Kevin McCarthy, Four Months After Jan. 6, Still
on Defensive Over Trump
But Mr. McCarthy, the House Republican leader who
could become speaker after 2022, says he needs to work with Donald Trump, who
“goes up and down with his anger.’’
Mark
Leibovich
By Mark
Leibovich
April 25,
2021
BAKERSFIELD,
Calif. — Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, was in an
uncharacteristically dark place.
It was
after the Capitol siege of Jan. 6, and he was getting pounded from all sides.
He was being accused, accurately, of promoting President Donald J. Trump’s stolen-election
lies. But Mr. Trump was still enraged at him for not doing more, and his
supporters had just ransacked Mr. McCarthy’s office.
“This is
the first time I think I’ve ever been depressed in this job,” Mr. McCarthy
confided to his friend, Representative Patrick T. McHenry, Republican of North
Carolina. “Patrick, man, I’m down, I’m just really down.”
Mr. McHenry
told him to gather himself. “You’re dazed,” Mr. McHenry said, recounting the
exchange. “You have to try to think clearly.”
As the end
of the Trump presidency devolved into turmoil and violence, Mr. McCarthy faced
a dilemma, one that has bedeviled his party for nearly five years: Should he
cut Mr. Trump loose, as many Republicans were urging. Or should he keep trying
to make it work with an ousted president who remains the most popular and
motivating force inside the G.O.P.?
Mr.
McCarthy chose the latter, and not for the first time. His extravagant efforts
to ingratiate himself with Mr. Trump have earned him a reputation for being an
alpha lap-dog inside Mr. Trump’s kennel of acolytes. Nine days after Mr. Trump
departed Washington, there was Mr. McCarthy paying a visit to Mar-a-Lago, the
former president’s Florida estate, in an effort to “keep up a dialogue” with
the volatile former president.
“He goes up
and down with his anger,” Mr. McCarthy said of Mr. Trump in a series of
interviews during a recent 48-hour swing through Indiana and Iowa, and home to
Bakersfield, Calif., which he has represented in Congress since 2007. “He’s mad
at everybody one day. He’s mad at me one day.”
Now, nearly
four months after Jan. 6, Mr. McCarthy continues to defend his support for Mr.
Trump’s bogus assertions that the election was stolen from him. Friends say that
he knows better and is as exasperated by Mr. Trump’s behavior as other top
Republicans, but that he has made the calculation that the former president’s
support is essential for his ambitions to become speaker after the 2022
elections, when Republicans have a decent chance to win back the House.
Pressed on
whether he regretted working to overturn President Biden’s 2020 victory, Mr.
McCarthy took the position that he did no such thing.
“We voted
not to certify two states,” he said, referring to Arizona and Pennsylvania,
whose slates of electoral votes Mr. McCarthy and fellow Republicans voted to
challenge, despite offering no proof of fraud that would have altered the final
tallies. But even if the Republicans’ challenge had been successful in those
states, Mr. McCarthy argued, the electoral votes would not have been enough to
tip the nationwide vote away from Mr. Biden. “And Joe Biden would still be sitting
in the White House right now,” he said.
So what
exactly was he trying to accomplish with his votes against certification on
Jan. 6? “That was the only time that we could raise the issue that there was a
question in the activities in those states,” Mr. McCarthy said.
On Sunday,
Mr. McCarthy was further pressed by the “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace,
who asked whether Mr. Trump had sided with the Jan. 6 rioters when the
president told Mr. McCarthy in a phone call that day, according to a claim by
another Republican House member, that the mob was “more upset by the election”
than Mr. McCarthy. Mr. McCarthy had called Mr. Trump to tell him the mob had to
stop.
Mr.
McCarthy sidestepped, saying Mr. Trump told him that he would “put something
out to make sure to stop this. And that’s what he did, he put a video out
later.”
“Quite a
lot later,” Mr. Wallace replied. “And it was a pretty weak video.”
Mr.
