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      Book Review: ‘Blowback,’ by Miles Taylor; ‘Renegade,’ by Adam Kinzinger; ‘Losing Our Religion,’ by Russell Moore

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      Miles Taylor, a former Department of Homeland Security official in the Trump administration and the author of the new book BLOWBACK: A Warning to Save Democracy From the Next Trump (Atria, 335 pp., $30), made his dramatic entrance in 2018 with an anonymous essay for The New York Times entitled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.” In it, he heralded the “unsung heroes” who were “working diligently from within” to impede Trump’s “worst inclinations.” The following year, having resigned from the D.H.S., Taylor published “A Warning,” also under the moniker “Anonymous.” Finally, in 2020, Taylor criticized Trump under his own name, endorsed Joe Biden and identified himself as “Anonymous.”Taylor now provides a more detailed accounting of the chaos inside the White House. Some of his allegations — that the Trump aide Stephen Miller wanted to blow up migrants with a predator drone; that the former White House chief of staff John Kelly described the president as a “very, very evil man” in response to Trump’s sexual comments about his daughter Ivanka — have made headlines and prompted some denials.The reference to “the next Trump” in the subtitle is already moot (we’re still dealing with the original one), but “Blowback” is bedeviled by a bigger problem: The more we learn of the outrageous behavior behind closed doors, the more enraging it is that Taylor — and his allies among the “axis of adults” — failed to speak out sooner. In 2018, after a particularly deranged set of phone calls about the so-called migrant caravan, Taylor told Kelly that things were getting really messed up. I wanted to shake him. Yes, Miles, it was getting pretty messed up.To Taylor’s credit, “Blowback” is full of regret. The 2018 opinion piece, while gutsy, was a sly justification for silence. By book’s end, Taylor has decided that anonymity itself, the mask he wore for years, “symbolizes the greatest threat to democracy.” The most moving passages in the book are those in which Taylor wrestles not with political monsters, but with his own demons. The mask of anonymity is entwined with his alcoholism; his recovery only arrived when he spoke truthfully in his own name. Taylor describes how falsity gnaws at the soul. Courage doesn’t always come on time, but as many an addict has ruefully remarked, it’s better late than never.The former Illinois congressman Adam Kinzinger — one of 10 Republicans to vote for Trump’s second impeachment and one of two to serve on the House’s Jan. 6 committee — is a late-breaking hero of the anti-Trump cause. RENEGADE: Defending Democracy and Liberty in Our Divided Country (The Open Field, 295 pp., $30) tracks Kinzinger’s childhood in the 1980s, his Air Force career, his six terms in Congress and his disillusionment with Trump’s Republican Party.Alas, it has none of “Blowback”’s redeeming anguish. Even Kinzinger’s sporadic insights about the roots of Trumpism (e.g. in the Tea Party) serve less to implicate the pre-Trump G.O.P. than to flatter Adam Kinzinger, who always appears presciently distressed by the intransigent drift of his own party.“Renegade” has applause lines for Kinzinger’s new liberal fans — he describes the senator and presidential aspirant Ted Cruz as an “oily, sneering manipulator” with a “punchable face” — and he adds some (unrevelatory) texture to the cowardice and bullying displayed by his colleagues. Kevin McCarthy, Kinzinger writes, behaved “like an attention-seeking high school senior who readily picked on anyone who didn’t fall in line” when he was minority leader. Twice after Kinzinger turned on Trump, he reports, McCarthy shoulder-checked him in the House chamber. (A spokesman for McCarthy has dismissed such criticism from Kinzinger as “unhinged tirades.”)What “Renegade” resembles most of all — down to its professional co-authoring by the award-winning journalist Michael D’Antonio — is a campaign book in search of a campaign. When Kinzinger announced his retirement in 2021, he said, “This isn’t the end of my political future, but the beginning.” Still, it’s difficult to imagine what sort of future that might be — unless Kinzinger gets much better at persuading other Republicans to join him out in the cold. “Renegade,” a book primarily about how much nobler Kinzinger is than his former colleagues, is unlikely to do the trick.Russell Moore’s LOSING OUR RELIGION: An Altar Call for Evangelical America (Sentinel, 256 pp., $29) is another book about a conservative suffering exile from his tribe for turning on Donald Trump.It is far more interesting, however, because Moore — the editor in chief of Christianity Today and a former bigwig in the 13-million-member Southern Baptist Convention — remains a dedicated evangelical. His “altar call” is addressed to fellow believers; to leaders of congregations riven by conflict; to pastors, like himself, whose theology is orthodox but whose politics, by Trump-era standards, are liberal; to churchgoers