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      The greater the fear Trump feels, the more sinister his threats become | Sidney Blumenthal

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      “DEATH!” tweeted Donald Trump about Gen Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (AKA “My Generals”). “TRAITOR!” he said about former speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (AKA “My Kevin”).“Monster” and “Deranged Lunatic” he labeled the New York state attorney general, Letitia James, who is prosecuting the case against him for his false valuations of Trump properties. “Deranged”, “Psycho” and “Crackhead” he called special prosecutor Jack Smith, who has charged him for his role in the January 6 coup attempt and his theft of classified documents.“We’ll stand up to crazy Nancy Pelosi, who ruined San Francisco – how’s her husband doing, anybody know?” he shouted at a rally, referring to Paul Pelosi, who was nearly murdered by a hammer-wielding assassin. “Crooked Joe Biden, let’s indict the motherfucker! Let’s indict him,” Trump said to a cheering crowd.“A racist … having an affair with the head of the gang or a gang member,” he claimed about Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney in Georgia, prosecuting him for the fake electors scheme. “Animal” and “Degenerate Psychopath” he called Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, who has charged him with campaign bribery. “[Senator Charles] Schumer’s girlfriend … is running this case against me,” he lied about a clerk in the New York courtroom, identifying her by name. For that transgression, Manhattan supreme court justice Arthur Engoron, who Trump previously said should be “disbarred”, issued a limited gag rule forbidding him from targeting officers of the court.Needless to say, Trump’s vilification of Bragg, Willis and James, all Black, is an extension of his lifelong campaign for white supremacy, going back to his discrimination against Black housing buyers and his full-page ads in the New York newspapers in 1989 calling for the death penalty for five Black and Hispanic youths, the “Central Park Five”, who were innocent of the charges against them. But he now has a larger agenda than a race war here and there.Trump’s torrent of attacks on judges, prosecutors and witnesses is of a piece with his larger project to delegitimize and demolish the institutions of government, including now the House of Representatives through the historic first overthrow of a sitting speaker. His goal in every arena is the same: to clear the path to one-man rule. His threats, incitements and smears are more than outbursts. They are statements of intention for his next presidency.The constitution must be suspended to overturn the results of the 2020 election: “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” he has proposed. He has announced he will prosecute and imprison his political opponents: “I will appoint a real special ‘prosecutor’ to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the USA, Joe Biden, the entire Biden crime family, & all others involved with the destruction of our elections, borders, & country itself!” He has pledged to purge the federal civil service and replace its employees with Trump loyalists: “You’re fired, get out, you’re fired,” he said, repeating his signature phrase from his television show The Apprentice. “[You] have to do it. Deep state. Washington will be an entirely different place.”Facing 91 felony counts in four separate trials, not to mention his second defamation judgment in the E Jean Carroll adjudicated rape case and the court-ordered unraveling of the Trump Organization in New York for decades of financial fraud, Trump has not stopped committing offenses. He has been a fount of ceaseless threats to specific officers of the court that he well knows may incite violence against them, interspersed with other calls for extralegal violence, such as shooting shoplifters. “Shot!” he shouted to a cheering crowd. If people can’t be bought off, told off or pushed off, they must be offed.Jack Smith’s filings to the Washington DC court requesting a gag order are a running commentary on Trump’s continuing crime wave. “Like his previous public disinformation campaign regarding the 2020 presidential election,” Smith wrote, “the defendant’s recent extrajudicial statements are intended to undermine public confidence in an institution – the judicial system – and to undermine confidence in and intimidate individuals – the court, the jury pool, witnesses and prosecutors.”In his collection of Trump’s latest “prejudicial statements,” Smith highlighted that Gen Milley, who Trump stated “had committed treason and suggested that he should be executed”, is “a witness cited in the indictment”.Smith addressed the issue of witness intimidation and tampering directly: “Even assuming that certain witnesses are not intimidated by the defendant’s statements, other witnesses see and may be affected by what the defendant does to those who are called to testify in this case. And regardless of whether certain witnesses are intimidated by the defendant’s extrajudicial statements, the defendant should not be permitted to attack or bolster the credibility of any witness in a manner that could influence prospective jurors.”Adding new felony charges against Trump for his egregious efforts at witness tampering would slow down the case against him. But the special prosecutor retains the option of filing those charges later. Trump’s inflammatory language could yet lead to further indictments.Trump’s threats are not simply rhetorical explosions but illegal attempts to intimidate witnesses and prejudice the jury. But they are more than that too. For Trump, the further the dismantlement of the rule of law, the smoother the path to one-man rule. Attempting