On the afternoon of November 15th, a congressional intern in a suit and tie sprinted down a wing of the Capitol carrying a cardboard box with a slit on the top for paper ballots, then disappeared into an auditorium. Inside, the House Republican conference was electing its new leaders. This was the first of two votes. The second will come on January 3rd, on the floor of the House of Representatives. There still wasn’t a clear majority for either party, but it was likely that the Republicans would flip the chamber, and the winner of the voting would become the front-runner for Speaker, second in line for the Presidency. Dozens of journalists sat on the floor outside, preparing for a long afternoon. Two more staffers carrying ballot boxes ran past. “Stop the steal!” a reporter shouted after them.
Four hours later, Kevin McCarthy, a fifty-seven-year-old congressman from Bakersfield, California, emerged with an exaggerated smile. McCarthy, who has more than a decade of service in the G.O.P. leadership, has feathery gray hair and was wearing a tailored navy suit. He had received a hundred and eighty-eight votes, about eighty-five per cent of the conference. “I’m proud to announce the era of one-party Democrat rule in Washington is over,” he said.
For the past two years, his colleagues had been calling McCarthy the “Speaker-in-waiting.” “Nobody knows the inside game better,” Paul Ryan, the previous Republican Speaker, has said. When Kevin Spacey was preparing for the role of Frank Underwood, the Machiavellian schemer on the Netflix show “House of Cards,” he shadowed McCarthy. (McCarthy joked that he agreed to it after learning that Underwood would be a Democrat.) Outgoing and personable, he is intensely social, “a happy warrior,” in the words of his friend the pollster Frank Luntz. Patrick McHenry, a House Republican and a confidant of McCarthy’s, once asked, “If Kevin McCarthy is alone, does he exist?” From the start of his career, in the late nineteen-eighties, as a congressional staffer at a district office in the Central Valley of California, his ambition was to reach the House; once he arrived in Washington, it was to become Speaker. The House is where he’s most himself. He likens spending time there to “having breakfast at a truck stop.”
“Everyone knows the joke,” a former House staffer told me. “All Kevin McCarthy cares about is Kevin McCarthy. He is the man for this moment.” His main strength has always been his malleability. There are no red lines, core policy beliefs, or inviolable principles, just a willingness to adapt to the moods of his conference.
It is perhaps for this reason that no one in the Republican leadership has tied himself to Donald Trump more closely than McCarthy. In 2016, McCarthy supported Trump for President unwaveringly, even when the rest of the Party establishment had doubts. On October 8th, the night before the first Presidential debate, he joined a conference call with prominent Party members. The “Access Hollywood” tape had just leaked, and the Republicans were discussing whether to pull their endorsements. “What the hell are you guys doing?” McCarthy asked, according to an account in “The Hill to Die On,” by Jake Sherman and Anna Palmer. “How can you do this and hurt our nominee?” Soon, he and Trump were speaking multiple times a day. Trump called him “my Kevin.”
Two years later, after the Democrats took the House, forcing the Republicans into the minority, McCarthy became the Party’s leader, one of its youngest ever. In 2020, though the G.O.P. lost the Presidency and the Senate, House Republicans picked up fourteen seats. Very few Republicans disputed Trump’s claims about the election having been stolen; the majority stayed silent. McCarthy went on Fox News to say, “President Trump won this election. . . . We cannot allow this to happen before our eyes.” That December, when the Texas attorney general petitioned the Supreme Court to contest the results in four states, McCarthy initially declined to sign an amicus brief in support of the lawsuit, but reversed himself hours after the list of signers went public and Trump got angry; McCarthy cited a “technical glitch.” On the night of January 6, 2021, after the insurrection at the Capitol, he voted against certifying the election. A week later, he voted against impeachment. “I’ll take this to the grave—Kevin McCarthy is responsible for the rise of Donald Trump again,” Adam Kinzinger, the outgoing Republican congressman from Illinois, told me. “He was so close to being dead.”
A President’s party typically suffers midterm losses in Congress; this year, the combined effect of high inflation and low approval ratings for Joe Biden led strategists to believe that Republicans could gain a twenty- to thirty-seat advantage in the House. “I look at Democrat incumbents right now,” McCarthy told Punchbowl News, in October. “I think they’re in denial.” On Election Night, however, McCarthy was forced to delay his appearance at a victory party in Washington, emerging at two in the morning to speak to a sparse crowd.
An election that was supposed to be about Biden had turned into a referendum on Trump and G.O.P. extremism. “Kevin and Trump, they’re not going to be separated by much,” Fred Upton, the retiring Michigan congressman and one of ten Republicans in the House who voted to impeach Trump in January, 2021, told me. “Like it or not, Trump’s the face of our party right now. He’s still very angry.”
The Speaker’s race is McCarthy’s to lose, and yet he could lose it still. During the first round of voting, McCarthy’s only official competitor was Andy Biggs, a legislator from Arizona, who received thirty-one votes but who vowed to fight on. Biggs is part of a far-right faction called the Freedom Caucus. The group, which has about forty members, has been a wrecking ball since its creation, in 2015, when it forced out John Boehner as Speaker and sabotaged McCarthy, who was running to replace him. Two years earlier, congresspeople who became core members of the Freedom Caucus had shut down the government and tried to force a federal default, in order to make a point about excessive federal spending. Its ranks have grown with election deniers, QAnon conspiracists, and diehard Trumpists. Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist, told me, “The Dems’ extreme people are extreme on progressive policies. The Republicans’ extreme are extreme on the level of the insane taking over the asylum.”
When the full election returns started to come in, later in November, the Party looked to have a razor-thin majority—five votes. Five outer-fringe Republicans immediately said that they’d block McCarthy from becoming Speaker. The Freedom Caucus wants McCarthy to make changes to House procedure that will allow them to obstruct future legislation. Even if McCarthy concedes, members of the Freedom Caucus profit from attacking him: the far right is no longer beholden to the Party for money, since it raises its own online by going nuclear. All of them represent increasingly conservative districts where their constituents don’t want them to compromise. Although McCarthy has done more than any other top Republican to accommodate Trumpism, he is still the establishment. “The thin ice that he’s been on is even thinner than he thought,” Norman Ornstein, of the American Enterprise Institute, told me. “When your margin is small, the problem is you’re held hostage.”
In front of the cameras last month in the Capitol, McCarthy put on a brave face. “We got to listen to everyone in our conference,” he said. “I respect each and every one. I respect them equally.” He continued, “One thing I’ve always learned—they don’t hand gavels out in small, medium, and large.”
A few minutes later, the size of McCarthy’s gavel was on display, whether he accepted it or not. Marjorie Taylor Greene—the Georgia congresswoman, QAnon true believer, and fanatical Trump acolyte—stepped up to the microphones in tan heels and a black flared coat. Last year, after journalists uncovered a string of racist and anti-Semitic comments that Greene had made, the House stripped her of her committee assignments. (Among other things, she suggested that California wildfires were ignited by a space laser fired by the Rothschilds, the Jewish banking family.) McCarthy responded by threatening Democrats that he’d come after them once Republicans retook the majority. After Democrats sanctioned Paul Gosar, of Arizona, for tweeting a video depicting him killing the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, McCarthy said he’d give Gosar and Greene “better” committee assignments.
The antic cast of the Republican Party makes it easy to overlook just how flexibly McCarthy negotiates and renegotiates his position. Trent Lott, the former Mississippi senator, who held top Party jobs in both chambers of Congress, used to say that he led “by being led.” McCarthy has made an art of this mantra; in a world of professional survivors, he has a special talent for staying alive. “I think he’s underestimated,” Eric Cantor, the former Republican House Majority Leader, told me. Along with Paul Ryan and McCarthy, Cantor was a member of a photogenic triumvirate of conservative ideologues known as the Young Guns, who, in 2010, were meant to represent a new generation in Congress. Cantor aligned himself with the insurgent members of the Party, frequently at the expense of his boss, John Boehner. Still, Cantor lost a primary in the spring of 2014, to a candidate from the Tea Party. Four years later, Ryan was gone, too, a casualty of Trumpism. “Think about the transformation and what has occurred in the time that he’s been in Congress,” Cantor said, of McCarthy. “Any kind of criticism of him falls short in terms of recognizing the ability to keep standing and to keep going and to keep leading in this kind of environment.”
For months, Greene had hinted that she might oppose McCarthy when he ran for Speaker. At the very least, she wanted to extract something in exchange for her support, which McCarthy likely needed if he wanted to win over the Trump wing of the Party. Now she had decided to endorse McCarthy for Speaker. “He is listening to all of our voices,” she told the assembled press. Many of her talking points were identical to his, down to the phrases he’d used.
As Greene finished, she said, “We have to have the gavel, because the gavel means subpoena power.” G.O.P. hard-liners are pushing for two years of revanchism to set the stage for 2024: unrelenting investigations into the Biden family, inquiries into Cabinet members, threats of impeachment. These actions will probably play poorly with voters. McCarthy knows it. Yet he now has a Speaker’s race to win, and a small and fractious majority to hold together. “You’re not there because people see you as a tough guy or because they see you as a strategist or as brilliant,” Ornstein told me. Many of McCarthy’s members “are happy to have a Speaker who’s this weak.”
I followed Greene after her speech and asked what McCarthy had promised her. We were walking briskly in the direction of the House floor. Her press aide was filming our exchange with his phone. “I’m looking forward to serving on the Oversight Committee,” she said, naming a House committee likely to lead congressional investigations into the Biden Administration. “That’ll start in January.”
McCarthy was one of three children born to modest, middle-class Bakersfield Democrats. His mother was a homemaker and his father was an assistant fire chief, whose job in the public sector offered generous health insurance. Kevin’s brother had glaucoma and needed multiple operations before he turned two. Until the fifth grade, Kevin suffered from a speech impairment that required therapy.
Bakersfield is an oil and agriculture town, one of the reddest parts of the state; its flat, desiccated landscape, just west of the Sierra Nevada, more closely resembles that of the Oklahoma plains or the scrublands of West Texas than the rest of California. As a teen-ager, McCarthy was affable and athletic. At Bakersfield High School, he played tight end for the football team, the Drillers.
