Newt Gingrich, the former right-wing Speaker of the House with a long and continuing legacy of promoting toxic partisanship and demonization of political opponents, has been trying to buck up Republicans in the face of disastrous polling about the upcoming midterms. Despite those polls, Gingrich is predicting a Republican win so crushing that it could lead to the annihilation of the Democratic Party.
In a July email to supporters of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, he predicted that the GOP would “pick up substantial seats in the House and several seats in the Senate.” That same month he went on Fox news to predict that voters would repudiate Democrats “in one of the most historic elections in our 250-year history.”
Polls have turned strongly against Trump and the GOP since then, but last week Gingrich repeated his prediction on Sean Hannity’s “Hang Out”:
I think the odds are much better than even that by Election Day we will win one of the most shocking off-year elections in American history, and election which could potentially rival Thomas Jefferson who created the Democratic-Republican Party and literally over a 12-year period annihilated the Federalist Party. The era of good feeling occurred because there were no Federalists left—it wasn’t because they said kumbaya and got together.
I think President Trump, despite all the weaknesses that you and I know well, is still, historically, an astonishing figure who intuits the American people, understands their values very deeply, and has the pure moral courage and the physical energy to move this country from a path that was literally going to kill the country.
Gingrich also told Hannity that House Speaker Mike Johnson should refuse to give committee assignments to elected representatives who, Gingrich claims, “hate America.”
This week, Gingrich repeated his predictions in a fundraising email for the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
Gingrich has been wrong before. In 2012, after failing in his own bid for the Republican presidential nomination, he predicted that Mitt Romney would crush Barack Obama and that Republicans would take control of the Senate. He was wrong on both counts. Back in 1998, he predicted that Republicans would pick up six to 30 seats, but they ended up losing five and he was ousted as Speaker.
Gingrich helped lead the modern Republican Party far to the right in the 1990s. For the past 20 years, he has been promoting what Right Wing Watch in 2016 called “the Christian Right’s revisionist history, beliefs about a divinely inspired American exceptionalism, anti-Obama conspiracy theories and diatribes about the supposed war on Christianity in the U.S.” That’s why some Christian nationalists energetically encouraged Trump to pick Gingrich as his running mate in 2016.
Trump appointed Gingrich’s former mistress and third wife, Callista Gingrich, U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See during his first term; she currently serves as U.S. Ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein.