to intimidate officers of the court and to tamper with witnesses is more than his legal strategy; it’s central to his overarching political strategy. He has systemic purpose. He is seeking to sideline every institution of government other than a presidency he occupies in which he is not bound by constitutional confines. By eliminating checks and balances now, he’s preparing for dictatorial rule.In 2020, under his aegis, the Republican party passed no platform whatsoever. Now, his incitements are the planks of the Republican platform on which all Republicans must run. His threats are his promises of what is to come. He is moving beyond the politics of grievance to the menace of revenge. Making him their candidate, Republicans are pledged to his violence and illegality. If he can escape accountability for his crimes, the rule of law collapses and the path is cleared for him. That is his vision. The criminal is the political.Trump seized upon the chance to advance the collapse of the speakership as an opportunity to reduce another governmental body that might be a check on him. The fewer barriers to one-man rule, the easier his road back to power. The party’s impotence is his strength. Kevin McCarthy’s demise appeared to him as a fortunate opening to grind toward control.The House Republicans rehearse an endless revenge tragedy strewing bodies on the stage. They flail at the Democrats, who for the crucial motion to vacate removed themselves to the reserved seats in the colosseum to watch the Republicans devour their speaker. The Republicans blamed the Democrats for failing to save McCarthy from the Republicans. McCarthy contrived to cooperate in his own destruction upon accepting the speakership by agreeing that one member alone could file a motion to vacate. Brutus, undisguised, was already lurking. McCarthy had put a knife in his hand in the first scene.With McCarthy’s corpse still warm, the speaker pro tempore Patrick McHenry’s first act was to evict former speaker Nancy Pelosi from her hideaway office, a little piece of real estate within the Capitol. It turns out it was a last sniveling request to McHenry from McCarthy, a spasm preceding rigor mortis. When she was speaker, she accorded the favor of the office to Dennis Hastert as a former speaker for as long as he remained in the House (before his pedophilia conviction). At the moment McHenry made his graceless gesture, Pelosi was in California, having accompanied the body of her dear friend Senator Dianne Feinstein to prepare for her funeral. He struck out at Pelosi as though her eviction punished her alongside the Republican eviction of Kevin McCarthy. It was presumably an equivalent slam of the Democratic speaker for the slamming of the Republican one.But Pelosi had left the speakership in dignity, handed off her baton and stays as an eminence, while McCarthy was despised, trampled and cut to pieces by his own. She served as the speaker for four years; he completed eight months, not quite to term. The displacement of Republican hostility to Pelosi only highlights their auto-da-fe of McCarthy. He is their former lord of the flies, felled by the swarm of flies. McHenry’s first act, ingratiating himself to the recently departed, established the tone of his even briefer transitional tenure. McCarthy all along tried to play to the bullies, joined in with the bullies, was roughed up by the bullies, and, finally, rousted by the bullies; after he was bullied out, his figurehead successor messed the clean slate with a small act of bullying. The hunger games continue.Trump was silent on McCarthy’s defenestration, the gratitude McCarthy received for his self-abasement, down to the nicety of regularly giving Trump gifts of jars of pink and red Starbursts, the former president’s favorite candy. The sweetener did not sweeten things for the candy man. Trump was the not-so-hidden hand reaching from behind the curtain, waving on the assassins. Stroking Trump almost to the last with praise, as “stronger today than in 2016”, McCarthy walked to his destiny with a knife about to be planted in his back. Immediately after the vote to remove him, Matt Gaetz stated, “I would say that my conversations with the former president leave me with great confidence that I’m doing the right thing.”McCarthy’s reward for loyalty to Trump led him into the usual cul-de-sac of Republicans trying to contain Trump. Predictably, Trump demanded what McCarthy could not deliver. “UNLESS YOU GET EVERYTHING, SHUT IT DOWN!” Everyone who decides to be involved with Trump inevitably faces an unacceptable request. In McCarthy’s case, it was shutting down the government, which would be disastrous for the razor-thin Republican majority going into an election. “If somebody wants to remove [me] because I want to be the adult in the room, go ahead and try,” McCarthy challenged his enemies. He could not bring himself in the end obviously to damage his party’s power through a shutdown. So McCarthy faced a choice of self-destruction, either losing the speakership eventually or immediately. He took his chances.Trump has mused to a rapt Iowa crowd of followers about his own possible fate: “If I’m sitting down and that boat is going down and I’m on top of a battery and the water starts flooding in, I’m getting concerned, but then I look 10 yards to my left and there’s a shark over there, so I have a choice of electrocution and a shark, you know what I’m going to take? Electrocution.” McCarthy thought he could survive by accommodating Trump. Then he somehow believed he could navigate between the rock and the hard place. But he was still eaten by the sharks. He met the fate of all the other adults in the room.At once, like a jack-in-the-box, Sean Hannity, Fox News host, popped up to float the idea of Trump as speaker. Rupert Murdoch, Hannity’s erstwhile