Shannon McCaffrey covered Newt Gingrich’s 2012 presidential campaign for The Associated Press.
Brash and bombastic, he has an assassin’s flair with harsh political language. He takes credit for dramatically remaking the Republican Party. And he’s trailed by a tabloid-worthy personal life with two ex-wives preceding the current one.
Donald Trump … and Newt Gingrich.
As Trump sought a running mate, the former Georgia congressman emerged as one of the last contenders standing. Temperamentally, they seemed soul mates.
But ultimately, the combination may have proved too combustible. On Friday, Trump announced on Twitter that Indiana Gov. Mike Pence — a steady conservative stalwart — would be his running mate.
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Gingrich may have put it best on Thursday as speculation swirled about who would be Trump’s pick.
“Do you really want a two-pirate ticket?” he asked impishly, handicapping his own chances.
At the same time, Gingrich seemed to be publicly campaigning for the job.
Even as late as Friday — just before Trump announced his selection — Gingrich upped the ante on one of the candidate’s more controversial proposals: to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the country. Hours after the attacks in Nice, France, that left at least 84 people dead, Gingrich called for testing “every person who is of a Muslim background” to determine whether they “believe in sharia.”
Gingrich would have brought battle-tested grass-roots organizing skills, a deep policy expertise and a sharp intellect to the ticket. But with that also came decades of baggage - ethics complaints, a polarizing government shutdown, marital infidelity, a reputation for wandering off script and a notoriously short fuse.
“Gingrich is not going to balance (Trump),” said Steve Anthony, a former Georgia State University political science lecturer and a onetime top Democratic statehouse aide who was once a student of Gingrich’s.
“Newt Gingrich is many things, but he is not a leveling agent.”
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Some political experts say that, in many ways, Trump is the logical heir to the “Republican revolution” Gingrich launched in the 1980s.
“Gingrich is the father of the movement Republicans,” his former press secretary R.C. Hammond told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Everything he’s worked for has paved the way for other reformers, like Trump, to step forward and lead.”
Gingrich created a stinging new vocabulary for the GOP as he engineered the Republican takeover of the U.S. House and crafted the "Contract with America." It was Gingrich who assailed the liberal welfare state. Those who opposed him were labeled "radicals." In a memo that laid out how to "speak like Newt" GOP candidates were encouraged to use words like "corrupt" and "traitor."
You can hear echoes of that today when Trump blasts his Republican primary opponent Ted Cruz as “Lyin’ Ted” or presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton as “crooked Hillary.”
“Some of the rhetoric he used, it was very sharp,” said former Democratic U.S. Rep. George “Buddy” Darden. “And it’s only grown sharper. He might very well have been the forerunner to Trump.”
And then there is the use of technology.
Long before social media, Gingrich - as a backbench bomb thrower in the House and later as speaker - used C-SPAN to reach voters directly. It is much the same way that Trump has leveraged Twitter to push his message out in 140-character bites. (Gingrich himself announced his 2012 presidential bid via Twitter, unique at the time.)
And long before Trump drew condemnation for attacking a federal judge, suggesting the jurist’s Mexican heritage made him unable to be impartial in a case involving the candidate’s for-profit university, Gingrich used the federal judiciary as a political punching bag. On the campaign trail during his failed 2012 bid for the Republican nomination for president, Gingrich said that judges who hand down rulings “outside the political mainstream” should be hauled before Congress by federal marshals to answer for those decisions.
Still for all the similarities, Anthony said there’s a difference.
Anthony argued that his old teacher’s use of language was carefully calculated, while Trump is a loose cannon.
“Gingrich took it up to the edge but Trump, he pushed it right over,” Anthony said.
Despite not being Trump’s vice presidential pick, Gingrich - back in the spotlight after his 2012 campaign - isn’t going away anytime soon.
Trump has suggested that, should he win the White House, Gingrich will have a prominent role in his administration. What that role will be is unclear.
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