In the end, it may not have been the case against Kevin McCarthy’s performance—the gripes over his dealmaking with Democrats, the legislative process he ran, the promises he did or didn’t make to any number of people—that cemented the abrupt end of his speakership.
For eight of McCarthy’s most dedicated Republican critics, their unprecedented and extraordinary decision to boot the speaker and throw the House into turmoil may have been most animated by something else.
Beef.
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The ringleader of the coup, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), has insisted his misgivings with McCarthy weren’t personal. “I have no personal animus to him,” he said on Fox News Tuesday night. “I hope he finds fruitful pastures, and I’m certain he will.”
But to many Republicans, it’s clear the far-right Florida congressman has long harbored a deep resentment toward McCarthy—and that’s clear to even McCarthy himself.
“You all know Matt Gaetz,” McCarthy said at a press conference Tuesday announcing he would not seek the speakership again. “You know it was personal.”
McCarthy first noted Gaetz’s most obvious incentive: boosting his own popularity with a MAGA base that had never really cared for the speaker, and fundraising off his gambit.
But McCarthy also mentioned something else. “I’ve seen the texts,” he said. “It was all about his ethics. But that’s alright.”
For over two years, the House Ethics Committee has had an open investigation of Gaetz, focusing on a variety of potential offenses—allegations of sexual misconduct most serious among them. That investigation was paused while the Department of Justice probed whether Gaetz had paid for sex with a minor, but it resumed recently when no charges resulted from the investigation.
According to The New York Times, Gaetz complained to colleagues that McCarthy hadn’t scuttled the investigation—even though he had no real power to do so. “It seems that the Ethics Committee’s interest in me waxes and wanes based on my relationship with the speaker,” Gaetz said on Monday, though he has since claimed the Ethics probe had nothing to do with his stand.
Beyond any Ethics Committee situation, McCarthy and Gaetz—the House GOP’s consummate backslapper and gadfly, respectively—seemed to just never get along.
In a revealing anecdote from her new book, former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson described what happened when she, Gaetz, McCarthy, and other members joined Donald Trump on a presidential retreat to Camp David. McCarthy ordered some alcohol and invited a small group back to his cabin. It was around 1 a.m. when there was a knock on McCarthy’s door.
<p>I thought it was Camp David staff coming to warn us to quiet down—Kevin’s cabin was across from the president’s. But when Kevin opened the door, we discovered Matt Gaetz leaning against the doorframe. Matt straightened his posture when Kevin asked him what he wanted, and he explained that he had seen my golf cart parked outside and thought that this was my cabin. Embarrassed, I got up and asked Matt what he needed. He explained that he was lost and asked me to escort him to his cabin. I told him to proceed around the circle drive—all the cabins were clearly marked and it was impossible to get lost. He asked me one more time to leave with him. “Get a life, Matt,” Kevin said, then shut the door.</p>
The Florida congressman is not the only one of the McCarthy rebels whose opposition might have hinged on personal considerations.
Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN), though a hardline conservative, consistently voted in favor of McCarthy during his slog to win the gavel in January. But what apparently tipped Burchett toward voting to boot McCarthy was a Tuesday morning call he got from the speaker.
According to Burchett—who said he was going to “pray about” his decision—McCarthy opened the conversation by belittling his faith. “He just said something that was very condescending,” Burchett said. “I thought to myself, that pretty much sealed it right there.”
After losing the vote later that day, an exasperated McCarthy insisted to reporters that he did no such thing, only that he read Burchett’s own words to him when they began speaking.
Another Republican who voted against McCarthy—Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO)—was passed over earlier this year for the chairmanship of an antitrust subcommittee. According to The Washington Post, McCarthy didn’t even inform Buck, an antitrust wonk who was set to win the chairmanship on seniority, that the position was going instead to Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY).
Buck ultimately learned about the “snub,” as the Washington Examiner put it, from the media about a week after he put out a book lambasting Big Tech.
