Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich said Monday on “The Laura Ingraham Show” that it is “suicidally stupid” for former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon to wage war against Establishment GOP senators who aren’t fully on board with President Donald Trump’s agenda.

When Bannon spoke at the Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, he warned that “it’s a season of war against a GOP Establishment,” adding that the American people who voted Trump into office “are coming for you.” Bannon has also said that he planning to primary vulnerable GOP incumbents up for re-election in 2018.

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But Gingrich told LifeZette Editor-in-Chief Laura Ingraham that he believes Bannon is “totally misdiagnosing the problem.”

“I think it’s suicidally stupid,” Gingrich said. “The problem is that there were 48 Democrats who voted ‘no’ on Obamacare [repeal and replace] and three Republicans who voted ‘no.'”

The former House speaker noted that 10 Democrats are up for re-election in 2018 in states that Trump carried back in 2016, saying, “If you took all the money that Bannon is going to raise to defeat Republicans and put it into defeating Democrats, we’d have a majority of 57 or 56 votes next year in the Senate. We’d pass virtually everything.”

Ingraham pushed back, pointing in particular to Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), who refused to vote for Trump and has publicly opposed the president on several key policy issues. Flake is up for re-election in 2018, and Ingraham has endorsed his primary challenger, Dr. Kelli Ward.

“On the issue of Flake and agreeing or disagreeing with the Trump agenda — you’re certainly right on Obamacare repeal,” Ingraham said. “But I think on the two major issues on which Trump was elected, on trade and immigration, he is directly on the other side of the president.”

“I think Jeff Flake has been one of the biggest problems in the U.S. Senate for the conservative populist agenda,” she continued. “He votes more with I think the Old Guard than he does with the future of the party, which is not a globalist future.”

Gingrich responded that he wasn’t “trying to defend Flake per se,” but noting that almost every senator Bannon is planning to primary is probably going to vote for a tax cut, and almost every one of them voted to repeal Obamacare.

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“These are not trivial things,” he said.

“So [Bannon’s] actually going to go out and run against Republicans who voted with Trump. That’s what makes this whole thing to me mystical,” Gingrich added. “I mean — what’s the principal case? Can you be irritated with the Establishment? Sure. Are some of them occasionally jerks? Sure. By the way, is the president sometimes not very wise? Sure.”

The former House speaker said that Republicans shouldn’t “cannibalize” one another, and that fighting a “civil war” against GOP incumbents would lead to disastrous consequences in 2018 and 2020 because “you guarantee that the other side wins.”

“You know, when we declared war on Germany [during World War II], we didn’t start by attacking Great Britain. And so I am deeply opposed,” Gingrich said. “And I disagree deeply with Steve about this.”

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Pointing to Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), who engaged in a highly publicized spat with Trump after he announced he wouldn’t be running for re-election in 2018, Gingrich said that it “makes perfect sense to me” for Bannon to “run somebody to make sure a good conservative won” that open seat.

“What doesn’t make sense is allocating this amount of money to trying to beat Republicans when you’ve got 10 Democrats in states that Trump carried. And at least six of those Democrats are vulnerable. And they’re not going to be vulnerable if we focus the money on Republicans,” he argued.

The House speaker, who spoke shortly before Trump met with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) Monday afternoon, noted that the two leaders have often been publicly at odds with one another. The only way to solve their problems and move forward on implementing the president’s agenda is to “listen to each other,” Gingrich said.

“The model I used as speaker was listen, learn, help and lead,” he said. “Those two guys are both mature adults. Trump needs McConnell in order to get things through the Senate, and McConnell needs Trump in order to increase his majority next year. And I think it would be very important for them just to listen to each other.”

“Get the budget through ideally this week so that you can get the tax bill through on reconciliation terms with 50 votes, and get all of these appointees approved,” Gingrich added. “If you go back and do that stuff, people will think of the Senate very differently by Christmas.”

(photo credit, homepage images: Newt Gingrich, CC BY-SA 2.0, by Gage Skidmore; photo credit, article images: Newt Gingrich, CC BY-SA 2.0, by Gage Skidmore)