boss, has referred to Hannity as “a moron”, and, at least according to Murdoch chronicler Michael Wolff, Hannity was playing the jester, for a jab of ratings heroin. But he is a slavish Trump stalwart, following him like a daddy figure, perhaps explained by his recent anecdote: “By the way, when my father would hit me with a belt, I didn’t actually raise my voice. We used to be the land of the free, home of the brave. What happened? When did we become the land of the snowflake?” Hannity’s cri de coeur was more revelatory of the underlying psychology of authoritarianism than anything he has ever said.Trump doesn’t need the quotidian grief of being speaker when he can direct the inmates of the asylum by remote control, and, anyway, he’s busy in and out of court. But the fake speaker ploy presented itself as a terrific, if brief, opportunity for playacting and grifting, like the fake electors scheme without the real life truth and consequences.After Trump retreated from glowering at the defendant’s table in the Manhattan courtroom for several days, using the occasion to gin up a round of contributions, Letitia James pronounced, “The Donald Trump show is over.” But once that episode of the show ended, the special episode of Speaker Trump appeared on the schedule. When he was in the courtroom, he retweeted a drawing of himself seated next to Jesus, with the caption: “This is the most accurate court sketch of all time.” Then he tweeted a photo-shopped picture of himself in the speaker’s chair, wearing a red Maga cap and in his right hand lifting up the gavel. He had passed from crucifixion to resurrection in less time than Jesus. Hail, Trump!Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted ecstatically, “If Trump becomes Speaker of the House, the chamber will be like a Trump rally everyday!! It would be the House of MAGA!!!” But this Trump candidacy was a speaker-for-a-day con. Trump announced his endorsement of Representative Jim Jordan, founder of the rightwing Freedom Caucus, who had harassed two previous Republican speakers out of their chairs, run against McCarthy and, most importantly, was a co-conspirator in the January 6 coup attempt. For the speakership, Jordan faces Representative Steve Scalise, McCarthy’s majority leader, a get-along-go-along kind of guy, a wholly owned subsidiary of the oil industry, the candidate of K Street corporate lobbyists.Jordan had stonewalled a subpoena from the House January 6 committee to testify to his involvement. He had mobilized the “Stop the Steal” movement months before the election, was the key member of the House in White House meetings plotting how to stymie the certification of the electoral college count, texted White House chief of staff Mark Meadows on 5 January to put pressure on then vice-president Mike Pence to “call out all electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all”, and on the phone strategizing with Trump throughout the fateful day. That evening, after the devastation, he led 139 representatives to object to certification.If section 3 of the 14th amendment, enacted after the civil war, barring former Confederates who “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion” from holding federal office, applies to Trump, as two prominent conservative legal scholars have argued, then even more clearly and forcefully it applied to members of Congress, including Jim Jordan. After initially agreeing that Trump should be disqualified, Federalist Society co-founder Steven Calabresi, professor of law at Northwestern University, flipped, citing an article by Michael Mukasey, former attorney general under President George W Bush, that argued the provision did not cover the former president but only members of the Congress and other “officers of the United States”. However tendentious the argument, Mukasey – and Calabresi – had inadvertently made the case for disqualifying Jordan and the others who voted against certification on 6 January 2021 from serving in office at all.McCarthy’s fall has been another stepping stone for Trump’s return to power. Trump has announced he will go to the Capitol to intervene in the speaker contest and address the House Republican Conference. The last time he wanted to visit, to march with the January 6 mob, he was restrained by a secret service agent whom he allegedly grabbed by the throat. Trump would be the only member of the J6 prison choir to come to the Capitol since then. He had joined the jailed insurrectionists who had formed a singing group by overlaying his recital of the Pledge of Allegiance on their version of The Star Spangled Banner. Trump has promised “full pardons with an apology to many” of those convicted of rampaging through the Capitol’s corridors chanting, “Hang Mike Pence!” Now, Trump says he would return there as “a unifier”.But, first, he took time to trash his former chief of staff Gen John Kelly, who confirmed on 3 October to CNN that Trump had disparaged wounded, captured and tortured soldiers as “suckers” and “losers”. Kelly offered a description of Trump: “A person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about … A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our constitution and the rule of law. There is nothing more that can be said. God help us.”After endorsing Jim Jordan, Trump wrote on Truth Social that Kelly was “by far the dumbest of my Military people … He was incapable of doing a good job, it was too much for him, and I couldn’t stand the guy, so I fired him like a ‘dog.’”The “wannabe dictator”, as Gen Milley calls him, is without theory or fig leaf. As the trials bear down, as Trump contemplates the shark or electrocution, he projects his The Pit and the Pendulum terror into violent threats. The greater the fear he feels, the more violent the threats. He is stalked by Thanatos. “DEATH!”
