Will Trump Save The Speakership For McCarthy, His OK Puppet?

So Far Trump Has Had No Impact

Matthew Boyle interviewed the reclusive Trump for Breitbart yesterday at his Doral golf resort south of Mar-a-Lago. Discussing the GOP speakership impasse, Trump said, “I think it’s a very dangerous game that’s being played. It’s a very dangerous game. Some bad things could happen. Look, we had Boehner and he was a strange person but we ended up with Paul Ryan who was ten times worse. Paul Ryan was an incompetent speaker. I think he goes down as the worst speaker in history. We took [out] Boehner— and a group of people, some of whom are the same, and they’re very good friends of mine. All those people are very good friends of mine… Think of it— we ended up with Paul Ryan. Boehner was like Winston Churchill compared to Paul Ryan. Boehner wasn’t perfect— nobody’s perfect— but Paul Ryan was a disaster for the Republican Party. That’s what we got. Now we have to live with him. He’s destroying Fox and he’s destroying the New York Post. We got to live with this maniac. This guy, Paul Ryan, couldn’t have gotten elected in his own area of Wisconsin. I went with him after I won the election and we had a tremendous crowd of people and they booed him off the stage. You remember that? They booed him off the stage. This guy is now telling Fox what to do… I support McCarthy… Look, I think this: Kevin has worked very hard. He is just— it’s been exhausting. If you think, he’s been all over. I think he deserves the shot. Hopefully he’s going to be very strong and going to be very good and he’s going to do what everybody wants… Now, I’m friendly with a lot of those people who are against Kevin. I think almost every one of them are very much inclined toward Trump, and me toward them. But I have to tell them, and I have told them, you’re playing a very dangerous game. You could end up with the worse situation. I don’t even want to say what it is, but I could tell you it’s a worse situation. You could end up with some very bad situations. I use the Boehner to Paul Ryan example. You understand what I’m saying? It could be a doomsday scenario. It could be. You could end up with somebody who would be a disaster like Paul Ryan was.”

Meanwhile, McCarthy did an interview with Hugh Hewitt yesterday about the 5 #NeverKevin members of Congress, the Five Mouseketeers , Matt Gaetz (FL), Bob Good (VA), Ralph Norman (SC), Andy Biggs (AZ) and Matt Rosendale (MT). He’s got 17 days to persuade them— they claim they are committed to voting as a bloc— to change their minds or he won’t be able to be elected speaker. He told Hewitt he’s still negotiating with them. They want him to agree to a suicide vacate the chair rule, which would change the rules to allow any member to force a snap floor vote to get rid of the speaker at any time. His team, generally conservatives rather than fascists— though Marjorie Traitor Greene has sold her soul to McCarthy— are wearing “O.K.” bad

ges, which stands for “Only Kevin.” No one has seen Trump wearing one, neither live nor on any of his scams NFTs. In fact no one is wearing the buttons. CNN's Melanie Zanona reported that some wags are pointing out that "OK," also means, "not great, just ok."

To make himself look badass, McCarthy promised he would remove Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell and Ilhan Omar from their committees. The speaker doesn’t have the power to do that and it would take a vote of the full House. No Democrats are going to support that and enough Republicans are opposed to it so that it’s not likely McCarthy would be able to pull it off. So far Andy Barr (R-KY), Nancy Mace (R-SC) and David Valadao (R-CA), all McCarthy allies, have all said “no dice.”

Annie Karni has this beat for the NY Times and Thursday she said in an interview that “The smartest people watching this closely are unwilling to make predictions at this point. McCarthy is playing it all very close to the vest. He’s not including other members of his leadership team in his deliberations or his calculations… He has to contend with something that no Democrat has had to face: a sizable group that was sent to Congress explicitly to obstruct. Some of the people he is attempting to bargain with don’t seem to have a price. They’re not motivated by legislating as much as they are about shrinking the federal government, or upending it completely… It seems like McCarthy is dealing with some chaos agents, which makes his process a lot more difficult than it was for Pelosi in 2018. Back then, she also had to negotiate her way to the speakership, but she was dealing with a caucus made up of members with specific demands that she could address.”

