(Screenshot: C-SPAN)
In a speech about President-elect Donald Trump and his incoming administration, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) explained that Trump is a highly successful marketer, which the mainstream media -- what he called the "propaganda media" -- do not understand and will not understand until they accept that they are dealing with a very talented and intelligent person.
“This is not easy," said Gingrich on Tuesday at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. "I’m just telling you, one of the great disgraces of the propaganda media we have -- all of us on the right should describe it the 'propaganda media,' drop the term ‘news media’ until they earn it -- and begin to realize that the propaganda media cannot come to grips with the level of talent that they’re dealing with.”
"People forget who Donald J. Trump is," said Gingrich. "[P]eople in the elites couldn’t figure out that this is a guy who’d made his entire living marketing to consumers. That he had thought every day, ‘How do I get you to come to my golf course? How do I get you to come to my hotel? How do I get you to come to my casino? How do I get you to buy my tie? How do I get you to watch my TV show?’"
"So, he has this intuition," said Gingrich. "We were talking about debating one day and he said, ‘What is your advice?’ I said, ‘I don’t have any advice.’ I said, ‘You’re a better debater than I am.’ Because – and he’s a totally different debater than I am, I’m not denigrating myself, I’m okay – but he intuits the audience in a way I can’t do. I cannot get the rhythm the way he does."
"And so, you had low-energy Jeb, which, by the way, is totally untrue," siad the former House Speaker. "Jeb Bush is a perfectly fine guy, was a great governor of Florida, is a good friend of ours. But he [Trump] said it in such a way that it stuck. It stuck to such a degree that it got inside Jeb’s head. And Jeb ends up running around New Hampshire, literally running, to prove he’s not low energy."
Commenting further on Trump's debate style, Gingrich related, “I was asked one time, as part of this process, I was on Bill O’Reilly one night in the very heat of the primary season, and O’Reilly said to me, ‘Why don’t the Republican candidates attack Trump? He’s clearly the frontrunner, they need to attack him.’ I said, ‘Bill, Donald Trump is the grizzly bear in The Revenant [movie].’ If you get his attention, he will get awake. When he gets awake, he will walk over, bite your face off and sit on you. The other candidates watch him do that and go, ‘not me, oh no, no, no. Let the bear eat. It’s okay. I don’t want to bother him.’ And that started with ‘low-energy Jeb’ [Bush]."
President-elect Donald J. Trump and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush. (AP)
"All these people, the news media, and this is a major part of the watershed that we’re in the early stages of, and why I so much wanted to come here and share with you today," said Gingrich. "This is a genuine watershed."
"There is an old world that’s much deeper than just liberalism," he said. "And there is the post-Nov. 8 world, if we can make it real. I tell everybody the Trump rally has to be turned into the Trump reality. There’s a big gap in those two. It’s going to take a lot of work."