His political awareness began after he graduated, when he won five thousand dollars in a state lottery. It was 1984, the height of the Reagan era. McCarthy had been enrolled in community college in Bakersfield, but he dropped out, investing part of his winnings in the stock market and using the rest to open a deli he called Kevin O’s. Later, he said that the experience showed him “what all small businesspeople learn: that the work is hard, the margins are thin, and the government is too often an obstacle, not an aid, to success.” When he sold the business, some two years later, he used his earnings to pay for college and business school at Cal State Bakersfield, where he joined the California Young Republicans, eventually becoming the organization’s chairman.
“Walking through campus, he was always chitchatting with people,” Susie Aspeitia, a friend who met him in a marketing class, told me. “His personality was so inviting. Everyone knew him. And, if you didn’t, before you knew it you knew him.” Aspeitia, whose family is Mexican American, had grown up surrounded by Democrats but considered herself largely apolitical. McCarthy, who was dating his high-school girlfriend and future wife, Judy, brought Aspeitia and her boyfriend into the Young Republicans. “He was right there with all of us, cleaning up glasses and dishes after events,” she said. “He was the president, but it didn’t feel like we were in a big political group.”
It was inevitable that someone like McCarthy would find his way to the office of Representative Bill Thomas, a former political-science professor at Bakersfield College and a Republican, who entered the U.S. House in 1979. Bright and acerbic, Thomas was a dealmaker and a pragmatist with a reputation for having more enemies than friends. But he was regarded as a serious legislator in Washington, where he later became the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and mentored Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, and Devin Nunes, who headed the House Intelligence Committee before leaving Congress to work for Trump.
In California, where moderates and conservatives were battling for Party primacy throughout the nineties, Thomas’s office was an influential hub. “The fight was usually over guns, babies, and taxes,” Ray Haynes, a former Republican assemblyman and state senator, told me. “Thomas tended to take the more moderate side.” His chief of staff, Cathy Abernathy, turned McCarthy down when he applied for a position in Washington, in 1987, but she gave him a chance as an unpaid intern in the district office. He was twenty-two. Within three months, she told me, “I had to hire an intern to be his intern.”
In October, Abernathy and I met for French toast at Pappy’s, a diner in Bakersfield with an oil theme—hard hats, gas pumps, miniature rigs. On the wall behind her, photographs of George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, and John Wayne hung beside an antique rifle and the mounted head of a buffalo. When McCarthy worked for Thomas, his district extended from east of Bakersfield to San Luis Obispo, near the coast. McCarthy’s job, Abernathy said, “was working the district”: attending meetings as Thomas’s emissary at local clubs, fixing problems, helping constituents. “He genuinely likes people. People like him,” Abernathy said. “He wants to be your friend. If there’s friction, he tries to smooth it out.”
McCarthy worked for Thomas for fifteen years. During that time, he climbed the ranks of the national Young Republicans, becoming the chairman in 1999. “He was someone with that boardroom presence,” Mike Madrid, who served as the political director of the California Republican Party in the late nineties, told me. “He’d walk into a meeting and the conversation would stop. He spoke for Bill Thomas. Everyone respected him.”
California was in the midst of a political realignment. In 1994, Pete Wilson, the Republican governor, was trailing his Democratic challenger by double digits when he embraced an anti-immigrant ballot measure called Proposition 187, which barred undocumented immigrants from using certain public services. The state was rapidly diversifying, and, though the passage of the proposition paid off in the short term by capitalizing on white anxiety (Wilson won reëlection), it contributed to a long Republican decline. “The California Republican Party is as conservative and white and rural as any party in the country,” Madrid said. “It’s seventy per cent white in a state that is thirty-five per cent white, not counting Hispanics.” Thomas and McCarthy were “fierce advocates for moderating the Party” and “making it more inclusive” in order to win. “They revelled in fighting with conservatives,” he said. “They knew California was not Bakersfield.”
With Thomas’s endorsement, McCarthy ran for the state assembly in 2002, and, when he won, his warm, conciliatory style endeared him to his new colleagues, including conservatives who distrusted his former boss. Dick Ackerman, a veteran state senator and assemblyman, took him aside to offer some friendly advice. “Kevin was using ‘Bill’ every other word,” he said. “I told him, Kevin, half the people here hate Bill Thomas. I wouldn’t use that to sell yourself.”
In Sacramento, a few weeks after the election, there was an orientation for incoming members of congress. It was held at a hotel and lasted a few days. One evening, a Democrat named Fabian Núñez, who’d just been elected to a district representing Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley, went to the bar with McCarthy. “We didn’t know each other until we got elected, but we hit it off right away,” Núñez told me. “Kevin says to me, ‘I think I’m going to be Republican leader and you’re going to be Democratic leader.’ I asked him what made him think that. He said, ‘Look, people gravitate toward us. People look up to us.’ There was no arrogance to it. It was just an observation of someone with a real political lens.”
About a year later, McCarthy ran for leader of his party in the assembly, against Ray Haynes, who was older, more experienced, and more conservative. When Haynes tried to strike a deal with McCarthy, offering to alternate in the job, McCarthy replied, “No, let’s just fight.” There were thirty-two members, nineteen conservatives and thirteen moderates; to win, McCarthy needed four conservatives. “He knew how to deal with them,” Haynes said. Once Haynes realized that McCarthy had their votes, he withdrew his candidacy. “I was a rival, but not an enemy,” he said.
