Does Newt have a point?

He contends Donald Trump could be a President on the order of Jefferson, Lincoln, and FDR.

Since Newt used this compare and contrast for his Gingrich360 article, I’m bringing it along.

When Newt Gingrich speaks, I usually listen because, over his career, he’s tended to think about the next generation rather than the next election cycle and rightsizing government is a generational thing. (As an example, a properly trained batch of Millennials and Gen Z would not have had a kitten about DOGE.)

Thus, when he wrote the other day that:

President Trump is rapidly growing a sense of Republican teamwork in Congress, state legislatures, and with governors across the country. If he keeps this pace, President Trump will clearly be in the same league as Presidents Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. All three built enormous national majorities. The 2026 election could be the watershed moment if Republicans gain in the House, Senate, and the states.

I had to add my two cents.

There is a caution I have about sharing Newt’s optimism, and it’s related to what I said above.

Thomas Jefferson had more or less of a blank slate, and the cache of being one of the OGs who put this nation together. As Gingrich notes, Jefferson was “a passionately small-government fiscal conservative” but saw an opportunity in the Louisiana Purchase and sent the Marines overseas to fight the Barbary pirates.

It’s funny in a way regarding Jefferson because, while Democrats revere him as a founder of their party, doesn’t that description sound a little bit like President Trump? Consider Trump’s overtures about Greenland and the successful strike against the Houthis in Yemen, Signal scandal notwithstanding. But Democrats can’t stand the Republican Trump and probably think he’s culturally appropriating TJ’s qualities.

And then we had Abraham Lincoln, the father of the modern Republican party, but ironically and arguably the one who did more to federalize the government by choosing war to restore the Union rather than the right of states to have the choice to participate. In the decades of Republican domination which followed, though, we had a “big tent” of Presidents: corrupticrats like Ulysses S. Grant and Warren Harding, the progressive reformers Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover, and the small-government conservative Calvin Coolidge. I’m not yet convinced that Trump is the small-government type, despite the presence of DOGE.

(Question for an alternative historian like Newt: had “Silent Cal” instead chosen to run in 1928, could we have avoided the Great Depression? Note that Coolidge died early in 1933 at the young age of 60, so he would not have lived out that term and perhaps had been in an Edith Wilson/Jill Biden situation in the interim.)

Instead, after the disaster that was Herbert Hoover to ingloriously end the GOP run, we got FDR and the New Deal, which begat the welfare state. And that’s where I think Newt’s analogy on Trump falls a little short.

You see, the power of government and the lure of “free money” eventually broke the independent spirit of the working people. Initially, there were probably those who were too proud to take “relief”, but hard times broke that pride because people had families to feed. FDR fostered the culture of dependence on Uncle Sam that has continued, more or less unabated, for close to a century, rising in tempo with LBJ’s Great Society and not ceasing despite Gingrich’s effort to make sure that when Bill Clinton said “the era of big government is over” that Slick Willie meant it.

While there are questions about who actually put the concept into words, the fact that people have been pretty much able to vote themselves into a piece of the national treasury beginning with FDR and supercharged with LBJ, the racist who reportedly claimed “I’ll have those niggers voting Democratic for the next two hundred years,” makes this a harder nut to crack than the one Jefferson or even Lincoln faced.

Certainly DOGE is a start but look at all the objections being put up by the Democrats, who have used the judicial system - with judges they have appointed for 12 of the last 16 years, along with the squishy David Souter-type disappointments only Republicans seem to select - to block as many Trump and DOGE reforms they can get nationwide injunctions on as they can. (The number of those placed against Trump dwarfs that of any of his predecessors - but remember the cow the media had about the judicial fight against Joe Biden’s illegal student loan forgiveness schemes?)

It’s going to take several years of somewhat conservative, somewhat libertarian, and very Constitutional acolytes infiltrating the present system to have success, and they will have to fight and stay strong for every last inch of territory the Left will have to defend. It’s not the term of Trump but the future his 19-year-old youngest son Barron will see that will define his father’s presidency.

In the meantime, though, you can Buy Me a Coffee, since I have a page there now.