Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. (AP photo)

(CNSNews.com) -- Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Friday that Trumpism is all about getting things done in government and changing whatever is not working.

“Trumpism is going to be about the following principle: If you see something that’s really stupid, change it,” Gingrich said during a speech at the American Legislative Exchange Council’s (ALEC) States & Nation Policy Summit held in Washington, D.C.

Gingrich praised President-elect Donald Trump, saying that “the heart of the reason that Trump emerged was he actually knows how to do things.

“That is, when Trump would go out and raise the money to build a building, the people actually expected a building. And so he had to contemplate what does it take to build a building? And then he actually had to get the building built,” Gingrich explained.

The former speaker told the audience of state legislators that with Republicans now in the majority in Congress, it is time for them to learn a new “evolutionary process led by an entrepreneurial leader who has three characteristics that are amazing.”

“He’s three different people,” Gingrich said of the president-elect. “If you want to understand how Trump operates, he has the disruptive patterns of Andrew Jackson, he has the sheer biological energy of Theodore Roosevelt, and he has the compulsive salesmanship of P.T. Barnum.

“And these three weave together to produce outcomes that are dramatically better than anyone I’ve ever seen.”

Gingrich noted that the Republican Party is now at a “watershed” moment in the life of the nation.

“We are potentially, if we do our jobs, at a genuine watershed. I always use the watershed model because when the rain comes down, if it hits this side of the watershed, it goes this way. If it hits this side, it goes this way. It’s decisive.

“So, for example, in the Appalachians, there’s a point the water will go either to the Gulf of Mexico, or it’ll go to the Atlantic. It’s that decisive,” Gingrich said.

Gingrich pointed out there are now “over 4,100 state legislators, the most in the history of the Republican Party since its founding in 1854. The most ever. We have 34 governors, which ties the most in modern times. We have 25 states in which the legislature and the governor are Republican, which means in theory, we should be held accountable for whether or not we’re really different.”

Gingrich noted that during the presidential campaign, Trump frequently asked his advice before taking the debate stage.

“Every time I said to him: ‘I don’t have any advice about debating.’ I said: ‘You’re a better debater than I am,’ because he’s totally intuitive,” Gingrich said.

“He somehow senses the audience, he senses his opponent. He figures out exactly what language will work. His opponent stands there like a deer in the headlights, going: ‘You’re not allowed to say that.’ And he just pounds on them.”

However, the former speaker also stressed the fact that although Donald Trump won the election, the hard work has only just begun for him.

“I said to the President-elect the day after the election: ‘You have now won a ticket to the dance. That’s all. Now you’ve got to dance,” Gingrich said.

“And you’ve got to dance well enough to get re-elected and you gotta dance for four more years. You gotta dance well enough to be successful as a Republican, and in eight years of good dancing, then you can write your memoir.

“But it ain’t like the election. The election was the beginning, not the end,” he concluded.