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One of President Donald Trump’s staunchest supporters has a warning for him: Americans will not support his war against Iran “forever.”
“I think they will back him for a little while, but they will not back him forever,” Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) told Fox Business’ “Kudlow” on Monday. He went on to identify “three huge challenges” facing the administration including keeping the Strait of Hormuz open, stabilizing the global economy and dismantling the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. If he succeeds in all three, he will be regarded as a “genius,” Gingrich argued, but if he fails it will be “a step into quicksand.”
Gingrich, despite supporting Trump in all three of his presidential campaigns and generally aligning with him ideologically, has occasionally parted ways with his fellow Republican. After Trump’s immigration authorities killed two innocent people in January, Gingrich warned that Trump risked squandering his popularity on the immigration issue by being too brutal.
Trump needs to “open up a national dialogue” Gingrich told Fox Business at the time, adding that “this is about dignity“ because “Americans don’t want to see the police behaving like a mob, Americans don’t want to see people killed in the streets, and Americans don’t want to see the kind of hunting down people in a way that really demeans the process.”
He added, “We need a national conversation about what we’re going to do, about people who’ve come here, some of them 20 years ago, who’ve been obeying the law, paying taxes, good neighbors, have kids, go to PTA. Very few Americans want to see the police walk in and pick them up and deport them.”
Despite these differences, Gingrich is also very influential over Trump’s thinking. Two of his chief speechwriters during his 2024 presidential campaign, Vince Haley and Ross Worthington, were described by Axios at the time as “the masterminds behind most of Trump's policy statements." Both men “worked under Stephen Miller in the Trump White House," and additionally each also worked for Gingrich during his 2012 presidential campaign. Worthington also co-authored a book with Gingrich.
The two were so influential in shaping Trump's policy-based rhetoric that Axios added at the time, "Those videos and corresponding text on his website go into far more detail than Trump, who famously has little interest in policy, does on the stump."