      Sidney Blumenthal is the author of The Permanent Campaign, published in 1980, and All the Power of the Earth: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, 1856-1860, the third of a projected five volumes. He is the former assistant and senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and senior adviser to Hillary Clinton More

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      Top Republican urges party to end ‘civil war’ and elect House speaker this week

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      Republicans in Washington need to elect a new speaker “this week” and end the party’s “civil war” in the House that is sending a message to the world of dysfunction, especially amid the conflict unfolding in Israel, a senior GOP figure said on Sunday.The Texas Republican congressman Mike McCaul, chairman of the House foreign affairs committee, urged his own party in the House to unify because “we have got to move quickly, we cannot paralyze democracy, especially when we have hotspots all over the world… and I’m just worried about the messaging this sends.”A small group of hard-right House Republicans last week managed to force out speaker and California Republican Kevin McCarthy, against the wishes of moderate colleagues, in an unprecedented move to punish him for allying with Democrats to prevent a government shutdown. McCarthy had only served in the post since January when he scraped through an unparalleled 15 rounds of voting.In an interview with CNN’s State of the Union show on Sunday morning, McCaul said it was important for the House, which cannot pass legislation without a speaker, to reboot “so that we can get things to the floor”, such as a bipartisan resolution condemning the attack by Hamas militants on Israel and action to help with Israel “replenishing” its Iron Dome anti-missile system.“It’s too dangerous a time right now to be playing games with national security,” he said, also expressing hope that the fighting in Israel does not escalate and spread.McCaul said of there were worries about an expansion of the crisis unfolding in southern Israel.“If this lights up into a larger jihadist war against the zionist, if you will, that’s always what keeps everyone up at night,” he said.Meanwhile, McCaul thought the House Republican conference was “ready to unify around one speaker and not have this civil war”. The rightwing congressmen Jim Jordan of Ohio, who has been backed by former president Donald Trump, and Steve Scalise of Louisiana are the current leading contenders to succeed McCarthy and votes are expected on Wednesday.“It was not my idea to oust the speaker, I thought it was dangerous…[considering] all the threats that are out there,” McCaul said in the CNN interview.“What kind of message are we sending to our adversaries when we cannot govern, when we are dysfunctional, when we don’t even have a speaker of the House? I mean how does Chairman Xi of China look at that when he says democracy doesn’t work, how does the Ayatollah [of Iran] look at this, knowing that we cannot function properly?” McCaul said, referring to Chinese president Xi Jinping.He said he thought either Jordan or Scalise “can provide solidarity”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe House minority leader and New York Democratic congressman, Hakeem Jeffries, also told CNN’s State of the Union that “it’s time for the GOP to end the Republican civil war…[because] we need to get things done” on Capitol Hill.Matt Gaetz, the Florida congressman, who instigated the ousting of McCarthy last week, said on NBC’s Meet the Press that there would be a new speaker this week and House Republicans would be “back on track” and “invigorated”.He called the crisis in Israel “horrifying” but said the situation in the House would not stop the US coming to Israel’s aid.The Republican presidential candidate for 2024 and former New Jersey governor Chris Christie said on ABC’s This Week that even without the events in Israel the ousting of the speaker of the House by a small GOP faction was “wholly irresponsible”. More

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      The Republican party is at last paying the price of its Faustian pact with Trump | Michael Cohen

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      More than 11 years ago, before Donald Trump emerged from the primordial ooze of the far-right fever swamp, before the aborted January 6 insurrection and before the latest spasm of Republican extremism felled House speaker Kevin McCarthy, two renowned political scientists, Thomas Mann, and Norman Ornstein, put their finger on the essence of increasingly dysfunctional US politics: the Republican party. Mann and Ornstein argued that the Grand Old Party (GOP) had become an “insurgent outlier” that was “ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition”.Eleven years later, the enfant terrible of American politics has somehow got unimaginably worse. The GOP today is less a political party and more an inchoate mass of cultural grievances, conspiracy theories and lowest common denominator political slogans. Trump, for all his toxicity, is a symptom of the GOP’s decades-long descent into madness. Legislating is not seen as a tool for bettering the plight of the American people but rather an opportunity to troll Democrats and play to the perceived slights of the party’s rank-and-file supporters.But Republican indifference to governing is, perhaps, the least of the party’s pathologies. In slavishly supporting Trump and his Maga – Make America Great Again – supporters, they have empowered a political movement that is increasingly testing the limits of the US democratic experiment.McCarthy’s political trajectory tells the sorry tale. After January 6, McCarthy, who, along with his political colleagues, was forced to hide from