Julia Ioffe is contributing writer at Politico Magazine.

If you’re of a certain age, there’s not much you know about Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the House. You might remember his failed 2012 presidential campaign, in which he briefly led the GOP field, and during which he declared, “By the end of my second term, we will have the first permanent base on the moon and it will be American.” If you’re a little bit older, like me, you might remember that he was the man who shut down the government back sometime around the blizzard of 1996. And today, you likely know him mostly as the gadfly circling the yellow-orange head of the presumptive Republican nominee, constantly telling the media that he, the eternally humble public servant, would not say no if called on to be Donald Trump’s running mate. “If Trump offers the position and is serious about it, which I think he would be after our conversations, listen, I would feel compelled to serve the country," Gingrich has said. Others say that, behind the scenes, Gingrich is not so phlegmatic: He has been actively lobbying to get Trump’s VP slot. On Tuesday, Trump told the New York Times that Gingrich was on his short list (and that he was “excellent”) and Fox News suspended its contract with Gingrich as a commentator in anticipation of such a nomination. By Wednesday, there was word that he was in a plane with Sean Hannity on his way to meet Trump—whatever that means.

Even if Gingrich doesn’t get the nod, he's enjoying a rare third political life, and a massive opportunity: He could still well serve in a Trump administration, or, if that doesn’t happen, be the man who helps reassemble the GOP Humpty Dumpty. “When the debacle of the Trump election is over, how do you pick up the pieces of the party and rebuild it?” says one Republican operative. “Newt could do that.”


If you're encountering Gingrich for the first time this year, it might be easy to imagine that, with his mop of white hair and long track record in D.C., he's a quintessential Washington graybeard, just the man to lend some policy and legislative expertise to a candidate who has never held public office of any kind. “He’s a one-stop shop of policy knowledge on such a wide array of issues, more than anyone in Washington,” says Republican lobbyist Ed Kutler, who worked with Gingrich in the House in the 1990s. “As much as he was a big thinker, he was a really good legislator. For a guy like Trump, that would be very helpful.” He’d be the link, the thinking goes, between the rodeo that is Trump World and the stuffy Washington establishment.

Donald Trump is making Newt look like a fairly conventional politician,” said a former Hill staffer. “Nobody would’ve said that back in the day.”

But hold up. Seriously? Newt Gingrich? For anyone who lived through his first, scorched-earth tenure in Washington, the idea that he’s reemerging as some kind of reality-based, ambassadorial elder statesman is nothing short of bewildering. Gingrich, former Obama adviser (and Gingrich friend) Van Jones told me, “was a bomb thrower’s bomb thrower.”

“He’s always been on the edges of what was acceptable,” said one former Hill staffer from Newt’s congressional heyday. “Donald Trump is making Newt look like a fairly conventional politician,” the staffer said. “Nobody would’ve said that back in the day.”

Back when the average millennial voter was still playing the original Pokemon—or, you know, being born—Newt Gingrich brought a new, confrontational, shoot-the-hostages approach to Congress, shutting down the government twice in the process. He's the man who divorced his first wife while she was in the hospital for cancer, and was eventually forced to resign as speaker not only because of an embarrassing Republican wipeout at the polls, but also because Congress began investigating a labyrinth of fraudulent nonprofits that looked like the kind of scandal that would send anyone back into permanently quiet retirement.

But no: He’s back. Again. So who is Newt Gingrich, and why do people get so worked up about him? Here’s your primer, millennials.

Newt’s an Army brat, but not a soldier

He was born Newton Leroy McPherson in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1943, nine months after his 16-year-old mother and 19-year-old father got divorced after being married for just three days. “We were married on a Saturday, and I left him on a Tuesday,” his mother, Kathleen Daugherty, told the Times in 1994. “I got Newtie in those three days.”