In an assembly dominated by Democrats, McCarthy faced a bind. Because conservatives outnumbered moderates in the minority, there wasn’t a strong appetite for compromise. Yet the Republicans lacked the power to pass legislation. Jim Brulte, who was the minority leader in the state senate at the time, told me, “When you’re the minority leader in the California State Assembly, you can only lead by sheer force of personality.” McCarthy distributed books (Newt Gingrich on politics), iPods, and watches; he planned Party retreats and organized weekly bipartisan basketball games at a Sacramento gym. He had presents ready for members’ birthdays and their children’s graduations. When Núñez, the Democrat, became the speaker of the assembly, he kept a binder with biographical information on his members. McCarthy paged through it once, while the two were chatting in the state capitol. “I have the same thing,” he told Núñez. “Except I have wedding anniversaries in mine. You don’t.”
Three months before McCarthy took over as the Republican leader of the assembly, the Democratic governor, Gray Davis, who was almost a year into his second term, was recalled. The winner of the vote to replace him was Arnold Schwarzenegger. “All of a sudden, the government changes and all the people Kevin knows are on the executive staff,” Richard Costigan, Schwarzenegger’s secretary of legislative affairs, told me. “The whole field shifted with the recall.” For McCarthy, a moderate Republican governor who happened to be a celebrity was a political lifeline. It helped that McCarthy was telegenic and celebrity-obsessed. Republican members used to rib him for not wearing a hat at softball games because it would mess up his hair. He also had a habit of collecting photos with celebrities on his cell phone. Schwarzenegger kept a nine-pound sword from the movie set of “Conan the Barbarian” in the governor’s office; his staff was too nervous to touch it. But one day McCarthy led some constituents into the office, picked up the sword, and started waving it around. Schwarzenegger walked in on him through a back door. “Conan the Barbarian was standing next to the minority leader,” Costigan said. “People wanted to be around the Governor, and Kevin helped to facilitate that.”
McCarthy served as minority leader in the assembly until 2006, when Bill Thomas announced his retirement from Congress and McCarthy ran for his seat, winning it handily. By then, he’d amassed a record in the assembly of helping pass budgets and securing modest legislative concessions, which the Republicans and the Democrats I spoke to seemed to praise equally, albeit for different reasons. “The Republicans went through leaders like I go through black flat shoes,” Susan Kennedy, a Democrat at the time, who served as Schwarzenegger’s chief of staff, said. “Kevin was one of the only ones who knew how to find compromise and still win politically. His DNA was tactical.” Dick Ackerman said that McCarthy helped “remind Schwarzenegger that he was a Republican.”
Bill Thomas, who is eighty-one years old and lives in Bakersfield, is still capable of making news. Last year, a week and a half after the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Thomas went on a local TV station to blast his longtime protégé as a hypocrite. McCarthy, he said, “built his new credentials as best he could” by parroting Trump’s “phony lies” about a stolen election.
Two days before Thomas spoke, McCarthy gave a brief speech on the House floor. “The President bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters,” he said. It was the first and last time McCarthy publicly crossed Trump. On the broadcast, Thomas said he hoped that “the Kevin who spoke during the impeachment, notwithstanding the fact he didn’t vote for it, will be the Kevin leading the Republicans on the floor of the House and not the ‘my Kevin’ ” who “had been supporting, nurturing the lies of the President.”
On a warm October afternoon in Bakersfield, Thomas picked me up in a red BMW Z3, and we went out for lunch at a fish-and-chips restaurant attached to a bowling alley. A Washington magazine that ranked Congress members by intelligence and temperament routinely gave Thomas high marks for “brainiest,” “meanest,” and “hottest temper.” He was proud of all three. “Meanest?” he said. “The reason was I said no. You have a cockamamie idea, I’m not going to put it up at midnight or at noon. The most popular people have round heels. They’ll roll over for anything.” When we arrived, he sat with his back to the front door so that we wouldn’t get interrupted by people who might recognize him and come over to chat.
“The Kevin McCarthy who is now, at this time, in the House isn’t the Kevin McCarthy I worked with. At least from outward appearances. You never know what’s inside, really,” Thomas said. “Kevin basically is whatever you want him to be. He lies. He’ll change the lie if necessary. How can anyone trust his word?” He went on, “At some point, you have to look at where you started and how you got to where you are, and I would ask you, How do you feel about yourself? I know what his answer would be, but it wouldn’t be the truth.” What would the answer be? I asked. “It was all worth it.”
When McCarthy served in the California assembly, it was common knowledge among state pols that he had national aspirations. “I can’t recall a time when he came into the office to talk about a substantive political issue,” Thomas told me. “The political goal as he moved up the district structure” was “to build up” relationships. “He’s the guy in the college fraternity that everybody liked and winds up selling life insurance, convincing people they need it.”
At lunch, Thomas preferred talking policy to politics, mostly because he was passionate about the details, but also because it illustrated his conviction about the nature of true influence and longevity in Congress. A terminal of the Bakersfield airport is named for him, as is a large public fund financing ongoing construction of highways and freight corridors in the region. Thomas refers to legislation as “product” and so can sound like a drug dealer when discussing road-improvement programs. In his view, the business of legislating is foreign to McCarthy. “He’s already said, ‘As soon as I become Speaker, I’m going after the Attorney General,’ ” Thomas told me. “Why would you want to spend your whole life trying to be Speaker to go after somebody? What are you for?”