the marauding insurrectionists, turned against the man responsible for the day’s violence. Privately, he told fellow Republicans: “I’ve had it with this guy”. But within weeks, he travelled to the ex-president’s palatial digs in South Florida and, on bended knee, pledged loyalty to the GOP’s orange god. He tried to block a bipartisan congressional committee to investigate January 6 and allied himself with conspiracy theorists who continued to spread lies about the 2020 election. Earlier this year, he gave in to Republican extremists and announced an impeachment inquiry of Joe Biden, even though there is no evidence that the president has committed any impeachable offences.McCarthy, like countless Republican supplicants over the past eight years, realised that his political aspirations were directly tied to his willingness to support Trump and the extremist forces within the party that have rallied around him. In a tale as old as time, he made a deal with the devil, only to be burned by the political forces he’d empowered. Trump’s hold over the Republican party is so complete that it borders on the pathological. Since March, he has been indicted four times and charged with 91 separate felonies. Yet his poll numbers among Republicans have dramatically improved. He enjoys a more than 45-point lead in the race for the party’s presidential nomination.There simply is no future in the GOP for an elected official who refuses to prostate themselves to Trump. Liz Cheney was the most vocal and impassioned Republican in speaking out against him after January 6. Her reward: McCarthy engineered her removal from the GOP House leadership. Then, in 2022, a Maga Republican challenged Cheney in a GOP primary and defeated her by nearly 40 points. Another Republican apostate, former presidential candidate and current Utah senator Mitt Romney, who twice voted to convict Trump in his impeachment trials, recently announced that he wouldn’t run for re-election.In a series of interviews with the Atlantic’s McKay Coppins, he recounted how, “in public”, his fellow Republican senators “played their parts as Trump loyalists, often contorting themselves rhetorically to defend the president’s most indefensible behaviour. But in private, they ridiculed his ignorance, rolled their eyes at his antics and made incisive observations about his warped, toddler-like psyche.”Like other principled Republicans, Romney is choosing to walk away, and it’s hard to blame him. His criticisms of Trump have led to death threats and he is now spending an estimated $5,000 a day on private security. But the result is that the GOP’s ranks are now increasingly filled by those with bottomless reservoirs of ambition and empty cupboards of integrity. So for those hoping that a principled and mature Republican party will somehow emerge from this mess, think again. The political incentives in the GOP run in a singular direction – to the far right. If there is any silver lining, it is this: for all the Republican voters who love Trump, there is a larger mobilised group of voters who loathes him.Indeed, what is perhaps most striking about Trump is the static nature of his political support. In fact, if one compares his approval ratings from February 2020 – before the Covid pandemic ravaged the nation – to those in November 2020, when he ran for re-election, they were largely unchanged. Since leaving office, his approval numbers have also largely stayed the same. Americans have, by and large, made up their minds about Trump – and the verdict is: “We don’t like him.”The last three US elections prove the point. In what was largely seen as a rebuke to Trump, in the 2018 midterms, Democrats picked up more than 40 seats and control of the House of Representatives. In 2020, he lost re-election by at least 7m votes to Biden(4m more than he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016). In the 2022 midterms, the Democrats dramatically overperformed, picking up a seat in the Senate and barely losing the House of Representatives. So far this year, in dozens of special elections, Democrats are overperforming by a whopping 11 points. Part of this is a byproduct of the supreme court’s decision on abortion rights, but it’s also a backlash to the extremism that Trump has engendered.Of course, elections are tricky things and there is no guarantee that the unpopular Biden will emerge victorious next November. But take his current lousy polling with a grain of salt. It’s one thing to want a different Democratic nominee, as many Democrats do, but elections are about choices. That the likely option for voters in November 2024 will be Biden, or a deeply unstable opponent who could be a multiple convicted felon, has a way of narrowing one’s focus. But even if Trump loses, the problem of the Republican party will still be with us long after he’s left the political scene. More

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      Democratic unity strikes contrast to Republican chaos as McCarthy exits