who’ve lost faith in their church but not in Jesus Christ. It is a startlingly open, honest and humble book, a soulful, fraternal entreaty for integrity, repair and renewal.Taylor and Kinzinger, putatively trying to convince readers to take the danger of Trump seriously, adopt a tone that is only tolerable if you already agree with them. Their books, in other words, are most likely to appeal to liberals eager for apostates from conservatism to flatter their anti-Trump indignation. By literally “preaching to the choir,” Moore, on the other hand, ironically avoids preaching to it figuratively.He is better equipped to lovingly cajole, carefully critique and persuade his readers, because he speaks to his audience in their own idiom, relying on theological concepts that hold particular potency for his fellow congregants, especially those who find themselves called to decry an evil they fear they have abetted.He is also sympathetic to the ways in which belligerent Trumpism can seduce Christian conservatives; it satisfies many of the same longings that religion does. “There is more than one way for you to secularize,” Moore writes. “All it takes is substituting adrenaline for the Holy Spirit, political ‘awakening’ for rebirth, quarrelsomeness for sanctification and a visible tribal identity for the kingdom of God.”Most of all, Moore resists the impulse to try to beat Trump at his own game. So many prophets of Trumpian doom respond to the former president’s howling narcissism with a narcissism of their own, implicitly ratifying Trump’s most noxious conceit: that he alone can fix it. But our moment calls for less heroism than humility; fewer grand self-portraits and more intimate self-searching. More

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      DeSantis Says He Will ‘Reorient’ U.S. Foreign Policy to Counter China

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      While the G.O.P. field has largely moved away from the neoconservative policies of George W. Bush, Mr. DeSantis has taken heat for some of his isolationist tendencies, including on Ukraine.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, working to maintain his second-place status in the Republican primary, said Friday that as president he would “reorient” U.S. foreign policy to give clear priority to China while downplaying national security risks posed by conflicts such as Russia’s war on Ukraine.In a speech laying out his approach, Mr. DeSantis cast Beijing as a greater threat to the United States than the Axis powers and the Soviet Union ever were because of its economic might. As commander in chief, he said, he would “prioritize the Indo-Pacific region as the most pressing part of the world for defending U.S. interests and U.S. security.”A less aggressive approach, he argued, would allow China to export its “authoritarian vision all across the world,” creating a “global dystopia.”“They seek to be the dominant power in the entire world, and they are marshaling all their society to be able to achieve that objective,” Mr. DeSantis said. “So this is a formidable threat and it requires a whole of society approach.”Mr. DeSantis’s remarks, delivered in Washington, D.C., at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, come at a difficult moment for his presidential campaign. Not only is he badly trailing former President Donald J. Trump in the polls, but Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and former ambassador to the United Nations, has successfully positioned herself as a credible alternative to Mr. Trump, puncturing the Florida governor’s argument that the Republican presidential primary is a two-man race.Mr. DeSantis has lately used foreign policy to attack other Republican presidential candidates, rebuking Mr. Trump for his critical comments about Israeli leaders and accusing Ms. Haley — who is attracting growing interest from Republican donors and voters — of being soft on China.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please More

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      Trump’s Extremists Are Now In Charge of the House

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      The three-week battle to choose a House speaker may be over, yet the fallout for the United States and its reputation as a sound government and a beacon of democracy will be long-lasting and profound.The Republicans in the House unanimously voted for a man who made it his mission to try to overturn the 2020 presidential election, who put the political whims and needs of former President Donald Trump ahead of the interests and will of the American people. A party that once cared deeply about America as the leader of the free world, and believed in the strength, dependability and bipartisan consensus that such a role required, has largely given way to a party now devoted to an extremism that is an active threat to liberal values and American stability.Americans and the world are starting to get to know Mike Johnson, now the second in line to the presidency, and it’s a troubling introduction. Donald Trump may not be in the White House, but Trumpism as an institution has transcended