Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich on Wednesday said conservative voters were going to be “rattled” by Donald Trump’s statement that the federal minimum wage should be raised to $10, and said the move was likely aimed at winning supporters from former Democratic presidential contender Sen. Bernie Sanders.
In an interview in Washington, the former House speaker weighed in on the leak of documents from the Democratic National Committee, saying it was “very possible” that more emails from Hillary Clinton would get dumped online in the future. He also commented on U.S. relations with Russia, calling Russian President Vladimir Putin a “bully” and saying that a President Trump would put Putin in “a very different environment.”
Here are key excerpts from the interview:
On Trump’s $10 minimum wage: “I think it will make some conservatives feel very rattled”
Asked by the Examiner how voters might respond to the recent statement by Trump that the minimum wage should be increased to $10 per hour, Gingrich said he thought it would “make some conservatives feel very rattled.” He added that it is “politically popular and economically very dubious.” However, he said, the political environment makes raising the minimum wage “almost unavoidable,” and pointed to his time in the House as an example.
“I do think Trump is basically going to run as a centrist conservative, not a hard right conservative,” Gingrich said. “He’s going to try and find a way to steal Sanders votes because Hillary drives them away with her corruption and inability to relate to people who want to reform.”
Trump proposed the increase during a Tuesday appearance on Fox News as part of a continued effort to draw in Sanders voters. “[W]hen Bernie Sanders said I want to go less than what the minimum wage is, I mean honestly these people are lying,” Trump told host Bill O’Reilly.
Critics have argued the remarks contrast with a statement the GOP nominee made during a presidential debate last fall that current wages are “too high.”
Putin is “like a bully”
Gingrich said President Obama bungled in his dealings with Russia by failing to attend the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, and added that it contributed to Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine’s Crimea the following year. “Putin felt so humiliated at having spent all that money to create the Winter Olympics, only to then be totally dissed by the West. It gave him the sense, ‘Well, what do I have to lose?'”
“You have to decide: Do you want to deal with Putin, or do you want him as an enemy? If you want to deal with Putin, you better think about what that means and how you do it,” Gingrich said. “Part of what you’re getting right now is [Putin’s] absolute contempt for Obama, Kerry, and Clinton. He’s like a bully. He thinks these people are nothing. I suspect with Trump he’ll find himself in a very different environment.”
Gingrich said the top threats posed to the U.S. came from Russia, as well as China and Islamic radicalism. He emphasized the need to rebuild the American military and its presence in space, and added reform was needed in the related bureaucracies because “they are too slow, too expensive, and too obsolete.”
On WikiLeaks: “Very possible” DNC hackers have Clinton’s private emails
Asked if Democrats have been too quick to suggest Russia leaked documents to deflect from what internal DNC emails revealed, Gingrich said the “level of corruption that the emails indicate, including big favors from donors, is pretty damaging to [the Clintons.]”
“I don’t think the average American is going to say, ‘Oh, let me get this straight. I should be mad at Putin because somebody in Russia might’ve hacked into your badly protected files which show you are racist, dishonest, corrupt, and trying to cheat Bernie Sanders,'” Gingrich said. “At the same time, I think the average American is going to say, ‘Gosh, doesn’t them hacking into this suggest they would have hacked into Hillary’s private email server? And when do we get to see the other 30,000 emails, which the Russians may have?'”
“I think it’s very possible that the same people, assuming that WikiLeaks is in fact Russian, that they may have all of her emails before she deleted them,” he said.
WikiLeaks last week released approximately 20,000 emails hacked from DNC servers. Clinton campaign officials have said the Russian government is the most likely actor behind the leak, and argued that it reflects on Trump.
Trump hit back in a tweet on Tuesday that said: “In order to try and deflect the horror and stupidity of the Wikileaks disaster, the Dems said maybe it is Russia dealing with Trump. Crazy!”
On Wednesday, Trump told reporters that if Russia is in fact responsible, he hoped the country could help find the emails Clinton deleted from her private server. Russian officials have denied any involvement with the hack.
