Sorting Out Trumpism for the Future

Following Tuesday’s election results, the challenge for Republicans will be to avoid the temptation of recrimination. The party and, more broadly, the conservative movement, would be better served by focusing on how in 2028 to recover the ground lost in Congress — and hold the White House. So says the former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, in his recent interview with the Sun’s “Sanity” podcast.“It is not our night,” lamented the GOP senate candidate in New Hampshire, John Sununu, who lost to his Democratic opponent. The voting reflected what the re-elected senator of Georgia, Jon Ossoff, tonight called “sweeping and decisive victories” for the Democrats. As of publishing time Decision Desk HQ and other news organizations projected that the Democrats had gained control of the House. The Democrats, too, looked poised for a strong showing in the upper chamber.Speaking before the voting, Mr. Gingrich reckoned that “once we’re past this election we’re going to have a very interesting debate about which parts of Trumpism are really the future and which parts of Trumpism are idiosyncratic and in fact are a passing moment that will not survive.” The former congressman, and current Sun columnist, added that “I think that will be far more important than the debate in the Democratic Party.”The debate within the GOP, Mr. Gingrich said, should be informed by “underlying data” showing that “when you get to core issues this country is much closer to the Republicans than to the Democrats.” That militates against pinning the midterm results on an electoral rebuke of core GOP principles. “We currently have a problem, which is actually a performance problem,” is how Mr. Gingrich put it, “not an ideology problem, not an issues problem.”In the former speaker’s telling, “it’s un-American to have gasoline this expensive. So you have to start and be honest about the fact that at a performance level we were set up by January for a great election, and we threw it away.” This is in part a result of having “bombed Iran without explaining it,” he added. That led Iran to “take us on, and they have a leverage which is real. You know it’s real because you’re looking at the price of oil.”Too, it’s not the GOP’s first rough election. “I’ve been through a lot of these,” Mr. Gingrich said. “The first great washout for us was 1958,” when “the economy was bad, the left got its act together, and we had an election so bad that the House Republicans did not recover” for decades. Yet “Eisenhower came back and worked with Rayburn and Johnson who were the Democratic leaders and had a very successful last two years,” Mr. Gingrich said. Mr. Gingrich’s suggestion in the event of a GOP midterm defeat was that “Trump needs to go to Camp David, bring up some people who understand Eisenhower, Lincoln, who had a similar problem, and figure out how to maneuver against an opposition party which controls” Congress. He added that “the first thing you do of course is figure out everybody who can’t stand the left and you build a coalition.”Such a strategy by Mr. Trump could echo the GOP achievements during an earlier era of divided government. When during the Reagan era the Republicans passed the tax cut of 1981, Mr. Gingrich explained, “we carried one-third of the Democrats,” in part because the Gipper had effectively used TV to address the nation and pitch his legislative agenda. “And so we passed it despite the fact that we were in the minority.”The House minority leader at the time, Bob Michel, “got Reagan’s agenda through again and again because he formed alliances with the Democrats who couldn’t stand the liberals,” per Mr. Gingrich. It’s a lesson that could beckon for Mr. Trump and the GOP. Of the Democrats in this midterm cycle, Mr. Gingrich concluded: “if they win, the first thing you do is figure out which of them are the most likely to say, ‘these guys are crazy,’ and you build a coalition.”

Sorting Out Trumpism for the Future

Sorting Out Trumpism for the Future

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