the man and provided the operating principles for the House of Representatives and much of the Republican Party.Those operating principles include allowing Mr. Trump to all but select the speaker, and elevating, in Mr. Johnson, one of the party’s most prominent election deniers. It has been disturbing to watch the slide from Republican speakers like Paul Ryan and John Boehner, who denounced attempts to challenge the election results, to the hemming-and-hawing of Kevin McCarthy, to the full-blown anti-democratic stands of Mr. Johnson. And it has certainly been a long slide from the party of Ronald Reagan — whose 11th Commandment was not speaking ill of other Republicans and who envisioned the party as a big tent — to the extremism, purity tests and chaos of the House Republican conference this year.Every Republican present in the chamber voted on Wednesday for Mr. Johnson, reflecting the exhaustion of a party that has been ridiculed for incoherence since it deposed Mr. McCarthy for working with Democrats to fulfill the basic function of Congress, to fund the federal government. The choice of Mr. Johnson came after Mr. Trump helped engineer the result by torpedoing a more moderate candidate, setting the stage for the 2024 presidential election to unfold with someone in the speaker’s chair who has proved his willingness to go great lengths to overturn a free and fair vote.It’s obvious why the former president was so supportive of the new speaker. Mr. Johnson was “the most important architect of the Electoral College objections” to Mr. Trump’s loss in 2020, as a New York Times investigation found last year. He made unfounded arguments questioning the constitutionality of state voting rules, he agreed with Mr. Trump that the election was “rigged,” cast doubt on voting machines, and supported a host of other baseless and unconstitutional theories that ultimately led to a violent insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Mr. Johnson now refuses to talk about his leading role in that shameful drama. When a reporter for ABC News tried to ask him about it on Tuesday night, he would not respond; his fellow Republicans booed the question, and one yelled at the reporter to “shut up.” Such questions cannot be dismissed when Mr. Trump is the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. Though changes in the law and Democratic control of the Senate make it much harder for the House of Representatives to impede certification of the vote, the American public deserves a speaker of the House who will uphold the will of the people, not someone willing to bend the rules of an election for his own side.More immediately, while his election as speaker will make it possible for the House to continue functioning, it is not clear that Mr. Johnson is committed to the work of actually governing. At the end of September, he voted against the stopgap spending measure negotiated by Mr. McCarthy that prevented a government shutdown. That bill was an important litmus test; Mr. McCarthy brought it to a vote and got it passed with bipartisan support, over the objections of Mr. Trump, leading to his downfall as speaker. Two other Republican speaker candidates, Tom Emmer and Steve Scalise, also voted for it — and were also vetoed by the extreme right.Mr. Johnson now says he would support another temporary stopgap to give the House time to pass drastic spending cuts. That promise may have won over the Republicans who blocked the candidacy of another extremist, Jim Jordan, last week. But Mr. Johnson’s voting record so far leaves little doubt that he prefers the performance of taking positions to actual lawmaking.This leaves Congress in a precarious state. The 22 days of indecision, backbiting and bullying that followed Mr. McCarthy’s ouster did significant damage to the reputation of the United States as a country that knows how to govern itself. One of the country’s two major political parties sent a piercing signal to the world and the nation that it is no longer a reliable custodian of the legislative branch — and many party members knew it.“This is junior-high stuff,” Representative Steve Womack, Republican of Arkansas, said a few days ago. “We get wrapped around the axle of a lot of nonsensical things. But, yes, the world is burning around us. We’re fiddling; we don’t have a strategy.”Nevertheless, Mr. Womack voted for Mr. Johnson. His preferred choice was Mr. Emmer, a Republican whose views are more moderate and who might have led the party out of its hard-line cul-de-sac. Mr. Emmer had the support of many other Republicans, but his candidacy never even got to the House floor for a vote.That’s because Mr. Trump exacted retribution for Mr. Emmer’s willingness to recognize the true outcome of the 2020 election. Mr. Emmer voted to certify those results, defying Mr. Trump, and the former president has never forgiven him. On Tuesday, he denounced Mr. Emmer on social media as a “globalist” and a fake Republican who never respected the MAGA movement. After Mr. Emmer dropped out in the face of growing opposition from the far right, Mr. Trump boasted to a friend: “I killed him.”Mr. Johnson will take control of the