Gingrich Fears ‘Unfocused’ Congressional Republicans Risk Electoral Disaster

Newt Gingrich, a man who knows a thing or two about wave elections, issued a warning to his fellow Republicans on Tuesday.

The former speaker of the House, who led Republicans in 1994 to their first congressional majority in 40 years, said on “The Laura Ingraham Show” that the current GOP majority is in jeopardy. The shame, Gingrich said, is that a Democratic takeover is not inevitable.

“It’s all unnecessary,” he said. “I think as Democrats go further and further to the Left and become stranger and stranger, they should be beatable.”

Gingrich said Republicans can point to strong economic growth, deregulation, and conservative judges that President Donald Trump has put on the bench.

“There are more than enough things Republicans could campaign on,” he said. “But I think that they are not focused, and I think they’re demoralized. It’s a very serious challenge for all of us who do not want to see a Nancy Pelosi speakership and Chuck Schumer as majority leader.”

[lz_ndn video= 33699521]

Trump has more at stake than his legislative agenda, Gingrich said. He pointed to the many Democratic candidates who have committed to impeaching him, regardless of what kind of case they might have.

“They didn’t want Trump to be president,” he said. “They don’t want Trump to be president. And if they get the chance, they’re going to kick him out of the White House.”

That philosophy is evident in the way Schumer, a New York Democrat who serves as minority leader of the Senate, has used every parliamentary tool at his disposal to delay and block the president’s appointees from confirmation hearings and votes.

“There’s no historical precedent for it,” he said. “We’ve never before seen the kind of raw politics Schumer has played, the way in which they have allowed American officials to just dangle in the wind for truly partisan reasons.”

The result is that holdovers from former President Barack Obama’s administration and career bureaucrats who favor more government are “cheerfully running all these agencies,” Gingrich said.

But Trump bears some of the blame for his own situation, Gingrich added.

He urged the president to keep focused on his successes and not get bogged down by the investigation into Russian election meddling and other issues.

“If the president has one really major failing as a leader in a free society, it’s the inability to develop a message and stick with it for three or four or five weeks,” he said.

Gingrich said those failings hurt not just politics, but policy as well. He pointed to a giant, deficit-busting spending bill Trump reluctantly signed last month.

“The spending bill got as bad as it did in part because the White House wasn’t laying down markers early on and then meaning them,” he said.

Related: Obama Appointee Rejects Andrea Mitchell’s ‘Off the Mark’ Trump Analysis

Gingrich said Trump “has a huge winning hand” but does not effectively use his powerful bully pulpit.

“When he focuses, he is very effective,” he said. “But he tends to focus briefly, and then he either gets bored or he allows something else to distract him.”

The same lack of focus also hurts Trump in dealing with special counsel Robert Mueller, Gingrich said. He said Mueller is “playing him like a fiddle,” which only takes the president off the mark.

“So, they come in; they do something they know will enrage him,” he said. “He then meets their expectations, and he goes on national television enraged, looking very unpresidential. And that weakens him and, you know, they go home thinking they’ve had a pretty good day.”

PoliZette senior writer Brendan Kirby can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter.