At a Tea Party rally in 2015, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump promised the voters at the Washington, D.C., event that if they elected him to the White House, Republicans would start winning, bigly. “We’ll have so much winning, you’ll get bored with winning!” he said to the crowd’s delight.
But since winning the White House as promised in 2016, Republicans have been doing a lot of losing instead. Trump lost the White House in 2020, while Republicans lost control of the U.S. Senate in 2021. The next year, Trump’s hand-picked candidates for Senate lost, too, including Herschel Walker.
But no loss may be more consequential than the loss of control inside the GOP-led House this week, where Trump-aligned candidates brought down consummate insider House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. But it ended up being a Kamikaze mission for the rebels, proving that left to their own devices, Republicans couldn’t govern themselves, let alone the country.
It all started before Trump in 2010, when then-House Minority Leader John Boehner tapped a junior House member named Kevin McCarthy to recruit Tea Party candidates to run for the House as Republicans. The 2008 financial crisis and President Barack Obama’s victory had unleashed a fury of conservative grassroots anger, as people saw Wall Street banks getting bailed out by the federal government and regular people paying for it with their tax dollars. Surely Republicans could harness that explosive energy and make it their own, the thinking went.
McCarthy recruited loads of outsiders and agitators and Republicans won a massive victory in 2011. Change started from there, but incrementally, and the boiling new Republican base wanted more, faster.
Fast forward to 2015, when a 2010 winner, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, invited billionaire Donald Trump to speak at the Tea Party event in Washington where Trump promised all the winning. Trump was never Tea Party guy, but his populist anger connected with theirs. At the same event, Trump took a swipe at then-House Speaker John Boehner. As the leading presidential candidate by then, Trump’s insult hurt Boehner’s standing with his own party’s grassroots.
“He’s been very disappointing in terms of his vigor,” Trump said.
Two weeks later, Boehner resigned as restless Republican members threatened to shut down the government over federal spending and called Boehner part of the problem. Sound familiar? Among the rebels threatening to depose Boehner at the time was U.S. Rep. Mark Meadows, who later became Trump’s White House chief of staff. But instead of waiting around for a vote of no confidence, Boehner left on his own terms.
The next House Speaker, Paul Ryan, didn’t fare much better. Although Ryan lasted until early 2019, about halfway through the Trump presidency, he spent much of it publicly scolding Trump for offensive Tweets and trying to walk Trump back from what he later called “bad decisions.”
Trump frequently mocked Ryan as a “weak and ineffective leader.” Returning the favor, Ryan recently said there’s no way Republicans can win in 2024 if Trump is the nominee.
“I think leaders should endeavor to be honest, ethical, moral people who try to set standards for themselves and lead by example across the country,” Ryan said. “Donald Trump doesn’t try to do any of that. He does the opposite, frankly. So I just don’t think he’s fit for the job here.”
With Ryan on the way out, his longtime deputy McCarthy rose to the top. Although he was the ultimate Washington glad-hander and money baller, McCarthy also was not wedded to the kind of policy ideas that Ryan was.
The litmus test for members and candidates by then was not about supporting a balanced budget amendment or Reagan-style foreign policy, but supporting Trump. Moderate House Republicans were out, while Trump loyalists like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz were in. Without being a complete Trump loyalist himself, McCarthy’s days as Speaker after Republicans won the House in 2022 were numbered.
You’d almost feel sorry for McCarthy if he hadn’t brought so much of it on himself. Looking to get into the Speaker’s office by any means possible, he agreed to an organizing rule allowing a single, disgruntled member like Gaetz to call a vote of no confidence against him, which he did after McCarthy dared him to, “Bring it.”
When it was all over, McCarthy complained it was mostly Democrats who had helped dumped him. But Democrats will tell you it was McCarthy’s decision to go to Mar-A-Lago after Jan. 6 that seeded their anger at him. By embracing Trump in that moment, they said, McCarthy had enabled Trump to do it all again.
The fallout from McCarthy’s loss has been loud, especially among Republicans who nearly all supported him. But they couldn’t save him from the Trump allies in the House who don’t mind the chaos.
And they don’t know what’s next.
Although Trump told reporters that he didn’t orchestrate McCarthy’s demise, Gaetz said Thursday that Trump had been “completely supportive of my efforts.”
By the end of the day, Trump announced he’ll be in Washington Tuesday to speak “as a unifier” to the GOP caucus as they decide on a new leader. He has endorsed U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan, who defended him during a Democratic impeachment inquiry. But he also suggested he might need to take the House over for a while, too.
“They have asked me if I would take it for a short period of time for the party, until they come to a conclusion,” he said. “I’m not doing it because I want to — I will do it if necessary, should they not be able to make their decision.”
Trump didn’t say who in the House had asked him to take over, but they must tired of winning.
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