Thomas had been willing to use his power not just to pass bills but to settle partisan scores. What struck him now was a tactical dilemma: if everyone in the conference knew that McCarthy would do anything to hold the Speakership, then he’d have no way of enforcing discipline. “Everything is focussed on becoming Speaker,” Thomas said. “What do you do after?” As the Party’s chief congressional fund-raiser, McCarthy could help get members elected. “You can’t hold the money over them anymore,” Thomas went on. “Now you’re in. What have you got that keeps them tied to you?”
On April 15, 2009—Tax Day—McCarthy took John Boehner to a Tea Party rally in Bakersfield, where thousands of anti-government demonstrators had gathered near the town’s full-size replica of the Liberty Bell to protest high taxes and government spending. One of their principal targets was the seven-hundred-and-eighty-seven-billion-dollar federal stimulus bill, passed two months before by a Democrat-controlled Congress, but their rage was broad, bipartisan, and generally anti-establishment. Boehner was seen as the last man standing from the Newt Gingrich era. In 1994, the Republicans had won the House for the first time in forty years, led by Gingrich, the Georgia congressman, who campaigned on a platform he called the Contract with America. Boehner told Republican politicians to go to Tea Party rallies—not to stand up and make speeches, but to listen. He tasked McCarthy with drafting a Pledge to America. Forty-eight pages long, it outlined the Republicans’ top priorities: repealing Obamacare, ending tax increases, and cutting federal spending by a hundred billion dollars.
McCarthy had quickly joined Republican leadership in the House by applying a lesson he’d learned from his years on Thomas’s staff: since his was a safe seat, he generated good will by plowing much of his campaign money into other candidates’ races across the country. In California, where a Republican governor was comfortable striking deals with Democrats, McCarthy had positioned himself as a more moderate dealmaker. But now, at the national level, the path to power ran through redoubled conservatism and strong opposition to President Obama. On the night of Obama’s first Inauguration, a group of influential Republican Party members had met for dinner at a Washington steakhouse to plot the course. “If you act like you’re the minority, you’re going to stay in the minority,” McCarthy said, according to “When the Tea Party Came to Town,” by Robert Draper. “We’ve gotta challenge them on every single bill and challenge them on every single campaign.”
For the 2010 election cycle, McCarthy worked with Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor to recruit candidates and to lead the campaign effort. Each was part of the Republican establishment, yet they sold themselves as outsiders with big ideas. After a conservative journalist anointed them the Young Guns, in an article in the Weekly Standard, they published a book with the same name; its precepts, which were based on slashing federal spending and rewriting the tax code, became their template for signing up candidates who were motivated by the rising populist tide to enter politics. “Boehner hadn’t even been told about the Young Gun manifesto,” a senior G.O.P. staffer told me. “They tried to be the three amigos.” Ryan was the policy expert, Cantor the political leader, and McCarthy the strategist. “It really was all Kevin,” Cantor told me. “He was always, again, playing on his strength of understanding where members are, knowing their families, understanding what their districts were like.”
That November, the Republicans retook the House by winning sixty-three additional seats, and conference members chose Boehner as Speaker and Cantor as Majority Leader. McCarthy became the Whip, whose job was to corral votes for Boehner and Cantor. Boehner wanted to lower spending by reaching a grand bargain with President Obama involving tax increases, a strategy that many Republican freshmen abhorred. Cantor and McCarthy supported the insurgents’ position. “There weren’t a lot of people back then who wanted us to deal with the White House,” Cantor told me.
McCarthy had a compulsion to be liked, and he identified with the freshmen he’d helped recruit. In his office, according to Draper, he put up black-and-white photos of the new congresspeople next to those of senior members. He hosted movie nights and took the congress members on field trips to the office building that housed the Bureau of Public Debt. During an election, he pulled aside Scott DesJarlais, a bald Tennessee physician who ran in 2010, to give him some pointers on his facial hair. “Michael Phelps shaves his entire body to get one-tenth of one second faster,” McCarthy told him. “I think that goatee is costing you five per cent of the vote.”
While the Republicans remained divided, Congress passed a series of temporary measures to keep the government open. But the tension grew, in large part because McCarthy and Cantor were stoking unrealistic expectations. “Boehner’s view was, You’re not going to repeal Obamacare. Stop telling the Tea Party people that you can,” the G.O.P. staffer said.
