Former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Monday evening on Fox News that if Democrats continue to defend “bureaucracy,” they will face a “big mountain to climb” come the 2026 midterm elections.
Since President Donald Trump’s push to clean out the government, including cutting government spending and government jobs, Democrats have protested, saying moves like upending the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) are unlawful. With lawmakers continuing to protest at events like Trump’s joint address to Congress on March 4, Fox host Sean Hannity asked Gingrich for his thoughts.
“Look, 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 hardline 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,” Gingrich said. “The answer to all of that is, frankly, you have to lock them up.”
In February, Department of Government Efficiency head Elon Musk announced on an X Spaces discussion that he and Trump had agreed to upend USAID and transfer its leadership to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Despite reports of billions in taxpayer dollars being wasted on USAID programs that had gone unchecked for years, Democrats rallied against Musk and Trump, with some lawmakers declaring “war.”
Protests against Musk have targeted his popular electric vehicle company Tesla. Some facilities, like one in Oregon, faced severe damage after someone fired gunshots into multiple cars, shattering windshields last Thursday, according to Fox News.
“You have to enforce the law, period. At some point, people begin to realize that you can’t wage war against the entire American people,” Gingrich said. “In that sense, I would argue that Elon Musk is simply one of the people serving the American people. He’s a senior adviser to the president of the United States. 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.”
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Gingrich said he and his wife had attended Trump’s State of the Union address, later writing in his newsletter that the party’s House lawmakers appeared like “zombie Democrats.”
“They couldn’t applaud anything. They couldn’t applaud the president. They couldn’t applaud a 13-year-old cancer survivor,” Gingrich said. “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.”
Just minutes into Trump’s State of the Union speech, Democrat Texas Rep. Al Green was ejected from the chamber after repeatedly yelling at the president. Notably, fellow Democratic lawmakers were seen not cheering for Trump’s honoree, 13-year-old D.J. Daniel, who suffered from brain cancer and was given an honorary Secret Service agent title that night.
“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,” Gingrich said.
“Our America’s New Majority Project just had a poll come out yesterday. Eighty-two percent 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 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 added.
(Featured Image Media Credit: Screenshot/Fox News/”Hannity”)
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