House at a moment when the United States needs to demonstrate leadership on the world stage. One of the most important decisions is coming right up: Will Mr. Johnson support Mr. Biden’s request for nearly $106 billion for aid to Ukraine and Israel? He has already voted against most bills to support Ukraine’s fight against Russian aggression.As speaker of the House, he plays a crucial role in the legislative system, determining the agenda by choosing which bills will reach the House floor for a vote, supervising committee appointments, and hammering out compromises to get legislation passed. (Nancy Pelosi, for example, demonstrated make-or-break leadership in creating the Affordable Care Act.)Mr. Johnson believes that the “true existential threat to the country” is immigration and led the Republican Study Committee, the largest group of conservatives in the House, which issued a plan to erode the Affordable Care Act, Medicare and Medicaid. It also refers to free public education as “socialist-inspired.”On social issues, Mr. Johnson has also embraced the positions of the hard right. He supported state laws that criminalized gay sex, and wrote in 2004 that gay marriage would “place our entire democratic system in jeopardy” and lead to people marrying their pets. As a congressman, he celebrated the demise of Roe v. Wade in 2022.It bears repeating that this Trump loyalist is now second in line to the presidency. The former president has never accepted being out of the White House, and it’s clear he still commands firm control over half of the Capitol building.Source photograph by Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Where Mike Johnson Stands on Key Issues: Ukraine, LGBTQ Rights and More

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      The new House speaker, an evangelical Christian, has a staunchly conservative record on gay rights, abortion, gun safety and more.Speaker Mike Johnson, the little-known congressman from Louisiana who won the gavel on Wednesday, is deeply conservative on both fiscal and social issues, reflecting the G.O.P.’s sharp lurch to the right.Mr. Johnson, a lawyer, also played a leading role in former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, helping to push a lawsuit to throw out the results in four battleground states he lost and then offering members of Congress a legal argument upon which to justify their votes to invalidate the results.He has a career rating of 92 percent from the American Conservative Union and 90 percent from Heritage Action for America.Here’s where he stands on six key issues.Government fundingMr. Johnson is a fiscal conservative who believes Congress has a “moral and constitutional duty” to balance the budget, lower spending and “pursue continued pro-growth tax reforms and permanent tax reductions,” according to his website.He voted in favor of the deal in May to suspend the debt ceiling negotiated between former Speaker Kevin McCarthy and the Biden administration. But alongside 89 other Republicans, Mr. Johnson voted against the stopgap funding bill Mr. McCarthy put forth last month to stave off a government shutdown just hours before it was to commence. That bill ultimately passed with more Democratic than Republican support and cost Mr. McCarthy the gavel.In a letter this week, before he was elected speaker, Mr. Johnson proposed a short-term funding bill to avoid a shutdown and an aggressive calendar for passing yearlong spending bills in the interim. But he did not specify what spending levels he would support in the temporary bill, and many Republicans have refused to back such measures without substantial cuts that cannot pass the Democratic-controlled Senate or be signed by President Biden.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please More

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      The House Finally Has a Speaker

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      Michael Simon Johnson and Rachel Quester and Dan Powell and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicWarning: this episode contains strong language.After 21 days without a leader, and after cycling through four nominees, House Republicans have finally elected a speaker. They chose Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana, a hard-right conservative best known for leading congressional efforts to overturn the 2020 election.Luke Broadwater, a congressional reporter for The Times, was at the capitol when it happened.On today’s episodeLuke Broadwater, a congressional correspondent for The New York Times.Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana won the election on Wednesday to become the 56th speaker of the House of Representatives.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesBackground readingThe House elected Mike Johnson as speaker, embracing a hard-right conservative.Speaker Johnson previously played a leading role in the effort to overturn the 2020 election results.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.Luke Broadwater More

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      In a Democratic District, Can a Party Defector Get Elected?

