Donald Trump’s campaign boasts a full roster of half-baked, racially tone-deaf and just plain bad surrogates.
In an interview with the New York Times, Newt Gingrich added himself to the latter list, offering a very lukewarm response when asked whether Trump is sane enough to govern.
According to the Times’ partial transcript of the exchange, reporter Michael Barbaro asked, “Does he have the mental fitness, the kind of psychological suitability to the office of the presidency?”
After a pause, the former House speaker replied, “Yeah, and my answer would be, sure.”
“Sure?” Barbaro asked.
“Sure,” Gingrich soldiered on. “I mean, he is at least as reliable as Andrew Jackson, who was one of the most decisive presidents in American history.”
After the reporter offered another opening to “be more forceful than ‘sure,'” Gingrich paused again before deflecting.
He went on to praise Trump’s “self-confidence” to take on the establishment, saying the right person to challenge the status quo “will by definition not be normal.”
Jackson, Gingrich’s metric for presidential reliability, was a slaveholder and trader who engineered the genocide of thousands of Native Americans during his tenure. Before he was elected President, Jackson killed a man he accused of insulting his wife in a duel.
