The Republican has a "moral imperative" to "step up to the plate" — and that means serving people in every community in the United States to reverse decades of failed Democratic policies, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich tells Newsmax TV.
"We've not had a Republican city councilman in Baltimore since 1942," Gingrich, 73, whom presumptive nominee Donald Trump is considering as a running mate, told "Newsmax Prime" host J.D. Hayworth in an exclusive interview from Paris.
Gingrich authored the 1994 "Contract With America" that led to the "Republican Revolution" that swept Congress later that year.
He talked with Newsmax following last week's fatal police-involved shootings of African-American men in Louisiana and Minnesota — and the retaliatory sniper attack on Friday that killed five Dallas police officers and wounded seven others.
"The city's a disaster," Gingrich told Hayworth. "The police are leaving. They can't recruit new police because they have a prosecutor who is so anti-police."
Racial strife was ignited last year after Freddie Gray, 25, died from injuries sustained while riding in a Baltimore police van. Three of the six officers charged with his murder have so far been found not guilty.
"There are neighborhoods in Baltimore that are terrible tragedies at a human level," Gingrich told Hayworth, adding that two deadly shootings occurred on Chicago's South Side one recent weekend every hour for 15 hours.
"We can't tolerate that in America," he said.
"The Democrats can't solve it — with their institutions, their ideologies and their policies — and the Republicans don't show up.
"It's time for us to go into every part of America, be clear about the fact that the failures of the left — the failures of their bureaucracy, the failures of their polices, the failures of their leadership — has led to the disaster we’re living in, and then offer dramatic, bold, new solutions.
"That should be a very major part of any campaign this fall."
See more of Hayworth's exclusive interview with Gingrich on Monday at 8 and 11 p.m. ET only on "Newsmax Prime."
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