When Newt was 3, Kathleen remarried. The man, Robert Gingrich, adopted young Newt and gave him his last name. The new and growing family bounced around the world with Robert, an artillery officer. When Newt was 15 and the family was stationed in Orleans, France, his father took him to see the World War I battlefield of Verdun. The sight of the decaying bones of unidentified soldiers shocked him. “I learned that the freedoms we now enjoy and take for granted were paid for in blood,” he would later write in his book Five Principles for a Successful Life, which bears a certain conceptual resemblance to Donald J. Trump's Art of the Deal.

Gingrich pauses during a radio speech in 1998. | Getty Images

Like the author of that book, Gingrich also didn’t serve in the Army, despite his pride in being an Army brat. He took student and parental deferments during the Vietnam War. In 1989, he told Vanity Fair that he regretted the decision. Kinda. “Given everything I believe in, a large part of me thinks I should have gone over,” he said. But, he added, “Part of the question I had to ask myself was what difference I would have made.”

Newt is as ambitious as he is flexible

Gingrich never lacked for a sense of his place in history. As a 15-year-old, he wrote a 180-page term paper on the balance of world power. He told his teacher he would move with his family to Georgia to “form a Republican party and become a congressman.” (A curious thing to say, given there was already a Republican Party.) Later, when he was a first-year history professor at West Georgia College—Gingrich earned a Ph.D. in history from Tulane—he applied to be chair of the department. He didn’t get the post but, undeterred, a year later he lobbied to become president of the entire college. That sense of wanting to be at the center of events never abandoned him. In 1994, he told a reporter: “People like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz.”

Gingrich first ran for Congress in 1974, telling his friends his goal wasn’t just to be elected, but to be speaker of the House. He lost. He lost again in 1976. In 1978 he won, and he arrived in Washington on the newly ascendant conservative fringe of the Republican Party, constantly trying to pull it rightward. This was new in Congress, and new to Gingrich as well: He'd been considered a liberal earlier in the decade. (Why the switch? "He saw that swinging to the right as Reagan did was the way to get to the goal he wanted, which was Speaker," his former minister told the New York Times in 1994.)

Gingrich was raised Lutheran, but he became a Southern Baptist when he moved to Georgia and began to aim for a congressional seat.

Today, Gingrich is a Roman Catholic.

Newt’s personal life is a hot mess

The first person Gingrich married was his high school geometry teacher. When he went to college at Emory, it was mostly to follow her, a woman named Jackie Battley, who was seven years his senior. He showed up at her door as soon as he graduated high school and persuaded her to date him. They got married in 1962, while he was still in college, and, as he put it, “two days after I was 19.” They had two daughters with whom Gingrich is still close. Jackie worked to support him through grad school and worked tirelessly on his congressional campaigns.

During his 1976 run for Congress, Gingrich speaks at a podium with his wife Jackie and daughters Jackie Sue and Kathy nearby. | AP Photo/Calvin Cruce, Atlanta Journal Constitution

When he finally won his congressional seat in Georgia, in 1978, he beat a woman named Virginia Shapard. Her plan, should she win, was to commute between Georgia and Washington and to leave her children at home with a nanny. Gingrich seized on this and ran an ad accusing her of abandoning her family. Under a photo of his own family, he wrote “When elected, Newt will keep his family together.” Two years later, he and Jackie were divorced.

According to a Mother Jones profile of Gingrich a few years later, he was philandering while Jackie was toiling on his campaigns. Once, a campaign aide was walking Gingrich’s two daughters to Gingrich’s car, “only to find the candidate with a woman, her head buried in his lap.” Another woman who claimed Gingrich was coming on to her when her husband was out of town recalled that, “on one occasion, he visited under the guise of comforting her after the death of a relative, and instead tried to seduce her.” In April 1980, he filed for divorce. At the time, Jackie was fighting uterine cancer.

From the Mother Jones profile:



Jackie had undergone surgery for cancer of the uterus during the 1978 campaign, a fact Gingrich was not loath to use in conversations or speeches that year. After the separation in 1980, she had to be operated on again, to remove another tumor. While she was still in the hospital, according to [Gingrich friend and former press secretary Lee] Howell, ‘Newt came up there with his yellow legal pad, and he had a list of things on how the divorce was going to be handled. He wanted her to sign it. She was still recovering from surgery, still sort of out of it, and he comes in with a yellow sheet of paper, handwritten, and wants her to sign it’…

‘Jackie was kind of frumpy,’ explains Howell ... ‘She's lost a lot of weight now, but she was kind of frumpy in Washington, and she was seven years older than he was. And I guess Newt thought, well, it doesn't look good for an articulate, young, aggressive, attractive congressman to have a frumpy old wife.’

Gingrich’s fellow professor at West Georgia College, Leonard Carter, had a similar story, telling CNN that Gingrich told him, “You know and I know that she's not young enough or pretty enough to be the wife of a president.”

Gingrich later changed his story, saying that it was Jackie who had filed for divorce. Court documents discovered in 2011 revealed the opposite was true. Jackie, in a rare interview with the Washington Post in 1985, confirmed the story. “He can say that we had been talking about it for 10 years, but the truth is that it came as a complete surprise.”

In April 1980, Newt filed for divorce while his wife, Jackie, was in the hospital fighting uterine cancer.

By then, Gingrich was already seeing a 28-year-old congressional staffer named Marianne Ginther, to whom he introduced his parents that summer while Jackie was in the hospital. In 1981, six months after the divorce with Jackie was finalized, Gingrich married Marianne. Meanwhile, Gingrich skimped and haggled on child support and alimony to the point that Jackie’s church (in Gingrich’s district) took up a collection to pay her electricity bills. At the time, he was spending $400 a month on dry cleaning and other sundries.

The Mother Jones profile, which was published in 1984 and highlighted Gingrich’s hypocrisy in peddling traditional family values while widely, eagerly engaging in adultery, was a hit on Capitol Hill. Democrats feverishly Xeroxed the piece and mailed it around to fellow members. But it didn’t seem to teach Gingrich anything: His romance with a House staffer (while he was still married to Marianne) was heating up just as he was going after President Bill Clinton for his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

This hurt the Republican Party “with more Christian-motivated voters who were still new to the Republican coalition,” says Michael Franc, who runs the conservative Hoover Institute’s D.C. bureau and, until recently, was policy director for House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy. He was a staffer with the Republican leadership when Gingrich was speaker. “That probably stalled that movement for a little bit from Southern Democrats becoming rock-ribbed, loyal Republican voters. Back in the mid-'90s, the move was still in progress.”

Newt, like Trump, collects ex-wives

Gingrich’s women seem to have a very precise shelf life: He left Jackie after 19 years of marriage. By the end of 19 years with Marianne, Gingrich moved on again. He had spent the past six years cavorting with a young, platinum blonde congressional scheduler named Callista Bisek, and Gingrich asked Marianne for an open marriage. “You want me all to yourself,” he allegedly told his wife of nearly two decades. “Callista doesn’t care what I do.” When Marianne declined, Gingrich filed for divorce. Within months, he was married to Callista.

Newt and Callista Gingrich hit the campaign trail during Newt’s failed 2012 bid for the presidency. | Getty Images

That marriage is 16 years old, which could be worrying Callista, but Newt and the people who know him insist this time is different. “They’re the cutest couple ever,” says Jones. “Total love bugs.”

Still, Republicans worry that a ticket with Gingrich would look even worse among conservative Christians, who are already skeptical of Trump’s bona fides, or among women, who loathe him. “They have six marriages between the two of them,” says one Republican operative. “If you’re looking to address the woman vote, this doesn’t really help with that.”

Newt has a healthy self-esteem

“He really believed when he was a junior in high school that he was destined to save western civilization," a school friend told the Post in 1985. During the beginning of his congressional career, Gingrich unself-consciously referred to himself as a “revolutionary.”

