Even before the midterm elections – when the vaunted “red wave” dried up – influential Republicans, over drinks in Washington, casually discussed the fate of Kevin McCarthy as a short-timer.
The man who would be the speaker of the House had already been taking a victory lap before a single vote was counted. “I’m better prepared now,” he recently told New York magazine. “If I’m not going to be acceptable to the body having that scenario this time, no one’s acceptable,” he boasted to Punchbowl News. The failed frozen yogurt shop owner from Bakersfield, California, envisions himself at last standing as the hero of his Horatio Alger success story atop the greasy pole. McCarthy now trumpets that he has won the confidence of the far-right Freedom Caucus that previously opposed his elevation. He clutches its leader, his twitchy former foe Jim Jordan, as a great friend. “Probably my biggest advocate is Jim Jordan,” he has said.
McCarthy’s bravado discloses a hint of insecurity. The talk of the steakhouses is that he will not last long.
Donald Trump’s ragtag minions of horned madmen and militias could not seize the Capitol on January 6. But when the 118th Congress is sworn in on 3 January, Trump’s coup will have broken through more than a police barrier to enter a new phase. That’s because Trump will, for all intents and purposes, become the de facto speaker of the House. If and when Nancy Pelosi ever so gently passes the gavel to Kevin McCarthy, “it would be hard not to hit her with it,” McCarthy said to the raucous laughter of a Republican crowd in 2021. The ultimate power will be held in the hands of Trump. From his gilded tropical palace, he will phone dictates to Jim Jordan and other acolytes who will transform the House of Representatives into his 2024 presidential campaign committee, virtual law firm and bludgeon for revenge. The House will be his hammer.
Trump still looms over the party, contemptuous of the bitter Republican finger-pointing blaming him for the midterm disappointment. Rupert Murdoch’s overnight order to Fox News to hype Florida Governor Ron DeSantis cannot suddenly cancel the Trump show Murdoch has been instrumental in producing, though for years he reportedly privately called him “a fucking idiot”. Trump is hardly dislodged.
In the 117th Congress, 147 Republicans out of 213 refused to certify the results of the electoral college. The margin of the slim new Republican majority will uniformly be election deniers, who will pad the Freedom Caucus before which McCarthy cowers. When the “red wave” was revealed to be a mirage, while the votes were still being tallied and the House Republican majority still uncertain, representative Matt Gaetz of Florida labeled McCarthy “McFailure”, pledged his eternal fealty to Trump and called for a challenge to McCarthy as speaker. Jason Miller, a former Trump official and his echo, went on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast to declare that if McCarthy “wants a chance of being speaker, he needs to be much more declarative of supporting President Trump”. Bannon, free on appeal from his conviction for contempt of Congress for refusing to testify before the January 6 committee, replied that “the Maga-centric nature” of the House and the Republican party would intensify.
When Trump’s mob ran through the corridors of the Capitol chanting “hang Mike Pence!” and “Nancy! Nancy!” and were yards away from breaking into McCarthy’s office, he desperately reached Trump at the White House to ask him to call it off. “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are,” Trump said, according to the journalist Robert Draper. “Am I upset? They’re trying to fucking kill me!” McCarthy shrieked. “Who the fuck do you think you are talking to?”
In the days after the trauma, McCarthy raised the idea that cabinet members invoke the 25th amendment to remove Trump – then defended Trump from impeachment, which did not preclude Trump calling him a “pussy”, and on 27 January flew to Mar-a-Lago to bend his knee in supplication.
McCarthy, even as he tries to balance along a fine line, chronically abases himself. Occasionally, he tries to cover his naked ambition with a transparent fig leaf. In May 2020, when Trump falsely claimed that Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman and an MSNBC TV host critical of Trump, had murdered a young female aide in 2001, despite being 800 miles away when she fell and fatally hit her head, McCarthy responded with a statement he must have thought displayed his political cuteness.
“I was not here with Joe Scarborough,” he said. “I don’t quite know about the subject itself.”