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      A contest between two New York City councilmen, Justin Brannan and Ari Kagan, will measure how strong the rightward shift is in southern Brooklyn.At a public housing complex in Coney Island, Brooklyn, a powerful Democratic councilman sought to quickly make the case for why voters should reject his opponent.“He was elected as a Democrat,” the councilman, Justin Brannan, said to a resident. “But he sold us out and became a Trump Republican.”Until recently, that simple argument would have been persuasive enough to convince most voters in this part of New York. But times have changed, and so has the political makeup of certain swaths of the city: Even though Democrats outnumber Republicans in the district by three to one, Republicans won three competitive state legislative seats in southern Brooklyn in 2022.Mr. Brannan’s opponent is Ari Kagan, a councilman who was elected as a Democrat to represent Coney Island, but is now a Republican. Because of redistricting, Mr. Brannan and Mr. Kagan have wound up contesting the same district.Mr. Kagan, who would probably have faced long odds against Mr. Brannan in a Democratic primary, won the Republican primary in June, setting up the most competitive and contentious Council election in the city. Its outcome could be a harbinger of whether recent Republican gains in southern Brooklyn might continue.It’s an area where in the 2021 mayoral election, the Republican candidate, Curtis Sliwa, drew slightly more votes than the Democrat, Eric Adams, who won by 40 percentage points citywide.Mr. Kagan has quickly adopted the talking points of his party, criticizing Mr. Brannan, who heads the Council’s Finance Committee, for failing to rein in the city’s spending and allowing the trinity of city crises — crime, migrants and homelessness — to flourish.Justin Brannan spoke to Julia Daniely while canvassing voters in Coney Island. He left the Councl’s progressive caucus this year.Paul Frangipane for The New York Times“He voted for and advocated for $1.4 billion for migrant services for the unbelievable migrant crisis, the public safety crisis, homelessness crisis, quality of life crisis, exorbitant taxation, exorbitant cost of living,” Mr. Kagan said in an interview.“He’s the chair of the Finance Committee, and he likes to say that he’s in the room where all decisions are made,” he added. “Then he has to own his own decisions.”Mr. Brannan talked about the money he has brought back to his district to renovate parks and build new schools and said Mr. Kagan is more focused on “demagoguery” than solutions.As early voting for the Nov. 7 election begins Saturday, issues such as abortion, the influx of asylum seekers and the war between Israeli and Gaza have often overshadowed more local concerns like trash pickup, the need for new parks and the poor living conditions in public housing.The district, the 47th, includes Coney Island, Bay Ridge and part of Bath Beach, and its residents are 49 percent white and 20 percent Asian. The race there is a prime example of how the nation’s divisive political debate has seeped into more local discourse, said Andrew Gounardes, a progressive Democratic state senator who represents southern Brooklyn and who endorsed Mr. Brannan.“If we’re cutting a ribbon for a new park and you’re sitting there talking about vaccines, it’s hard to bring you back from that,” Mr. Gounardes said. “Maybe we never really had you.”Mr. Brannan has nonetheless seemed to have adjusted his political stances, perhaps in recognition of the shifts among voters in South Brooklyn. He left the Council’s Progressive Caucus earlier this year because he opposed a new statement of principles that required its members to commit to reducing “the size and scope” of the Police Department.He, like Mr. Kagan, says he opposes the placement of migrant shelters in their district — a stance that has put him at odds with fellow Democrats, including Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, an assemblywoman who leads the Brooklyn Democratic Party. She said that predominantly white neighborhoods like Bay Ridge in Brooklyn should have migrant shelters and criticized Mr. Brannan for not being supportive.“Justin has an opportunity to contrast himself from his Republican opponent and support a Bay Ridge shelter as a true blue progressive Democrat,” Ms. Bichotte Hermelyn said.Mr. Brannan still has broad support from reliable Democratic mainstays, including several labor unions. He is also being backed by Future NYC, a pro-business super PAC supporting moderate Democrats, which is expected to spend around $100,000 on attack ads that paint Mr. Kagan as “unhinged” and a “Democrat turned Republican.”“Justin is actually a pretty good example of someone who is a center left Democrat. He’s not for defunding the police,” said Jeff Leb, the group’s treasurer. “Ari has become a complete extremist.” Mr. Brannan has attacked Mr. Kagan for refusing to fire his campaign manager, who made derogatory statements on social media about African Americans and the L.G.B.T.Q. community. He has also criticized Mr. Kagan for shifting his stance on abortion.In the Campaign Finance Board’s voter guide, Mr. Kagan wrote that “life starts at conception,” and that abortions should only be allowed in cases of rape, incest or if the life of the mother is in danger. But in July 2022, when he was a Democrat, Mr. Kagan voted in favor of a package of bills that strengthened access to abortion and reproductive health in the wake of the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.Ari Kagan, right, still has the support of Wanda Feliciano, center, even though he has switched parties.Paul Frangipane for The New York Times“I‘m still a Democrat,” Mr. Brannan said, noting Mr. Kagan’s rightward shift. “I didn’t sell