McCarthy played both sides. He was protective of the new members, but he had a job to do. In March, 2011, according to reporting by Draper, McCarthy tried to rally the members to compromise by pitching a provisional spending deal as a way for Republicans to keep the pressure on Obama. “When you’re coming around a corner and you see your friend in a fight, what do you do?” he said. “First, you jump in and you help beat up the other guy. And then when it’s all over you can ask, ‘Hey, what was that fight about?’ ”
The next few years were unstable and rancorous. In an effort to emphasize that Republicans had ideas of their own, Mitt Romney chose Paul Ryan as his running mate in the 2012 Presidential campaign, elevating a hyper-conservative agenda on spending and tax cuts. “We didn’t just want to be against what Obama was doing,” Cantor told me. “It turns out we were rebuffed.” By now, the forces he and McCarthy had indulged in the Republican conference were becoming unmanageable. “I forget how many times they voted on repealing Obamacare, but that was never enough,” the staffer lamented. At one point, in December, 2012, Boehner opened a Party meeting by reciting the Serenity Prayer. In October, 2013, the government shut down for sixteen days, and a large faction of House Republicans refused to raise the debt ceiling, risking a default. To reopen the government, Boehner was eventually forced to find votes among Democrats. After that, it became impossible to regain control of the Party. At a G.O.P. retreat at a hotel in Maryland, in January, 2014, Boehner presented a set of Republican principles. “It didn’t go well,” one attendee told me. “I could see McCarthy staff and Cantor staff celebrating. They were huddled in the corner kind of laughing over the failure.”
The Freedom Caucus emerged at the start of 2015, partly as a consequence of the growing rift between Tea Party members and the House Republican leadership. On July 28th, one of its founders, Mark Meadows, the North Carolina congressman who later became Trump’s White House chief of staff, walked onto the House floor and filed a motion to “vacate the chair,” initiating a vote to oust Boehner as Speaker. After Boehner stepped down, the vote to replace him, which took place in October, was supposed to be pro forma and uneventful. With Cantor no longer in the House, McCarthy was the obvious front-runner.
Republican members had already gathered to vote when McCarthy appeared with his wife and family and announced that he was withdrawing from consideration. “The meeting was immediately adjourned,” Carlos Curbelo, a former two-term Republican congressman from Florida, told me. “Everyone was shocked. No one saw it coming.” Speculation about what the precipitating event might have been persists to this day. One explanation was that McCarthy had committed a significant gaffe in an interview with Sean Hannity, in September, when he suggested that the House’s special committee on Benghazi was trying to sink Hillary Clinton. This was common knowledge, but in Washington you weren’t supposed to say it out loud. Ultimately, though, it was the Freedom Caucus that blocked him. It opposed anyone from the Party’s existing leadership structure, and McCarthy hadn’t yet consolidated enough support among other members to compensate for the lost votes. “He called Paul Ryan right before the press conference and said, ‘I’m dropping out of the race and endorsing you for Speaker,’ ” a former senior Hill staffer told me. Ryan was in good standing with the Party’s different factions, making him the most viable alternative. “In order for Kevin to stay in his role and stay relevant, it had to be seamless,” according to the staffer. But Ryan, who didn’t want the position and hadn’t yet conferred with his family, was blindsided. It took more than two weeks—and a pressure campaign mounted by Boehner and others—to persuade him to take the job. The staffer told me, “Paul said, ‘You cannot do that. You can’t put me in that position.’ ”
On January 6, 2021, when Capitol Police evacuated the House chamber, McCarthy went to his office, accompanied by Bruce Westerman, a Republican congressman from Arkansas. Once the rioters breached the building, security officers took McCarthy to a military base, where he joined Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer. Westerman, who stayed behind, grabbed a Civil War sword from a display in McCarthy’s office and hid in the Minority Leader’s private bathroom.
Of the top four leaders in the House and the Senate, McCarthy was the only one on regular speaking terms with Donald Trump. Members were texting McCarthy, begging him to tell the President to call off the rioters. When he reached Trump by phone, the President reportedly said, “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.”
Before the insurrection, McCarthy had told his members that the vote to certify the election would be a “vote of conscience”: there wasn’t a party-line position, so no one would be punished for how he voted. But this also meant that members were on their own at a time when many of them were receiving death threats from constituents. The only member of the Republican House leadership to take a strong stance against the President’s lies was Liz Cheney, of Wyoming. At first, McCarthy refused to clarify his position and wouldn’t answer when members asked him for direction. The factions weren’t clearly divided along ideological lines. A group of fierce conservatives, including Chip Roy, a congressman from Texas and a member of the Freedom Caucus, thought it was a bad idea to oppose certification. When another congressman asked McCarthy how the leadership saw the vote, he responded sharply, “You want me to give you your voting card?”
On January 3rd, McCarthy made his position clear—and went a step further. According to “Unchecked,” by Rachael Bade and Karoun Demirjian, he allowed staffers for Jim Jordan—a former nemesis from the Freedom Caucus, a rabid Trumpist, and a vociferous election denier—to set up a special area next to the House floor to recruit votes against certification. When House moderates and some of McCarthy’s own staff objected, the journalists write, he “dismissed their concerns out of hand.” (McCarthy’s office denies this.)
In private, McCarthy criticized Trump for inciting the insurrection, according to recordings obtained by the Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns. On a conference call with House Republican leaders, on January 8th, McCarthy said, “What the President did is atrocious and totally wrong.” Two days later, he said, “I’ve had it with this guy. What he did was unacceptable. Nobody can defend that and nobody should.” At one point, he broached invoking the Twenty-fifth Amendment, telling colleagues that he might ask the President to resign.