“He had a stunning level of arrogance,” says Gene Sperling, who ran the National Economic Council for Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. He also had to deal with Gingrich in various budget negotiations throughout the 1990s. “He would kind of tell Clinton that—he’d have some example of a speaker and president who worked together”—it was, according to one of Gingrich’s former staffers, Republican President Ronald Reagan and Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, a Democrat—“and imply that if you make me a sort of co-president, I’ll work with you. If not, I’ll take you down.” After he was elected speaker, Gingrich publicly asked Clinton whether the presidency was still relevant.

Newt likes big ideas. Details? Not so much

Gingrich styles himself a big-ideas, think-outside-the-box kind of guy. In 1994, he penned a national platform for Republican congressional candidates and called it a Contract with America. It was an attack on taxes, welfare, moral decadence and the entrenched political establishment. Its promises included a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution; a crime bill financing prison construction and additional law enforcement; an exhortation to “discourage illegitimacy and teen pregnancy” and reform welfare; increased military spending and decreased participation in the U.N.; capital gains tax cuts; and term limits for legislators.

What Newt Gingrich imagined in the 1970s, that’s the world you live in today,” says Van Jones. “You literally can’t tell the history of American politics in the 20th century without mentioning his name.”

It was a bold, conservative agenda, and politically quite popular. Gingrich and his Republican army claimed it as a mandate and continued to try to ram the Contract’s various iterations through the White House with as little compromise as possible. They wanted to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for drilling. They wanted a quarter-of-a-trillion dollars in tax cuts. They wanted to get rid of certain government agencies. They wanted to cut funding to the congressional Black Caucus.

Clinton vetoed them all, but those big ideas had helped win the House for the GOP in 1994—the first time the Republicans had a majority in 40 years—and they changed the identity of the Republican Party. “Ideas became the distinguishing trait,” says Franc, who adds: “Paul Ryan is a product of that.”

The constant churning out of ideas was not always a good thing. “Some were good; not all were good ideas,” says a former Gingrich staffer. “He tended to a) generate a lot of ideas, b) to verbalize them.” A lot of the ideas were half-baked, but “when you’re speaker, people are ready to march to the beat of whatever beat he called,” says the staffer. Gingrich would spout an idea, and House members would start rushing to work on and implement it, only to have Gingrich pooh-pooh the idea and move on to something else. “It was internally challenging,” says the staffer. “It did send some people off on doing things that were not that fruitful.”

From 2012: Newt wants moon colony by 2020

His ideas didn’t stop there. Gingrich was trained as a historian and obsessed with dinosaurs but always fascinated by this thing called the “future.” In the early 1990s, he wrote the forward for a book by two of his favorite authors, futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler, who predicted that the world was on the cusp of major, tectonic change on par with the Industrial Revolution. It would become a cybernetically connected, informationally driven world. It sounded loony at the time but, turns out, it wasn’t so crazy. Neither was his push, nearly 15 years ago, for electronic health records. “He talked [in the 1990s] about every child getting a laptop,” says the former Gingrich staffer. “That seemed really farfetched at the time. He’s a guy who’s been ahead of his time on a number of things.”

Even in his post-speakership years, Gingrich has been, says Franc, an “idea generator.” In the George W. Bush years, when Congress passed Medicare Part D, Franc was head of government relations at the Heritage Foundation and recalls that Gingrich “was fairly vocal with moving forward with that. Our complaint at Heritage was that it was more spending.” But the details didn’t concern Gingrich. “He didn’t worry; he wanted structural reform,” says Franc. According to a GQ profile, in August 2002, Gingrich—who was then busy consulting, writing historical fiction and setting up one business after another—sent an Iraq invasion plan to the White House and the Pentagon. The plan went as follows: Overthrow Saddam Hussein, send in the special forces, persuade the Iraqi military to switch sides. Presto, change-o!

