Newsmax
Gingrich: '100 Percent' Sure About No Cabinet Role
Wednesday, November 16, 2016 12:49 PM
By: Sandy Fitzgerald
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who was an instrumental surrogate during Donald Trump's election and after, said Wednesday he would like a role as "chief planner" moving forward, but he is "100 percent sure" he doesn't want an official role in Trump's presidential administration.
"One hundred percent," Gingrich told Fox News' Jenna Lee during a telephone interview on the "Happening Now" program, after she asked him if he was "100 percent sure you don't want an official role?"
"I'm 100 percent," Gingrich stressed.
Gingrich has mentioned the chief planner role a few times, including on the day after Trump was elected and Monday. He explained Wednesday to Lee how his past experience would make him particularly qualified to work as a planner rather than in a cabinet role.
"One of the great problems in Washington is people drown so much in the daily news and the scandal, whatever this week's problem is," Gingrich said. "There is very little systematic effort to think ahead. If we get back to be the kind of country where you want to be, we will make America great again, it takes five or six years."
Gingrich said his own background, as House Speaker, as someone who helped write the 1994 Contract With America, and as someone who worked with Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, gives him "some unique ability" to be a planner.
"Any of those things bring to bear what I learned over a long time how government and America works," Gingrich said.
Meanwhile, Gingrich called reports in The New York Times and other media outlets about turmoil in Trump's transition team the "same baloney" from "the same people who thought Trump would disappear" and who thought Hillary Clinton would be the next president.
"They found a new way to be confused," Gingrich said.
Gingrich said Wednesday's transition meeting, helmed by Vice President-elect Mike Pence, was "very good" and "covered a lot of ground."
"I feel very comfortable, working similarly with Vice President [Dick] Cheney in 2000, he ran the transition for president George W. Bush," Gingrich said.
The Trump team is "getting their ducks in a row in a rapid way," he continued, and Trump's experience as a CEO will "become more and more obvious."
"The Trump transition team is in transition," Gingrich said. "It was inevitable, because in fact, President-elect Donald Trump is in fact a hands-on CEO who knows how to run business and is committed to putting together an administration that bears his imprint and achieves what he set out to do."
Part of the confusion stems from people who want to apply traditional standards to Trump, when they do not apply.
"They tried that all through the primaries, and he kept winning despite the fact that nobody understood," Gingrich said. "This is a very confident manager who runs a very big worldwide system, who has a real knack for getting things organized, and he will do it his way, and if that doesn't fit The New York Times' [plan], it is not Trump's problem."
Gingrich predicted in the next few weeks, a "very effective transition" will take place, bringing together a "lot of talented people" with Trump, a "very hands-on leader."
The Trump team, he continued, has to find 4,000 workers, starting with cabinet offices, and is doing so in a "very methodical way," and the president-elect will use his skills to make the eventual decisions.
http://www.newsmax.com/Politics/Newt-Gingrich-no-cabinet-role/2016/11/16/id/759217/
