Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich speaks on Trump

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich speaks at the 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland.

 *** Newt was my Congressman when I came to Atlanta some years back - he is sharp and to the point  and does not play games with people!  

Here is part of his inter view by 
Isaac Chotiner

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It’s true that it’s the easiest thing in the world for a Muslim in Syria to come to the United States?

Well, it is certainly in Obama’s interest to allow you to come as a refugee. He’d let a lot more people come if he could.

Well, people are suffering.

People are suffering everywhere. How about everybody in Darfur? Should they all come to Miami? The suffering thing is liberal tripe. It is nonsense.

That doesn’t sound so much like the Reaganite conservatism you mentioned earlier.

What doesn’t?

Saying suffering is liberal tripe. I thought he was a champion—

Suffering is an excuse and allows people to be guilt-tripped into doing bad policy. Look at who is going to Germany right now. These are population migrations, not refugee streams, and they are going to change Europe permanently to our disadvantage.

I want to get back to what Trump is doing, and we both know he is playing on impulses—

No, no we don’t.

We don’t?

What we know is that Trump has had the nerve to raise questions in a clear language because he represents the millions of Americans who are sick and tired of being told that they have to be guilt-ridden and keep their mouth shut.

So why are Trump’s negatives so high, if he is giving a voice to the masses?

Look, Trump has been campaigning in a Republican primary with harsh language and has been routinely attacked by the elite media as much as they can. Reagan went through the same cycle. Do you know how many points Reagan was behind Carter in March?

It was double digits, right?

Twenty-five. Not just double digits. Twenty-five points. So if you had talked to me in March of 1980, you would have said, “How can I support this crazy right-winger who makes movies with chimpanzees and is 25 points behind Carter?” And I would have said, “Because I think he can win.” Which, by the way, he did.

Is there really nothing that worries you about this guy? The way he deals with reporters, his campaign manager, etc.? You are not at all worried he has authoritarian tendencies?

No. No. [Laughs.] Which part of that is supposed to bother me?

That his campaign manager may have assaulted a reporter?

Oh c’mon. Did you ever look at it?

I have looked at it, many times.

That’s an assault?

He grabbed her arm very hard.

[Sarcastically] He grabbed her arm very hard. OK.

He grabbed someone else a few days ago at a rally. It’s on video!

Right.

Trump has offered to pay legal fees for people who hit protesters. None of this worries you at all?

No. Doesn’t actually.

OK.

You are asking and I am telling you. And by the way, his strategy with the media is quite simple. In a Republican primary, nothing helps you more than being the guy who stands up to the media. I think I can testify to this from personal experience.

Yes, I remember your debate in South Carolina.

Yeah. So Trump has carried it to perfection. The media doesn’t like it but the fact that Trump, if you watch some of the things the media does to Trump, the fact that he fights back doesn’t bother me at all. It’s hardly authoritarianism, for Pete’s sake. Unless you want to say that Margaret Thatcher is an authoritarian, and John F. Kennedy, who you will remember at one point kicked out the New York Herald.

I didn’t know that. For what?

He didn’t like the coverage so he kicked him out of the White House.

Well, I don’t approve of that.

Of course you don’t. I do. I’m a politician. I thought it was kind of cool. You are the press. We are even.

You must know a lot of people in Washington like Kristol and Krauthammer and George Will who are horrified by Trump. This isn’t just liberal angst.

I think a number of them need to go on vacation.

You think that is all it is?

I think the tension is getting to them.

The tension of what?

Of having to deal with something that they don’t understand and don’t believe in. It horrifies them. It represents an alternative world they never dreamed of.

And what is that world?

Many years ago, Bill Buckley said that he would rather be governed by the first 100 names in the Boston telephone book than the Harvard faculty. Well, that may be what is about to happen. I think there is no one on the Supreme Court who didn’t graduate from Yale or Harvard. Does that not strike you as a little narrow for a country of 315 million people?

You must notice that Trump has no serious foreign or domestic policy, and that these “intellectuals” who are horrified by this are not just dreaming it up out of nowhere.

They are queueing off something different than the American people are.

Is your job, as a politician, to merely follow the American people?

I am applying the Buckley principle to the Washington intellectuals. They are inbred, they talk to each other, they are treating the American people with contempt. Forget Trump. Seventy percent of Republicans between Trump, Carson, and Cruz have repudiated their world. And they are saying, “Boy, these people are really hicks. They are so stupid they have been taken in.” Well maybe, just maybe, those American people know something the guys in Washington don’t, and frankly, I am on the side of the American people, not the Washington intellectuals.

 

I am guessing that I can’t convince you that the Carson campaign was basically a direct-mail scam, in that case.

No, the Carson campaign was a very sincere guy who probably wasn’t prepared to run for president and who attracted an amazing number of people. So I think it is a bit much to say that the people who decided to give money to the guy who was tied for first or second in the polls was a scam. He couldn’t put it together, but it tells you something that people gave him $62 million because they found his quiet, calm honesty better than the sick system they are tired of. I would say that’s a more accurate statement.

The—

You have one more question, then I am gone.

If there is one thing you think the GOP needs to fix, what would it be?

To design a campaign to include every single American and every single neighborhood.

Something tells me it is going to be hard to do that with someone who speaks negatively about many minority groups.

It depends what he says when he goes into those minority groups.