But abasement in the service of self-interest is not loyalty. Trump, who recalls every slight as lese-majesty, has taken McCarthy’s small measure as “my Kevin”. He knows that McCarthy thinks, as McCarthy blurted to the House Republican conference in 2017, that Putin “pays” Trump – “swear to God”. He will never be judged sufficiently loyal, nor trusted to do absolutely everything he’s ordered to do, especially when those orders are to lay siege to the justice department in a bid to interfere with its investigations of Trump.
Kevin McCarthy’s McCarthyism, like the previous McCarthyism, is rooted in personal ambition, but in Kevin McCarthy’s case it is more motivated by a desire to to go along than by the feral instinct displayed by Joe McCarthy, with Roy Cohn whispering in his ear before he got into Trump’s.
Kevin McCarthy has always known the score: that Republican mendacity, from little white lies to big lie, is born of sheer cynicism. From time to time, he inadvertently spills the beans. His impulse to babble the truth was uncontrollable in 2015, when he blabbed about the House investigation on Benghazi, revealing its political intent: “Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping.”
McCarthy surely knows that the cruel Republican culture war is hypocrisy. When it comes to Trump’s handpicked senate candidate from Georgia, Herschel Walker – who is facing a runoff election with senator Raphael Warnock, and who allegedly paid for girlfriends’ abortions, allegedly abandoned both his legal and illegitimate children, and allegedly engaged in violence against his ex-wife – McCarthy has maintained radio silence.
His passivity in the face of vice is the price he willingly pays to sustain the virtuous sheen of the culture war. While he advances himself through each cowardly act, his performance does not inspire confidence from his own cohort, who see through the cellophane man. He must dance faster and faster just to stand still.
McCarthy will obediently issue blanket approval for House committees to launch a thousand inquisitions. Democratic groups engaged in voter turnout efforts will be investigated. Democratic attorneys who defend voting rights will be targeted. Progressive nonprofits involved with elections and criminal justice will have their nonprofit status challenged. Secretaries of state who have frustrated Trump election deniers will be pressured. Biden administration officials, from national security to homeland security, will be subpoenaed to scandalize their policies. Military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine, already assailed by the Republican pro-Putin caucus, will be squeezed. No “blank check”, McCarthy has said.
Corporations and banks that invest in green energy, or adopt diversity and equity policies, will be pressured. Tech platforms will be hauled before the klieg lights for depositions on alleged political discrimination against conservatives, to intimidate them into following the example of Elon Musk, who attended McCarthy’s private political retreat in Wyoming this past August. (“Elon believes in freedom. Elon is an entrepreneur. Such an American success story,” McCarthy said.)
The subpoenas will fly. And, quite predictably, the House will manufacture a conflict over the federal budget to shut down the government in an attempt to enforce its draconian policies, as Republicans have done before as a tactic against Bill Clinton in 1995 to 1996 and against Barack Obama in 2013.
Then the House may impeach President Biden – and possibly Vice-President Kamala Harris, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, among others. The writer Barton Gellman recently laid out the coming strategy in the Atlantic. “McCarthy wants to oversee subpoenas and Benghazi-style hearings to weaken the president ahead of the 2024 election, not issue a call for Biden’s removal,” Gellman writes. “But there is little reason to think that McCarthy can resist the GOP’s impulse to impeach once it gathers strength.”
Gellman further quotes Ted Cruz, from the senator’s recent podcast, pressing for Biden’s impeachment, “whether it’s justified or not”, as payback for Trump’s two impeachments. Like many Republicans, Cruz uses the word “weaponize” in the same way that Republicans have adopted the word “grooming” to accuse public school teachers of trying to turn children transgender. “The Democrats weaponized impeachment,” said Cruz. “They used it for partisan purposes to go after Trump because they disagreed with him. And one of the real disadvantages of doing that … is the more you weaponize it and turn it into a partisan cudgel, you know, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.”
After the January 6 committee is disbanded, the House judiciary committee will paint a bull’s eye on the Department of Justice (DoJ). The committee will act as Trump’s team for the defense. As the investigations circling Trump close in, from the fake electors’ scheme to the Mar-a-Lago archives theft, Trump and his allies will intensify their charges that the justice department is “weaponizing” the law. Jim Jordan will claim that the DoJ is unfairly persecuting Trump while failing to investigate properly the “Biden crime family”, only beginning with Hunter Biden.
