He reportedly circulated unsupported rumors about a scandal involving a teenage congressional page, and tried to tie Wright to shady foreign-lobbying practices. Watergate, this was not. Heading into the midterms, he rallied Republicans around the idea of turning Election Day into a national referendum. While candidates fanned out across the country to campaign on the contract, Gingrich and his fellow Republican leaders in Congress held fast to their strategy of gridlock.
As Election Day approached, they maneuvered to block every piece of legislation they could—even those that might ordinarily have received bipartisan support, like a lobbying-reform bill—on the theory that voters would blame Democrats for the paralysis.
Pundits, aghast at the brazenness of the strategy, predicted backlash from voters—but few seemed to notice. Even some Republicans were surprised by what they were getting away with. By the time voters went to the polls, exit surveys revealed widespread frustration with Congress and a deep appetite for change. Republicans achieved one of the most sweeping electoral victories in modern American history.
They picked up 54 seats in the House and seized state legislatures and governorships across the country; for the first time in 40 years, the GOP took control of both houses of Congress. On election night, Republicans packed into a ballroom in the Atlanta suburbs , waving placards that read liberals, your time is up! Grinning out at the audience, he announced that a package had just arrived at the White House with some Tylenol in it. T he freshman Republicans who entered Congress in January were lawmakers created in the image of Newt: young, confrontational, and determined to inflict radical change on Washington.
From the creation of interstate highways to the passage of civil-rights legislation, the most significant, lasting acts of Congress have been achieved by lawmakers who deftly maneuver through the legislative process and work with members of both parties. On January 4, Speaker Gingrich gaveled Congress into session, and promptly got to work transforming America. Determined to keep Republicans in power, Gingrich reoriented the congressional schedule around filling campaign war chests, shortening the official work week to three days so that members had time to dial for dollars.
There had been federal funding lapses before, but they tended to be minor affairs that lasted only a day or two. The gambit was a bust—voters blamed the GOP for the crisis, and Gingrich was castigated in the press—but it ensured that the shutdown threat would loom over every congressional standoff from that point on. Over the course of several secret meetings at the White House in the fall of , Gingrich told me, he and Clinton sketched out plans for a center-right coalition that would undertake big, challenging projects such as a wholesale reform of Social Security.
Never mind that Republicans had no real chance of getting the impeachment through the Senate. He thought he was enshrining a new era of conservative government. In fact, he was enshrining an attitude—angry, combative, tribal—that would infect politics for decades to come. In the years since he left the House, Gingrich has only doubled down. Mickey Edwards, the Oklahoma Republican, who served in the House for 16 years, told me he believes Gingrich is responsible for turning Congress into a place where partisan allegiance is prized above all else.
He noted that during Watergate, President Richard Nixon was forced to resign only because leaders of his own party broke ranks to hold him accountable—a dynamic Edwards views as impossible in the post-Gingrich era.
Newt has been a big part of eroding that. But when I ask Gingrich what he thinks of the notion that he played a part in toxifying Washington, he bristles. These days, Gingrich seems to be revising his legacy in real time—shifting the story away from the ideological sea change that his populist disruption was supposed to enable, and toward the act of populist disruption itself.
On December 19, , Gingrich cast his final vote as a congressman—a vote to impeach Bill Clinton for lying under oath about an affair. By the time it was revealed that the ex-speaker had been secretly carrying on an illicit relationship with a young congressional aide named Callista throughout his impeachment crusade, almost no one was surprised. Gingrich declined to comment on these allegations.
Detractors could call it hypocrisy if they wanted; Gingrich might not even argue. The CNN moderator grew flustered, the audience erupted in a standing ovation, and a few days later, the voters of South Carolina delivered Gingrich a decisive victory in the Republican primary. One of the hard things about talking with Gingrich is that he weaves partisan attack lines into casual conversation so matter-of-factly—and so frequently—that after a while they begin to take on a white-noise quality.