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      “Democrats in disarray” has been an oft-repeated joke in Washington in recent years, a tongue-in-cheek reference to the tensions that repeatedly flared up between the progressives and the centrists of Joe Biden’s party. But on Tuesday, House Democrats presented a united front as their Republican counterparts turned against each other and ultimately ousted one of their own in a historic defeat.The entire House Democratic caucus voted unanimously to remove the Republican Kevin McCarthy as speaker on Tuesday, joining eight mostly hard-right lawmakers in supporting a motion to vacate the chair. Refusing to intervene in a mess of Republicans’ own making, Democrats looked on as McCarthy was unseated, making him the first House speaker in US history to be removed from office.Under the oversight of their new leader, Hakeem Jeffries of New York, House Democrats have marched in lockstep to challenge Republicans’ policy agenda, offering a stark contrast to the fractious conference that McCarthy tried and failed to unify. As they look to take back the House next year, Democrats hope to use the instability displayed this week to make a broader argument about the extremism that they say has come to define the modern Republican party.Heading into the Tuesday vote, speculation abounded over whether McCarthy might offer Democrats some kind of deal to help save his speakership. But McCarthy chose not to, telling CNBC on Tuesday: “They haven’t asked for anything, and I’m not going to provide anything.”Instead, McCarthy tried to appeal to members’ faith in the integrity of the House to keep his gavel, arguing that a removal of a speaker would represent an irreversible black mark on the institution.But that argument struck many Democrats as hypocritical coming from McCarthy, particularly given the speaker’s stunning flip-flop regarding the deadly insurrection at the Capitol on 6 January 2021. In the days after the attack, McCarthy said Donald Trump “bears responsibility” for the violence carried out by a group of the former president’s supporters. But just two weeks later, McCarthy flew to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida to make amends, and he later denounced the work of the House select committee investigating the insurrection.McCarthy “went to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring and voted not to impeach Donald Trump for inciting a violent insurrection against the 2020 presidential election and our government”, Jamie Raskin, a Democratic member of the select committee, said Tuesday. “This is a somber day for America as the chickens come home to roost for Kevin McCarthy.”The final self-inflicted nail in McCarthy’s coffin came on Sunday, the day after the House passed a continuing resolution to extend government funding through 17 November and avert a federal shutdown. House Democrats overwhelmingly supported the stopgap funding bill, with just one member voting against it, but 90 House Republicans opposed the legislation.And yet, when McCarthy appeared on CBS News’ Face the Nation on Sunday, he attempted to blame Democrats for the last-minute scramble.“I wasn’t sure it was going to pass. You want to know why? Because the Democrats tried to do everything they can not to let it pass,” McCarthy said. “They did not want the bill. They were willing to let government shut down, for our military not to be paid.”House Democratic leaders played a clip of McCarthy’s interview during their Tuesday morning caucus meeting, just hours before the chamber’s vote on removing the speaker. McCarthy’s comments outraged Democrats, fortifying the caucus’s resolve to support the motion to vacate.“It goes in political 101 textbooks going forward as maybe one of the most … stupid things somebody could do on the eve of your survival vote,” Gerry Connolly, a Democratic Virginia congressman, told NBC News.In the end, every present House Democrat voted to oust McCarthy, ensuring the end of his speakership. Democrats commended Jeffries on keeping his members unified on Tuesday, mirroring the caucus’s unanimous support for Jeffries through 15 rounds of voting during the speakership election in January.“Yesterday was a pure demonstration of the type of leadership and continuity that [Jeffries] brings to the table and how inclusive he is,” said Antjuan Seawright, a Democratic strategist. “He has, I think, been extra intentional about keeping all four corners of the House Democratic caucus square together and living out what diversity and inclusion means when it comes to House Democrats.”Jeffries has now called on more centrist members of the House Republican conference to join Democrats in forming a “bipartisan governing coalition”.“At this point, we simply need Republican partners willing to break with Maga extremism, reform the highly partisan House rules that were adopted at the beginning of this Congress and join us in finding common ground for the people,” he wrote in a Washington Post op-ed published on Friday.So far, Republican partners have been difficult to find. Some of McCarthy’s allies blamed House Democrats for the speaker’s removal, accusing them of prioritizing their political goals over the good of the country. Democrats have scoffed at that argument, asserting that McCarthy brought about his own downfall by trying to appease the hard-right members who ultimately ousted him. McCarthy only won the speakership in January by making concessions to hard-right lawmakers, including a rule allowing any single member to introduce a motion to vacate the chair. That decision came back to haunt McCarthy this week.“The same rightwing extremism that gave McCarthy the speakership was the same rightwing extremism that took away his speakership,” Seawright said. “House Democrats should continue to draw the contrast with extremism that has hijacked and pretty much taken over the Republican conference with the comparison and the contrast of what was able to be done” when the Democrats had the House majority.Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, suggested the speakership debacle could be a launchpad for Democrats to engage in a fuller discussion about rightwing extremism. With government funding due to run out in just a month, Green said it was urgent for Democrats to make a policy-based pitch against Republicans’ legislative agenda.