Over 280 pages,Newt Gingrich, House speaker turned Republican presidential hopeful turned prolific author of historical (andcriticswould say political) fantasy, goes all out to flatter the man in the Oval Office.
“President Trump’s reelection was the triumph of a man and a movement,” Gingrich writes. “Each needed the other if America was to be saved.”
More to the point, perhaps, a second Trump term enabled a second ambassadorial gig for Callista Gingrich, Newt’s third wife. Emissary to the Vatican in Trump’s first term, she ison her wayto being envoy to Switzerland.
Newt also slobbers overElon Musk: the world’s richest person turned chainsaw-wielding enemy of the federal government, turned embittered Trumpworld exile.
“Musk is in many ways the Christopher Columbus of our time,” Gingrich writes. Gingrich might have been better advised tocompare Musk to Tony Stark, alter ego of Iron Man.
The Gingrich family brokerage account may be talking, too. A recent filing by Callista Gingrich with the office of government ethics reveals between $1m and $5m in Tesla stock.
Then again, Musk has emerged bruised, literally sporting a black eye. According tothe New York Times, the Tesla and SpaceX billionaire ingested ketamine and other drugs while wreaking havoc and ruining lives as a special government employee.
Not that special, either: Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” failed to significantly reduce government spending. Musk arrived in DCvowing to slash $2tn, then left $1.86tn short of the mark.
“Was it all bullshit?”Trump openly asked.
Musk quickly returned the favor. Mincing no words, he branded Trump’s beloved “big, beautiful bill” a “disgusting abomination”.
Quickie political tomes, ripe for airport bookstands, are dashed out fast by design. Apparently, Gingrich didn’t bet on Musk’s lame exit or his trashing Trump.
Like most such books, Trump’s Triumph contains score-settling, too. Gingrich has plenty outstanding.
Nearly 40 years ago, as the Republican House whip, he clashed with George HW Bush, hammering the 41st president for breaking his pledge of “no new taxes”. Later, in 2012, Gingrichbadlylost the Republican nomination to Mitt Romney. During that run, news of profligacyexploded. The Gingriches maintained a credit line between $500,000 and $1m at Tiffany’s, the New York jeweler. Barack Obama “would have Newt for breakfast … at Tiffany’s”,a Romney spokesperson said.
If Trump’s Triumph is any guide, Gingrich has failed, or never tried, to conquer his resentment of such establishment figures.
“We were for fundamental change within the GOP and had taken on the Gerald Ford-Bush family-Mitt Romney accommodationist wing of the Republican party,” he crows, of the Trump takeover.
But unpaid debts linger. Literally. In a 2014 filing with the Federal Election Commission, Newt 2012 debts exceed $4.652m. More than a decade later, the campaign’s latest filingputsthe figure at $4.637m.
Debt be damned. Gingrich would rather claim credit.
“Early on,” he writes, Trump “decisively sided with the legacies of Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and, frankly, myself”.
There is faux nostalgia, too: “In the fall of 1996, PresidentBill Clintonand I were planning major bipartisan reforms for Medicare and Social Security. The Monica Lewinsky scandal exploded and destroyed everything … Neither of us could have possibly ignored or downplayed it without facing severe political consequences.”
For the record, Gingrich led an impeachment that failed. After details of his own affair emerged, he left Congress.
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“I’m willing to lead but I’m not willing to preside over people who are cannibals,” he complained of his Republican colleagues.
Trump’s Triumph does not discuss how, in 1988, Gingrich filed an ethics complaint against Jim Wright, then Democratic speaker who resigned rather than face the music. The wheel turned. In 1997, the House ethics committee recommended Gingrichbe reprimanded, and he was fined $300,000. The House adopted the ethics report by a vote of 395-28, making him the first speaker so admonished.
Nowadays, Gingrich is more eager to stay on the right side of the powers that be. But he and Trump are not always on the same page. Differences emerge on Iran and immigration.
In 2012, Gingrich received $20m in campaign donations from Sheldon Adelson, the late casino magnate who wanted to nuke Tehran. Gingrich still wants regime change.
“We need a strategy that helps the Iranian people take their own country back from a dictatorship that has trapped, imprisoned, and impoverished them,” he writes. “We still have no strategy except accommodation and diplomacy with a regime we assume is unchangeable. This must change.”
Trump has other ideas. “I would like to see Iran be very successful,”he said last October. “The only thing is, they can’t have a nuclear weapon.” In office, he pursues a nuclear deal – to replace the one he trashed first time round.
According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran has increased its stockpile of highly enriched uranium by half since February. Speaking to the Wall Street Journal,Gingrich chivviesTrump’s negotiator, Steve Witkoff: “There’s a real danger of the Trump envoys being talked into a pretty foolish deal that’s not enforceable.”
On immigration, Gingrich praises the legal kind as a “powerful source of economic and technological growth”. Legal immigrants, he writes, help “make America wealthier and more technologically advanced”. In the real world, the Trump administration works to restrict foreign students.
True to form, Gingrich also tries to go big, gazing back toward Rome and the American revolution. He’s a historian by training, after all.
“The Founding Fathers sought to protect freedom by inventing a machine so complex and divided against itself that no dictator could force it to work quickly,” Gingrich writes.
Yet he opposes anyone standing in Trump’s path, as many courts are doing.
“I think in Trump’s sense, he really does believe God wants him to make America great again,” Gingrich writes. “And if that means you take on Harvard, or you take on the courts, or you take on the bureaucracy or whatever, that’s what he’s going to do.”
The divine right of Trump? Caesar will approve.
Trump’s Triumph ispublishedin the US by Hachette