McCarthy’s dodge speaks to his role as Mr. Trump’s chief envoy to Republicans
in power. At 56, he is perhaps the most consequential member of his party in
post-Trump Washington in large part because of his chance of becoming the next
speaker of the House. Republicans need to win roughly five more seats to
reclaim a majority in 2022, a viable prospect given that congressional
districts are set to be redrawn and precedent favors nonpresidential parties in
midterm elections. In contrast, Senate Republicans — deadlocked 50 to 50 with
Democrats — face a treacherous map, with analysts viewing Senator Mitch McConnell
of Kentucky, the minority leader, as less likely to command a majority after
2022.
Mr.
McCarthy knows the surest way to blow up his speakership plans would be to
alienate Mr. Trump, who relishes being both a potential kingmaker to his
favored candidates and saboteur of those he is determined to punish.
“He could
change the whole course of history,” Mr. McCarthy said, referring to the
prospect that Mr. Trump could undermine Republican campaigns, or leave the
party entirely. “This is the tightest tightrope anyone has to walk.”
‘Like Your
Older Brother’
Mr.
McCarthy and Mr. Trump share some essential traits. Both men are more
transactional than ideological, possess a healthy belief in their own abilities
to charm and tend to be hyper-focused on the zero sum of politics (i.e.,
winning and losing). As the leader of a minority caucus, Mr. McCarthy has been
less concerned with passing signature legislation or advancing any
transformational policy initiatives.
His main
preoccupation has been doing what it takes to win a majority and become
speaker. He has worked feverishly to that end by recruiting candidates,
formulating campaign strategies and raising huge sums ($27.1 million in the
first quarter of 2021, spread over four targeted funding entities), much of
which he has distributed to his members, earning himself the vital currency of
their devotion.
“Kevin has
unified the Republican conference more than John Boehner or Paul Ryan ever
did,” said Representative Jim Banks, Republican of Indiana, referring to Mr.
McCarthy’s leadership predecessors. “He’s been to my district four times. My
donors know him. They have his cell number. Kevin’s capacity to build and
maintain relationships is not normal.”
As the
leader of a historically fractious caucus, Mr. McCarthy’s most effective
unifying tactic has been through common opposition to the “radical socialist
agenda” of Democrats, particularly Republicans’ designated time-honored
scoundrels like Representative Maxine Waters of California, after she said
protesters should “get more confrontational” in the event Derek Chauvin was
acquitted in the killing of George Floyd.
Mr.
McCarthy moved quickly to call a House vote to censure Ms. Waters. The measure
promptly failed as Democrats charged hypocrisy over Mr. McCarthy’s
unwillingness to condemn worse in his own ranks, among them Representative Matt
Gaetz of Florida (possible sex trafficking) and Representative Marjorie Taylor
Greene of Georgia (support in 2019 for assassinating Speaker Nancy Pelosi,
among other incendiary stances on social media).
Friends say
Mr. McCarthy has little stomach for playing the heavy. “Look, I work with
people I don’t get to hire,” Mr. McCarthy said. He shrugs off the presence of
“problematic” members as a phenomenon of both sides. “I’m just a simple
person,” Mr. McCarthy likes to say, a standard line in his stump speech. “The
Senate is like a country club. The House is like a truck stop.” He prefers
eating at a truck stop, he said, “a freewheeling microcosm of society” where he
would much rather fit in than try to impose order.
“Kevin is a
little like your older brother,” Mr. McHenry said. “He doesn’t want to be your
parent.”
Who’s in
Charge?
Mr.
McCarthy took a seat at a family restaurant in Davenport, Iowa, during a recent
visit to highlight a disputed congressional race left over from 2020.
Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks, a Republican, had prevailed by six
votes over Rita Hart, a Democrat who was appealing the matter to a House
committee. Mr. McCarthy accused Democrats of trying to steal the seat, which
invited immediate charges of a yawning double standard given how Mr. McCarthy
had supported Mr. Trump’s efforts on a much grander scale.
Later that
day, Ms. Hart conceded defeat, and the dispute was resolved without riots.
“This is a good day,” Mr. McCarthy said. But that morning, Mr. Biden had
unveiled his infrastructure bill and had called Mr. McConnell, and not Mr.
McCarthy, to brief him ahead of time. Mr. McCarthy volunteered that he had not
once spoken to Mr. Biden since Inauguration Day, a slight he maintained did not
bother him, although the pique in his voice suggested otherwise.
