The Kevin McCarthy Mess Is Peak Trumpism

Despite his best efforts, the leopards have finally come for Kevin McCarthy’s face. For those not extremely online, I’m referring to a 2015 tweet from YA novelist Adrian Bott: “‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.” 

It’s nearly eight years later and McCarthy is learning this lesson the hard way, as his quixotic quest for the Speakership, which spanned most of that time, is falling apart on C-SPAN. Rumors of an affair (which McCarthy denied) might have derailed McCarthy from taking over the gavel from John Boehner in 2015. And again, in 2018, when McCarthy was set up to be Speaker, Republicans lost the House. Now finally, Republicans have a razor-thin majority, but their party is too dysfunctional to govern. McCarthy is finding it impossible to stop a brakeless freight train driven by morons, making a mess of the 118th Congress before members are even sworn in. 

How Republicans in Congress unraveled isn’t a mystery. There’s a straight line from Newt Gingrich to the Tea Party to Donald Trump to a Colorado congresswoman named Lauren Boebert saying she wants a “single-member motion to vacate.” Such a motion would mean that any member of the House, at any time, could call a new Speaker election. In other words: The Speakership would be held hostage by whichever congressperson was feeling craziest that day. McCarthy has already agreed to a five-member threshold for a motion to vacate, which means that five members can get together and throw sand in the gears whenever they want. Not exactly a recipe for legislative success. 

On Tuesday morning, McCarthy must’ve woken up convinced that he could wear down his fellow Republicans by just holding the vote again and again to get to the 218 votes needed in a quorum of 434. McCarthy lost the first vote, and the second, and the third. Meanwhile, every Democrat voted for Hakeem Jeffries, giving the New York congressman a higher tally than McCarthy, albeit short of 218. Not only were Democrats unified, but they busted out the popcorn to enjoy watching the car crash across the aisle. 

Leading up to his public humiliation, McCarthy had tried everything from threats to appeasement to donations—literally, donating to 17 out of the 20 congresspeople who then prevented him from becoming Speaker. (Well, buying off members of MAGA-world seemed like a good strategy.) You’ll remember that McCarthy went down to Mar-a-Lago to pose for photos with Trump less than a month after the former president incited the January 6 insurrection. McCarthy did everything he could to placate MAGA, but perhaps because of his close proximity to Trump, or in spite of it, the leopards came for his face anyway. Even Trump’s call on Wednesday morning to back McCarthy didn’t work, as he lost a fourth and fifth vote hours later. 

Sure, there’s some historical precedent for what’s playing out in Congress, though one must stretch back before smartphones, or even the fax machine, to an America comprising 48 states. Indeed, the last time a Speakership ballot went more than one round was 1923, when a group of Republican insurgents prevented Massachusetts congressman Frederick Gillett from becoming Speaker for nine rounds of votes until procedural reforms were considered. In 1923, the group of insurgents wanted something specific; a century later, renegade Republicans don’t appear primarily motivated by policies or appointments. They just don’t seem to want to give McCarthy the job.  

Republicans created a cult of personality around Trump. And now that Trump is off the main stage, the cult no longer has a personality. It’s just a cult with lots of zealotry but no actual tenets or beliefs. And even if McCarthy does eventually prevail, the chaos gripping the House GOP is just a symptom of a larger problem. The Republican Party isn’t really a governing party anymore. It’s an incubator for right-wing celebrities. Republicans didn’t even bother writing a new convention platform in 2020, relying on its reality television host’s demented charisma. And when that didn’t work, and Joe Biden decisively beat Trump, the majority of House Republicans tried overturning the election.

It’s not just Trump who Republicans are expected to take marching orders from, but right-wing media figures as well. After McCarthy failed three Speakership contests, Punchbowl’s Max Cohen tweeted, “Rep. Guy Reschenthaler, who’s poised to be chief deputy whip, on what could possibly swing the 19 Jordan voters: “We’ll see what happens when Tucker and Sean Hannity and Ben Shapiro start beating up on these guys. Maybe that’ll move it.” Here’s a Republican Party so broken that it needs Tucker Carlson to help them whip votes.

This intrinsic weakness in the GOP allowed the base to run wild, embracing everything from anti-science stupidity to paranoid conspiracy theories. Perhaps, in 2015, Trump led the base. But by 2020, Trump had lost control of the monster he created. The base decided to reward social media stunts with small-dollar donations. Fox News and the right-wing internet ecosystem created a world of mini Trumps, little congressional bomb-throwers like Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Matt Gaetz. More motivated by fame than governing, these members seem to want what Real Housewives want: to build their brands. These congressional Kardashians don’t have a governing principle beyond obstruction and attention, of which they’ve all been getting amid this week’s party meltdown.  

Whether or not McCarthy eventually wins the Speakership, this ugly episode is sure to do lasting damage to the party. Republicans are in disarray, and the more they pretend they aren’t, the more clueless they look. Trump and Trumpism have now lost Republicans three elections, but still the party refuses to learn anything from its mistakes. Republicans are scared to take the perhaps short-term political hit to disavow the ash heap of Trumpism. If anything, they seem to be looking for another cult leader to lead them. The party that was once hostage to Trump is now hostage to Lauren Boebert and Matt Gaetz and his merry band of misfit toys.