my soul to keep my job.” He launched a website called the “Ari Kagan Accountability Project” to track the positions Mr. Kagan has shifted on since switching parties. Mr. Kagan said that he’s against racism and homophobia, and that his campaign manager apologized. He regrets his vote on the abortion legislation but not his shift to being a Republican — a move that may make him more attractive to the area’s Russian American voters.Gregory Davidzon, who owns Russian language media outlets where Mr. Kagan — who emigrated from Russia three decades ago — once worked, said that Mr. Kagan, like other Republican candidates in the area, would have broad support in the community.He pointed to a neighboring district encompassing Brighton Beach and Sheepshead Bay, where the sitting councilwoman, Inna Vernikov, was recently arrested after she openly displayed a gun on her hip at a pro-Palestine rally that she opposed. He said the arrest would not hurt her chances at re-election.“If it was Mickey Mouse on the ballot, it would be a vote for the Republican as well,” Mr. Davidzon said.Mr. Kagan has also won endorsements from several law enforcement unions; the Parent Party, a group that supports school choice and policing; and the conservative Asian Wave Alliance.Among the few things Mr. Brannan and Mr. Kagan agree on is that a casino shouldn’t be built in Coney Island. Each also thinks that his opponent represents his party’s more extreme positions.At a recent visit to Unity Towers, a city housing development in Coney Island, Wanda Feliciano, a former tenant leader, told Mr. Kagan that he still had her support even though he was now a Republican.“He did what he had to do for a reason,” Ms. Feliciano said, adding that she remembered how Mr. Kagan helped expedite repairs to the heating system in the buildings and brought food and supplies for residents during the pandemic.“He’s still going to do good for us no matter what party he’s in,” she added.At Carey Gardens, the public housing development that Mr. Brannan had visited, Mr. Kagan’s party switch was met with far less enthusiasm.Mr. Brannan told Star Turnage, 42, a construction worker, that her Council representative had switched parties. After she told Mr. Brannan that her bedroom wall was leaking, he informed her that Mr. Kagan had voted against the $107 billion municipal budget in June that contained funding to repair public housing.Mr. Kagan was the sole Republican to vote against the budget because he said it included “billions for migrant services” but not enough money to hire more police officers. Ms. Turnage had no doubt about her view of Republican politicians. “I would never vote for them,” she said. “They’re not for the people.” More

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      How the Right’s Purity Tests Are Haunting the House G.O.P.

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      When Casey Stengel had the misfortune to be the manager of the historically inept 1962 New York Mets, his famous plaint was, “Can’t anybody here play this game?”The question for House Republicans, mired in a weekslong demonstration of their internal dysfunction, is: Does anybody here want to play this game?It is tempting to interpret the chaos in the House as the function of a dispute between the pro- and anti-Trump elements of the party, but this isn’t quite right: The deposed speaker, Kevin McCarthy, is in no way anti-Trump. Instead, there were pre-existing trends, either represented or augmented by the rise of Donald Trump, that have undermined G.O.P. coherence and made the Republican House practically ungovernable in the current circumstances.The conservative movement has warred against the party establishment since its inception. Conservative heroes like Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich rose by arraying themselves against Republican powers-that-be that they considered too timid and moderate.The Tea Party of the 2010s seemingly reflected the same tendency toward greater conservative purity. Yet, it was more populist and more disaffected with the G.O.P., which is why so many of its leaders and organizations lined up so readily behind Donald Trump.On top of this, the two losses to Barack Obama, especially the second one in 2012, convinced many Republican voters that their party was feckless and naïve. Mitt Romney was serious, civic-minded and conscientious, and got absolutely bulldozed by the Obama campaign, which portrayed him as some kind of monster.The thinking of a lot of Republicans after that was, basically, If you portray all our candidates as crude, unethical partisan haters, well, maybe we should give you one.At the same time, the power of the party establishment had atrophied thanks to all sort of factors, from campaign-finance reform to social media, while it still remained a hate object for much of the right. This made the establishment a ready target for Donald Trump in 2016, but ill-suited to fighting back against him.Mr. Trump is a little like Bernie Sanders — a forceful critic of his party’s mainstream who isn’t at his core a member of the party. (Senator Sanders isn’t a registered Democrat, while Mr. Trump became a Republican again after flitting among various affiliations and would surely quit once more if things didn’t go his way.) The difference is that Mr. Trump won the Republican nomination in a hostile takeover, whereas the Democratic Party had the antibodies to resist Mr. Sanders.Even as Mr. Trump was something new in Republican politics, he was also something familiar. Even before his rise, Republicans were much more susceptible than Democrats to nonserious presidential candidates running to increase their profile for media gigs, book sales and the like. Mr. Trump was this type of candidate on a much larger scale, and, again, happened to actually win.One way to look at it is that the very successful model that the commentator Ann Coulter forged in the world of conservative media — generate controversy and never, ever apologize — came to be replicated by candidates and officeholders.Both Vivek Ramaswamy and Matt Gaetz are creatures of politics for the sake of notoriety. It creates entirely different incentives from the traditional approach: Stoking outrage is good, blowing things up is useful, and it never pays to get caught doing the responsible thing.At the congressional level, there was a related, although distinct phenomenon. With the rise of the Tea Party, the tendency of the right flank of the House Republican caucus to make the life of the party leadership miserable became more pronounced. This was especially true in spending fights. The pattern was that the right, associated with the House Freedom Caucus after its founding in 2015, would hold out a standard of impossible purity, and then when leaders inevitability failed to meet it, denounce them as weak and traitorous.There are, of course, legitimate disagreements about tactics and priorities, and the leadership doesn’t always make the right calls. But some of these members consider the legislative process in and of itself corrupt, and refuse to participate even if they can increase the negotiating leverage of their own side or move spending deals marginally in their direction.This was a notable dynamic in the spending fight that led to the toppling of Speaker McCarthy. His fiercest critics did nothing to help keep him from having to resort to the option they found most hateful — namely, going to Democrats for a kick-the-can deal in advance of a government shutdown.Representative Gaetz, the Gavrilo Princip of the Republican meltdown, exemplifies almost all these trends. He is a House Freedom Caucus-type in his attitudes toward the leadership and his rhetoric about federal spending, but his ultimate political loyalty is to Donald Trump. He’s overwhelmingly concerned with garnering media attention. And no one has the power to bring him to heel.There’s no dealing with the likes of Mr. Gaetz because he’s operating on a different dimension from someone like Mr. McCarthy, a pragmatist and coalition-builder who is trying to move the ball incrementally. It’s the difference between politics as theater and politics as the art of the possible; politics as individual brand-building and politics as team sport.In the last Congress, Nancy Pelosi had a slim majority like Mr. McCarthy and a restive handful of members on her left flank, the so-called Squad. Yet she held it together. The difference is that Ms. Pelosi still had considerable legitimacy as a leader, which gave her the moral power to keep everyone together. It is instructive to contrast her not just with Mr. McCarthy, but with the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell. Whereas Ms. Pelosi, an institutionalist concerned with getting things done, is a legend among Democrats, Mr. McConnell, also an institutionalist concerned with getting things done, is hated by much of his party’s own base and constantly attacked by the party’s de facto leader, Donald Trump.The situation in the Republican House caucus has now developed into a sort of tribal war, where memories of real or alleged wrongs committed by the other side lead to more conflict and more bad feelings. So, establishmentarians and relative moderates were willing to take down the speaker candidacy of the House Freedom Caucus co-founder Jim Jordan, rejecting his new argument that everyone had to come together for the good of the whole.It may be that exhaustion sets in and Republicans eventually settle on a speaker, or it may be that the problem is unresolvable and they will have to find a way to govern under the speaker pro tempore, Patrick McHenry. Regardless, it’s become obvious over the last three weeks that no, not nearly enough Republicans want to play this game.Rich Lowry is the editor in chief of National Review.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Republicans Grapple With Being Speakerless, but Effectively Leaderless, Too

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      With a speaker fight in the House, concerns about an aging Senate leader and a 2024 front-runner who has the party in a vise grip, some G.O.P. members worry the turmoil could have long-term effects.Kevin McCarthy, the ousted speaker, was making his way through the Capitol when reporters asked what he thought of the chaos consuming House Republicans, who for nearly three weeks have been trying and failing to replace him.His answer veered into the existential. “We are,” he said on Friday, “in a very bad place right now.”That might be an understatement.In the House, Republicans are casting about for a new leader, mired in an internecine battle marked by screaming, cursing and a fresh flood of candidates. In the Senate, their party is led by Senator Mitch McConnell, who spent weeks arguing that he remained physically and mentally fit enough for the position after freezing midsentence in two public appearances. And on the 2024 campaign trail, the dominant front-runner, Donald J. Trump, faces 91 felony charges across four cases, creating a drumbeat of legal news that often overwhelms any of his party’s political messages.As national Democrats largely stand behind President Biden and his agenda — more united than in years — Republicans are divided, directionless and effectively leaderless.For years, Mr. Trump has domineered Republican politics, with a reach that could end careers, create new political stars and upend the party’s long-held ideology on issues like trade, China and federal spending. He remains the party’s nominal leader, capturing a majority of G.O.P. voters in national polling and holding a double-digit lead in early voting states.And yet his commanding position has turned Republicans into a party of one, demanding absolute loyalty to Mr. Trump and his personal feuds and pet causes, such as his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. The result is an endless loop of chaos that even some Republicans say once again threatens to define the party’s brand heading into an election in which Republicans — after struggling to meet the basic responsibilities of governing the House of Representatives — will ask voters to also put them in charge of the Senate and the White House.“This looks like a group of 11th graders trying to pick the junior class president, and it will hurt our party long term,” said former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who is challenging Mr. Trump for the party nomination. “It’s going to be very hard to make the case that the American people should turn over control of the government to Republicans when you can’t even elect a speaker.”In recent months, the former president has focused more on his own legal peril than on his party. Flouting pressure from the Republican National Committee, Mr. Trump has largely opted out of some of the party’s biggest moments. He skipped the first two Republican primary debates for his own events and plans to skip the third, forgoing a chance to present his party’s message to an audience of millions.And he has largely taken a hands-off approach to the fight over the House speakership. Nine months ago, he helped install Mr. McCarthy as speaker. But he did not come to Mr. McCarthy’s rescue this fall when Representative Matt Gaetz led the charge to oust him. He then endorsed Representative Jim Jordan, who has failed to win enough support.Political parties out of power typically lack a strong leader. In 2016, Mr. Trump’s election plunged Democrats into years of ideological battles between a restive liberal wing and a more moderate establishment. But what’s less typical — and perhaps more politically damaging, some Republicans said — is the drawn-out, televised turmoil putting the internal dysfunction on public display.“It’s kind of a captainless pirate ship right now — a Black Pearl with no Jack Sparrow,” said Ralph Reed, a prominent social conservative leader, who argued that the issues would eventually be resolved. “But on the bright side, we will have a speaker at some point.”“These Republicans are complete idiots,” Ann Coulter, the conservative commentator, said on a radio program last week.Mr. McConnell all but threw up his hands in interviews on the Sunday talk shows. “It’s a problem,” he said on “Face the Nation” on CBS. “We’re going to do our job and hope the House can get functional here sometime soon.”And The Wall Street Journal editorial board, long a bastion of establishment Republican thought, wrote more than a week into the drama: “As the current mess in choosing another House Speaker shows, never underestimate the ability of Republicans to commit electoral suicide.”Most frustrating to some Republicans is the fact that the messy battle is largely symbolic. Democrats control the Senate and the White House, meaning that whoever becomes speaker has little chance of making their agenda into law.Still, there could be real-world political implications. As Republicans battled one another, Mr. Biden focused on an actual war. He spent much of last week building support for Israel, with a wartime visit and an Oval Office prime-time appeal for $105 billion in aid to help Israel and Ukraine — funds that face an uncertain future in a House frozen by infighting.It’s a split screen Democrats are more than happy to highlight.“The president of the United States, a Democrat, gave the strongest pro-Israel speech, at least since Harry Truman, maybe in American history,” said Representative Jake Auchincloss, a moderate Democrat from Massachusetts. “The division is on the Republican side of the aisle, where they are so fractured they can’t even elect a leader of their conference.”Mike DuHaime, a veteran Republican strategist who is advising Mr. Christie, said the inability to pick a speaker was a “new low” for Republican governance. “If you don’t have the presidency there is no clear leader of the party,” he said. “That’s natural. What’s unnatural here is that we can’t run our own caucus.”But others say that Mr. Trump, along with social media and conservative media, has turned the very incentive structure of the party upside down. With a broad swath of the conservative base firmly behind the former president, there may be little political cost in causing chaos. The eight Republicans who voted to oust Mr. McCarthy, for example, are likely to face no backlash for plunging the party into disarray. As their message is amplified across conservative media, they’re more likely to see their political stars rise, with a boost in fund-raising and attention.“What’s happening is you have people who don’t want to be led, but also want to engineer a situation where they can be betrayed and use that to rail against leadership,” said Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist and former National Republican Senatorial Committee aide.Some Republicans doubt the incident will have a lasting impact. In the summer, the party will pick a nominee at its national convention, and that person will become Republicans’ new standard-bearer.Nicole McCleskey, a Republican pollster, said the messy dust-up in the House would be forgotten by next November’s elections, washed away as just another moment of broken government amid near-record lows for voters’ trust in Congress.“People are used to Washington dysfunction, and this is just another episode,” she said. “It’s Republicans and Democrats, and they’re all dysfunctional. For voters, it’s just further evidence that Washington can’t address their problems.” More