Whether or not Newt Gingrich has officially joined the likes of Sarah Palin and Jan Brewer on Donald Trump’s vice presidential shortlist, it appears that Gingrich is having a major impact on the presumptive GOP nominee’s campaign.
According to a recent National Review article, the Trump and Gingrich speak to each other every day and the former House speaker has had “his hand in every major policy effort” by Trump’s campaign.
Certainly, the two share an almost unrivaled egomania and are skilled in the art of ridiculing liberal media “elites.” While he has developed a wonky reputation, Gingrich has also joined Trump in engaging in conspiracy theories about President Obama.
Back in 2012, Gingrich alleged that “we know so little about this president,” urging conservative activists to “raise a whole range of questions about Barack Obama.”
“Where’s his senior paper at Columbia?” Gingrich asked. “Where’s his application to go to Columbia? All sorts of stuff that we don’t know. In some ways we know less about this president than almost any president in modern times.”
Gingrich has also attacked the “elite media” for failing to investigate Obama’s past: “Do you think you are going to see two pages on Obama’s Muslim friends? Or two pages on the degree to which Obama is consistently apologizing to Islam while attacking the Catholic Church? Do you see anybody in the elite media prepared to say, gee, isn’t this kind of odd, that we really worry a lot about the Quran and nothing about the Bible?”
He has embraced a line pioneered by Dinesh D’Souza that Obama exhibits “Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior,” arguing that Obama “refuses to behave like an American president.”
Gingrich defended birthers, such as his potential running mate, by blaming the president for the rise in conspiracy theories surrounding his birth: “I think that Obama creates very powerful emotions about him, largely because of the radicalism of his views. And I think that that’s a key fact. I mean, nobody runs around and asks whether Colonel [Allen] West was born in the United States. He’s an African-American, you know. He’s a congressman. Nobody runs around and says, ‘Is Tim Scott born in the United States?’ He’s a congressman. He’s African-American. So the idea of asserting that any charge against Obama somehow manages magically in the media to get back to racism, I think is just one more device to protect Obama.”
Just as Trump now says that it’s “payback time” for voters who believe that America’s leaders are running the country into the ground and abandoning patriotic values, Gingrich once called on “the 80 percent of the country that actually believes in classical America” to fight “to take back power from the minority elite.” On another occasion, he warned that America would soon turn into “a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.”
Rather than adding intellectual heft to Trump’s conspiracy-theory-ridden campaign, Gingrich would just intensify Trump’s paranoid style of politics.
