History Lessons

 Newt Gingrich served divorce papers on his second wife while she was in a hospital recovering from cancer treatments.

He closed down the government because Bill Clinton didn’t give him an honored place in Air Force One.

He was a disruptive force the House long before Silicon Valley claimed the term as their own.

He was brutal to his enemies and didn’t much care for the concerns of anyone who disagreed with him.

He was a serial liar who puffed up his paltry credentials with claims of knowledge about US history that were absolute garbage.

He broke the ground and sewed the dragon’s teeth whose chaos Donald Trump tried to reap.

I say “tried” because Trump hasn’t won an election since 2016, and has never led the GOP as a whole to any political victory.

And it’s not as if any of Gingrich’s qualities are in doubt, or hidden:

It's not as if any of these qualities are in doubt or are hidden. These are all things that are facts we know, and not speculation. Every aspect of this man is a trash fire.

And yet, they worship him because he promises vengeance. 2/n https://t.co/pWKIwNJ5Os

— Brynn Tannehill (@BrynnTannehill) February 27, 2024

He lies the way most people breathe. You cannot trust a word he says. And what's worse, he doesn't even make them plausible much of the time. So many "Oh, sir..." stories that clearly never happened. 4/n https://t.co/pMwh7xWsrT

— Brynn Tannehill (@BrynnTannehill) February 27, 2024

Which brings me to the next point: zero empathy. The man cannot related to the emotions of other people. He says crass and horrible things to people all the time. He has no ability to relate to average people. or people suffering. 6/n pic.twitter.com/FQmSUXpkn6

— Brynn Tannehill (@BrynnTannehill) February 27, 2024

And not only is he dumb, he's ignorant and proud of it. He's basically Dunning-Kruger effect made flesh, because he thinks he's smart, and can do the jobs of experts. 8/n https://t.co/4gW5Ec8y4k

— Brynn Tannehill (@BrynnTannehill) February 27, 2024

He's a nepo baby: everything he has in life was handed to him. From his bone spurs diagnosis, to someone taking his Wharton entrance exams for him, to the seed money for starting a real estate business, life was handed to him on a platter. 10/m

— Brynn Tannehill (@BrynnTannehill) February 27, 2024

Gingrich is not a nepo baby. But he is certainly a mean, petty SOB.

He's racist AF. From refusing to rent to blacks, to his full page ad calling for the (wrongly convicted) New York 5, Trump has a long history of being on the wrong side of it. 12/n https://t.co/xSPMSx7kND

— Brynn Tannehill (@BrynnTannehill) February 27, 2024

He steals from the poor: he has a long history of stiffing his contractors, and then paying pennies on the dollar because he can afford lawyers and they cannot. 14/n https://t.co/kwpAvkH9Dn

— Brynn Tannehill (@BrynnTannehill) February 27, 2024

Gingrich is an adulterer, and he does think himself infallible.

The main difference between Gingrich and Trump is that Gingrich was never POTUS. After the failed debacle of the Clinton impeachment, and the government shutdown, he fell from the third-highest Constitutional office in the land, to leaving Congress in disgrace. A brief, but ignominious, career. But he convinced enough people that if s back-bench bomb thrower could overthrow the Speaker of the House and become Speaker himself, why not a non-politician boob for President? And even then the groundwork was laid by the Tea Party which was invented by the Koch Brothers, et al., to keep alive what Gingrich brought to the Party.

There is indeed nothing new under the sun, and not even Trump sprang full-grown from the brow of a discontented electorate.