Kevin McCarthy is the latest Republican leader to find out that it’s impossible to get ahead of his party’s inexorable march to its far-right extremes.
The Californian, who has lost a stunning 11 consecutive House roll call votes in his bid to become speaker, was the first major GOP leader to embrace ex-President Donald Trump after the January 6, 2021, insurrection.
But on Friday’s two-year anniversary of the worst attack on American democracy in the modern era, he’s finding out that even that supposedly career-enhancing bet is insufficient to unlock the votes of Trump’s heirs in the chaos wing of the GOP.
McCarthy is becoming the latest example of a political leader consumed by a revolution the “Make America Great Again” radicals helped to stage. For the radical lawmakers now blocking his ascent to his dream job, he’s become the political establishment he once condemned.
Republicans won control of the House through democratic means in a free and fair election. But their far smaller-than-expected majority is offering extra leverage to the kind of pro-Trump extremists many voters appeared to reject in last year’s midterms.
But not even Trump himself – the author of the election-denying scam that led to the insurrection and who once could move the GOP in the House with a single phone call – could rally MAGA fundamentalists in the House for McCarthy. His failure to do so hints at diminished influence for the ex-president after his limp launch of a 2024 White House bid and a disastrous midterm election campaign for his chosen candidates. It might show that the wildest manifestations of Trumpism no longer need Trump himself.
Two years ago, scores of House Republicans refused to certify President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory and many spent years appeasing Trump’s lawless behavior. Yet after driving democracy to the brink, the GOP controls one half of Capitol Hill – or will if it eventually gets its act together and picks a speaker.
In another surreal scene on the Hill this week, one of those Republicans, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene – who has downplayed the insurrection and said rioters would have “won” if she was in charge – is complaining about the extremism of some of her colleagues who oppose McCarthy.
“That’s not serious. I don’t think that’s leadership, and I really see it as more obstruction than progress,” she told CNN’s Manu Raju on Thursday.

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