Donald Trump would be a "better president" than Hillary Clinton, but he needs to learn to use more precise language in his speeches and interviews, Newt Gingrich said Friday,
"I strongly support Trump and I think he'd be a much better president, much less dangerous president than Hillary Clinton, whose corruption and dishonesty gets bigger and bigger every day," the former House Speaker told Fox News' "Fox & Friends" program.
"But one of the things that is frustrating about his candidacy is his imprecise language. He uses three words when he needs 10."
For example, when Trump called President Barack Obama and Clinton the "most valuable players" for ISIS and blamed Obama as being a "founder" of the Islamist terrorist group, he should have explained his thoughts more, said Gingrich.
"I think it's perfectly fair to say in a very powerful debate that the Obama/Clinton decision to pull out of Iraq created the vacuum, which enabled ISIS to emerge,"said Gingrich. "I think if he said it in that sense, then clearly the conditions for ISIS were created by a series of decisions that Obama and Clinton made, he'd be 100 percent accurate. It would be very understandable."
Trump instead compressed his stand into a claim Obama created ISIS, Gingrich said, and not everyone would understand what he meant. Even more, the comment left Trump wide open to media criticism, the former speaker told Fox News.
"I know what Trump has in his mind, but that's not what people hear," Gingrich said. "I think that he has got to learn to use language that has been thought through and that is clear to everybody and to stick to that language because otherwise the mainstream media is going to take every possible excuse to pile on him."
However, doing so could go against Trump's "personal style," said Gingrich.
"I think that his personal style is so deep that he's so used to this kind of shorthand and frankly, you're dealing with a guy who carried 37 primaries and got 14 million votes, and it was a style that none of his Republican opponents could cope with," Gingrich told the program.
He continued he does not think Trump fully understand that at this point in the election, the media is taking every chance it can to attack him as one of the two candidates, especially since he's a conservative.
"[This is a] lesson Ronald Reagan learned in August of 1980," said Gingrich. "You have to understand that the news media is going to attack you every chance they get and it's your job not to give them a chance."
Meanwhile, on Thursday, more than 70 Republicans urged the Republican National Committee to cut funding from Trump's campaign and to aim it more at House and Senate races, a call Gingrich blamed on "establishment deserters."
"They don't understand the Trump insurgency or they understand it and it is frightening them," Gingrich said. "If you look at Harry Truman's re-election, he had Wallace, Henry Wallace, a left winger on one side. He had Strom Thurmond's segregationists on the other side.
"He was so far behind in early September that Gallup quit polling. The average poll was off by between 9 and 20 points on Election Day and Truman just ignored them and kept coming."
Trump is a "direct assault" on Washington's "insider system," the former House speaker and presidential candidate told Fox News. "You're seeing that, I think a profound shakeup between people who care more about developing policies that work and people who care about belonging to the establishment."
As Trump represents "real change," Gingrich said, insiders will continue to oppose him.
"I think part of their endgame is to feel morally virtuous," Gingrich said, and opponents in the government want to say they "stuck with the good, decent people who don't use confusing language...a part of it is he genuinely scares him. He's a general insurgent."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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