The charges against former President Donald Trump are giving a major boost to his bid to return to the White House, according to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
“They’re forcing Republicans to choose between corruption and Trump,” he told The Epoch Times, noting that even Trump’s Republican critics, such as Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush haven’t been impressed with the case.
“Trump is stronger today than he was a month ago,” said Gingrich, a contributor to The Epoch Times.
Recent poll data and political analysis largely lean in favor of Gingrich’s prediction.
Trump has raised $8 million in the four days after a New York grand jury in a deep blue county indicted him on allegations relating to his alleged role in a hush money payment to adult entertainment star Stormy Daniels. A Yahoo! News-YouGov poll taken immediately after the indictment found 57 percent of respondents supporting Trump over his leading potential rival Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who had 31 percent of the hypothetical votes. In a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on April 3, 48 percent of Republican respondents backed Trump as their party’s presidential nominee, up from 44 percent in a March 14-20 poll.
The 34 counts of felony charges brought about by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg made Trump the first former president to face criminal prosecution. Trump on April 4 pleaded not guilty to all charges.
The unprecedented indictment has united all major Republican 2024 hopefuls to rally behind Trump, and Gingrich—who says the case from Bragg is no more than a “publicity stunt”—said the prosecution has made it “very hard for anybody to attack him, because it sounds like you’re siding with the corrupt establishment.”
Trump, Gingrich said, will likely become the Republican nominee and “Biden’s policy failures are going to make it more likely that Trump will win the election.”
“He’ll be the first American President to lose an election and come back and win a second time after Grover Cleveland,” who won the presidency in 1884 and then again in 1892, Gingrich said.
Gingrich quoted from a speech from a Cleveland ally, Democrat Edward S. Bragg from Wisconsin, who said that people love and respect Cleveland “not only for himself, for his character, for his integrity and judgment and iron will, but they love him most of all for the enemies he has made.”
“That could pretty easily be applied to Donald Trump,” Gingrich said.
He added that the indictment is a “very bad, very dangerous precedent” that reminds him of the lead up to the fall of the Roman Republic, exacerbated by economic issues, government corruption, and crime.
“It has to worry you, to watch some of the stuff going on here,” he said. “Because you now have people on the left who are willing to abuse the law, do things that clearly have nothing to do with justice.”
The unsealing of the Trump indictment has led some legal analysts to question the merits of the charges, and in Gingrich’s view, “every time you turn around, the case gets weaker.”
“It tells you how much they hate and fear Donald Trump,” he said. “We’ve been through seven years now of those constant attacks by the corrupt establishment against Donald Trump, and they’re going to continue as long as he stays in public life.”
From Trump’s standpoint, Gingrich said, his attackers “invented the Russian dossier” which falsely alleged that the 2016 Trump campaign had connections with Russia—“a lie” over which two media outlets, The New York Times and Washington Post, won Pulitzer Prizes “for reporting it as the truth.”
Then, during the 2020 election year, 51 former U.S. intelligence officials collectively downplayed a damaging story revolving around a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, son of then-presidential candidate Joe Biden and Trump’s Democrat rival, claiming that there was reason to believe the story was a Russian plant, without providing any evidence in the face of the physical evidence in Republican possession. That was on top of two impeachment efforts targeting Trump from House Democrats that both died in the Senate.
“He’s just been under unending constant fights,” Gingrich said. “And I think it’s because he’s such an enormous threat to the entire system of the left.”