The House Republicans will demand the internal documents and sources in every case the DoJ is pursuing about Trump. When the justice department refuses to hand over materials from ongoing investigations, subpoenas will be issued for them, and when the DoJ invariably declines – because to comply would violate the law and all of its protocols – contempt charges will be filed against attorney general Merrick Garland, his deputy, Lisa Monaco, and individual prosecutors. The dismissal of those contempt filings will have no bearing on the House proceeding to the impeachment of Garland, Monaco, et al.
The point for the Republicans will not necessarily be to remove Garland, which would be highly unlikely, but instead to discredit any justice department case against Trump as politically motivated, to portray Trump as the victim, and to rouse the Republican base. Most importantly, the judiciary committee interference would attempt to severely cripple the investigations.
If this sounds like conjecture, consider that Jim Jordan wrote to Merrick Garland and the FBI director, Christopher Wray, on 2 November – a week before the election and under the letterhead of the judiciary committee, as if he were already the chairman – demanding information and sources in current cases involving Trump, extremist militias and far-right figures.
In his lengthy list of requests, he asked for “all documents and communications between or among employees of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Justice, and the executive office of the president referring or relating to classifying or reclassifying domestic violent extremism cases, for the period of January 1 2020, to the present”; “all documents and communications referring or relating to the decision to seek a search warrant for President Trump’s residence”; and “all documents and communications referring or relating to the use of confidential human source(s) in connection with the search of President Trump’s residence”. Jordan followed up by releasing a dense 1,050-page compendium of conspiracy theories – 1,050 rabbit holes he promises to go down.
If McCarthy exhibits the slightest queasiness, commits another of his trademark gaffes that reveal too much of the truth, or is simply not militant enough for Trump, his speakership will become unstable. The jackals already surround him, and there is a ready alternative waiting in the wings to replace him. Elise Stefanik, adored by Trump, seamlessly transmogrified from moderate to Maga, emerging as Trump’s defender during his first impeachment. “A new Republican star is born,” Trump tweeted. The 38-year-old congresswoman’s ambition is a raging fever.
Once a classic Bush Republican – an assistant to George W Bush’s eminently reasonable chief of staff Josh Bolten, no less – Stefanik has since become Trump’s full-throated champion. She whipped up the purge of Liz Cheney as chair of the House Republican conference for Cheney’s heresy and engineered herself into the job, profusely praising Trump as “the leader”. This year, she introduced a resolution to expunge his second impeachment over the insurrection as “a sham smear”. Since the midterm elections, she has thrice endorsed Trump for president in 2024. The leaning tumbril awaits McCarthy too.
Trump declared his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination the third time, after two impeachments and a coup attempt, one week after the Republican midterm debacle, in which many of the loyalists bearing his imprimatur fell before the voters. Nor has he been deterred by the prospect of a contest with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who, to claim the prize, would have to murder the king and be tainted with his blood.
It was a grand illusion that Trump would somehow fade away, Biden restore the spirit of civility of the old Senate, and Garland prosecute the January 6 rioters to be done with the mess, shelving the whole episode as a thing of the past, with decency and the rule of law prevailing again.
The Republican fear campaign in the midterm elections, projecting the menaces of inflation, crime and trans rights, will dissolve the instant the contest is over. On January 6, Trump waved his mob forward: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them.” Trump’s coup, which has never ended, will now continue with the House of Representatives as his chief political tool.
TS Eliot, in The Hollow Men, wrote:
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
On 13 September, Trump retweeted a kitsch portrait of himself wearing a “Q” on his lapel, the symbol of the QAnon conspiracy cult that venerates him; its slogan, “The Storm Is Coming”; and the cryptic letters, “WWG1WGA”, which mean “Where We Go One, We Go All”. As Trump tweeted on 23 December 2020 to promote the January 6 insurrection: “Will be wild”.
Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth
