On the last evening before Donald Trump was scheduled to announce his vice-presidential pick, and in response to unfolding events in Nice, France, Newt Gingrich made one last bid for the Trump ticket.
Gingrich then suggested that those who failed a test and were found to be adherents of “sharia law” should be deported from [America]. The highly charged proposal echoes Trump’s controversial idea to institute a religious test for immigrants entering the country “until we figure out what is going on.”
This, then, answers the question nobody was asking: How far Newt Gingrich would be willing to go to get on the Trump ticket. It beats out Chris Christie's months of abject groveling by a good bit.
There are some problems with the idea. Unconstitutionality would be one; an egregious misunderstanding of what "sharia" is would be another. Both are unflattering to someone who, like Newt, swears to be an intellectual, and by morning Gingrich was grousing over "media overreaction" to his proposal for religious cleansing. He only meant the bad ones, of course.
And thus we once again close the book on Newt Gingrich, defender of civilization, man with no apparent sense of shame. He would have made a good partner for Trump. He seems willing to defend anything.