He’s supposed to be a leader—the leader, in fact, of the Republicans in the House of Representatives. But he ain’t doing much leading.
As The Daily Beast reported, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) went in a matter of weeks from angrily criticizing Donald Trump for inciting the MAGA mob that attacked the Capitol—to kissing up to the entire Trump family.
“The House of Representatives’ [Republican caucus] is comprised of the Trump party—with the exception of 10 or 11 reps,” says Rick Wilson on the latest edition of The New Abnormal. “They’re the pro-sedition, pro-insurrection, pro-mob party.”
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“Right? It does feel like McCarthy is really giving Trump the Republican Party. He really is,” adds Molly Jong-Fast. “I mean, there was like a chance where the Republican Party was going to escape from Trump’s clutches. And then [McCarthy] was like: ‘Too scary. Let’s go back.’”
McCarthy went down, too—all the way to Mar-a-Lago, to bend the knee on Thursday.
“Kevin McCarthy had to flee his office [during the Capitol riot]. He begged Donald Trump to speak, to stop what was going on as it was going on. And Trump was silent. And now Kevin McCarthy is going to apologize to Donald Trump,” says Jon Allen, co-author of the forthcoming Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency. “I don’t know what to do with that… If you come to my house and try to kill me, if you bring your guns to my house, one thing I will not be doing is apologizing to you and begging for your forbearance.”
And meanwhile, the Republicans in the Senate are acting only slightly less timid.
“I call it the alligator fried chicken theory, which is you can keep throwing the alligator fried chicken [while you’re] sitting on the edge of the dock. But when you’re out of fried chicken, he bites your foot off, OK?” Rick says. “They keep thinking they’re going to be the last one like that. They’re the last piece of fried chicken and they’re going to be OK. They are not. [Trump] will always be there doing this to them from afar. He will haunt them until he is dead. And once he’s dead, they’ll upload them to the cloud and he’ll haunt them for all the Trinity until the heat death of the universe.”
“The only path to cutting off the pernicious infection and the metastasizing cancer that is Trumpism is to vote to convict him. Now, I recognize that that would take people in the Senate on the Republican side with these rare and terrifying characteristics that are unimaginable in modern American politics, things like courage and integrity and patriotism and a love of country and putting country before party,” Rick adds. “All these things would be, would be easy, but they’re also in Congress rare as hen’s teeth, as my grandma would say.”
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