Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich tells Breitbart News that he would consider being Republican candidate Donald Trump’s running mate in November’s general election.
Asked if Trump has asked him to be running mate, Gingrich said, “No.”
Asked if he would consider being running mate, Gingrich said, “Yes.” But, “I think he has to make that decision.”
“It is the most extraordinary campaign of its time,” the former speaker added. “He’s come out of nowhere and defeated 16 other candidates.”
“If he catches fire he could be much like Reagan in 1980,” Gingrich said, noting that Trump could match those record numbers “if this thing continues to evolve and people learn how dishonest and unserious Hillary Clinton is.”
In conversation, Gingrich habitually rattles off ballot statistics for small nationalistic parties in other parts of the world, from Austria, where the election “is so close they’re going to have to re-run it because the establishment stole about 60,000 votes. The two parties that had run the country came in fourth and fifth,” to Rome, where Virginia Raggi won the mayoral election heading the populist Five Star Movement. To Great Britain.
“The British people heard from the establishment unanimously opposing it and the people just ignored them and rolled over it,” he said before he started talking about the election of a schoolteacher in Iceland.
“I think the Clintons are very, very hardworking,” Gingrich said. “They have an entire strategy of methodically lying and being surrounded by lawyers, so it all works out.”
Does Gingrich still have the clout to whip votes on Capitol Hill?
“I have a very broad range of contacts and friendships,” he says. “But I’ll do that whether I’m vice president or not.”
Years of calling Gingrich the “former House speaker” as his title in articles is somewhat anachronistic. He has been, for a Republican generation that elected virtually the entire 2016 presidential field, more like Washington’s most active citizen attendee of government ethics and reform hearings. He can be seen on the Hill sometimes doing things like blocking new Section 1332 regulations on Obamacare by the Department of Health and Human Services. He also runs a media production company on the Virginia side of the Key Bridge.
Breitbart News grilled Gingrich, winner of the 2012 South Carolina primary and loser to Mitt Romney in the more-important Florida primary, about his debate assertion that the United States needs a more “humane” deportation policy? What does he think about Trump on immigration?
“Walls work. I’ve always been for the wall. I’ve always believed you’ve had to have fencing. We have the right to control who comes into the United States.”
“My only point was, we’re not going to have forced deportations” in great numbers of law-abiding illegals who are already in the country. “Trump knows that. What he is proposing is similar to something Kay Bailey Hutchinson proposed that [some illegal aliens] can go home, register, and come back legally. I think that is sustainable.”
When Gingrich introduced Trump at his rally this week in Ohio, people chanted “Newt!” for vice president, drawing a reaction from Trump. When Gingrich started running long in his opening remarks, people to the right of the stage yelled “Trump!”
“Your governor, who’s a good friend of mine, but it’s about time he got on the Trump bandwagon,” Gingrich said to applause.
“This guy is going to kick over the table,” Gingrich said. “So I want you to give a great Ohio welcome to the next president of the United States Donald Trump.”