Newt’s line in the history book: The man who poisoned Washington

More than anyone else in the modern history of Congress, it’s Gingrich who observers credit for bringing the hyperpartisan, obstructionist approach to Washington that we associate with the capital to this day. “When in doubt, Democrats lie," he said in 1988. He trafficked in sticky political nicknames: the “loony Left” and “daffy Dukakis.” In 1996, he actually sent out a memo to Republican candidates to help them learn to “speak like Newt.”

It wasn’t just rhetorical: Newt’s rise to the speakership in 1994 came after years of infighting, trying to swing the party hard to the right along with other young radicals like Trent Lott and Dick Armey. “These young members who were in the minority, in the House, were very frustrated by an inability to translate radical ideas into policy,” says Franc, of the Hoover Institute. “They were impatient.”

From the back bench, he and his radical brethren went after the congressional establishment, including fellow Republicans for not being conservative enough. He called Senate Majority leader Bob Dole, a veteran and a storied Republican, “a tax collector for the welfare state.” In 1978, he told Georgia Republicans, “I think that one of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don't encourage you to be nasty.”

If he had knives out for his own party, he had a grenade ready for the Democrats. While there had been a few government shutdowns during the 1970s and '80s, they were minor burps, and sometimes, government agencies simply continued to function without funding, knowing it was just a temporary wrinkle. The Gingrich shutdowns, say experts, were nuclear. There were two of them. The first, in November 1995, shut down the federal government for five days. The second was more extreme. In December 1995, 800,000 federal workers were furloughed for three weeks—because President Clinton didn’t accede to all of Gingrich’s demands during budget negotiations, and neither blinked.

Publicly, Gingrich blamed the breakdown of negotiations in November 1995 on Clinton, offering a strange story of Clinton snubbing him and Dole on the plane during a trip to Israel for Yitzhak Rabin’s funeral: The president had the gall to make them use Air Force One’s back stairs.

Newt Gingrich was depicted as a crying baby on this famous front page of the New York Daily News from November 16, 1995. | New York Daily News | AP Photos

But it was Gingrich and the Republicans who ended up suffering the political consequences. After the first shutdown, and Gingrich blaming it on Clinton’s aeronautical disrespect, the New York Daily News ran a now legendary cover with Gingrich as a diaper-wearing, tantrum-throwing baby and the headline CRY BABY. Just weeks after the second, longer shutdown, Clinton delivered a State of the Union address in which he pointed to a man sitting next to Hillary Clinton. He was a Social Security worker who survived the Oklahoma City bombing and rescued three people from the wreckage. Then, as Republicans gave the man a standing ovation, Clinton pressed on: The man had to work without pay during the shutdown. “Never, ever, shut the federal government down again,” he said. (Infuriated, Tom DeLay would later rewatch the scene over and over, screaming at the television.) Driven by popular anger over the shutdown, Clinton went on to win reelection in 1996, and Republicans were routed in the 1998 midterms.

If that reminds you of the tactics rowdy Republicans used in the 2013 government shutdown, you wouldn’t be wrong. Ted Cruz, the driving force behind the 2013 crisis, openly invoked Gingrich’s example. An approving Gingrich said shutdowns are “a normal part of the constitutional process.”

Newt trashes the media—and loves the media

On May 15, 1984, Gingrich raised the hackles of House Speaker Tip O’Neill by alleging Democratic congressmen were sympathizing with communist forces in Nicaragua. | AP Photos

Gingrich relished hyperbole and stunt. In the early 1980s, his hyperconservative, 12-member group in the House, called the Conservative Opportunity Society, would spend hours after the end of a normal House day delivering fiery speeches on Democratic sins to an empty chamber. The point was that the C-SPAN cameras were still rolling, beaming their angry oratory into a quarter-of-a-million American households. Infuriated, Speaker Tip O’Neill, a Democrat, made the cameras pan to show the empty seats. It didn’t stop Gingrich, who went on to accuse Democrats of being communist-lovers. O’Neill finally lost his cool, raging at Gingrich on the House floor that it was “the lowest thing I have ever seen in my 32 years in the House.” Gingrich was elated: The speaker berating him made it on the evening news, and a radical backbencher had gone prime time. “I am now a famous person,” Gingrich gloated at the time.

