Annie Karni, once of Politico, covers Congress for the New York Times. Her colleague Luke Broadwater, once a Pulitzer prize winner for the Baltimore Sun, makes the Trump administration his beat.
As co-authors, at book length of Mad House, they deliver a sharp and wit-filled portrait of Capitol Hill dysfunction. Generally unflattering, Karni and Broadwater dedicate their book on modern US politics to “the leakers, gossips, and busybodies who populate the halls of Congress”.
Their tone matches the age. Under Donald Trump, politics is performative, personas are outsized. People are angry. What passes for authenticity is prized. Ambition and wishful thinking are rife. The players know it, yet find the call of fame irresistible.
Karni and Broadwater begin with the cautionary tale of Kevin McCarthy, hapless and desperate as speaker of the House, and end with impressions and ruminations from Chuck Schumer, the Brooklyn-born leader of Democrats in the Senate.
McCarthy comes off much worse. His fellow House members rejected him. Hell, they humiliated him. All the way from Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic speaker emeritus, to Matt Gaetz, the Republican bad boy from Florida who somehow became Donald Trump’s first pick for attorney general, almost all of them loathed him.
As a California congressman, McCarthy was a back-slapping schmoozer – not anyone’s idea of someone cut out for “high-stakes negotiations”, in the words of the authors. “I don’t know what the hell he’s doing here. Why is he even here?” Pelosi would say – with McCarthy standing right there. “He was a waste of space, and it was a waste of her time to have to talk to such an idiot,” Karni and Broadwater write.
Pelosi was not alone. Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, the Democratic whip, was similarly unkind. McCarthy, she said, “was about a pursuit of power, and the rest of it didn’t matter. That inherently made him a dangerous and ineffective leader.”
For Gaetz, it was personal. McCarthy declined to shut down an ethics committee investigation into allegations of drug use and underage sex. When McCarthy’s fall came, he attempted to frame it as a “Matt Gaetz grudge fuck”. Some measure of consolation arose: being Trump’s attorney general pick didn’t work out for Gaetz, who’s now out of Congress entirely, a minor TV host.
In December, the ethics committee released its report. It was not a good look for anyone, let alone a prospective AG. The committee found “substantial evidence” that Gaetz “violated House Rules and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, impermissible gifts, special favors or privileges, and obstruction of Congress”.
Still, Gaetz is married to Ginger Luckey, sister of Palmer Luckey, a tech mogul and defense contractor. Gaetz also sells videos on Cameo. “I served in Congress. Trump nominated me to be US attorney general (that didn’t work out),” he advertises. “Once I fired the House Speaker.”
Karni and Broadwater have more than the saga of McCarthy and Gaetz to make the reader scowl, cringe and giggle. “If there was one thing politicians of every ilk serving in the 118th session of Congress could agree on,” they observe, “it was that they were members of a dysfunctional legislative body populated by a bunch of clowns.”
Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican, is caught yearning to be Trump’s running mate in 2024. Her past criticisms of him? Her vote to certify the 2020 election? Forgettable sins, she hopes. Yet she is acutely aware that Trump is the force of the day.
“I can’t move forward and move up and be anti-Trump,” Mace says. “That’s just not where the country is.” More like, it’s not where Republican voters are. “If I want to have a career going forward, then I have some decisions I have to make.”
Karni and Broadwater twist the knife, cataloging Mace’s “nine tattoos, up from zero”. The congresswoman’s body art includes the names of her children, on her ribs. A Robert Frost quote elsewhere. The opening sentence from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway? On her torso. Mace keeps Bible quotes on her fingers, “tattooed in red to make them less visible”. A graduate of the Citadel military school, the daughter of an army general, Mace sits on the armed services committee.
More seriously, Karni and Broadwater capture how Schumer lowered the boom on Joe Biden, as his age and infirmity grew too great to ignore. After the then president’s televised faceplant last June, on the debate stage with Trump, the New York senator told his former colleague the end was nigh. No more than five Senate Democrats believed Biden should keep running. Beyond that, “if the president refused to step aside, [Schumer] would argue, the consequences for Democrats and Mr Biden’s own legacy after a half century of public service would be catastrophic”.
“If I were you … I wouldn’t run,” Schumer said. “And I’m urging you not to run.”
Biden said: “You’ve got bigger balls than anyone I’ve ever met.” He soon stepped out of the race.
But Schumer was not clear-eyed on all things. “Here’s my hope,” he told Karni and Broadwater. “After this election, when the Republican party expels the turd of Donald Trump, it will go back to being the old Republican party.”
Call that … wishful thinking.
Another Democrat, Chris Murphy of Connecticut, wasn’t buying it.
“There are plenty of examples of societies captured by a singularly unique individual demagogue and that get healthy after that person disappears,” Murphy tells Karni and Broadwater. “I don’t know. I’m not as optimistic as he is. I worry there’s a rot at the core of the country that will continue to be exposed politically.”
Now Schumer himself stands exposed, his leadership in question over his failure to stand up to Republicans pushing a punishing spending bill. The New Yorker is 74 and still uses a flip phone. Murphy is 51, from the iPhone generation, seen as a leader in waiting. On the Senate side of Karni and Broadwater’s Mad House, change may be coming.
Mad House is published in the US by Penguin Random House
• This article was amended on 13 April 2025. An earlier version said that Nancy Mace was a North Carolina Republican. She is a South Carolina Republican.
