When Kellyanne Conway used the term “alternative facts” in an interview with NBC, the statement went viral not just because of its brazen insincerity, but because there was a measure of transparency to it: in our current political climate, there seems to be, as Newton’s third law would dictate, an equal and opposite alternative for every fact, each weaponized by talking heads to bolster their a priori convictions.

Newt Gingrich’s new book, Understanding Trump, is a good example of this. In an effort to portray the president as a gravely misunderstood working-class hero, an outsider politician victimized by an antagonistic mainstream media, the book, released last week, proceeds from a set of facts that should be practically unrecognizable to anyone who’s seen Trump speak or breathe or, most of all, govern.

Gingrich’s manifesto includes a foreword by none other than Eric Trump, who calls the book a “look inside possibly the greatest campaign of all time”. What follows is a diagnosis of the president’s unlikely rise as the product of several factors, some extraneous and others unique to Trump himself. Some of the book’s most salient points are explored below:

‘Trump is far more a product of Queens than Manhattan’

Gingrich fawns over Trump for eating fast food aboard his ‘nicely outfitted’ Boeing 757. Photograph: Carlos Osorio/AP

Gingrich begins by casting Trump not as a mega-rich Manhattan socialite but as a Queens kid of humble origins. In fact, a not insignificant portion of the book’s introduction is dedicated to framing Trump as this, not that: “an entrepreneur, not an academic”; “a builder, not a financier”; “a pragmatist, not an ideologue”.

It’s hard to argue with those characterizations; Trump is certainly not an academic, nor has he seemed particularly ideological in the vein of other Republican politicians. But Gingrich’s attempt to put in prose what rightwing pundits have been arguing for a year and a half – that Trump understands and champions the issues facing ordinary American workers – seems misplaced when positioned next to anecdotes about his own personal interactions with the president.

Gingrich recalls a meeting he and his wife Callista had with Trump in Des Moines before his campaign kicked off. Trump wanted an estimate from Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, of how much a presidential campaign might cost. Gingrich tells him he’ll need $70 to $80m to be “competitive.”

“His response was priceless,” Gingrich writes. “After a moment of thought, he said: ‘$70 to $80m: that would be a yacht. This would be a lot more fun than a yacht!”

Later, Gingrich fawns over Trump for eating fast food aboard his “nicely outfitted” Boeing 757; then he commends his “lifetime interest in working people.” Finally, he praises the president’s “entrepreneurial rather than academic” approach to knowledge, arguing that it’s unimportant whether or not he knows the capitals of 42 countries since, “in stark contrast to Washington intelligentsia”, Trump “makes certain he knows what he needs to know to be successful at the time he needs to know it.”

In that same vein, Gingrich writes that the president “gets up everyday and wants to know what’s really going on” – providing as evidence Trump’s willingness to take a congratulatory phone call after the election from the president of Taiwan.

That incident was largely seen as an act of diplomatic folly that temporarily threatened the US relationship with China. But shortly after, when the Trump Organization was granted preliminary approval to register 38 trademarks in China, Trump quickly reverted back to the One China policy after flirting with the idea of abandoning it.

‘Trump is effective at busting up conventional wisdom’

Trump: the four-legged table. Photograph: Joshua Roberts/Reuters

In her perceptive 1995 essay for the New York Review of Books, The Teachings of Speaker Gingrich, Joan Didion wrote the following about the former speaker of the House: “The positions he takes are acutely tuned to the unexamined fears and resentments of large numbers of Americans, yet he stands, in his rhetoric, alone, opposed by ‘the system’, by ‘Washington’, by ‘the liberal elite,’ by ‘the east coast elite’...or simply by an unspecified ‘they.’”

In Understanding Trump, Gingrich, still preoccupied with “they,” rides Trump’s pseudo-populist wave to advance his own ideas. In the book, he writes that to understand Trump we must think of him as a four-legged table, each limb denoting a piece of the ideological whole: anti-left, anti-stupid, anti-PC, pro-American.

“The ability to puncture conventional wisdom is important because much of conventional wisdom in Washington is dumb,” Gingrich writes. “A perfect example is the ridiculous uproar when it came out that Trump had decided to stop receiving daily intelligence briefings, opting instead for briefings two or three times a week. Trump broke up this nonsense quickly, explaining that the briefing was so repetitive that it was a waste of time.”

One wonders if Gingrich couldn’t find a better anecdote to aid in his portrait of Trump as a man of the people, on a mission to cut the bureaucratic fat and streamline governmental processes. Instead, the best he could do is regurgitate what the far less articulate Trump has said himself, a more galvanizing, vulgar variation of the four-legged anti-table.

‘The intellectual yet idiots will no longer chart our course’

‘President Trump is leading a movement to bring tacit knowledge to the forefront of our federal system.’ Photograph: Mark Wilson/Getty Images

In a chapter called “The Rise of the IYI,” Gingrich again finds way to frame Trump’s inexperience as an asset in an indictment of what author Nassim Taleb refers to as the “Intellectual Yet Idiot.”

In an essay published in September of 2016, and later parroted by Gingrich in response to the first presidential debate, Taleb popularized the term “IYI”, a more specific moniker for the class of persons otherwise referred to as elites, cucks and snowflakes.

Taleb characterizes the IYI as someone who subscribes to the New Yorker, has attended a TED Talk, and “doesn’t even deadlift”. He goes on: “Beware the semi-erudite who thinks he is an erudite. He fails to naturally detect sophistry.”

There’s a kind of irony in Gingrich’s coopting Taleb’s argument for the purposes of Understanding Trump; it seems the former speaker, who made a career out of fanning the flames of government skepticism, has grown less capable of detecting sophistry than he once was.

The shilling continues when Gingrich brings in Michael Polanyi to strengthen his defense of Trump: “Explicit knowledge is what you would learn from a traditional education, while tacit knowledge is what you learn by actually doing something.

“In the United States we have a surplus of explicit knowledge in our bureaucracy, political establishment, media, and institutions of higher learning,” Gingrich, a guy who’s written about a profound high-school experience reading writer and biochemist Isaac Asimov, continues. “President Trump is leading a movement to bring tacit knowledge to the forefront of our federal system, so that it can return to being a practical government that effectively works for its people.”

‘America is undergoing a great transition, and Trump was the only candidate who seemed aware of it’

Trump: praised with Gingrichian platitudes. Photograph: David Zalubowski/AP

And here, before he uses the book’s second half to discuss how Trump and the GOP can successfully govern, we encounter more of Gingrich’s hagiography as he praises Trump for identifying a thirst for change within the electorate.

First, Gingrich points to the left’s “self-narrowing bullying culture of privilege-checking”, denouncing identity liberalism as a “toxic” trend that contributed to a wave of resentment on which Trump capitalized.

“If the prism through which you view the world is one defined by race, gender, and sexual orientation,” Gingrich writes, “then everything must be motivated by either acceptance or hostility to those aspects of identity.”

Speaking of Trump’s inaugural address, Gingrich argues that “Trump spoke directly to the millions of frustrated Americans who have watched their communities decay while the intellectual yet idiots in our government and media claimed the economy was improving, unemployment was down, and America was leading in the world.”

The book, in total, is filled with Gingrichian platitudes of this sort. They don’t exactly help us “understand Trump,” though they do offer a look into the rhetorical acrobatics one might employ to defend the indefensible.

As for what Gingrich has to say to those who oppose the president, a useful, Trumpian distillation of his views can be found of the very first page: “They are either clueless or lying. Ignore them.”