What if it isn’t over?

Newt Gingrich, one of Donald Trump’s closest confidants and most visible boosters, on Friday raised the novel possibility of a Trump-Clinton rematch in 2020 — a spooky Halloween-weekend notion for the many voters who just want the ugly race to stop.


“The challenge for everybody’s going to be, 'What if he gets 48 or 49 percent?’” Gingrich said in a video interview for POLITICO’s “Open Mike” series. “And what if he says: ‘You know, I like this campaign and stuff. I ain’t leaving’? There will then be a Trump Party.”

Speaking a few hours before the FBI’s email review became public, Gingrich declared that “odds are better than even” that Trump will win.

But the former House speaker added that if not, Trump might form “a Trump Party inside the Republican Party, just the way William Jennings Bryan brought populism into the Democratic Party.”

Gingrich floated the notion when he was asked if Trump TV — a new media empire that might emerge from the campaign’s aftermath — would be a good idea.

“It’d be silly,” Gingrich said at his office in Arlington, Va. “He’s bigger than that. … It’s an irrelevancy. I mean, I know what it takes to run CNN or Fox. These are big operations, and he could do that if he wants to get out of politics, but he doesn’t need it.”

And so you think he might run again in 2020?

"I think that’s very possible,” Gingrich responded. "I think he likes being part of a movement — he likes thinking of it as a movement. … I was thinking about this, [and] he said to me the other morning, … ‘I sent out one tweet and 15,000 people showed up.’”

POLITICO asked: So you’re predicting a Trump-Clinton rematch?

Gingrich: “Could be, assuming she survives.”

What do you mean “survives”?

“That she’s not impeached and convicted,” Gingrich replied. “Look … when people have time to actually digest WikiLeaks and some brave person puts together a book and goes, 'This, this, this, this, this,' it’s very hard to imagine how there’s not going to be some serious effort in the first year of her presidency.”

Gingrich said he “can imagine Trump being the guy who creates a Trump Report every morning on corruption in Washington and then goes around the country.”

“I mean, think about it,” Gingrich said, getting excited about his own idea. “This guy is worth billions of dollars, so he can get in his private plane with his team to fly wherever he wants to, to then go back either to Trump Tower or Mar-a-Lago. I mean, he can do this a long time because he likes it.”

The Trump Report, Gingrich added, could be “him looking in the camera with a teleprompter saying, ‘Here are the five examples of corruption this morning. Send us your ideas.’”

Gingrich said he hadn’t talked to Trump about the idea, “because I think he’s going to be president, and you don’t worry about these secondary things.”

“This town’s nuts,” Gingrich added. “You have a guy who can draw 30-, 40-, 50,000 people and who’s a billionaire, so he doesn’t have to go work, he doesn’t have to join some lobbying firm, OK? He could golf four days a week, and have three mass rallies a week. You get four years of that, you think there’s not going to be a Trump Party?”

Asked about a front-page article in Friday’s New York Times reporting “dark fears” among Trump supporters of “violent conflict” if Clinton wins, Gingrich said the reaction to a Democratic win would be “rage and disgust”: “I think it’ll be very difficult for the country. … I think their message to the Republican leadership will be, ‘You had better prepare to fight her every single day.’”

Would he consider the result legitimate?

“Depends what you mean by ‘legitimate,’” Gingrich replied. “Do I think that the entire national establishment, having sought to impose itself dishonestly and ruthlessly, was able to pull off stopping the American people? Yeah, they might be able to do that. … There’s no question in my mind in Philadelphia you’re going to have massive theft. I mean, anybody who thinks you’re not going to have massive theft in Philadelphia is either foolish or a liar.”

Trump also commented on the finding by the POLITICO Caucus poll that 71 percent of GOP insiders think polls underestimate Trump’s support because of secret Trump voters who don’t want to admit their choice to pollsters.

“The secret Trump vote is a person who knows if they tell you they’re for Trump, you’ll yell at them,” Gingrich said. “And that’s caused by the news media creating such an active suppression of Trump …

“What you have is the entire national establishment, including the news media, telling you that you’re an idiot if you’re for Donald Trump, or you’re a racist or you’re a homophobe or you’re something. Well, why would you put up with that kind of beating? And particularly because Trump supporters are particularly anti-establishment, which means they assume there are bad people out there who will get them.”

Discussing Trump’s technique in the Republican primary debates, Gingrich said “one of his key techniques is you hit him and he has to own you. I mean, it’s his doctrine. It’s not psychological. I did Bill O’Reilly one night in the middle of all this and he said, ‘Why are these guys so hesitant about attacking him?’ And I said, ‘Bill, Donald Trump is the grizzly bear in ‘The Revenant.’ If you get his attention, he’s going to walk over, bite your face off, sit on you for a while, and then wander off and go to sleep.”

And Marco Rubio was Leo DiCaprio?

Trump laughed: “That’s right.”

Gingrich said Trump “has grown immensely” during the campaign, and that part of his success, which fooled the experts, is “because sheer name ID is an enormous advantage.”

“None of us who think of ourselves as sophisticated had paid attention to ‘The Apprentice,’” Gingrich said. “Since it wasn’t ‘Downton Abbey’ and it wasn’t on PBS, none of the people in the elite even knew it existed. …

“So when he saw a camera, he knew what to do. Now, none of us got it because what he did was aimed precisely at blue-collar workers in a bar. I mean, he knew that this was his core market, and he knew that they liked guys who were tough. …

“He knew from all of NBC’s research why people watched ‘The Apprentice,’ why it had good ratings. … It had a real feel of reality. You thought you were learning something. And he is a very dynamic personality. He’s in-your-face. And all those things came together, and so Trump applied them as a national personality.”