resolution that we are debating can Donald Trump make America great again, it is difficult to imagine a guy making America great again when everything in his personal life reeks of hypocrisy based upon what he’s saying today. I completely understand -

Rudyard Griffiths: - One second, one second. We’re – I’m really conscious about time here so what we’re going to do is we’re going to wind this up by having Speaker Gingrich explain why the personal isn’t a reflection of the professional. We’ll give you a very quick last word, Rob, and then we’ll go into closing statements.

Newt Gingrich: I think the hutzpah of a Clinton supporter worrying about conflict of interest is so – it is so infuriatingly breathtaking. I’ll just give you one example. Under Hillary Clinton the US State Department lobbied the Haitian government against raising the minimum wage from $3.00 a day to $5.00 a day on behalf of people who happen to have given to the Clinton Foundation. Now, this is a level of disgusting mixing of government and personal wealth and corporate and this whole thing for anybody who’s for Hillary Clinton to raise the concept of conflict of interest shows a capacity for schizophrenia that is stunning.

Rudyard Griffiths: Rob.

Robert Reich: Talk about a capacity for schizophrenia, that idea that somehow the Clinton Foundation is a bad thing or that somehow it can be compared with Donald Trump’s worldwide efforts. The Clinton

- 31 - Foundation has done some very good things. It is a charitable foundation. It has a track record that is extraordinarily commendable. The second: Laura, your notion somehow that Donald Trump has created jobs. Do you have an expression here in Canada called stiffing? That is when you don’t pay somebody. Do you know that the landscape of America, in fact the world, is littered with people, with contractors and employees who have never been paid but are owed by Donald Trump, have been stiffed by Donald Trump? And when you say that somehow Donald Trump has created jobs but the Clintons haven’t, the Clintons have both been involved for most of their lives and I have seen it and I’ve experienced it and I’ve worked with them in the public sector and in the public sector Bill Clinton as president created 20 or presided over an economy because of his policies that created 22 million net new jobs in the United States. That is not insignificant.

Laura Ingraham: Okay, now wait a second. I’m just – this is breathtaking. Now you’re saying that Hillary Clinton, the feminist icon – my first book was called “The Hillary Trap”, by the way, so – that was back in 2000, but the feminist icon. We’re supposed to judge Hillary Clinton’s plan for the economy, Robert, from her husband’s record on the economy because I thought women stood for themselves. I thought – come on. I thought women –

Robert Reich: - Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Wait a minute.

Laura Ingraham: This is what happens when you cut to the bone to the liberal, they always start to cry foul. Remember I am woman, hear me roar. Hillary Clinton is always the tough, pioneering, trailblazing woman except when the going gets tough then it’s like oh, I’m a damsel in distress, can, can, can Obama go campaign for me or Michelle you’re more popular than I am, can you go campaign for me? Or, or, or, or … And I’ll finish in a second. Or my husband’s economy was really good so please just believe me; he’s going to be my economic advisor and he’ll save me from all of this. If you want to

- 32 - stand on your own two feet – they don’t like it. If you want to stand on your own merit and your own two feet with your own policies then I’m ready to hear about how Hillary has been hiding in a secret treasure chest somewhere the secret to the US economy, all these secrets that she’s been keeping from Barack Obama all these years because he hasn’t been able to do it. But I hope Hillary stands on her own two feet and is a strong woman, an accomplished woman and says you know something, my husband’s his own person; I have my own way forward and listen to my ideas. I think that’s better.

Rudyard Griffiths: Okay. Okay. Bob, and then we’ll begin our closing statements. So Bob, last word in the moderated portion to you. Please be brief.

Robert Reich: I will be very brief.

Rudyard Griffiths: Thank you.

Robert Reich: I disagree. But let me just say, Laura, you can’t have it both ways with due respect. On the one hand you were saying Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton haven’t created a single job. On the other hand you’re saying oh, but Hillary Clinton wasn’t really responsible for all those new jobs that were created under the Clinton administration and she is just taking advantage of the fact that –

Laura Ingraham: - She was first lady, Bob.

Robert Reich: She was first lady, but the fact is that Hillary Clinton to the extent that she is and has been a partner with Bill Clinton over the past 40 years, I think that she deserves some credit and she’s –

Rudyard Griffith: Robert, I don’t know if you’re going to win this one. It might be better just to –

Robert Reich: - Wait, wait, wait. Wait a minute. Her health policy. I was there in the White House when she worked night and day to try to craft a health policy. There’s been no first lady –

- 33 - Laura Ingraham: - And it was – and it failed.

Robert Reich: - that has ever done that kind of work.

Laura Ingraham: And it failed.

