“I spent a little bit of time in politics,” a grinning Newt Gingrich reminded a Donald Trump rally in Ohio this week. “I have never — I know of no example in American history of a moment where the leader and the American people came together as fast as they have in the last year with Donald Trump… . Everybody else talks about how they would like to kind of change Washington a little bit in a calm and social way. This guy’s going to kick over the table!”
A few minutes later, it was Trump’s turn to laud Gingrich.
“He gets it,” Trump says. “And he says that I’m the biggest thing he’s ever seen in the history of politics.”
It’s a regular mutual admiration society. Newt loves Trump; Trump loves Trump. So I suppose it has to happen. In a year in which the Republican Party offers us a reality star as its nominee to be president of the United States and leader of the free world, then of course Trump’s partner in that effort must be Georgia’s own Gingrich. Fate and logic both demand it.
Because frankly, if you’re looking to balance the ticket by adding someone of maturity, discipline and emotional stability, someone with no ego willing to stay in the background and do the hard gritty work of governing while Trump runs off to promote a golf course, we who know Newt best know that he is just the man you want as vice president. To do anything less would be to leave the cherry off the sundae, to cut short the Fourth of July fireworks show before the grand finale. It just wouldn’t be … right.
And yes, it’s also true that nobody with a future in the Republican Party is willing to join Trump on the ticket, for fear of the permanent stain it would leave. At age 74, Newt fits that bill perfectly as well.
Besides, they’ll be perfect together. Really, they will. Because Newt and The Donald have so very much in common. Three marriages apiece, a capacity for self-destruction, a willingness to say about anything and an inordinate fondness for the Man in the Mirror offer more than enough foundation for a productive partnership. As I’ve noted before, Newt in many ways made the rise of Trump possible in the Republican Party, and there would be poetry in having him on the ticket to reap what he has sown for the past 35 years.
And while I’ve never been comfortable with armchair psychoanalysis, let me leave you with an observation by Carl Jung and see if it rings a bell:
” … when one unconsciously works against oneself, the result is impatience, irritability and an impotent longing to get one’s opponent down whatever the means,” Jung wrote. “Generally certain symptoms appear, among them a peculiar use of language: one wants to speak forcefully in order to impress one’s opponent, so one employs a special ‘bombastic’ style full of neologisms that might be described as ‘power words’ … whenever anything unworthy of belief has to be insisted on in the teeth of inner resistance. The language swells up, overreaches itself, sprouts grotesque words distinguished only by their needless complexity. The word is charged with the task of achieving what cannot be done by honest means. It is the old word magic, and sometimes it can degenerate into a regular disease.”
So Newt and Trump? Yes please. With a cherry on top.
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