Newt Gingrich “Don't assume automatically that the so-called experts are right”
Published
Citation From the April 13, 2020, edition for Fox News' Fox and Friends
NEWT GINGRICH (FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR): I have been watching President Trump with his briefings and bringing in CEOs of companies, and bringing in experts. He reminds me a lot of Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt was this very aggressive entrepreneurial personality. He created the rough riders to go fight in the Spanish American war. He was a great nationalist. He wrote significant books on the naval winnings in his 20s. He wrote what became the classic study of the naval war of 1812. He won the Nobel peace prize trying to bring peace between Russia and Japan in 1907, so this was a guy who created the Panama Canal. You know, he did all sorts of things.
And there is a lot of parallel between the entrepreneurial style of Trump, which is part of what drives some of the news media and some of the academics crazy. Entrepreneurial personalities don't fit the political science model of the presidency. And Theodore Roosevelt was probably the other great example of that. In Teddy's case he became so popular that the teddy bear was named for Theodore Roosevelt for a small baby bear he refused to shoot, and a Brooklyn toy manufacturer created a bear modeled on that baby bear and became Teddy's bear that has been popular for over a hundred years now.
So there's a lot we can learn, do what works, don't assume automatically that the so-called experts are right, keep pushing, you saw the President do this with the antimalaria drugs, you saw him do this with refurbishing masks where all of the sudden they went from zero being refurbished to 120,000 a week by Bechtel. You have seen breakthrough in getting companies to sign up contracts for production. So in a sense you have this surging aggressive personality, the downside is sometimes he can make a mistake, that's the nature whether it was Theodore Roosevelt or Donald Trump, it's the nature of entrepreneurial personalities, but he's going to get off the floor and try the next thing.