It wasn’t a lie about Donald Trump that could doom Kevin McCarthy. It’s the truth he spoke
Kevin McCarthy, your life is paging you. Your soul, or what’s left of it, wants to know what happened to you. The formerly reasonable California legislator, the House Minority Leader from Bakersfield, took one more step toward infamy on Thursday.
McCarthy seemingly has been caught in his biggest lie yet.
First, the New York Times reported that McCarthy – one of the lead enablers of former President Donald Trump – actually wanted Trump to resign after the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
McCarthy, of course, denied this. So the Times shared the audio of McCarthy telling a congressional colleague that Trump had to go. In a phone call, responding to Rep. Liz Cheney asking about the chance Trump might resign, McCarthy said he thought Trump would be impeached because of the bloodshed on Capitol Hill wrought by insurrectionists attempting to invalidate the victory of current President Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
“The only discussion I would have with him is that I think this will pass, and it would be my recommendation you should resign,” McCarthy said in an audio recording played Thursday night on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show.
“But what I think I’m going to do is I’m going to call (Trump)” McCarthy said.
“This, this is what I think: We know that (impeachment) will pass the House. I think there’s a chance it’ll pass the Senate, even when he’s gone,” McCarthy said.
As we all know, Trump wasn’t impeached. McCarthy, despite what he said and seemingly believed after Trump incited insurrectionists has remained loyal to a former president, who endures as the greatest threat to American democracy.
And now this – the malignant followers of Trumpism within the Republican Party now know that McCarthy isn’t really one of them. His soul may have been intact, if only for a moment when he spoke words that all Republicans should have spoken after Jan. 6: That there is no room for Trump or Trumpism in America. That Trump and his most vile followers are still working to undermine a democratically elected president in Biden and they want to win in the next elections later this year and in 2024, no matter what it takes.
“The irony of this moment is Kevin McCarthy will likely not get the powerful spot he’s always wanted (House Speaker) because he got caught lying about saying the obvious truth everyone knew to be right,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican consultant and co-founder of The Lincoln Project. “It’s the perfect encapsulation of the Republican Party in the time of Trump.”
McCarthy probably won’t lose his congressional seat for speaking the truth about the threat of Trump. But the leadership of the House Republican caucus? Oh, boy.
There is no room for truth on that perch at present. So McCarthy is already bowing and scraping before the cult of Trump, which has its entertainment value until we all acknowledge this reality: McCarthy could be replaced by someone even more loyal to Trumpism over democracy.
McCarthy is in line to be the next entity destroyed by an association with Trump. Is America next?
This story was originally published April 22, 2022 at 5:00 AM with the headline "It wasn’t a lie about Donald Trump that could doom Kevin McCarthy. It’s the truth he spoke."
