As the gears of transition grind in Washington and speculation swirls over the composition of President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said in a special Dentons briefing Thursday that he hopes to assume an extra-governmental advisory role to the new president.
“My goal is to be senior planner looking at the totality of the federal government and thinking through how to redesign it,” Gingrich, now a senior advisor in Dentons’ bipartisan public policy and regulation practice, told me. “And to do that you have to be an outsider, because I think it’s virtually impossible to be in the government and maintain the strategic focus you need if you want very, very large scale change,”
He added that he believed former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Senator Jeff Sessions would both get “major” jobs in Mr. Trump’s new administration.
Republicans’ stunning victory Tuesday defied all electoral modeling, I noted, in the same way that British populists flew under the polling radar to upset the recent United Kingdom referendum to leave the European Union.
That invisibility, Gingrich said, was borne of nationalist voters’ deep distrust of elite media and refusal now to cooperate with an establishment they regard as openly hostile.
“The conservative nationalist voter is so vilified by the elite media, whether it’s in Britain, Germany, France, or the United States, so attacked and so disparaged–they’re xenophobic, they’re isolationist, they’re racist, just think about the mean nasty names.
“There was a significant block of people who would not talk to pollsters when they left the voting booth [on Tuesday], and these people were all Trump supporters,” he said. “I think this goes back to the depth of hostility between the elite media and the anti-establishment conservatives.”
Listen to the full interview here:
