Kevin McCarthy’s Speakership Bid Has Fox News at War With Itself

The Republican battle over the next House Speaker has bled into the most vital media organ in conservative politics: the Fox News prime-time lineup. On one side stands Sean Hannity, who is urging the 20-or-so far-right holdouts to let Representative Kevin McCarthy claim the gavel. And on the other is Tucker Carlson, who has thrown his support behind that very group in an apparent pressure campaign to quash McCarthy’s bid.

The disagreement boiled over Wednesday, when Hannity, who had urged the holdouts to “work it out,” confronted Representative Lauren Boebert, one of the anti-McCarthy ringleaders, on air. “So, if I’m gonna use your words and your methodology and your math, isn’t it time for you to pack it in, and your side to pack it in, considering he has over 200 and you have 20?” Hannity asked the lawmaker. Boebert responded by saying she understood “the frustration” but refused to capitulate amid the host’s grilling.

Carlson, for his part, delivered an anti-McCarthy monologue Wednesday. “Oh, you’ve got reservations about Kevin McCarthy? You don’t want to be ruled by a man who wears a Ukrainian flag lapel pin and lives with Frank Luntz?” the host asked his audience, referencing McCarthy’s 2021 admission that he had rented a room from Luntz, an establishment Republican pollster. Carlson then argued that McCarthy was making no effort to reconcile with his detractors, most of whom are members of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus. “Instead, like the left they purport to oppose, they’re using threats and fear to force people to support the candidate,” he said of McCarthy’s team. Carlson has also defended the cohort of insurgents from attacks made by fellow Republicans: After Representative Dan Crenshaw, a pro-McCarthy Republican from Texas, insisted that his party “cannot let the terrorists win,” the Fox host described the lawmaker as “the snarling face of the donor class.” Crenshaw replied by urging Carlson to “grow thicker skin.”

Late Wednesday evening, after a sixth ballot failed to produce a Speaker, McCarthy offered a number of concessions to the 20 hard-liners blocking his path to the gavel. The new terms would acquiesce to many demands made by the holdouts, including allowing a rule change that would let one GOP member call a vote to oust the Speaker; granting Freedom Caucus members top committee assignments; and promising to bring likely nonviable border-security legislation to a floor vote, according to The Wall Street Journal.

As far as Fox News goes, Carlson is in the minority. On Thursday, Fox & Friends’ Brian Kilmeade had even harsher words for the holdouts than Hannity, calling the “Never McCarthy” set “insurrectionists”—a term he switched to “saboteurs” on the suggestion of his cohosts, Steve Doocy and Ainsley Earhardt. Doocy was similarly irate in another Fox & Friends segment Thursday. “I heard so many people say, ‘You know, that’s just how democracy works.’ This is not democracy. This is a televised hijacking,” he declared. “They are intent, simply, on blowing up the party, which they are doing, and this Congress. They do not care.”

Still, Carlson did find a friend in Laura Ingraham, who ultimately sided with the exact group of conservatives whom Doocy criticized. “What looks chaotic and kind of seems counterproductive to many—it’s actually, in its own way, refreshing because it’s democracy in action,” Ingraham said Wednesday. Carlson trotted out the same line, calling the chaos a “refreshing” showcase of democracy that is only “embarrassing if you prefer the Soviet-style consensus of the Democratic Party’s internal elections.”