Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich stopped by the New York Times‘ new election podcast, The Run-Up, for Tuesday’s debut episode. During his visit, Gingrich told host Michael Barbaro that Donald Trump is “out of [his] rut” after his last three speeches, in which he didn’t make “any major mistake.”
Reflecting on the past week (which included the Republican nominee’s feud with the Khan family), Gingrich said he was “particularly disappointed that [Trump] didn’t take a deep step back and point out that it’s Mr. Khan that picked the fight. The fact is, Mr. Khan decided to be a politician. He went to a national convention. If you look at what he said, it was very vicious and very nasty.”
Barbaro moved on to the topic of whether Trump would be psychologically fit enough to be commander-in-chief. “Does he have the mental fitness, the kind of psychological suitability to the office of the presidency?” the host asked. After a long pause, Gingrich replied, “My answer would be, sure.” He went on:
“Sure. I mean, he is at least as reliable as Andrew Jackson, who was one of the most decisive presidents in American history. Nobody would have predicted Abraham Lincoln’s capabilities before he became president, and most people didn’t believe him while he was president.”
When Barbaro followed up about his choice of the word “sure,” Gingrich said that “the kind of personality that is prepared to be outside the total establishment and have the self confidence to take on the establishment of both parties is a personality which will by definition not be normal.”
On a related note, some folks aren’t wild about hearing the media dig into Trump’s supposed mental state. Former Rhode Island Democratic representative Patrick J. Kennedy — a mental health advocate and founder of The Kennedy Forum — penned an op-ed in The Washington Post and urged voters to stop with the armchair psychology. “We can reject Trump without resorting to making baseless diagnoses of his mental health,” he wrote.
New episodes of The Run-Up will be released every Tuesday and Friday until election day. Other guests on this week’s episode include Nate Cohn, a data analyst from the Times‘ The Upshot, and Amy Chozick, who covers Clinton for the paper.
(Via New York Times & Washington Post)