EXCLUSIVE: Newt Gingrich: ‘The Country Is in Rebellion,’ Trump Can ‘Kick Down the Doors’

Newt Gingrich told Breitbart News that the country is in rebellion against the coastal power centers and that Donald Trump might be the candidate who can “kick down the doors” of the establishment.

Former House speaker Gingrich weighed in on Trump’s rise.

“I think he represents a different era” in the same conservative movement, Gingrich said. “The system has become so incompetent and outrageously bureaucratic. The centers of power are so, so in New York, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles, that the whole rest of the country is in rebellion. And people are looking for somebody who can kick down the doors.”

“It’s a very deep, very real movement,” he said.

Gingrich spent Friday on Capitol Hill promoting an initiative to make changes to Obamacare so that states can make more decisions about how to implement their own health care and insurance programs. Gingrich is working with his old colleague across the aisle, Tom Daschle, to get support for his plan. The Obama administration is coming out with new regulations on Section 1332, the part of the law that applies to “state innovation waivers.” Gingrich is fighting to protect those waivers from becoming over-regulated.

“These are very specific reforms, so we can actually move forward, instead of waiting until 2017 to fix some of these problems,” Gingrich said.

“The core idea is to return authority to the states with waivers, to give states the power to try to adapt the system to their own needs,” he said. “We also have a real desire from a number of governors to create a bigger insurance market. For many small states, having one publicly controlled insurance market is not effective, because there are not enough people to justify it.” Citizens can get better deals on health care in regional and multi-state markets.

“I think there’s a 50-50 chance.” Gingrich said, when asked if he can succeed in getting the Obama administration to make some concessions when it comes out with its massive list of regulations on the waivers.

Gingrich is optimistic about the new Republican speaker, Paul Ryan, who was a mere conservative-movement staffer for groups like Freedomworks in Washington in the 1990’s as Gingrich passed welfare reform and the balanced budget amendment.

“I think he’s doing pretty well,” Gingrich said of Ryan. “I like the initiatives he’s starting. I like how he’s returning legislative authorities to the committees. I like how he’s calling for entrepreneurship within the policy committees.”

“Ryan was really a protegé of Jack Kemp. I think the same kind of idea-oriented attitudes that characterized Jack are going to characterize Ryan.”