The original aphorism always struck me as pro-hedgehog, but not even that strongly?
And it kinda sounds like Gingrich is lowkey saying Trump doesn’t know much but I haven’t seen anyone reacting as though this were the savage drag it feels like it is…‘Foxes are very clever, while hedgehogs know the one thing they need to do to not die’ doesn’t really seem like it’s praising either, to me. I think the reaction on that post was mostly to the anti-intellectual reframing by Gingrich: ‘Clinton knows many LIES, while Trump knows the SIMPLE TRUTH, and that’s all he NEEDS to know’. (Although there’s probably some people who just didn’t get the reference.)
Oh fair, I definitely didn’t read the tweet as calling up the notion that Clinton knows lies but that read is definitely available.
I think it’s hard, if you’re reading along the grain, to interpret Gingrich as saying “Clinton is full of untruths.” He says specifically “many things you can fact check,” and does so as a direct contrast to Trump, who is famous for saying things that turn out to be factually false. If he meant “Clinton says things but then you FACT CHECK THEM and they are LIES”…well, he did so in a way that causes his favored candidate to look even worse than his non-favored candidate, by a lot, using his own proffered metric.
I think this has to mean “Clinton has technical command of the political and economic situation, whatever, boring, she’s not going to do anything useful with that knowledge because politicians like her never do; meanwhile, Trump is no expert, but at least he’ll be actually trying to fix things somehow.”
(Berlin was neither pro-fox nor pro-hedgehog as such, but Gingrich’s framing is definitely “lots of unimportant things versus The Only Important Thing.”)
…aaaaaaaaaaand now I’ve dedicated measurable amounts of time to exegesis of a Newt Gingrich tweet. Possibly I need to rethink some life choices.