Karni also said that “if McCarthy fails to get the necessary votes on the House floor, someone of more stature than Biggs, like Scalise or Representative Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, could potentially get drafted into becoming a speaker candidate.” This is hilarious since Patrick McHenry, who is facing another scandal because he was bribed by Sam Bankman-Fried was prevented from taking the GOP Whip job because he was the one who invited Madison Cawthorn to the orgy… and that barely even starts to address his myriad closet case scandals. He would be the ideal GOP speaker-- for the Democrats.

Yesterday, Dana Milbank noted that if McCarthy succeeds “in his speakership quest (which is likely, if only for the lack of an alternative), he will earn the distinction of being the first speaker in U.S. history not to speak fluent English. For eight years, I have been attempting to make sense of his sentences and mostly come up empty. Deep in his brain there seems to be a syntax scrambler (I’m guessing it was put there by Hunter Biden, or perhaps the Chinese) that causes violent clashes between subjects and objects, nouns and verbs, singular and plural, and past and present. In 2014, I wrote that ‘his words come out as if they have been translated by Google from a foreign language.’ Revisiting his ‘valiant but often unsuccessful struggles with the English language’ a year later, I concluded: ‘The speaker-apparent apparently still can’t speak.’ Now he’s making another lunge for the top job, and words continue to bedevil him. ‘We’re Christmas season,’ he announced this week. We are? He continued: ‘A talk of the majority right now who wants to put a small continuing resolution to bump all the members up two days before Christmas, to try to vote on a package they cannot read, written by two individuals who will not be here, on spending for the entire government.’ Do not even attempt to diagram that sentence.”

Nor these:

“Did they learn nothing in the last month election? Did they learn nothing with the American public being harmed? And to walk through to pass the largest bill that we passed throughout the year in the last days before Christmas, where they won’t even tell you what the baseline is now, the two people who will not be here are held accountable to their constituents, that they’re going to determine this?”

Have I answers no to questions pose you, Speaker Mister.

Out tumbled clauses and phrases cruelly severed from their intended meaning: “Now they want to jam the American public in exactly what they want to do… stop the fentanyl coming for killing our children… we wouldn’t have a border that’s run away… we do much stronger in the majority… What argument did I propose that have anything to do with the speaker?… And if two people who are who deciding it aren’t going to be held up to the voters, do you feel good about that as an American, not about as a reporter?”

…Members of the far-right Freedom Caucus have demanded McCarthy include right-wing poison pills in future debt ceiling increases and must-pass bills— an almost certain prescription for defaults and shutdowns.

Fearing just such an outcome from the House radicals, Senate Republicans have reached out to House Democrats to negotiate an omnibus spending bill for 2023 (an “omni-bill” in McCarthy-speak) before the GOP takeover of the House on Jan. 3. Why? They don’t think McCarthy will be up to the task.

Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) told Politico “it’s too much to ask” of McCarthy to fund the government. Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) told Semafor that “for Kevin’s sake… some Republicans just feel like we should relieve him of that burden.”

McCarthy initially agreed with his would-be Senate saviors, and encouraged negotiators to reach a deal. But (recurring theme alert) he reversed himself under pressure from hard-liners and now says the matter should wait until Republicans take control.

A band of Senate conservatives this week tried to rally support behind McCarthy’s latest position, urging GOP colleagues to postpone the negotiations.

Sen. Mike Lee of Utah said he disagreed with the several Republicans who told him “it’ll be too hard for Kevin McCarthy.”

Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) urged a postponement to give “House Republican leadership opportunity to… come up with a plan.”

But the Senate band was small: only four lawmakers. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), billed as a participant, was a no-show. A reporter asked if the sparse attendance meant that Senate Republicans are “tacitly admitting that House Republicans just aren’t ready.”

“Umm,” replied Lee, “those who are making that point are not doing so tacitly. They’re doing so explicitly.”

And they’re doing so because they know that an O.K. speaker of the House is not good enough.

This morning, Adam Schiff told his supporters that "With Kevin McCarthy’s hopes of becoming Speaker of the House pinned to the votes of Trump-loving House members like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Jim Jordan, and Lauren Boebert, [Trump] is continuing to exercise an outsized influence on our government. There's no doubt in my mind that McCarthy will continue to be a leader who is completely beholden to the dangerous demands of Trumpism and MAGA politics. And that means they will continue to attack and demonize anyone who stands up to them. McCarthy has already vowed to remove me from the Intelligence Committee, a strictly political move to win the support of MAGA House members and part of a broader effort to neutralize oversight of their abuses."