Newt Gingrich Could Be Trump's Secretary Of State

As the fog of a long and fraught Election Day begins to lift and the results begin to sink in, questions will inevitably arise about what an actual Donald Trump presidency will look like. Looming large among those questions are those of who he'll reward with a cabinet seat, and specifically who Trump's Secretary of State will be. Enough major Republican leaders have gotten onto his bad side that his list of choices is likely to be fairly short, but from that list, it's possible that he's settled on former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.

Given Trump's shaky grasp of foreign policy, his eventual Secretary of State is likely to play an outsized role in his cabinet, even as the most senior member of that body. Trump based a significant portion of his campaign on what he saw as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama's failures in the realm of foreign policy, claiming that Clinton's proposals on how to approach Syria and Russia could "trigger World War III." Trump's plan for addressing ISIS and the crisis in Syria seems to be mainly to leave the matter in the hands of Syrian President Bashar Assad and Russia — a plan that left many observers with questions during the campaign.

Gingrich was in the running for Vice President, but he'd likely be content with the position of Secretary of State. The question of whether he's at all qualified for it is trickier, however. While he did serve many years in Congress and manage to rise to great prominence, his most memorable political acts in the 1990s were to shut down the government over a minor issue. Similar to Trump, he often toyed with the bounds of what a politician can actually get away with — although now, compared to Trump, he appears to be a Washington insider with decades of valuable experience.

After Gingrich's failed run for presidency in 2012, it would have been sensible to assume that his political career was over — and then he found someone to latch onto, and latch on he did. While he has not always been the most overt or ardent supporter of President-elect Trump, he's been there all along, and Trump has apparently noticed. While the campaign has not officially announced any cabinet positions, it's quite likely that they will soon begin to do that, and Gingrich will almost certainly be among those chosen.