June 7, 2021

By Bill Berkowitz

“Nazi theory … specifically denies that such a thing as ‘the truth’ exists… If the Leader says of such an event, ‘It never happened’ – well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five – well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs.” – George Orwell

As promised, on June 5th “the Real” Donald Trump, the twice-impeached former president and instigator of the January 6 Capitol riot, returned to the electoral battlefield as the marquee speaker at the North Carolina Republican Party's state convention. According to NBC News’ Jonathan Allen, Trump “plans to follow up with several more rallies in June and July to keep his unique political base engaged in the 2022 midterms and give him the option of seeking the presidency again in 2024.”

While he is out rallying the troops, Team Trump is crafting a political platform. And they are turning to Newt Gingrich.

Newt Gingrich has always been a mean-spirited, aggressive super-spreader of misinformation, disinformation and hyperbole, and an entitled white politician who thinks better of himself than most Americans ever have. He is a stranger to honesty and no stranger to political propaganda. Now, Gingrich, along with Senator Lindsey Graham, one of Donald Trump’s premier sycophants, is engaged with Trump in developing a twenty-first-century version of Gingrich’s 1990s Contract With America.

Do you remember Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With America” that helped lead to the Republican Party’s 1994 takeover of the House of Representatives for the first time in four decades? Remember Newt Gingrich, who after he helped take down Democratic House Speaker Jim Wright, due to an ethics violation, was forced to resign after four years as Speaker of the House for ethics violations? Remember the then-twice married Newt Gingrich leading the charge against President Bill Clinton for the Monica Lewinsky affair, while having an extra-marital affair with a congressional assistant, Callista Bisek, now his third and current wife?

For the past several years, the disgraced former House Speaker has been a political nonentity with appearances on the Fox News Channel and other right-wing media outlets,. But, if hula-hoops can be dragged out from the garage, and 1990s fashionables can be pulled out of boxes in the attic, why not a resuscitated Newt Gingrich?

Master of the Hyperbolic

A few days before the 1994 Midterm elections, Susan Smith drowned her two young sons. Responding to the tragedy, Newt Gingrich publicly claimed that electing Democrats would lead to more incidents of infanticide. Gingrich told the AP that “The mother killing her two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we have to have change. I think people want to change and the only way you get change is to vote Republican.”

When the Columbine attack occurred in 1999, Gingrich blamed “elites” for the shootings by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, which resulted in 13 deaths. Gingrich said: “I want to say to the elite of this country — the elite news media, the liberal academic elite, the liberal political elite: I accuse you in Littleton … of being afraid to talk about the mess you have made, and being afraid to take responsibility for things you have done, and instead foisting upon the rest of us pathetic banalities because you don’t have the courage to look at the world you have created.”

Gingrich, a serial failed presidential candidate, has always been a master of the hyperbolic. Interestingly, his remarks pinning infanticide on Democrats predated the conspiracy theories of QAnon by 20 years. 

Creating a Twenty-First-Century “Contract With America”

It is no wonder then that former President Donald Trump is reportedly turning to Gingrich for help crafting his political policy agenda.

Politico’s Meridith McGraw wrote: 

With an eye toward winning back the House and Senate in the 2022 midterm elections, former President Donald Trump has begun crafting a policy agenda outlining a MAGA doctrine for the party. His template is the 1994 "Contract with America," a legislative agenda released ahead of the midterm elections in the middle of President Bill Clinton's first term. And, as a cherry on top, he's teaming up with its main architect — [former House Speaker Newt] Gingrich — to do it.

Politico reported the "Trumpified Contract" is "likely to take an 'America-First' policy approach on everything from trade to immigration. The source described it as 'a policy priority for 2022 and beyond.'"

As Salon’s Heather Digby Parton recently wrote, Gingrich’s “original Contract with America was a monstrous document, calling for punitive measures against poor women, destroying product liability, extremely harsh criminal justice laws and more. They were the far right's racist dog whistles combined with the mainstream's corporate giveaways but they were sold with an aggressively hostile demagogic pitch that the right-wing voters who listened to talk radio were thrilled to hear.”

Although most of it was never enacted, with the exception of draconian welfare reform, it did help the GOP take over Congress for the first time in over forty years.

According to McGraw, “it remains to be seen just how comprehensive the updated Contract will be, if one is issued at all. Gingrich, who wrote the ‘Contract with America’ along with former congressman Dick Armey, said it shouldn’t be expected to debut ‘anytime soon.’ But when asked about what should be included in a 2022 Republican agenda, Gingrich outlined a list of potential priorities.” Team Trump appears to be depending on Gingrich to bring some coherence to Trump’s agenda.

Bill Berkowitz is an Oakland, California-based freelance writer covering right-wing movements. His work has appeared in BuzzFlash, The Nation, Huffington Post, The Progressive, AlterNet, Street Sheet, In These Times, and many other print and online publications, as well as being cited in several books.

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