The least successful House speaker in history—the only one to be ousted—is taking time out of his revenge agenda to take a stab at rewriting history to somehow make himself the hero. That includes a Georgetown University event called “How Strong Is Our Democracy? With Kevin McCarthy.” Politico reports that despite that title, at “a time when both Democrats and Republicans—for very different reasons—warn that ‘democracy is on the ballot’ in 2024, he didn’t seem to have that level of concern about the stakes.”
McCarthy has been trying to position himself as some kind of elder statesman for the GOP from just about the moment he got fired from the job. He’s going to have several problems selling the idea that he’s a serious man with serious ideas, starting with the fact that even before he was booted from the speakership, he was presiding over the least productive Congress in generations.
Another problem is that he’s, at heart, just a petty guy. At the same Georgetown event that was supposed to be about our democracy, McCarthy just couldn’t resist taking a potshot at Rep. Matt Gaetz, the Florida chaos agent who engineered McCarthy’s ouster.
“I’ll give you the truth why I’m not speaker,” McCarthy whined. “It’s because one person, a member of Congress, wanted me to stop an ethics complaint because he slept with a 17-year-old … Did he do it or not? I don’t know.”
Yes, that’s a very serious political leader speaking. The biggest problem for McCarthy’s legacy as a statesman, however, is that he’s still got his wagon firmly hitched to the biggest internal threat the nation has faced since the Civil War: Donald Trump.
That includes diminishing the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and Trump’s role in instigating it.
“What happened on January 6 was wrong; I don’t apologize for anyone who did it,” he told the Georgetown gathering, but as Politico’s Ben Jacobs reports, “it was a critique of those who stormed the Capitol, not those, including Trump, who spent months egging on MAGA loyalists to do so.”
He remained firmly Trump’s guy throughout, not by defending some of Trump’s most outrageous acts but by deflecting their importance:
He was diplomatic when asked about more controversial parts of Trump’s record. “I didn’t know that he had a fake electors scheme,” McCarthy said when asked about the former president’s actions in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election. When asked about Trump’s references to immigrants poisoning the blood of our country, McCarthy said “I’ve never heard him say that.” He added eventually, “I don’t think that’s what President Trump believes in my time around him. Never heard it.” Trump has repeatedly used the phrase in recent months, including in a March interview on Fox News.
McCarthy’s so attached to Trump, he’s even acting as a sort of spokesperson for him to The New York Times.
“Trump is going to want a team player, and this is going to be about adding value to the ticket,” he said, speaking about the search for a vice presidential candidate and the most important factor in that selection: who can raise a lot of money. Just like McCarthy has done as a top fundraiser for the party.
Hmmm … A “team player” who can “add value to the ticket?” Maybe McCarthy’s campaigning for more than just his legacy.
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