SATURDAY, OCTOBER 23 , 2021. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A
to the Super Bowl — you don’t
change coaches.”‘We are united’
McCarthy likes to point out the
symbols, paintings and framed
documents he has used to deco-
rate his Capitol office. Immigra-
tion documents from Ellis Island
showing the arrival of his Italian
forefathers hang on one wall.
Others display oversized paint-
ings of Ronald Reagan and Abra-
ham Lincoln and a map of the
United States made from hotel
room key cards he has gathered,
including one from Bohemian
Grove, an exclusive gentleman’s
club north of San Francisco, and
another from an Alabama Hilton
Garden Inn.
He keeps an empty bottle of
Bordeaux in his office — Château
Talbot, 2003 — that he had his
whip team sign in January of
2009 just after Republicans voted
unanimously against President
Barack Obama’s first stimulus
bill.
That was the night, he says, he
knew Republicans would retake
the majority.
“They asked me how was that
possible. We needed over 40 seats
to win the majority,” he recalled.
“I said, ‘No, we are united to-
night.’ ”
When Republicans won back
Congress the next year, with a net
gain of 63 seats, he popped the
cork with his team.
He believes it is certain to
happen again — a prospect even
McCarth y’s detractors see as
credible.
“People like me look at it and
kind of find it repulsive,” said Bill
Kristol, a conservative author
who has compared McCarthy to
“the piano player in the House
Republican brothel.”
“But,” he acknowledged, “there
is a sense that it might work.”
[email protected]
[email protected]times bubbled up on the margins.
Joe Kent, a Trump-endorsed rival
for Herrera Beutler, is the first
prominent candidate to say he
will not support McCarthy for
speaker.
“He is not a leader,” former
Trump adviser Stephen K. Ban-
non said in June of McCarthy on
his daily podcast, which has be-
come an anti-establishment rally-
ing point for Trump devotees. “He
is the pledge chairman at the
fraternity. He is drinking what the
client’s drinking.”
McCarthy has moved delicately
as he tries to lay out boundaries
for his own caucus. He removed
then-Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa)
from his committee assignments
in 2019, after King appeared to
defend the term “white national-
ist.” Then this year he fought
unsuccessfully to keep Rep. Mar-
jorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) on one
of her two committees after old
offensive statements by her sur-
faced, including a comment
about killing Pelosi.
Months later, McCarthy con-
demned Greene’s comparison of
the Holocaust to mask mandates.
He has told some people close to
him that she was a big problem,
according to people familiar with
the conversations, although he
has not said that publicly.
“He is trying to balance fac-
tions,” said one Republican strat-
egist, who spoke on the condition
of anonymity to reflect the strat-
egy. “It is almost an impossible
job, before you put Trump into it.”
But McCarthy believes the dys-
function of the last two congres-
sional GOP majorities can be left
behind, and he has won some
powerful supporters. Rep. Jim
Jordan (R-Ohio), who challenged
McCarthy in 2018 to become mi-
nority leader, now says he fully
backs McCarth y’s speakership.
“He has brought the team to-
gether,” Jordan said in an inter-
view. “The coach that brings youbit, but no one was supposed to
say it.
At the Nashville dinner, his
learning curve was still on dis-
play. Presented onstage with an
oversized gavel, meant as a sym-
bol of his coming coronation, Mc-
Carthy said it would be “hard not
to hit” House Speaker Nancy Pelo-
si (D -Calif.) if she were to hand it
to him after Republicans win con-
trol of Congress.
It was a joke he had made
before, in private se ttings with
dono rs, according to multiple
people who had heard him. But
under a national glare, Pelosi’s
allies pounced, accusing McCar-
thy of using violent rhetoric
against a woman.
“This is a wholly different posi-
tion that he is in. And it has been a
really deeply jarring process to
realize that for anyone,” Rep. Pat-
rick T. McHenry (R-N.C.) said of
his friend’s second climb toward
the top leadership seat in the
House. “And given how atrocious
the politics are right now, it is
even more difficult.”
As it stands, it is hard to find a
Republican who does not believe
the par ty is on track to take back
the House next year. Republicans
hope to gain at least as many seats
as they need from the decennial
redistricting process alone, as-
suming voters behave as they did
in 2020.
McCarthy is widely viewed
amo ng his colleagues as the over-
whelming favorite to become
speaker if Republicans retake the
majority. But opposition has atimpeach or censure Trump for
actions that led to the Jan. 6
attacks.
The group has also sent checks
to nine other Republicans who
voted to support the bipartisan
commission to investigate the at-
tacks. Trump warned of “conse-
quences” for that “wayward” and
“weak” group. Some of Trump’s
fiercest defenders, including
Cawthorn and Rep. Lauren Boe-
bert (R-Colo.), have also benefited
from joint fundraising agree-
me nts.