His smarter-than-thou persona seems so impenetrable, his mind so unchangeable, that after a while you just give up on anything approaching a regular human conversation. But the zoo appears to have put Gingrich in high spirits, and for the first time all day, he seems relaxed, loose, even a little gossipy. When Trump first began thinking seriously about running for president, he turned to Gingrich for advice.
Over breakfast at the downtown Marriott, Trump peppered Newt and Callista with questions about running for president—most pressingly, how much it would cost him to fund a campaign through the South Carolina primary.
This would be a lot more fun than a yacht! Once Trump clinched the nomination, he rewarded Gingrich by putting him on the vice-presidential short list. For a while it looked like it might really happen.
Gingrich had the support of influential inner-circlers like Sean Hannity, who flew him out on a private jet to meet with Trump on the campaign trail.
But alas, a Trump-Gingrich ticket was not to be. There were, it turned out, certain optical issues that would have proved difficult to spin. In fact, according to a transition official, Gingrich had little interest in giving up his lucrative private-sector side hustles, and was never really in the running for a Cabinet position. Gingrich disputes this account. In Washington, the appointment was seen as a testament to the self-parodic nature of the Trump era—but in Rome, the arrangement has worked surprisingly well.
Meanwhile, back in the States, Gingrich got to work marketing himself as the premier public intellectual of the Trump era. Ever since he was a young congressman, he had labored to cultivate a cerebral image, often schlepping piles of books into meetings on Capitol Hill. He is not a natural booster for the economic nationalism espoused by people like Steve Bannon, nor does he seem particularly smitten with the isolationism Trump championed on the stump.
There is no room for compromise. If you ask me, there is no evidence. This whole thing is like mirrors within mirrors. You have a whistle-blower who is not actually blowing the whistle, who turned out not to know anything, and wrote a letter which was mostly false.
Well, if you go through and read it, he made all sorts of assertions that were just plain not true. Look, most of the media hates Trump. Most of the news media is desperate to get rid of Trump. I want to try and have this conversation as two human beings. Thank you. I will do the same depending on how the rest of the conversation goes. The point I am trying to make is that we are living in this world where Republicans are going to defend Trump whatever the facts of the case are.
And Democrats are going to attack Trump no matter what the facts of the case are. None of you guys have the guts to go back and look at the number of times Schiff lied over the past several years. Just plain lied. Rather, we focussed on whether the evidence was sufficient to charge any member of the campaign with taking part in a criminal conspiracy.
It was not. Why would you expect us to be flexible, knowing that, the minute one of us said anything flexible, you would immediately distort it and use it to attack Trump? But it seems like the point you are making is that a lot of conservatives and Republicans in this country, and Republicans in Congress perhaps, feel like there is some sort of cultural civil war going on.
And you have this guy who is a messenger, who is putting forward conservative policies and confirming conservative judges, and standing up for conservatives in the culture war. And, because of that, we have something like Ukraine.
I think that most conservatives, if you had said to them five years ago that Barack Obama was pressuring someone to investigate a political rival, would have said that was an inappropriate way to deal with American aid to a foreign country.
You are famous for loving zoos and dinosaurs. Why do you love them so much, and how does your love of animals connect to a shared sense of humanity that you think we might all have? I am fascinated and intrigued with the natural world, whether in its paleontological form or its current form. I am intrigued with watching how animals operate and what they do, and how different systems coexist.
I think it is endlessly fascinating. Plus, I like them. I have dogs, I like them. I have given zoos rhinoceroses and a variety of other things, and it is fun. His crusade against Democrats culminated in the plot to destroy the political career of Speaker Wright. Democrats, for their part, were alarmed, but did not want to sink to his level and took no effective actions to stop him. This brand of warfare worked, not as a strategy for governance but as a path to power, and what Gingrich planted, his fellow Republicans reaped.
He led them to their first majority in Congress in decades, and his legacy extends far beyond his tenure in office. From the Contract with America to the rise of the Tea Party and the Trump presidential campaign, his fingerprints can be seen throughout some of the most divisive episodes in contemporary American politics.
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