Newt Gingrich Is a Radical Prophet of the Big Lie

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We may soon long for a return to the halcyon days when Newt Gingrich was merely a blight on the Vatican. The former Speaker of the House got a ticket to Rome when his third wife, Callista, was appointed Ambassador to the Holy See by devout follower of Christ Donald Trump, though Gingrich was pitching his religiosity as far back as his 2012 presidential campaign following his conversion to Catholicism. (At that time, some raised questions about the fact Gingrich was on his third marriage, having reportedly cheated on his first two wives with their replacements and, in an account Gingrich denies, having tried to iron out a divorce with his first wife at her hospital bed as she recovered from a cancer surgery.) The Gingrich dream team secured this plum gig after serving Trump loyally during the 2016 campaign, and it looks like Newt is determined to continue that service in 2022. Unfortunately, that means aiding in the former president’s assault on the basic foundations of the American system.

Ol’ Newt joined Maria Bartiromo on the Fox News airwaves on Sunday to rail against the Democratic legislative agenda, on which he is correct that the party’s leadership is flailing, before proceeding to the phantasmagorical stuff. He suggested people who favor higher levels of government spending to build out the social-safety net are in thrall to a “secular religion”—as opposed to the supply-side economics that have governed the Republican Party since Art Laffer laid out the theory on a cocktail napkin in 1974—and compared its practitioners to the Jacobins and Bolsheviks. But that was just a prelude to the discussion of a recent op-ed from Gingrich, titled “The Wolves Will Become Sheep,” in what now passes as Newsweek magazine.

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This should be no surprise considering Newt’s Newsweek stinker prefaces a discussion of the January 6 Committee with references to Joseph Stalin and Robert Mugabe. (Gingrich pitches himself as both a man of God and a historian.) In fact, Gingrich’s televised grasping for a reference to the British monarchy’s colonial-era abuses felt downright tame by comparison.

Meanwhile, you will notice he does not make a single specific claim about anything the committee or its members have done. The op-ed also does not bother with specifics, buttressing vague allusions to the various “actions” of House Democrats or the committee or Attorney General Merrick Garland or President Joe Biden with adjectives like “vicious” and “destructive.” Newsweek also saw fit to publish the claim that “the attorney general has the power to direct the FBI and U.S. Attorney’s Offices to frame people” with zero examples provided. Which of the people charged by the Justice Department in the ongoing January 6 investigation were framed? Which of the people called by the committee to testify have been so gravely mistreated? Some members of the mob that came to the Capitol brought a gallows, and some chanted, “Hang Mike Pence,” but it’s the people looking into what happened who are, in Gingrich’s estimation, “basically a lynch mob.”

Pope Frank was loving life during Callista Gingrich’s tenure as U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican. Vatican Pool Getty Images

Gingrich did come up with the financial burden of lawyering up as a reason the January 6 Committee has “run amok,” but the ex-Speaker’s full portfolio here ought to demonstrate that such trivialities are hardly his concern. He has correctly assessed that, as an outfit now thoroughly committed to authoritarian dominance politics, the Republican Party need only claim Democrats have run amok in vicious and destructive fashion—while investigating a violent street-mob attack on the peaceful transfer of power undergirding our democratic system, that is—in order to justify a reaction. (Never mind that the committee also features two Republicans.) It doesn’t matter whether the committee has engaged in any actual acts of malfeasance, just as it doesn’t matter that there was no voter fraud. All that matters is who has power. Hence, the sheep and the wolves. The op-ed spends most of its time laying out a plan for retribution because that in itself is its own argument. Retribution is the reason to retake power. Once the power is retaken, that becomes its own argument for seeking retribution.

(It’s worth tracing the back-and-forth here for the record, though: the ex-president Gingrich serves fomented an attack on the seat of the national legislature to prevent another branch of government confirming he would leave power. Federal law enforcement is conducting an investigation into that event, as are Democrats in the House of Representatives, who have been joined by a couple of Republicans. This ally of the ex-president is now hinting the investigators could face jail time without accusing anyone in particular of any particular crime.)

