Thursday on Fox News Channel’s “Hannity,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich offered his theory on how it was Bill and Hillary Clinton were able to tout themselves as the champions of women’s rights despite having accepted money from Middle Eastern countries with lackluster women’s rights records.

Gingrich summed it up for host Sean Hannity by saying the Clintons had perfected the art of “being in the mud.”

Partial transcript as follows:

I think a — two segments or three segments going country by country over how they treat women, how they treat gays and lesbians, how they treat Christians and Jews, how much money they gave to the Clintons, or, and as you mentioned briefly, looking at the Iranian deal and the amount of money Bill Clinton made for their personal family out of that kind of deal, where the Russians are clearly paying them off — I think there a lots of things — the challenge you’ve got with the Clintons is nobody has been better at being in the mud than they have, and they can live in the mud.

For some reason, they’ve acquired this skill that if they can just get it down there and get dirty enough where people get disgusted, and in disgust, they might be able to win.

The clearer it is how bad they are, the clearer it is what the choices in your life are — you know, for every American to understand, this is how bad the economy is going to be, this is how she’s going to kill jobs, this is how bad our security is going to be, these are the risks she’s going to take bringing in unvetted Syrian refugees.

I mean, there are so many things wrong with the Clinton campaign that if we could find a way to get that across — she gets — you saw in the debate the other night. The strongest points for Trump were the first half of the debate, where they were on big issues. And on every big issue, he was beating her.

And then Lester helped her get off on the junk, and it was totally one- sided. I’ve said over and over, this was the Holt-Clinton versus Trump debate. And let me tell you I believe Anderson Cooper will be vastly worse.