For most of January, Trump’s standing in the Party teetered. Moderate members were ready to break with him, and those on the far right had dug in. But the majority weren’t sure how to position themselves. “At this point, we don’t know where this is going to go,” Adam Kinzinger told me. “So let’s take the middle, ‘Let’s just all get along, I just want to get elected to my little district in Kentucky’ guy. He’s our bellwether. He’s kind of sitting there, keeping his head down, trying to figure out what’s going to happen.” Then, on January 28th, McCarthy travelled to Mar-a-Lago to pay obeisance and pose for a photo. “As soon as he went to Mar-a-Lago, you felt that person shift,” Kinzinger said. “That person shifted to begrudgingly defending Donald Trump, and from then it was just off the cliff.”
Peter Meijer, a freshman Republican from Michigan, joined the group of ten Republican congresspeople who voted to impeach. “I would love it if leadership shared my minority views. But they are minority views,” he told me, a few months after losing his primary. “There are times when followers look to leaders, and there are times when leaders look to followers.”
Kinzinger had entered Congress with the Tea Party class, in 2011. He was an Air Force pilot who flew missions in Afghanistan and Iraq; McCarthy featured him in an extended profile in the book “Young Guns.” “We had a great relationship until recently,” Kinzinger said. McCarthy repeatedly told him that he considered Trump crazy and that his job was “to keep him from doing something super-duper crazy,” Kinzinger went on. But it wasn’t lost on him that McCarthy would “light up talking about how often Trump called him.”
On February 3rd, the Republican conference gathered in the auditorium of the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center. Onstage, McCarthy sat in the middle of the leadership team, taking questions and comments on two orders of business. The first was whether Liz Cheney should be kicked out of the Party leadership for insisting that the election had not been stolen. The second was what to do about Marjorie Taylor Greene, then a new freshman. A week before, evidence had surfaced that she had called for the execution of Nancy Pelosi and claimed that the 2018 massacre of seventeen people at a high school in Parkland, Florida, had been staged.
The meeting lasted more than four hours. “We’re expecting Kevin McCarthy to say some stuff about Marjorie Taylor Greene,” Kinzinger said. “I didn’t expect that he was going to kick her out of our committees, but I did expect that he was going to take a stand that Jewish space lasers was a bit of a line too far.” Cheney survived her vote by a secret ballot, with McCarthy giving a perfunctory speech in her defense. He made a more spirited pitch on behalf of Greene. “They’re going after Marjorie for things she said before she even got here,” he told the crowd, according to an audio recording obtained by Draper. “They’re coming at you next.” Kinzinger walked up to one of the corner microphones. “I unleashed,” he told me. “The Party has lost its damn mind,” he said to the group. McCarthy spent “more time defending Marjorie Taylor Greene than saying a word about Liz Cheney.” McCarthy sat with his arms folded while Kinzinger spoke. “He just didn’t give a shit,” he told me.
Months later, Kinzinger was in the middle of a conversation near the House floor when McCarthy bumped him hard from behind. “He shoulder-checks me,” Kinzinger told me. “This is the most junior-high place since junior high. And he’s the most junior-high leader.” Kinzinger went on, “I thought it was a good relationship, but you also realize he’s a pretty vacuous, hollow guy who makes everyone think they have a great relationship with him.” (A spokesman for McCarthy called Kinzinger “ridiculous” and “outlandishly vitriolic toward Kevin,” referring to Kinzinger’s criticisms of McCarthy as “unhinged tirades.”)
When congresspeople raised concerns about the Party’s increasingly violent extremism, McCarthy blocked them. Steve Womack, a conservative and a military veteran, resigned from a Republican leadership committee in protest. In the spring of 2021, McCarthy deputized John Katko, a moderate from a pro-Biden district in upstate New York, to negotiate the terms of a bipartisan January 6th commission with House Democrats. The idea had never appealed to McCarthy, but he floated it to keep his options open. In May, Katko came back with a deal: the commission would have subpoena power, and there would be five members from each party. “Katko got a hundred per cent of what Kevin asked for,” Fred Upton told me. (Katko declined to speak to me.) But, after Trump criticized the commission as a “Democrat trap,” McCarthy withdrew his support and voted against it. “I had one Republican tell me the day or two before, ‘Fred, you won’t believe me, but I’m actually going to vote for this. I think that it’s fair,’ ” Upton said. “At the end of the day, he voted no because of Trump—Kevin wasn’t going to take him on.”
Cheney brought up her opposition to Trump any time she could, and because she was the third-highest-ranking Republican she frequently appeared alongside McCarthy when she did so. The last time they spoke together in public was after a press conference in late February, when a reporter asked if Trump should speak at an upcoming meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference. “Yes,” McCarthy said. Cheney said, “I don’t believe that he should be playing a role in the future of the Party or the country.” “On that high note, thank you very much,” McCarthy said, and walked off.
In a second vote that May, with McCarthy in the majority, Cheney was ousted from the leadership. He then campaigned against her in her primary that summer. “McCarthy went out of his way to make an example out of Liz,” a Republican who is close to both of them told me. “He did so because he knew she was going to lose. It was unprecedented to back the opponent of a member of the leadership team. The message was, If you go against Kevin, there are going to be consequences.”