Of course, Gingrich also doesn’t need to bother with specifics because he is wading into an existing swamp of paranoid delusion. “They’re running over people’s civil liberties,” Gingrich said, citing no examples because no one watching requires them. They’ve been hearing this for most of a year. It’s part of the furniture. The lynchpin beliefs of this diseased ecosystem have no relationship to the observable evidence, but they were long since accepted on faith. It’s something like a secular religion, one with deep roots in the conservative movement. By the Smithsonian’s account, the Mount Sinai where Art Laffer produced the singular conservative economic commandment of the last 40-odd years was the Two Continents restaurant in Washington, D.C., where he’d circled up with Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld—and journalist Jude Wanniski—after then-President Gerald Ford proposed a plan to combat inflation by raising taxes. At that point, the saints of this peculiar faith were canonized: The Job Creators. We eventually got one as president, and now his acolytes can only serve him by spreading a more virulent delusion, one that has likely ended the political career of Cheney’s own daughter. According to the prophet Newt Gingrich, that would constitute getting off easy.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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Newt Gingrich and the GOP’s Creeping Authoritarian Streak

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I’ve always had a soft spot for Newt Gingrich. While I grew disappointed in his Trump boosterism, I always admired his intellect (heck, I even made the case that he should be Trump’s running mate).

But a comment he made Sunday on Fox News suggests Gingrich has tipped too far toward MAGA world’s worst authoritarian instincts to be redeemable.

Gingrich warned that Republicans will retake power after the 2022 midterms, and “all these people who have been so tough, and so mean, and so nasty are going to be delivered subpoenas for every document, every conversation, every tweet, every email.” In other words, Democrats who are investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot will have their turn in the barrel, just as soon as Republicans take over the gavels.

“I think when you have a Republican Congress,” the former House Speaker continued, “this is all going to come crashing down. And the wolves are going to find out they are now sheep and they’re the ones who are going to face a real risk of, I think, jail for the kind of laws they’re breaking.”

The “wolves” Gingrich refers to are better explained in his recent Newsweek column titled, “The Wolves Will Become Sheep.” In this piece, he accuses the Jan. 6 Committee of being a “lynch mob,” but (as was the case in his TV segment) does not cite any specific laws that have been broken by investigators. The closest he comes to making an actual indictment is to say that “The Jan. 6 Select Committee is in the process of potentially bankrupting scores of Americans who worked for or supported President Trump. They face financial ruin defending themselves against the committee’s attack.”

Gingrich responded to my emailed request for clarification by referring me to a Substack essay written by Glenn Greenwald, who does cite examples, including raising the theory that Congress simply does not have the constitutional authority to conduct this sort of investigation. Greenwald also argues the committee is playing hardball for no legitimate purpose. Citing a subpoena against former Trump campaign spokesman Taylor Budowich, he alleges that the committee schemed “with JPMorgan and its counsel Loretta Lynch to ensure that [he had] no time to seek judicial relief regarding the committee’s attempt to obtain mounds of his personal and financial records.”

Regardless, Gingrich and Greenwald’s legal arguments should be adjudicated on the merits right now, as opposed to the former House speaker dropping thinly veiled threats of future retaliation—threats that include the word “jail.” After all, the Supreme Court just rejected Trump’s attempt to block documents from being sent to the Jan. 6 Committee. Presumably, this suggests the committee has a legal right to conduct the investigation.

A senior statesman, like Gingrich, should not be promiscuously injecting political retribution into the discourse—especially in this political atmosphere.

But that’s just what Gingrich did.

In his appearance Monday on Steve Bannon’s podcast, MAGA Rep. Matt Gaetz said, “You know what, Newt’s right! We are going to take power. And when we do, it’s not going to be the days of Paul Ryan and Trey Gowdy where the Republicans go limp-wristed, where they lose their backbone, and they fail to send a single subpoena.” (On Monday, Bannon also floated the idea of impeaching Joe Biden. It’s probably just a matter of time before both ideas—Gingrich’s and Bannon’s—are the default position of Republicans running for office.)

Gingrich is well aware that using political power to “lock her up,” as it were, is the stuff of banana republics and authoritarian regimes. In his “The Wolves Will Become Sheep” column, seemingly oblivious to the irony, Gingrich compares the January 6 committee to some of history’s most vindictive:

“Think of Joseph Stalin killing his rivals. Think of the Castro brothers torturing, imprisoning and exiling political opponents. Consider the decay of Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe, as political opponents were imprisoned, killed and exiled,” he writes. “Recall the ruthlessness of Hugo Chavez in taking over Venezuela…”

In Gingrich’s telling, the Jan. 6 committee are the wolves, and Gingrich is advocating not revenge but a restoration of the rule of law.

