Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Democrats will not stop until former President Donald Trump is “in chains.”
Speaking at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Mr. Gingrich said that Democratic leaders hope that if Mr. Trump winds up in jail then people won’t vote for him.
“What’s happening of course is because they’ve gone to overkill — I mean you get to do one of these. When you do three or four or five of them, people get the joke,” he said of the multiple states trying to remove the former president from the primary ballot.
He predicted that an “explosion of outrage across the whole country on a scale we have not seen in our lifetime,” would occur if Mr. Trump winds up in jail.
“Because people are just going to say this whole thing is rigged. You know, it’s absurd,” he said in the speech Wednesday. “But the danger is that they have the power of the government.”
The former president is currently facing four criminal trials: two for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, one for hush money payments during the 2016 presidential race, and one for allegedly mishandling classified documents after leaving office.
Colorado and Maine have moved to remove Mr. Trump from the primary ballots over his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. The states cite Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which says that anybody who made an oath to the Constitution and “engaged in insurrection” cannot hold federal office again.
States including California and Michigan decided that Mr. Trump could stay on the 2024 primary ballot. Challenges in over 30 states have been filed.
• Mallory Wilson can be reached at mwilson@washingtontimes.com.
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