Newt Gingrich predicts Trump's victory is 'beginning to build', win against Biden will be bigger than expected
Former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich feels President Donald Trump has high chances of beating Joe Biden in the November 3 elections comprehensively. The 77-year-old, who served as a representative from Georgia for two decades and as the speaker between 1995 and 1999, reposed confidence in the incumbent during an interview with Fox News on Saturday (August 22) night and assured that Trump's chances of returning to office are bright.
At a time when Trump is battling several challenges, including containing the coronavirus pandemic which has hit more than 5.7 million people and claimed 176,000-plus lives, Gingrich predicted a win for the GOP leader that “will be a dramatically bigger” one that what people are expecting at the moment. He said the president’s victory is slowly “beginning to build”. Several polls have shown Biden leading Trump in the run-up to the election and the president even brought a change at the helm of his campaign team, replacing the long-serving Brad Parscale with Bill Stepien to boost prospects.
Gingrich’s remarks came in reference to the Democratic convention held last week when Biden was formally nominated as the presidential candidate. His words also came ahead of the Republican convention this week where Trump is expected to make an appearance every night. The president had almost an unopposed run in the primary season and will accept his nomination during the convention.
Gingrich was in the run to become Trump's deputy in 2016
Gingrich, who contested in the 2012 presidential primary but ended up unsuccessful, was one of the earliest Republican members to back Trump. He even featured among the three final candidates that Team Trump zeroed in on as the vice-presidential pick although former Indiana governor Mike Pence clinched it in the end.
“We don't have to want to make stuff up. We don't have to invent some post office phony scandal. We just have to tell the truth about how radical these people are,” Gingrich said during the interview, taking a dig at Trump’s opponents. He also said voters need only to look at places like Chicago, Seattle and Portland -- big cities that are run by Democrats but have been witnessing chaos in the recent months.
“Rioting every day for 90 days that begins to be a fact. And it was very interesting to me that neither [Joe] Biden nor [Kamala] Harris was willing to say a word about Antifa, [not] a word about a level of crime,” he said, echoing the president’s strong words against the violence that has engulfed several cities in the US in the wake of the brutal killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May.
“You know, [we] have the mayor of Chicago announcing that she's going to have police on her own personal street because she wants her family to be safe. But good luck to the rest of the city. Well, I think this stuff sinks in at a level of reality that even NBC News can't cover up,” Gingrich said.
Gingrich, also a long-serving Fox contributor who had a controversial stint in the Congress, also slammed Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris and said the duo had no chance of winning this high-profile election. Taking a dig at Harris, the Republican called her “the most radical member of the Senate based on voting, which means she's to the left of [Bernie] Sanders and the left of Elizabeth Warren. I mean, you know how hard that is”. He also called the California senator a “terrible performer”.
While the former House Minority Whip conceded that Biden gave the best speech of his career during the Democratic National Convention, he also predicted that the former veep’s lead in the polls “is not going to last”.
“I say to myself, when people get to know them better, just as happened with George McGovern in 1972, they're going to say, “You know, ... I don't think so. I just I can’t vote for you”.”
Gingrich asks Trump to capitalize on Biden's 'darkness' jibe
Last week, Gingrich told Fox that he thought Harris was the most “anti-Catholic bigot” to be fighting on a national ticket in modern times. He also advised Trump to “embrace, embellish upon, and emphasize again and again” the Democratic presidential nominee’s “light and darkness” theme during his closing speech at the party convention. The 77-year-old vowed to bring to end the “darkness” of the Trump era if elected to office.
“Let the American people decide where the darkness is and who is creating it,” Gingrich said, referring to the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests in Portland and other cities. Trump hit back at Biden’s “darkness” jibe at an event in Arlington, Virginia, last week saying while the Democrats saw “darkness”, he was seeing the US’s “greatness”.
In 1995, the ‘Time’ magazine named Gingrich as the “Man of the Year” for his role in curbing the Democrats’ four-decades-long majority in the House of Representatives. But the 50th speaker later courted several controversies which saw him stepping down under pressure from his own party after the poor show in the 1998 midterm elections. Gingrich not only quit as the speaker the same year but even from the Congress early next year.