Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is warning that Democrats’ “very dangerous” rhetoric and behavior could lead to something “serious” against President Donald Trump.
During an interview on Fox News, Gingrich dismissed a claim by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., that Republicans are “on the run,” warning that Democrats are in a rage and offering “no solutions.”
Gingrich said the left is resorting to extreme tactics in an effort to resist President Donald Trump and oppose Elon Musk’s efforts to cut government spending.
“Well, I think that everything you showed earlier reflects what Lincoln said at Gettysburg when he said, this is a test of whether this system or any system so conceived in liberty can survive. You have a hard-line group who believe that they have the right to be violent, that they have the right to deny the American people the choice of their leadership, that they have the right to break the law. The answer to all of that is, frankly, you have to lock them up. You have to enforce the law,” Gingrich began.
“Period. And at some point, people begin to realize that you can’t wage war against the entire American people. And in that sense, I would argue that Elon Musk is simply one of the people serving the American people. He’s a senior advisor to the president of the United States. And I think that, in that sense, all of this is totally unacceptable, as is harassing a Supreme Court justice or harassing the vice president and his three-year-old,” Gingrich added.
“What I saw the other night … the House Democrats were sort of zombie Democrats. They couldn’t applaud anything. They couldn’t applaud the president. They couldn’t applaud a 13-year-old cancer survivor. They couldn’t applaud a young man who wanted to go to West Point. They couldn’t applaud people who were there who had lost loved ones. It was pretty bizarre. And I think that, you know, Hakeem Jeffries may think he has to say these things. He’s their leader,” he said.
“What’s he going to say? But the fact is, the Democrats currently have no solutions. They are so enraged that Trump is actually changing what, overwhelmingly, Americans believe is a corrupt system. I’ll just give you one piece of data. Our America’s New Majority project just had a poll come out yesterday. 82% of the American people believe the system is corrupt. Now that’s dangerous. Both for the survival of freedom. But also it tells you the fact that the Democrats, who want to defend the bureaucracy and the corruption and the waste, they’re going to have a big mountain to climb come 2026,” Gingrich continued.
Ron Brownstein, a senior political analyst for CNN, said Monday that the Democratic Party was in its weakest position since the 1980s, arguing that the party is still trying to figure out the best way to move forward.
“If you talk to Democrats, you know, they recognize they are in a hole. I mean, the image of the party is probably in a weaker position than at any point since I think the 1980s, the Reagan and George H.W. Bush era,” Brownstein told CNN’s Audie Cornish.
“But if you ask Democrats how they think they are going to come back, there is a debate about, you know, within the party, do you fight on every front or do you focus on the economic issues? And I think most Democrats believe their best chance of kind of getting a second look from the public in 2025 is this debate over the budget,” Brownstein argued.
Cornish and Brownstein discussed the Friday federal government funding deadline, as Cornish said GOP lawmakers were hoping to offset tax cuts in the federal budget and that the “likely target could be Medicaid.”
Trump, the White House, and Republicans have maintained for weeks that the GOP proposed bill does not include cuts to Medicare and Medicaid.
Brownstein argued that the Democratic Party could link the argument that the GOP will be cutting Medicaid to fund tax cuts for the wealthy to the budget, and that it might be their best strategy in 2025.