It’s easy to imagine a scenario in which Kevin McCarthy was the Republican hero of 2022. Had the Party won more seats in the House, he could have claimed that he built a decisive majority by controlling the middle and the extreme right, defying the laws of political gravity. Last winter, he confronted an old friend, Jaime Herrera Beutler, of Washington, who voted to impeach Trump and eventually lost to an election denier in the primary. McCarthy had told her about the call he’d had with the President on January 6th, which she later shared with the press. “I alone am taking all the heat to protect people from Trump!” McCarthy told her. “I alone am holding the Party together!” (Herrera Beutler and McCarthy disputed this account when it was first reported, by Bade and Demirjian.)
Just as he had in 2010, McCarthy recruited a diverse and promising class of candidates in 2022, uniting them under a broad and usefully nondescript platform called Commitment to America. He also helped raise five hundred million dollars, including two hundred and sixty million dollars for the Congressional Leadership Fund, the Party’s largest House super pac. It spent heavily to support moderate candidates against far-right challengers. Herrera Beutler received money, as did David Valadao, a McCarthy ally, who represents a largely Hispanic district next to his that went for Biden in 2020. The bet made by the Republican establishment, Peter Meijer told me, “was that you can split the difference between traditional Republicans and pathways to the majority while also humoring Trump. I don’t think that’s a bet that paid off.” Although Valadao became one of only two of the ten Republican impeachers to win reëlection, after McCarthy persuaded Trump not to attack him, Herrera Beutler’s seat went to a Democrat for the first time in eleven years.
McCarthy has spent the past seven years, since he last ran for Speaker, working to shore up his support on the right. Previously, Freedom Caucus members were not given the top jobs on committees, because Party leadership considered them too extreme. McCarthy has brought figures such as Jim Jordan into the establishment—Jordan will soon have one of the most prestigious jobs in the conference, the chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee, where he’ll have the power to harass the Administration.
“The way he maneuvers is he gives everyone what they want,” the senior Hill staffer said, of McCarthy. “It’s all about member management. His constituents are the members of the Republican conference.”
Yet now McCarthy is going to the January 3rd floor vote on a knife’s edge. The day that he won the first round of voting for the Speakership, Don Bacon, a pragmatic Republican congressman from Nebraska, issued a threat of his own. Why should the Freedom Caucus be calling all the shots? Bacon considers McCarthy the only serious contender for Speaker. But, if the conference failed to coalesce around him, Bacon said, “I’m going to work with like-minded people across the aisle to find someone agreeable for Speaker.”
McCarthy had recruited Bacon to run for Congress in 2015, after hearing him give a speech in support of a candidate who went on to lose his race. The day after the election, Bacon told me, “I got two calls, one from the county chairman. Got another guy said he wanted to be my campaign manager. I wasn’t even thinking about running.” Bacon is a member of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus and the Main Street Republicans, whose numbers, Bacon said, are larger than those of the Freedom Caucus. The problem is that their unwillingness to wreak general havoc makes it harder to “flex our muscles.” He said, “We’re not going to let a minority of a minority of our party—it’s a small number—just hold the rest of Congress and the country hostage. At some point, people like me are going to say, Enough is enough!”
McCarthy seized Bacon’s threat to strike a deal with Democrats as a way of scaring the far right into backing him; it may be the strongest argument he has. “If we don’t do this right, the Democrats can take the majority,” he told Newsmax. “If we play games on the floor, the Democrats can end up picking who the Speaker is.”
In October, when the prospective majority looked bigger, McCarthy was careful not to oversell an agenda based on vengeance. He was sending a message to congresspeople such as Bacon, who badly wants to legislate. Before the midterms McCarthy said, “I think the country doesn’t like impeachment used for political purposes at all. . . . I think the country wants to heal and . . . start to see the system that actually works.”
Since then, he’s issued threats about investigating Biden and his Cabinet, signalled that he’s willing to oppose raising the country’s debt ceiling, and suggested that he’ll investigate the January 6 Committee. On November 22nd, he travelled to El Paso to deliver a menacing speech about immigration and the Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas: “If Secretary Mayorkas does not resign, House Republicans will investigate every order, every action, and every failure to determine whether we can begin impeachment inquiries.” A number of Republicans I interviewed said that impeaching Mayorkas would count as a “moderate” outcome in the 118th Congress.
“The debt limit scares the shit out of me,” Kinzinger told me. “Because here’s the thing. In the past, Boehner or Ryan can eventually cut a deal and rely on fifty of us to vote for it. . . . It’s going to be hard for McCarthy to cut deals. That freaks me out.”
It is an indication of the state of the Republican conference that McCarthy’s most clear-eyed critics still see him as the only rational check left. He may embody a vast range of contradictory identities and principles, but at least one set of them dates to the pre-Trump era. Mike Madrid, who worked with McCarthy in California and went on to co-found the Lincoln Project, the anti-Trump group, told me that McCarthy was “the last person I felt comfortable being critical of.” He had trouble believing that “my Kevin” was his Kevin, he said. “Which guy was he all along?”
Recently, McCarthy has been in marathon meetings with members of the Freedom Caucus, trying to reach agreements on changes to the House rules. The one demand he has actively resisted is the “motion to vacate the chair,” the strategy that pressured Boehner: it would allow a single member to force a vote on McCarthy’s ouster. It’s the only deal breaker for McCarthy because it’s the only one that directly threatens his Speakership. He appears to be flexible on nearly everything else. ♦
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