Gingrich: ‘If You Are a Conservative and You Sit Down with Chris Matthews, You Should Have Your Head Examined’

Friday on Fox News Channel’s “The O’Reilly Factor,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich discussed what many have deemed to be a “rough week” for GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump.

Gingrich acknowledged to fill-in host Eric Bolling that it was a rough week for Trump, but defended him for his remarks on not taking the use of nuclear weapons in some extreme circumstances off of the table, as Trump did in a town hall with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews earlier this week.

“His position on nuclear weapons is exactly right. It’s the position of Ronald Reagan. It’s the position of Gerald Ford. It is the position of Jimmy Carter. It was the position of Richard Nixon. It was the position John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. It was the position of Dwight Eisenhower. You can’t be in a world where there are 5,000 Russian nuclear weapons, in a world where the Iranians are trying to get a nuclear weapon and then say, ‘Oh I will never ever use them.’ So I think he what he was doing was pretty sophisticated – more sophisticated than some of our liberal friends who take things off the table that they can’t possibly mean. So that’s one where I think Trump is absolutely correct.”

As for his abortion statement during that same town hall that had gotten a lot of press over the last few days, Gingrich said was a mistake for Trump and now the Republican presidential hopeful has to clean up that mistake.

“On the other one – man, if you are a conservative and you sit down with Chris Matthews, you should have your head examined,” Gingrich said. “It’s not his position. That super PAC ad is a lie. They know it is a lie, but he made the mistake. It was like an error in baseball. It was his error and now he has to go back and clean it up.”

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