Ideas have consequences, and Gingrich is trafficking in a very bad idea.

Exiled Republican Rep. Liz Cheney summed it up thusly: “A former Speaker of the House is threatening jail time for members of Congress who are investigating the violent Jan. 6 attack on our Capitol and our Constitution… This is what it looks like when the rule of law unravels.”

As future historians contemplate whether Donald Trump was the inevitable conclusion for the GOP or a fluky black swan, a complicating factor will be how many Republican heroes from the 1990s—think Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, and Rush Limbaugh—embraced and enabled him.

Did Trump change Gingrich, or has the real Newt finally been liberated?

As a 78-year-old historian, Gingrich, unlike Gaetz, should be expected to know better. Unlike the backbencher congressman, Newt was once third in line to the presidency and he was appearing on the top-rated Fox News—not a fringe outlet like Bannon’s War Room podcast, One America News Network (OAN), or Newsmax.

Of course, the knock on Gingrich was always that he was grandiose and had too many eccentric ideas. But he was brilliant. He had panache. In the TV era, it helps to have a flair for the dramatic and I always thought Gingrich at least operated within the broad acceptable spectrum of liberal democracy.

This is to say, Gingrich was always a hyper-partisan culture warrior, but he was also an intellectual who was well within the conservative movement’s mainstream.

The scary thing is, he still is.

Gingrich: Dictators will see ‘once-in-a-lifetime opportunity’ if Biden flinches against Putin

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Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told “Fox & Friends” on Monday that President Biden’s response to Russia could embolden “dictators” around the world, including China. Gingrich said the world is watching whether Biden “flinches” against Vladimir Putin.

BIDEN CLARIFIES UKRAINE COMMENT THAT CAUSED UPROAR: RUSSIAN TROOPS CROSSING BORDER WOULD BE ‘INVASION’

NEWT GINGRICH: First of all, the Obama-Biden administration was going to put sanctions on after Putin seized Crimea. I don’t think that had any effect at all. In fact, if anything, they convinced Putin that he could ignore those kinds of threats. Putin now controls Germany because they made a series of bad decisions as a result of which the German economy has to have Russian natural gas. The Germans would be going into a cold winter, collapsing economically and collapsing in quality of life if the Russians actually cut it off. So the Germans are very much against NATO taking too strong a role.

Meanwhile, the Russians have sort of expanded the playing field. They have now announced that they want to have military maneuvers off of Ireland, which the Irish have protested about. At the same time, their ally, China is flying 23 aircraft over Taiwan. I think everybody is watching to see what the United States does. If we flinch, and if we convince the dictators that we can be pushed around, they are going to push very hard because Biden may be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to rip off our allies and have nothing done. And I think it’s very, very dangerous.

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Newt Gingrich: Biden seems to believe whatever he makes up

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Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House, joined “The Ingraham Angle” on Thursday to discuss the Biden presidency and what Republicans need to do in order to expand their base.

McCONNELL: BIDEN ‘GOT IT WRONG AGAIN,’ WHEN HE CLAIMED GOP CAN’T SAY ‘WHAT THEY’RE FOR’

NEWT GINGRICH: “He may live in a world where he makes up things and then he believes whatever he makes up, and the President of the United States, that is really dangerous. So, I think we, as Republicans, have an obligation—not just to reach out to our base, but to broaden that base dramatically by offering solutions. You just showed a picture of Glenn Youngkin—the new governor of Virginia—who’s doing a great job of reaching out to independents, to Democrats, to minorities…to creating a vision of a better Virginia that brings people together. All those governors you showed who are doing great jobs—same thing—they’re positive they’re solution-oriented, and as a result, not only are their states doing better, but the governors are doing pretty darn well.”

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‘Wrong, idiotic, crazy’: Honig reacts to Newt Gingrich’s Fox interview

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CNN legal analyst Elle Honig reacts to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s Fox interview where he falsely claimed that lawmakers serving on committee investigating the violent Jan. 6 insurrection could face jail time.