Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., obediently did the bidding of Donald Trump for years. And all he got out of it was the shortest House speakership since 1876.
Throughout the Trump era, McCarthy was consistently a fawning servant of the MAGA king. He was, as the Washington Post notes, the first member of House GOP leadership to endorse Trump for president in 2016. He voted to support Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results. While he briefly criticized Trump as bearing “responsibility” for violence in the Jan. 6 riot, he voted against impeaching him, and he tried to exonerate the man for his attempt at sedition. Just weeks later, he helped rehabilitate Trump’s image through a public meeting with him at Mar-a-Lago.
Trump helped provide cover to the movement that took McCarthy down.
McCarthy worked to get the GOP’s most prominent Trump critic, then-Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, kicked out of the party’s leadership. He forged a close alliance with one of the most conspiratorial, flame-throwing MAGA politicians in the House, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. As Post reports, he collaborated extensively with Trump on House endorsements. Trump and McCarthy had a close enough relationship that Trump referred to him as “my Kevin.” And in September, McCarthy hinted at a 2024 endorsement of Trump by describing him as a better candidate than Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for the Republican nomination.
Yet, when McCarthy was in trouble this fall, Trump didn’t even try to rescue him. Instead, Trump helped provide cover to the movement that took him down.
As McCarthy scrambled in recent weeks to put together a government funding bill that would advance Republican goals and satisfy his unruly caucus, the former president called for a government shutdown, selling it as a way to stick it to the Democrats. “Republicans in Congress can and must defund all aspects of Crooked Joe Biden’s weaponized Government that refuses to close the Border, and treats half the Country as Enemies of the State,” he wrote on Truth Social in September. “This is also the last chance to defund these political prosecutions against me and other Patriots.”
Trump’s call for a government shutdown showed support for the far-right Republicans’ rebellion against McCarthy. The anti-McCarthy bloc, led by Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, demanded sweeping spending cuts and hard-line immigration policy that McCarthy knew would never make it through the Democratically controlled Senate. Even though Gaetz’s crew likely knew that its extremist proposals were futile, Trump’s public advocacy for a shutdown as a political goal unto itself made its members look like authentic MAGA champions sticking up for the base.
As Gaetz led an effort to oust McCarthy from the speakership, Trump could have intervened on his behalf and given McCarthy something for his years of meek devotion. He chose not to. Instead, he deliberately sat on the sidelines and took an outwardly neutral position. Hours before the vote that ousted McCarthy, Trump asked on Truth Social, “Why is it that Republicans are always fighting among themselves, why aren’t they fighting the Radical Left Democrats who are destroying our country?” Trump’s anodyne take about GOP infighting demonstrated that he wasn’t looking to help a friend out but that he was a fair-weather friend.
After the vote, Gaetz implied that Trump had endorsed his coup. “My conversations with the former president leave me with great confidence that I did the right thing,” he told reporters Tuesday. Trump on Wednesday told reporters that he “did not” encourage Gaetz to push out McCarthy.
We don’t know what happened behind closed doors. But it doesn’t matter what was or wasn’t said. As New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman recently put it on a panel on CNN, “Donald Trump will always leave as many options open as possible so he never has to foreclose anything — and then he can end up on the side of where something is going.”
McCarthy hardly deserves our sympathy. “I don’t regret standing up for choosing governance over grievance,” he said with a straight face after he was toppled. The very essence of Trump’s movement is grievance over governance. McCarthy gladly cooperated with Trump and was then taken hostage — and eventually deposed — by the nihilistic movement that Trump authored. McCarthy has nobody to blame but himself.
Trump’s style is to demand fierce loyalty but guarantee nothing in return. He is transactional, and, to be fair, sometimes he upholds his side of a bargain. Trump did often speak warmly of McCarthy and supported his bid for speaker. But it’s clear that he has zero qualms about exiting any kind of relationship the moment he suspects it doesn’t advance his interests. The glue of his relationships is his estimation that they can enhance his power. When Trump called McCarthy “my Kevin,” he wasn’t using a term of affection; he was using a term of possession.