Gingrich: Trump 'Much More Isolated Than He Thinks He Is'

President Donald Trump is "much more isolated than he thinks he is" following his statements about the Charlottesville protest violence, and he must become "substantially more resistant and reliable," former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Thursday.

"He has much weaker support in congress than he thinks he does, and I think a lot of it is self-inflicted," Gingrich told Fox News' "Fox and Friends" program. "He had a perfectly good press conference, if he had stopped. I mean, they were talking about infrastructure, it's a unifying bipartisan, positive step on the agenda, and I am sure everybody's standing around him was stunned to have him wander off and reopen an issue that he had successfully the day before put to rest."

Such departures, Gingrich said, leave people not knowing what to expect each morning.

"That's dramatically weakening him [from] getting things done in the Congress," the former speaker said.

Show host Steve Doocy pointed out that when Trump feels like he's being attacked, he hits back "10 times harder," but Gingrich said that the president's campaign-style attack mode, which got him elected, isn't helping him now that he's in the White House.

"You know, President [Ronald] Reagan had this problem twice," Gingrich said. "Once in August of 1980 during the campaign, he had a week that was just terrible. He was stumbling all over the place and again with the Iran crisis that broke out in 1986. Both times Reagan was in deep trouble. Both times he stopped, fought through what he had to get done, did it with enormous discipline, stuck to his message."

There are many things that are going "very, very well" with Trump's presidency, including the economy, and if Trump would be more "disciplined and focused," he'd more than recover in three weeks and be in a position this fall to push tax reform and other agenda items through Congress.

Meanwhile, Gingrich said he feels a committee may be needed to protect American history amid the calls to tear down memorials honoring Confederate veterans of the Civil War, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Thursday.

"You go back to the French Revolution, where they decided to destroy the past, you watch the Taliban, which decided to blow up Buddhist monuments that were 2,000 years old," Gingrich told Fox News' "Fox and Friends" program. "You watched ISIS, which destroyed ancient history. I think that we ought to be clear about this. Maybe we need a committee to protect American history."

The committee could decide on other examples of leaders with questionable pasts, said Gingrich, mentioning late West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd, a one-time KKK member.

"A former member of the Supreme Court belonged to the Ku Klux Klan," Gingrich said. "Should we remove memories of Hugo Black? What's it going to be?"

Gingrich continued that while the arguments continue, there have been large numbers of murders in cities like Baltimore and Chicago, and "enormous problems in helping every person have a chance to pursue happiness."

"All of this stuff is a lot of noise," Gingrich said. "It doesn't fix a single one of the underlying key problems to trap people in poverty and violence in America."

He also claimed that the "hard left" would like to see all monuments depicting slave owners disappear, including those honoring the founding fathers.

"If you really look at the hard left, they will eliminate [George] Washington," said Gingrich. "I'm not sure what they do with the Washington Monument. But they would eliminate Washington. They would eliminate [Thomas] Jefferson. They both owned slaves. Would they then sandblast them in South Dakota off of that mountain?"

Gingrich further questioned how people can go back 250 years and apply today's standards to the people living back then.

He did admit, though, that he thinks President Donald Trump was "inadequate" with his comments on Charlottesville, especially when he said there were some "good people in that crowd of neo-Nazis and alt-right."

"Look, if you're a good person, and you hear people chanting anti-semitic chants, you leave," Gingrich said. " I think Republicans have to condemn unequivocally the kind of violence and bitter and bigotry and racism that we saw in Charlottesville. At the same time, we ought to condemn the left because it's clear if you look at the ACLU tweets, they say, look, both sides were fighting in Charlottesville. Not just the neo Nazis."