Notably, Buck had not mentioned that history in discussing his opposition to McCarthy. A spokesperson for Buck did not respond to a request for comment.
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) was probably the most surprising addition to the ranks of the McCarthy rebels. An occasional moderate who sometimes postures with the hard right, Mace might not be in office if not for McCarthy; when she first ran for Congress in 2020, the GOP leader steered millions of dollars to her struggling campaign to flip a seat held by a Democrat.
In the final days of his speakership, Mace’s opposition seemed to come from out of nowhere, and she struggled to articulate exactly why she was upset, other than claiming that he had not kept promises he made to her.
After Mace appeared on ABC’s The View to slam McCarthy, the speaker told reporters he called her chief of staff, who he said told him “You have kept your word, 100 percent.”
At his press conference, McCarthy was asked by a reporter if he regretted “not reaching out” to Mace directly, with the reporter adding that Mace was not happy that he called her chief of staff.
“She was on The View saying I didn’t keep my word, so I didn’t know what to…” McCarthy responded, before trailing off and, apparently, deciding not to say more. “Listen, I can’t say this in the press, but OK.”
There is a deep irony to the fact that McCarthy’s fall from grace was accelerated by personal grievances. What brought the California Republican to the top of his party was not brainpower or legislative mastery, but relentlessness in cultivating allies and building strong interpersonal relationships.
In their defenses of McCarthy ahead of the vote on Tuesday, GOP member after GOP member testified to his strengths as a leader, colleague, and friend. He was someone who never missed a call on birthdays or when a child or grandchild was born, they said.
McCarthy’s skill in this regard carried him far—but only so far. In today’s House GOP, under the rules that he himself approved, a small group of determined lawmakers could topple a broadly popular speaker, for whatever reason they want.
Whoever succeeds McCarthy—no matter if it is Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA), Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH), or someone else—will have enemies. Every political leader racks up a few of those in the course of rising through the ranks. But that one disgruntled colleague could engineer the downfall of a speaker is just one reason why McCarthy’s successor may have just as impossible of a job as he did.
What remains clear is that there are plenty of strong political incentives for Republican members to be seen as fighting the party establishment, no matter how chaotic the outcome.
Gaetz, for instance, is seen as likely to run for governor of Florida in 2026, where his anti-McCarthy crusade could make him a hero in a GOP primary. (He has said he is not planning to seek the office.)
Another one of the anti-McCarthy eight, Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-MT), is gearing up to run for U.S. Senate in Montana, where he would face off against GOP consensus pick Tim Sheehy in a primary battle.
Mace, meanwhile, fundraised off her vote the following day—though, pleading for contributions in an interview from the Capitol on Fox News, the congresswoman may have unknowingly broken the strict prohibition on soliciting campaign donations in the building.
It’s unclear if these lawmakers will face any consequences from their party anytime soon. But plenty of Republicans are worried that failure to respond forcefully might incentivize the behavior even more.
Several GOP lawmakers have called for the conference to expel Gaetz, as fury boils over in the wake of the coup he orchestrated. Freshman Rep. Max Miller (R-OH), who once served as an aide to Trump, called Gaetz “disturbed.”
“He’s gone too far,” he said. “He’s a party of one. He’s going to fail.”
Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) told The Daily Beast he wanted Gaetz out of the conference as well.
“He’s not a Republican,” Bacon said of Gaetz. “He’s an anarchist.”
And Rep. Michael Lawler (R-NY) has made attacking Gaetz something of a sport in recent days, calling him a “charlatan” on Monday and saying he thought Gaetz should be expelled on Tuesday. Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-WA) wondered to The Daily Beast whether it was just Gaetz who should be expelled.
If Gaetz was taking the calls for his punishment personally himself, he wasn’t showing it on Tuesday.
“If they want to expel me,” he told reporters, “let me know when they have the votes.”
Zachary Petrizzo contributed to this report.