Rudyard Griffiths: Okay. We’re going to move to closing statements. We’re going to be conscious of the time so we’re going to do this in the reverse order and that means Jennifer Granholm you’re up. You’ve got three minutes on the clock.

Jennifer Granholm: Okay. So I totally want to lighten it up a little bit. So in honour of tonight I have constructed an ode to this Munk Debate and to sanity in the US elections. So with apologies to Dr. Seuss. So Bob and I have spoken tonight against the resolution. America’s already great. Trump’s not the solution. Well, many Canadians believe him a chump. Americans will not elect a president Trump. If history’s any guide, please don’t despair. We’ve never had a president with that colour hair. So sad Newt and Laura have not yet come to grips with the reality of the Trumpocalypse. Ponder for a moment Trump’s psychology. His whole rationale for running is he – you ask why does his bluster seem so sure. Is it because he’s so insecure, his language so forceful, his words so bold? He seems super strong for a seven year old. Manipulated by flattery, goaded by tweets, his hand near the launch code when he overheats. He insults our allies and when he’s done he’s bromancing Putin and Kim Jong-un.

Now, we could care less that he’s twice divorced, but we do care about the jobs he’s outsourced. He boasts I’ll bring back the jobs that were let go, but he makes stuff in China and Mexico. Tonight one reason we could not let up our attacks is Trump’s refusal to release his own taxes. This lack of transparency like never before. Is he stashing his loot in some haven offshore? Is it because he’s not a ten millionaire or because Donald’s rate is grossly unfair or that his global investors are at such a scale that Trump foreign policy would be for sale? He’s the candidate of America firstism

- 34 - spewing anti-immigrant rants and racism, building huge walls are part of his plans, must all be related to the size of his hands. Of course that wall will block bad guys from Mexico. Weird there are no bad guys here in Ontario and his issues with women and what it reveals seems he likes us thin in tiaras and heels, punish the women who exercise choice, criticizing the sound of Hillary’s voice, bleeding out bile like a bloviating blowhard. I think it’s time play that woman card.

So no pressure. No pressure tonight. Vote as your conscience dictates. The election just turns on the outcome of the Munk Debates.

Laura Ingraham: I would say it’s very difficult to follow Dr. Seuss tonight. I went to Dartmouth College and Dr. Seuss went to Dartmouth College so I think there’s some connection with us, Jennifer, on that. I actually have a rap if you guys – would you mind? No. I’m totally kidding. That would be really tragic; a blonde American rapping. That would be really – Vanilla Ice part two.

I think it’s really serious what we’re talking about tonight and poetry that is really funny notwithstanding. America is in decline and I’m a daughter of a working class couple. My mom was a waitress until she was 74 years old; her hands knotted up with arthritis from carrying the trays. She died at age 79, not having much time for retirement, but she worked really hard for her children. She wore the same coat for – winter coat for, I don’t know 35, 40 years. My father ran a carwash. We picked tobacco. We picked blueberries. We picked peaches. We delivered newspapers. We did jobs because there’s dignity in work and we had to because that’s how we got by. And I learned from my mother that when something is true say it, when something is wrong fight against it, don’t be afraid even if you’re in a room of skeptics, smile and try to share your story.

- 35 - The story of America is very complicated, but in 240 some odd years we didn’t get to this place to then just see it all go down the drain not because of one party failing, but because of both parties failing our country and our people. We have real unemployment in America now, real unemployment which includes underemployment and people taking part time jobs because they really can’t find the work they want at about 12.6 percent. Most people that Newt talked about who are really in despair have just given up looking for work altogether.

I think Donald Trump is the only person right now to make America great again because the alternative would continue us on a path of the same decline, the same division on our streets, frankly, between the races, between the poor and the rich, immigrants and non- immigrants because without prosperity and without the dignity of work, without the ability to make a better living America will not continue to exist as it does today and that might sound alarmist, that might sound oh, that’s never going to happen, but in a scenario where we have the rise of China, the adversarial posture of Russia and America in decline, my friends that is not a good scenario for this beautiful country where we are sitting and standing in today. Donald Trump will make America great again.

Robert Reich: Well, as you can see, the 2016 election has worn me down. I was six foot two before it. I’m also getting old; you know, I remember Harry Truman as president; I remember the Eisenhower-Stevenson election; I remember an America that did feel very different to the one that I am witnessing today. Part of what has happened to your neighbour to the south is frustration and anger and anxiety over declining wages and declining job security. Two-thirds of Americans are living pay cheque to pay cheque today and jobs are becoming less secure and for the first time in memory most Americans believe their children will not do as well as they are doing. And to that extent I agree with our debating opponents, but I

- 36 - think that the vision we believe is better for America is sharply different.