Throughout his career, Gingrich, like Trump, has both trashed the corrupt mainstream media and used it for his tireless self-promotion. After the showdown with O’Neill, Gingrich gave a strategy talk to a conservative group. “The number one fact about the news media,“ he said, "is they love fights." When he gave “organized, systematic, researched, one-hour lectures. Did CBS rush in and ask if they could tape one of my one-hour lectures? No. But the minute Tip O'Neill attacked me, he and I got 90 seconds at the close of all three network news shows. You have to give them confrontations. When you give them confrontations, you get attention; when you get attention, you can educate.”

Sound familiar?

Like Trump, he has called out the “elite media," referring to them as “despicable trash,” accusing them of twisting his words “out of context” and barring journalists from his office. At the same time, he gives reporters plenty of access for long, rambling strolls through Newtland.

Newt also has a love-hate relationship with the Clintons

President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton toast with House Speaker Newt Gingrich at a celebration of Clinton’s second inauguration ceremony, January 1997. | Joyce Naltchayan/AFP/Getty Images

The old liberal legend is that Gingrich had a personal animus toward Bill and Hillary Clinton. He was Captain Ahab, and their political ruin was his white whale. He went after Bill legislatively; he led the push for his impeachment; his mother told Connie Chung that Hillary was “a bitch” (after which Hillary invited her to the White House for tea). Once, Gingrich himself went after Hillary, implying she was corrupt. This was, says the former Gingrich staffer, “singularly unhelpful.” Outraged, Bill used his State of the Union speech to defend her. (“We’re not polling this one, man,” says Sperling, Clinton’s economic adviser at the time. “This is just a man defending his wife.”)

But behind the scenes, things looked a little different. “Gingrich hated and had a crush on Clinton, I can’t quite describe it,” says Sperling. “Gingrich thought he was the smartest guy in the world. He loves shooting the shit. When the two of them would get in there, there was this weird thing where they could start wonking out on some issue. It used to scare the hell out of both sides. Everybody would be like, Mr. President, anything you say in front of him can and will be used against you. And Gingrich’s people were saying the same thing to him. And yet the two of them were capable of going off for 45 minutes on microtechnology issues.”

“Newt is kind of like the socially awkward kid who doesn’t understand that when people are being polite they’re just being transactional,” says the former Gingrich staffer. “The Clintons were just tolerating him, and he was taking it as they were friendlier than they were.”

In 2010, Gingrich told Robert Draper of GQ that he had “total admiration” for Hillary. “You have to respect her. This is a first-class professional. And if Bill is First Spouse, it'll be one of the great moments. A new TV show! The East Wing!”

Newt’s first act ended in loss and scandal

After a drubbing in the 1998 midterms, House Republicans revolted, and Gingrich relinquished his leadership post (but not without raging, on a call with fellow Republicans, that “we need to purge the poisons from the system” and saying he was unwilling to lead “cannibals”). He left the House almost immediately afterward and hasn’t held public office since.

It wasn’t just the loss that sank him. His entire speakership was riddled with controversy, with the House Ethics Committee fielding 84 ethics complaints against him. Republicans allege that this was all political, ginned up by Democrats to take back control of the chamber. But, in addition to various press investigations that turned up lots of malfeasance (like $15 million in political fundraising not declared to the Federal Election Commission), Gingrich in December 1996 admitted bad behavior and bringing discredit on Congress. A month later, in January 1997, the House voted overwhelmingly (395 to 28) to reprimand and fine him. It was the first time in the House’s history that the speaker was disciplined like this.

