Newt Gingrich loves to talk about Newt Gingrich. Listening to him is like watching a greedy carnivore reminisce about his most sumptuous past banquets. His eyelids are heavy with the years; his stride is slower. But the former speaker of the House of Representatives (1995-1999), who welcomed Le Monde to his modern offices in Arlington, Virginia, has retained the attitude of a succulent plant, flourishing in a hostile environment. In an American right that has gone off he rails, abandoned to extremists with no memory or principles, Gingrich continues to display in conservative media a blend of intellectual virtuosity and an adolescent taste for street fighting.

“I get up every day thinking I could affect the country. I’m the same way at 80 that I was at eight. I tended to identify with adults, not children. My biological father’s wife said to me one day, ‘Don’t you want to go out and play with the kids?’ And I said, ‘No.’ I was busy reading a book on vertebrate paleontology at the time. When I was about four, I saw my great-grandfather die and it occurred to me that that’s what would happen. So I should fill up the time between then and when it happens.” At the age of 11, Gingrich appeared before the City Council of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to argue in favor of opening a zoo, with a financing plan. Did his vision of politics come from the animal world, requiring a survival manual, a sharp knife for gutting game and some serious hiking boots?

Gingrich was one of the first to believe in Donald Trump as a politician. In 2015, the New York real estate tycoon, then a TV host, was mocked by Washington elites. “I saw him as a man who understood instinctively that the left was both weird and ultimately failing and who had the guts to take them head on and who was really good as a marketer.” A tribute in the form of a hidden autobiography. Though Gingrich is passionate about history – particularly World War II – while Trump is passionate about money, wrestling and his golf handicap, the two men actually have one thing in common: transgression. Each in his own way has roughed up the Republican Party, imposing unprecedented methods on it.

The unexpected advent of Trump in 2015-2016, then the slow absorption of the party by his Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, are not anomalies. They find their logic in the long term, across the decades. It’s hard to pinpoint a decisive break in the Republican Party’s transformation. The Grand Old Party was founded in the 1850s by politicians committed to the fight against slavery. A century later, the party of Abraham Lincoln was courting the Southern states, which were anxious about the end of racial discrimination (Civil Rights Act of 1964).

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