“Extremism doesn’t just mean they can’t rally their caucus on the House floor. Extremism means they would actually cut social security benefits for millions of current and future seniors,” Green said. “The extremists within an already extreme Republican party that are in charge are the same ones who would be most likely to use their leverage to cut programs like social security.”As the House prepares for another speakership election, much of the conversation in Washington has focused on who might replace McCarthy. But for Green, the more important conversation involves how the new Republican speaker will govern with a newly emboldened hard-right faction in his conference. Steve Scalise and Jim Jordan, two speaker candidates, have also backed drastic government funding cuts, voting in favor of McCarthy’s recent failed proposal to temporarily reduce most government agencies’ budgets by up to 30%.“I think it’s important to connect the dots between the chaos and extremism we’ve seen playing out in this leadership fight and what those same forces will attempt to do in the upcoming government funding fight,” Green said. “It’s very possible that members of the public perceive these as two very different stories, as opposed to two chapters in the same story.” More

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      Donald Trump backs hard-right loyalist Jim Jordan for House speaker

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      Donald Trump is officially backing the brash, longtime loyalist and founding member of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, the Ohio congressman Jim Jordan, to succeed Kevin McCarthy as House speaker when voting takes place next week.“Congressman Jim Jordan has been a STAR long before making his very successful journey to Washington, DC, representing Ohio’s 4th Congressional District,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social social media platform, with his some of his signature inflammatory flourishes, early on Friday.He added: “He will be a GREAT Speaker of the House & has my Complete & Total Endorsement!”The announcement came hours after the Texas congressman Troy Nehls said on Thursday night that the former US president had decided to back Jordan’s bid and after Trump said he would be open to serving as interim leader himself if Republicans could not settle on a successor following McCarthy’s stunning ouster.Trump, the current Republican presidential frontrunner for the 2024 election, has used the leadership vacuum on Capitol Hill to further demonstrate his control over his party and drag it further to the right.House Republicans are deeply fractured and some have been asking him to lead them in the lower congressional chamber, a seemingly fanciful suggestion that he also promoted after inflaming the divisions that forced out McCarthy as speaker.“Just had a great conversation with President Trump about the Speaker’s race. He is endorsing Jim Jordan, and I believe Congress should listen to the leader of our party,” Nehls wrote late on Thursday on X, formerly known as Twitter.In an interview later with the Associated Press, Nehls, who had been encouraging Trump to run for the post himself, said the ex-president instead wanted Jordan.“After him thinking about it and this and that … he said he really is in favor of getting behind Jim Jordan,” Nehls said.Jordan is one of two leading candidates maneuvering for speaker along with the congressman Steve Scalise of Louisiana. Both are trying to lock in the 218 votes required to win the job and need the support of both the far-right and moderate factions of the party. It’s unclear whether Trump’s endorsement will force Scalise, the current GOP majority leader, out of the race, or if either can reach the threshold.Indeed, Nehls said that if no current candidate succeeds in earning the support needed to win, he would once again turn to Trump. “Our conference is divided. Our country is broken. I don’t know who can get to 218,” he said in the interview.Trump earlier in the day had been in talks to visit Capitol Hill next week ahead of a speakership vote that could happen as soon as Wednesday, according to three people familiar with the discussions who spoke on condition of anonymity ahead of an official announcement. Trump confirmed the trip to Fox News Digital and said he would travel on Tuesday to meet with Republicans.The trip would have been Trump’s first to the Capitol since leaving office and since his supporters attacked the building in a bid to halt the peaceful transition of power on 6 January 2021. Trump has been indicted in both Washington DC and Georgia over his efforts to overturn the results of the election, which he lost to his Democratic party challenger, Joe Biden.Jordan is one of Trump’s biggest champions in Washington DC and has been leading spurious investigations into prosecutors who have charged the former president. He was also part of a group of Republicans who worked with Trump to overturn his defeat, ahead of January 6. Scalise has also worked closely with Trump over the years.Others are waiting in the wings potentially to contest for the speakership, including the Oklahoma representative Kevin Hern, who as chair of the Republican study committee leads the largest faction of Republicans in the chamber.The Associated Press contributed reporting. More

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      The McCarthy debacle barely scrapes the surface of how dysfunctional Congress is | Osita Nwanevu