“When he
was vice president, we would do stuff together,” Mr. McCarthy said. “He would
have me up to eat breakfast at his residence.”
Mr.
McCarthy flashed a photo of himself from his phone with the vice president at
the time, separated by tall glasses of orange juice and plates of freshly cut
melon and blueberries. Mr. McCarthy, who likes to attend Hollywood award shows
and big-ticket galas, brandished phone photos of himself over two days with
other eminences, including Mr. Trump, Pope Francis, Arnold Schwarzenegger and
Kobe Bryant. There was also one of himself in high school with majestically
feathered hair.
But he is
also a small-town guy who keeps up with old boyhood pals and still seems enamored
of having been popular at Bakersfield High School, where he played tight end on
the football team. He travels home often to his district lined with swaying oil
jacks, spread across California’s agricultural interior, two hours north and a
world removed from Los Angeles, not to mention Washington 2,700 miles away.
The son of
a firefighter, Mr. McCarthy has a shorthand bio that’s well-worn: He won $5,000
in a lottery, left community college to open a deli, learned firsthand the
havoc government intrusion can inflict on business owners, sold the deli,
earned a marketing degree and M.B.A. at California State University,
Bakersfield, and was elected to the California Legislature in 2002.
The
waitress came over, and Mr. McCarthy ordered fried chicken and chunky apple
sauce.
The meal
landed while he was on hold waiting to be interviewed by Sean Hannity, giving
Mr. McCarthy the chance to methodically rip apart his fried chicken. He
separated the batter and meat from the bone with savage gusto, and shoveled as
much as possible into his mouth before the interview began. His fingers grew
greasy, as did his phone.
The gist of
the Hannity interview was consistent with one of Mr. McCarthy’s recurring
themes of late: Democrats are acting in a heavy-handed manner antithetical to
Mr. Biden’s conciliatory impulses. This therefore proved that Mr. Biden was not
really in charge of his own government, a familiar Republican trope since the
popular-so-far Mr. Biden took over.
‘That’s My
Job’
Mr.
McCarthy became the House Republican leader after his party lost its majority
in 2018 and Mr. Ryan retired. Republicans came shockingly close to winning back
the majority in 2020, despite predictions they would lose seats in a
coronavirus-ravaged economy and with an unpopular president leading the ticket.
Instead, the party netted about a dozen seats, leaving it only five short. Mr.
McCarthy’s colleagues began referring to him as “speaker in waiting.”
After the
House chamber was evacuated on Jan. 6, Mr. McCarthy retreated to his Capitol
office with a colleague, Representative Bruce Westerman, Republican of
Arkansas. When it became evident the rioters were breaking in, Mr. McCarthy’s
security detail insisted he leave. But Mr. Westerman was left behind in Mr.
McCarthy’s inner work area, he said in a recent interview.
For
protection, Mr. Westerman said he commandeered a Civil War sword from an office
display, barricaded himself in Mr. McCarthy’s private bathroom and waited out
the siege while crouched on the toilet.
Friends
describe the postelection period as traumatic for Mr. McCarthy, who publicly
perpetuated the fiction that Mr. Trump had won while privately asking him to
stop.
“Every day
seemed worse than the day before,” said Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster and
frequent McCarthy sidekick. “He knew the impossible position he was in.”
Still, the
turmoil never brought Mr. McCarthy to a breaking point with Mr. Trump. “Look, I
didn’t want him to leave the party,” Mr. McCarthy said. “Mitch had stopped
talking to him a number of months before. People criticize me for having a
relationship with the president. That’s my job.”
Whenever the
former president’s name came up in these interviews, Mr. McCarthy would lower
his voice and speak haltingly, wary of not casting Mr. Trump in a way that
might upset him. “Is this story going to be all about Trump?” Mr. McCarthy
asked, after back-to-back questions on him. He then paused, seemingly bracing
for a ceiling fan to drop on his head.
Catie
Edmondson contributed reporting from Washington.
April 20, 2021
Mark Leibovich
is the chief national correspondent for The New York Times Magazine, based in
Washington. He is the author of three books and has also won the National
Magazine Award for profile writing. @MarkLeibovich
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