Trump is following former Speaker Newt Gingrich’s hubris-fueled overreach path
As the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term draws to a close, he might want to give Newt Gingrich a call.
Newt, the former U.S. House speaker, could caution Trump about the risks of hubris-fueled overreach.
In fall 1994, The Raleigh News & Observer named me its Washington correspondent. U.S. Rep. David Price, D-N.C., one of our local members of Congress, was in line to chair the House Transportation Appropriations Subcommittee, a powerful post that would enable him to steer tens of millions to infrastructure projects around the country.
I spent three hours interviewing him about his ambitious plans to build and upgrade bridges, roads, highways and public transit nationwide.
Then voters intervened: That November, they gave Republicans their first House majority in a half century.
Bill Clinton was able to turn the tables on Gingrich
Gingrich, then a Republican member of Congress from Georgia, was heralded as the stunning triumph’s architect, thanks to his Contract With America, 10 reforms he vowed to oversee.
His fellow GOP lawmakers elected him House speaker when Congress convened in January 1995. Nine provisions passed the House. Some died in the Senate, while others became law after modifications.
Gingrich was riding high. Time Magazine named him its 1995 Man of the Year. Newsweek heralded “Newt Gingrich’s Revolution.” News outlets said he had more power than President Bill Clinton, who responded with a remarkable denial: “The Constitution gives me relevance. The power of our ideas gives me relevance. The president is relevant here.”
In the coming months, Clinton rebounded. He vetoed bills making steep spending cuts and imposing strict work requirements for welfare recipients. Gingrich and his GOP allies failed to overturn 11 of his 13 vetoes. Clinton negotiated compromises and then, to Gingrich’s consternation, took credit for reforms he’d opposed. He stole Newt’s thunder by declaring, in his January 1996 State of the Union address, “The era of big government is over.”
That November, he sailed to reelection while boasting of overhauling welfare programs and getting tough on crime.
Clinton’s comeback was fueled by more than his considerable political prowess. Intoxicated by his electoral success, Gingrich overreached. Claiming that “Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society has failed,” he proposed $450 billion in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid — almost $1 trillion in today’s dollars. He forced two government shutdowns, halting key services. By a 2-to-1 margin, voters blamed Gingrich. Bidding to bolster his 1996 presidential campaign, Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole broke with Gingrich and refused to slash the big entitlement programs.
Undaunted, Gingrich pressed for even more radical changes. He tried to gut the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, two landmark measures Republican President Richard Nixon had signed into law. Ignoring polls showing strong support for them, Gingrich and his GOP acolytes repeatedly said they were based on “junk science,” a slur that deeply upset scientists I interviewed in the air-quality division of the Environmental Protection Agency near Raleigh.
Trump might benefit from former speaker’s advice
Trump and Gingrich, of course, are different, both in personality and in power.
For all his bombast, Gingrich was a political historian who, however grudgingly, accepted the Founders’ constitutional checks and balances among the three main government branches. And for all the power he acquired in 1995, he didn’t control the executive branch as Trump does, and he had to contend with a much more independent Senate.
Gingrich also couldn’t count on a Supreme Court that would grant him immunity from criminal prosecution and go far beyond the abortion limits he tried to impose.
And unlike Trump, Gingrich confronted a talented political foil in Clinton, who simply outwitted him. Despite Clinton’s 1996 reelection, he remained as speaker until Jan. 3, 1999, when Republicans’ poor showing at the polls two months earlier compelled him to resign.
Even with his advantages over Gingrich, Trump’s once-intractable hold on GOP lawmakers appears to be weakening. In recent weeks, they’ve rejected his bid to eliminate the Senate filibuster, compelled the release of the Epstein files, and criticized U.S. warplanes killing two survivors of an airstrike on an alleged drug-smuggling boat in the Caribbean Sea. Just on Jan. 8, the Republican-controlled Senate voted to limit his use of military force in Venezuela. The Supreme Court blocked him from deploying National Guard troops to the Chicago area in an immigration crackdown.
Twenty-three GOP representatives and five Republican senators have announced they won’t seek reelection next fall, perhaps fearing a midterm wave by Democrats.
Trump has never been one to seek advice, but as the new year unfolds and congressional campaigns begin, he might ask a famous Georgian octogenarian for help avoiding embarrassing defeat.
James Rosen is a former political reporter and Pentagon correspondent for McClatchy who has received awards from the National Press Club, Military Reporters and Editors, and the Society of Professional Journalists, which in 2021 named him top opinion columnist.
