The Slatest

More Evidence That Newt Gingrich Has No Principles

Newt Gingrich speaks to the media as Donald Trump listens at Trump Tower following a meeting between the two on December 5, 2011 in New York City.

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Newt Gingrich is so desperate to be Donald Trump’s running mate that he’ll do pretty much anything to win the job, from abandoning his long-held beliefs to flying halfway across the country on Sean Hannity’s private jet to plead his case in person. That desperation makes the timing of this leak, via ProPublica, all the more awkward for the former House speaker:

Newt Gingrich, a leading candidate to be Donald Trump’s running mate, told Republicans at a closed-door meeting earlier this year that Trump is not a conservative, speaks to voters “at the lowest level of any candidate in either party,” and could lose in a landslide if he didn’t significantly change his approach to campaigning.

Gingrich suggested Trump’s move from campaigning to governing would be challenging: “How we make the transition from, you know, language for fourth graders to real policy, I don’t know.”

Gingrich made those remarks during a February speech in Washington to the Republican State Leadership Committee, a recording of which was shared with ProPublica and published late Wednesday night. (For a sense of Newt’s duplicitousness, look no further than what he told Slate’s Isaac Chotiner only a month later: that he was “very impressed” with Trump and that “academic knowledge” is “greatly overrated” anyway.) Trump currently claims to be working with a VP short-list that is between 2 and 4 people long as he prepares to make his selection officially known this Friday. Gingrich, it seems, may have some explaining to do if he wants to remain on that list. While the Georgia Republican spoke highly of Trump’s ability to dominate media coverage and the GOP primary during his speech, he also offered up a handful of less flattering words about the celebrity businessman’s policy and governing chops:

  • “I do not believe anybody including Trump can tell you what a Trump presidency would be like.”
  • He described the former reality TV star’s political approach to “some weird combination of the Kardashians,” adding, “I mean think about it, the whole tweeting, the whole continuous noise.”
  •  “National Review’s right. Donald Trump’s not a conservative.”

Will this torpedo Gingrich’s chances? I doubt it. Trump has already proved capable of forgiving (if not forgetting) when Republicans have been willing to go from lobbing insults at him to singing his praises. He and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie traded plenty of fire on the campaign trail last year, and Indiana Gov. Mike Pence endorsed rival Ted Cruz at the end of April only days before the Hoosier State GOP primary. Yet both men are believed to be in contention to be Trump’s no. 2, along with Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions. There’s a decent chance that if Trump does listen to the tape of Newt, he’ll miss the RINO charges entirely and instead only hear his potential running mate saying things like, “I operate on the premise that when people are doing something really smart, even if I don’t like it or I don’t understand it, it’s my job to figure them out, not their job to figure me out.”

Read more Slate coverage of the 2016 campaign.