BURSTFormer House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) suggested President-elect Trump would be "better off" letting the government shut down.
"I think that President Trump would be much better off to let the government close to let Biden sit there as a totally incompetent president presiding over a mess, and to go to the country and say to the country, 'I am not going to be a president who sells you out. I need your help to convince the Congress to pass a good bill,'" Gingrich told Fox News's Harris Faulkner on Friday.
"I think the country would respond," Gingrich added.
The interview comes as as the House scrambles to find a route to avoiding a shutdown before Friday night's deadline.
Earlier this week, a bipartisan 1,500-page continuing resolution (CR) to keep the government funded into the new year went down in flames after it came under criticism from Trump allies, including Elon Musk, and eventually Trump himself.
The backlash led to House Speaker Mike Johnson's (R-La.) "plan B" deal, which failed in the House on Thursday and raised the odds of a government shutdown.
Trump on Wednesday also demanded a debt ceiling increase be paired with the stopgap bill, issuing a joint statement with Vice President-elect JD Vance saying that while the Republican Party wants disaster aid and support for farmers — issues tackled in the temporary funding proposal — he also wants Congress to pass a “streamlined spending bill” that doesn’t give Democrats “everything they want” and has “an increase in the debt ceiling.”
Trump later backed Speaker Johnson’s plan B agreement, but 38 House Republicans and all but two Democrats voted against it.
Gingrich's comments on Fox News follow a post he made on the social platform X on Thursday morning, advising Trump and his GOP colleagues to "not be afraid" of a shutdown.
"President Trump and Republicans should not be afraid of a government shutdown. The next election is two years away," Gingrich wrote in the post.