Part of the anger and part of the fear and part of the anxiety in America today has found its way into a kind of viciousness, a name calling and inability of people to talk with one another across the great boundaries of party and class and race and it is vitally important – and I say this as somebody who is getting older, who served as secretary of labour in the Clinton administration, who has served even in a Republican administration. That’s something else that I’ll tell you tonight if you can keep under your hats, but we have to learn, all of us, to work together and work together better.

Donald Trump, to my mind, his xenophobia, his nativism, his misogyny, his narcissism, his megalomania represents a temperament and a character that is very dangerous for the United States. He needs to be repudiated in a big time and I mean this. So I want to ask all of you, I want to ask the 14 percent of you who are still with Trump, I want to ask you to come over to our side for the simple reason that I want Americans to know that here in Canada you know right from wrong and you will repudiate this person who should never have been nominated to be president of the United States.

Newt Gingrich: Well, first of all, thank you. It’s been a lot of fun. I think you can tell that all four of us like to live in a world of words and are fairly good at it, but I just want to pose one question in a way of measuring that question and I think Donald Trump is a risk. I think when you have somebody who’s totally outside politics and who’s an entrepreneurial businessperson, then by definition to bring them in at the very top is a risk. So let me be clear about that. But I also think that the current pattern is an even bigger risk and this is what I ask you over the next few weeks to think about as you read your newspapers or watch TV news. How many terrorist attacks does it take in Europe, in the United States, where I think now a

- 37 - humanitarian crisis in Nigeria because of Boko Haram? How many places do we have to have disasters to begin to believe that the current policies are not working?

I recommend to you all of you a couple books, one by Sam Quinones called “Dreamland” which is a study of the intersection of Mexican heroin and OxyContin and is an absolutely breathtaking and disturbing picture of what’s happening in America to people who have lost hope and I urge you to look at it and then everyday when you read about the next overdose, the next loss of life, the next 22 year old who should still be with us ask yourself. You go from George W. Bush saying there’s an axis of evil. He names three countries. One of them’s Iran. We are currently sending Iran billions of dollars and day by day we’re learning that the deal’s even worse. You think the Iranians have changed? You think they’re not – the state department under Obama now today says they’re the largest state supporters of terrorism on the planet and we’re sending them billions of dollars. Do you think that’s going to work?

So every time you turn around the system’s not working. The next riot, the next violence, you think this has worked? And my point’s pretty simple. I’ve been at this stuff since August of 1958. I helped create a majority for the first time in 40 years. I was speaker of the house. I worked with Bill Clinton to balance the federal budget, to reform welfare. I am genuinely frightened not just for the United States, but for all of western civilization. And you just read the papers, put the dots together and you decide which is the bigger risk, more of the stuff that isn’t working or taking a gamble on real change.

Rudyard Griffiths: Well, ladies and gentlemen, we began the week with a pretty, let’s face it, uninspiring, less than terrific debate, let’s hope the next two are better, but we’ve ended the week – we’ve ended Friday with a debate on US politics that I wanted to watch on Monday and you gave it to us tonight. Please, let’s thank our debaters for a fantastic

- 38 - … Bravo. Thank you, guys. Thank you, everybody. That was a great debate. So we have a luxury tonight. We don’t have the responsibility of voting in November, but we get to cast a ballot now. All 3,000 of you in this hall have a ballot, you received a second ballot on your way in -

Laura Ingraham: - Remember the drinks I promised you.

Rudyard Griffiths: The margaritas for the 14 percent. You’re going to have the opportunity to think about your vote. We’re going to quickly take a look at the results were at the start of the evening again. We began tonight’s debate with an agree/disagree vote. Those numbers, I believe, were 14 percent in favour of the motion, the rest 86 percent opposed. You’re split on whether you could change your minds or not so let’s see if that’s happened. All of you, there’s ballot boxes on the way out of the hall and we’ll tally those results around 9:00. For those of you watching this broadcast right now on C-SPAN, CPAC and elsewhere, the results will be on our social media feeds also shortly after nine p.m.

So again, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for being part of a terrific Munk Debates. To the ballots, to the bar, to the margaritas, let’s do it.

Backstage two teams of debaters. Backstage live interviews in about the next five minutes on the Munk Debates Facebook page I’ll speaking with Governor Granholm, Robert Reich, finding out what they liked about this debate, if there were any arguments of their opponents throughout that they thought were valid. I’ll do the same thing with Newt Gingrich and with Laura Ingraham. We’ll get those two interviews to you in the next five to ten minutes, just stay on this feed and again, thanks for joining

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