Gingrich uses a visual aid to illustrate an argument about Medicare in 1995. | Getty

At issue was a class Gingrich taught at the business school at Kennesaw State College in Georgia. Called “Renewing American Civilization,” the class offering advertised that the course’s “substance is derived from Mr. Gingrich's expertise as an historian and his experience as a national leader.” It would offer 10 two-hour lectures on topics like “Personal Strength” and “Applying American History” to things like inner cities. It also said that Gingrich expected some 50,000 students to tune in remotely for the class. But for that, the class needed funding, so Gingrich asked people to contribute money—$50,000 for “sponsors,” $10,000 for “friends”—through The Kennesaw State College Foundation, a tax-deductible nonprofit.

The Ethics Committee tried to investigate complaints by three House Democrats that the course was just a thinly veiled political operation; Gingrich and his lawyers stonewalled. When the subcommittee dedicated to investigating this finally released its report, it turned out that the point of the class was less to hone Personal Strength than to recruit people to the Republican Party and train them in the political arts—which is illegal, given the foundation’s 501(c)3 status as a nonpolitical nonprofit. The class, said the committee's report, "was a coordinated effort to have the 501(c)(3) organization help in achieving a partisan, political goal.” The subcommittee also scolded Gingrich for "inaccurate statements" that made its investigation more difficult.

For these and many other gymnastic contortions of nonprofits for political goals, the House Ethics Committee fined Gingrich $300,000—a sum Gingrich had to borrow from Dole. Part of the punishment was for misleading the committee—a similar offense for which he would then pursue Clinton.

Don’t worry. Newt is very, very rich.

According to Gingrich’s lawyer, the various businesses Gingrich set up after the fall netted the former speaker $100 million in revenue in the first decade of his post-speakership. From a 2011 Washington Post story:





Among Gingrich’s moneymaking ventures: a health-care think tank financed by six-figure dues from corporations; a consulting business; a communications firm that handled his speeches of up to $60,000 a pop, media appearances and books; a historical documentary production company; a separate operation to administer the royalties for the historical fiction that Gingrich writes with two co-authors; even an in-house literary agency that has counted among its clients a presidential campaign rival, former senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.).





Gingrich is certainly enjoying himself. He now golfs; he’s also constantly commenting on the day’s events on Fox (until Tuesday’s suspension) and his favorite medium, Facebook live. He’s tweeting. He’s strategizing, generating ideas. And, he’s making movies: This spring, he released a documentary film he produced, called “The First American.” It is a biography, complete with historical reenactments, of the life of George Washington. The trailer is narrated by Newt and Callista, who stand motionless and so close together that one gets the sense they might be conjoined. Newt and Callista hosted the premiere at Mount Vernon, Washington’s home, standing in a receiving line in front a massive stained-glass mural. “Only Gingrich's unique in-depth knowledge of the political realities of friend and foe could weave such a spellbinding tale of events and personalities,” says Gingrich’s website, GingrichProductions.com. (Watch the trailer. You won’t regret it.)

Newt actually did change America

Gingrich, obsessed with George Washington and Napoleon and Caesar, has in a sense achieved his own spot in American history. “You cannot write a history of 20th-century Congress without devoting a few chapters to Newt Gingrich,” says Franc.

“What Newt Gingrich imagined in the 1970s, that’s the world you live in today,” says Van Jones, a Democrat who describes himself as “to the left of Pluto.” “Paul Ryan exists in reality because of the imagination of Newt Gingrich four decades ago. You literally can’t tell the history of American politics in the 20th century without mentioning his name.”

Could that ambition, oddly, explain the appeal of being Trump's second fiddle? “I’m not entirely sure why he’s drawn to Trump,” says the former Gingrich staffer. “I spent an evening with Newt a couple months ago when he was in his pro-Trump mode. He said, look, Trump gets up in the morning, runs all these successful businesses, so he can do this job, too.” But maybe the thinking is a little different. To be the politically savvy, vicious and ambitious sidekick of a presidential candidate who doesn’t seem to care a jot for policy? To have the VP job with a Republican Congress and a boss who doesn't mind delegating the actual plans to someone else? Oh, imagine the big-idea, world-historical possibilities.