Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich says that the Orlando nightclub shooting is an “act of war” that should prompt American leaders to finally understand the reality of radical Islamic terrorism.

“We have a commander in chief in Barack Obama who explicitly lied to the American people about Benghazi and who is now explicitly lying to the American people about Orlando,” Gingrich said in a wide-ranging interview with “Breitbart News Sunday” on Sirius/XM Patriot Channel 125.

Gingrich made clear the stakes for this November’s election, and made a blunt and effective case for why Republicans must win it.

“It’s totally utterly dishonest and misleading,” Gingrich said of Obama’s press conference Sunday, during which he did not describe the shooting as an act of radical Islamic terrorism. “This is an act of war. This is an act committed by a dedicated Islamic supremacist. In the world of an Islamic supremacist, killing gays is totally legitimate. And this is part of what the gay community has to come to grips with. These people are their mortal enemies. Literally mortal. Will kill them.”

“This person was acting within the framework of a Sharia position that we have still refused to come to grips with. The fact that the FBI was following this guy in 2013 and following him in 2014 tells them that the guidelines for them are much too strict and much too biased,” Gingrich said.

“Barack Obama cannot accept the reality that Islamic supremacists want to destroy Western civilization and in the process want to kill as many Americans as they can. He just can’t come to grips with it. This is a bizarre period. Not since [President James] Buchanan refused to accept that the Civil War was coming and allowed the situation to decay for over a year, not since then have we had a president so totally out of touch with reality.”

“If that means the Congress needs to issue a declaration of war against Islamic Supremacism. I called for this, by the way, on 9/11 and 9/12. I said immediately, 9/11 is an act of war and we should declare war. And I got pushed back very hard by the [George W.] Bush administration. And they were wrong. Look, we need to understand: we are at war. And anything less than an understanding that we are at war weakens us in the eye of an enemy that wants to destroy us.”

‘The Congress has to hold hearings. The Congress has to start passing laws. They have to put Obama and Clinton in a box,” Gingrich said. “And then you have to win the general election this fall.”

Gingrich, who expressed his sympathies for Donald Trump and the Trump movement before the Iowa caucus, offered political advice for Republicans over the next five months: “The way you do that is you have a great national debate, and you win the election, and you defeat the people who are nuts.”