A Trump adviser said the for-
mer president is displeased with
McCarthy supporting any of the
Republicans who voted for im-
peachment. Trump said in a
Sept. 23 radio interview that he
wanted to find out more about
where McCarth y’s money was go-
ing. “I’m going to see who he is
funding,” Trump said. “If he is, I
will stop the whole deal.”
The former president has
nonetheless agreed to headline a
November fundraiser for the Na-
tional Republican Congressional
Committee, a separate House ef-
fort that McCarthy helps to lead.An unruly caucus
The last time McCarthy had a
shot at the speakership, in 2015,
he undermined his case by going
on Fox News to brag about the
political motivations of a Repub-
lican investigation of former sec-
retary of state Hillary Clinton
after an American diplomat was
killed in Benghazi, Libya. Every-
one knew it was a political gam-dorsements.”
The relationship remains hot
and cold. The former president
has leaked word about McCar-
thy’s visits to Trump’s homes in
Bedminster, N.J., or Mar-a-Lago,
Fla., to drive public interest, while
also privately bad-mouthing Mc-
Carthy to advisers and entertain-
ing the possibility that someone
else might make a better speaker,
according to the former presi-
dent’s aides.
Aides say Trump has learned to
be wary of McCarth y’s different
interests, even as they continue to
work together. Trump, these aides
say, has still not forgiven McCar-
thy for his proposed censure for
the Capitol riot. “He’ll never get
over that,” a Trump adviser said.
“It’s really their main disagree-
ment.”
More ominously, Trump has
declared vengeance on the 10
House incumbents who voted for
his impeachment, even as McCar-
thy has tried to defend some,
according to people familiar with
their conversations. Trump has
endorsed primary challenges
against Reps. Fred Upton of Mich-
igan and Jaime Herrera Beutler of
Washington and, before his re-
cent announcement that he
would not seek reelection, Antho-
ny Gonzalez (R-Ohio).
“1 down, 9 to go,” Trump said in
a statement soon after Gonzalez
bowed out.
Despite Trump’s rages, McCar-
thy has continued to fund Trump
critics in his party, following fi-
nancial agreements signed with
them before Jan. 6, based on a
formul a that determined how
vulnerable incumbents could be
in 2022.
Through a committee called
Take Back the House, which has
been used in other recent election
cycles, McCarthy has been chan-
neling money to the reelection
campaigns of eight of the 17 Re-
publicans who signed on to eitherMcCarthy talks of the tens of
thousands of votes out of more
than 150 million cast that kept
him from winning the majority in
2020, and how he roughly dou-
bled the number of female Re-
publican House candidates in one
election cycle. He knows how
many of those who voted for
Trump in 2016 never turned out
two years later, and tells nearly
everyone he meets that all the
Democratic incumbents who
went down in 2020 fell to women
or minority GOP candidates.
But the omnipresence of
Trump has still kept McCarthy
maneuvering to keep the party
from splintering. The roots of his
relationship with Trump date to
2016, say people involved, when
McCarthy was the first member of
House leadership to endorse him
for president after it was clear the
New York businessman would be
the nominee. Weeks later, McCar-
thy was captured in a private
audio recording with Ryan and
others, saying that he believed
Russian President Vladimir Putin
was paying then-candidate
Trump.
“Swear to God,” McCarthy said,
before Ryan asked everyone in
the room to make sure McCar-
thy’s comment never leaked.
Aides said McCarthy was joking.
Once McCarthy became minor-
ity leader in early 2019, he made
courting Trump a top priority,
persuading him to endorse every
GOP incumbent in the House —
because they all voted against his
first impeachment — and to rec-
ord more than 50 telephone ral-
lies and endorsements for GOP
House candidates.
“Kevin McCarthy and Presi-
dent Trump would go through
each race, one by one, with Mc-
Carthy making his asks,” said a
former White House of ficial fa-
miliar with the process in 2020.
“Sure enough, week after week,
you’d see batches of primary en-
PHOTOS BY JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POSTLEFT: House members clap as Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy,
center, speaks from the House steps on July 29 about the
leadership of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif .) and
President Biden. BELOW: McCarthy shows off his American flag
ja cket after spea king to veterans and volunteers visiting from his
home district in California on an honor flight, at Arlington
National Cemetery on Sept. 16. BOTTOM: McCarthy, 56, is
silhouetted in his office on Capitol Hill on Sept. 22.“[Kevin McCarthy] has brought the team
together. The coach that brings you to the
Super Bowl — you don’t change coaches.”
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio)