President Trump should encourage House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to do more joint TV appearances, Newt Gingrich joked Sunday.

Gingrich's comments come after Pelosi, D-Calif., and Schumer, D-N.Y., were mocked online last week for their awkward televised response to Trump's prime-time Oval Office address regarding his demand for roughly $5.6 billion in border wall funding which has resulted in a political standoff at the root of a record-breaking partial federal government shutdown.

“[Schumer] and Pelosi were so bad the other night that the president ought to sort of pay them to go on TV once a week," Gingrich, himself a former House speaker, told John Catsimatidis on AM 970's "Cats Roundtable" radio program, based in New York.

"If that’s the future of the Democratic Party, it’s going to be a very long election for Democrats in 2020," Catsimatidis said. "I think that [Schumer is] dealing with the objective reality that his party will not tolerate working with Trump, and so in order to survive, he is taking positions and doing things that you or I would think make no sense at all and don’t fit everything we know about him as a person."

Although the Democrats' on-air rebuttal got higher ratings than the president's address, their wooden appearance was widely mocked on social media. They drew comparisons to the twins in 1980 classic horror film "The Shining" and the brother-sister duo depicted in Grant Wood's 1930 oil painting "American Gothic." The Democratic leaders were also likened to a set of disappointed parents.

"I feel like I just brought home a bad report card," MoveOn's Jordan Uhl tweeted.

[Opinion: Twitter mocks ‘creepy twins’ Schumer and Pelosi for their Trump response]