Former President Trump stunned the American political scene Monday with what could shape up to be a near-record margin of victory in the Iowa caucuses.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who once represented the now-key swing state of Georgia, said Trump's victory comes in spite of all of the mainstream media's efforts and foreshadowing of a resounding defeat.
"[D]espite every lawsuit, despite every effort to destroy Trump, the people of Iowa have stood up and said, ‘No, he is our candidate’," Gingrich added on "Hannity."
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"He's the nominee. Get over it – He is the nominee. He's going to win the nomination. The news media doesn't want to say that because they need to somehow hype ‘please watch us while we go through this charade’."
The former speaker, who served as the top House Republican from 1995 to 1999 claimed there is no longer a viable path for a "number two" candidate.
"[Y]ou get to be the leading ‘irrelevant’ or the second ‘irrelevant’ or the third ‘irrelevant’, but nobody is going to be number two because [Trump] is going to dominate totally if you look at the country at-large."
He called the former president the leader of an anti-establishment national political movement, rather than a simple presidential candidate.
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Gingrich also noted Iowa, now considered reliably red, used to be quite the swing state. Former President Obama was the last Democrat to win the state, and its last Democratic senator, Tom Harkin, left office in 2015.
The former speaker credited Trump with helping make that a reality, as he defeated both Hillary Clinton and President Biden in recent general elections in the Hawkeye state.
Fox News chief political analyst Brit Hume said Monday that Trump's large margin-of-victory proves his "enduring appeal" with Republican voters.
He said Fox News voter analysis polling has shown GOP voters want a political "upheaval" of the current state of affairs, and that Trump is the person they believe to be the most suited to bring it about.
Hume added that caucusgoers supporting Trump likely voted in-part based on their recollections of America prior to Biden's tenure:
"I think a lot of the strength of his appeal is based upon people's memories of how it was pre-COVID, while he was president. They remember the economy and how it boomed," he said. "They remember the fact that we weren't in any wars or even indirectly funding wars overseas that they knew about."
"President Biden points continually to the fact that the job growth has been great lately, and it has. And that the economy's continuing to grow, and it certainly has: But the extent of the inflation that predominated for so long under him, under Biden, has soured people's thinking about this economy."
In that way, he told "Jesse Watters Primetime" that millions of Americans wish the country was in the straits it was prior to the incumbent's election.
After the caucuses were collectively called for Trump, Fox News host Sean Hannity remarked the former president continues to "defy all conventional political gravity."
"Usually you would think that if somebody gets arrested, if somebody gets indicted, that their poll numbers would go down," he said.
"In every case they have gone up. And I wonder if it's been such overkill, because this started the day that he and Melania Trump came down that escalator leading into three long years of what turned out to be nothing but lies and conspiracy theories peddled by fake news…," Hannity said.
"They all were wrong – And I wonder if, in some odd way, they took a man like Donald Trump and they actually have turned him into a victim," the host continued, adding that some people may support him simply due to the fact they view his ongoing near-decade of scrutiny as mistreatment and "fundamental unfairness."
In that way, former George W. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer told "Hannity" that the most notable gap in the country at this point is the one between the working class and the "college educated Democrats who are really [news] reporters in the mainstream media."
Fleischer said some of Trump's appeal to those in the former category is likely attributed to the former president's understanding of their daily lives and living conditions, while he characterized the mainstream media as a collection of politically-liberal people in "elite bubbles" who essentially parachute into Middle America to interview residents at key points on the calendar, and then leave without considering much about such people.
"The majority, of course, are those type of Americans who are not the college-educated Democrat-reporters. And that's why they missed the story of 2016. And that's why I think that you have still so many people cheering for the defeat of Donald Trump who are out of touch with such a huge swath of this country," Fleischer said.
"Donald Trump, to his credit, is intuitively in touch with them. And you're seeing that tonight on the ground in Iowa. These results are really staggering if they hold up for President Trump."
However, Fleischer added that New Hampshire – next on the political calendar – hosts a much different GOP electorate than Iowa's. He said the New England state is notably moderate, like its bluer neighbors, and that a candidate like Nikki Haley may have an advantage there to some degree.
"Haley's problem, though, based on the results tonight, is she's got to crack conservatives [as a voting bloc]. She cannot win on the basis of liberal, moderate Republicans alone with some help from independents," he said.
"And that's where, in Iowa at least, there's no evidence that anybody can run against Donald Trump."
