“This is a city which if you don't shove it as hard as you can while you have momentum, it will just surround you,” Newt Gingrich said. | Getty Gingrich: Trump must act fast or get sucked into the swamp

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Sunday that President-elect Donald Trump must “swing for the fences” in his first year in the White House, or else risk being sucked in by the Washington “swamp” that he has pledged to drain.

“This is a city which if you don't shove it as hard as you can while you have momentum, it will just surround you,” Gingrich said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday morning. “I mean, the swamp doesn't want to be drained. And the swamp will just suck you in if you let it. So he needs to have a very, very aggressive first year.”


Gingrich said Trump must be a “salesman” as president, loudly backing the package of proposals he will try to enact once he assumes office.

It is especially important, Gingrich said, that Trump seek bipartisan cooperation wherever possible and floated a massive infrastructure project as one issue where he might find a willing ally in incoming Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and other Democrats.

“I think it's very important that Trump try to have as many Democrats as possible help him do this,” the former House speaker said. “Because one of the lessons of the Obama years is, if you do things that are big on a purely partisan basis, they're not stable. I mean, I think Trump wants to change America to make it great again for a generation. Not just for eight years.”

Trump’s loss in the popular vote to Hillary Clinton will “to some extent” prove a challenge, Gingrich said, but he also noted that the former secretary of state’s higher overall vote total is largely the result of her running up the score in California, where the GOP does not compete.

The former House speaker has previously voiced support for doing away with the Electoral College and said Sunday that “in the long run, you want to find a way to have the whole country represented.”

Gingrich dismissed as “garbage” the notion that Trump’s candidacy had somehow given voice to the “alt-right,” a movement attacked often as promoting racist, misogynistic and anti-Semitic rhetoric. Instead, Gingrich said the president-elect is “a mainstream conservative who wants to profoundly take on the left.” He recommended that Trump remain himself once he assumes the presidency and “the country will organize itself around who he is.”

As for Trump’s prolific and often bombastic Twitter account, Gingrich said: “My advice to that is to always have an editor.” He said the social media platform, which has gotten Trump into hot water on occasion, is a powerful means of communicating directly with the public without having to go through a media outlet that might distort the message he is seeking to convey.

“Donald should [keep tweeting],” Gingrich said. “I mean, look, it's a technique for reaching 13 or 14 million people at no cost and gets him around the New York Times.”