Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich likened Donald Trump to heroes of ancient epics in a fawning interview with Fox News’s Kellyanne Conway.
During a stop by “Hannity” on Friday, Gingrich rationalized Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s meeting with Trump as a sign that the Facebook boss understood the president-elect’s special place in the world.
“I think the only way you can begin to understand this is to take Trump totally outside of normal American politics and recognize that he’s a mythic figure,” Gingrich told Conway. “He’s like some of the people who come out of the Viking sagas.”
One of Trump’s earliest GOP backers, Gingrich added that the president-elect survived a shooting and bested Kamala Harris because he was a “genuine, historic leader.”
The former speaker claimed the tech billionaire and other powerful figures’ embrace of Trump was a sign of a “cultural change that you see maybe twice in a century.”
Some, including The New York Times’s Maggie Haberman, saw the Meta CEO’s Wednesday trip to kiss the ring at Mar-A-Lago as an indication that big tech figures are cozier to Trump than during his first term.
“As with a number of industries, but certainly the tech industry, a lot of people coming to Trump and not the other way around,” Haberman said in a CNN interview on Wednesday night.
Mar-A-Lago, the center of Trump’s transition, has hosted former Trump critics like Zuckerberg, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in recent weeks.
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