Newt Gingrich told
Newsmax TV on Thursday that the rancor was so strong against Ted Cruz not endorsing Donald Trump that his son Eric asked him before he spoke to "put in a couple paragraphs to try to get this thing over with and out of the way."
"They were very surprised by the intensity of the booing and the reaction from the delegates," Gingrich, the former House speaker, told "Newsmax Prime" host J.D. Hayworth in an interview from the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
He said Trump told him that "people are going to be talking about it so much that they're not going to be paying attention to my speech on national security or, more importantly, to Mike Pence's vice presidential acceptance speech."
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Gingrich said he took his cue from a key paragraph in Cruz's speech Wednesday at the Quicken Loans Arena.
"I don't think he meant it to be, but if you read the principles that Ted Cruz said mattered, the only person running for president with those principles is Donald Trump," he told Hayworth. "There's no way you could say Hillary Clinton is for the Constitution as we interpret it.
"She's against the Second Amendment. She would eliminate freedom of religion in the First Amendment. She would do many things that violate the Constitution.
"So, I was pretty confident if I put it that way that the delegates would understand," Gingrich said. "I had just taken Ted's rejection and turn it into an acceptance and then let him deal with it.
"It's his problem," he told Hayworth. "He shouldn't have done it. He shouldn't' have said it the way he did.
"It was a very childish, selfish thing to do.
"When you're invited into somebody's house — and this is Donald Trump's house this week — if you're invited to somebody's house, you don't go in and pour acid on the flowers.
"You either don't go at all or you show some level of being a good guest."
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