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      While those who follow politics closely are busy parsing what the ouster of Kevin McCarthy as House speaker might mean for Congress, those who don’t ⁠– meaning the bulk of the American people ⁠– could be forgiven for tuning much of the drama of the last few weeks out. Ordinary Americans have little faith in Congress as it stands: as substantively or strategically consequential as they might be, the battles between members of our most reviled class, politicians, seem to most like juvenile squabbles.Here’s a detail that might incense them further. For generations, members of the US Senate have carved and scrawled their names into their desks. This rite, the stuff of summer camp and grade school, is, to the peculiar mind of a US senator, something more profound ⁠– yet another tradition, as though they needed another, signifying their membership in an august and noble fraternity.The same can be said of the Senate’s dress code, which was unanimously rescued and formalized this past week after Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer relaxed the chamber’s rules, seemingly to accommodate the defiantly casual Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman. Men will be asked to wear full business attire from now on ⁠– a requirement that has its practical advantages. As Robert Menendez, the New Jersey senator, may allegedly know, a suit jacket is a fine place to stow wads of cash in a pinch and useful, in the abstract, for another reason ⁠– disguising, through costumes of respectability, how grubby, venal and unremarkable many of our politicians are.A group letter written in the defense of the dress code described the Senate as “a place of honor and tradition”. “The world watches us on that floor,” it reads, “and we must protect the sanctity of that place at all costs.” Of course, the world usually has better things to do than keep up with congressional proceedings on C-SPAN, but there are embarrassing exceptions, the latest dramas among Republicans in the House among them, though the fact that they’re taking place in the opposite chamber shouldn’t flatter the Senate and its defenders ⁠– “the world’s greatest deliberative body” is nothing more than the geriatric wing of one of the world’s most unserious legislatures.And while much due attention is given to the problem of money in politics and more and more conversations are being had about Congress’s structural defects ⁠– once the late Dianne Feinstein is replaced and California regains its full complement of senators, each of the state’s voters will still have just over one-sixtieth the representation in the chamber of a voter in Wyoming ⁠– we ought to have a conversation, too, about the culture of the place.The inescapable fact uniting so much that grates about Congress right now ⁠– Republican shenanigans in the House, the Democratic party’s sluggishness in handling an obviously corrupt, compromised and distracted Menendez, gerontocracy within both parties ⁠– is that we ask very little of our representatives. Being a member of Congress simply isn’t substantively demanding enough.The irony of all the talk about how elderly our leaders are, and the reality that, in fact, has allowed obviously infirm politicians like Feinstein and Mitch McConnell to retain their positions even as they go catatonic in public view, is that the halls and offices of the Capitol are absolutely teeming with unelected and invisible young staffers ⁠– many of whom are in their 20s and 30s, some of whom are constitutionally incapable of occupying the offices they serve ⁠– who do much of the actual work Americans believe our elected officials do themselves.Policy research, drafting and reviewing legislative language, authoring speeches, drawing up the questions senators and congressmen ask at hearings, writing tweets and statements that go out under their bosses’ names, preparing talking points for media appearances, relaying directives from party leaders about how to vote and why ⁠– as a practical matter, the average politician in Washington today needn’t be more than a warm body with a pulse ready to cast a given vote.Of course, the late Senator Feinstein did her level best to test even that. But the fact that she, as one New York Times headline put it, “[Relied] Heavily on Staff to Function” was only partially a function of her age ⁠– the same is true of all but a relatively small and wonky contingent of unusually hard-working legislators.That’s not to say the rest don’t have concrete and vital responsibilities of their own ⁠– in 2013, the Huffington Post obtained documents from Democratic congressional campaign committee recommending that freshmen members of the caucus spend at least four hours every day calling donors for campaign contributions, more than the total amount of time recommended for visits with constituents and working in committees or voting on the House floor combined, a figure probably comparable to the number of hours spent dialing for dollars on the other side of the aisle.“After votes in the House, a stream of congressmen and women can be seen filing out of the Capitol and, rather than returning to their offices, heading to rowhouses nearby on First Street for call time, or directly to the parties’ headquarters,” Ryan Grim and Sabrina Siddiqui wrote. “The rowhouses […] are typically owned by lobbyists, fundraisers or members themselves, and are used for call time because it’s illegal to solicit campaign cash from the official congressional office.”Once call time is done, we might find our representatives making canned speeches prepared by dutiful staffers before a mostly empty chamber, some of which might find their way into campaign ads and materials later.It can’t really be a surprise, given this, that Congress attracts so many who have little fundamental interest in doing the work of governing themselves ⁠– or that it sustains the careers of even those who do well after they’re personally capable of doing it. In either case, the legislator is little more than a cog in a vast machine influenced variously by donors, interest groups, major leaders and figures in both parties, the media, primary voters, and, yes, somewhere in the mix voters in the general electorate, though it should be said that most legislators don’t have to sweat much for their approval come election time.In the 2022 midterms, 84% of House seats were either uncontested or decided in races where the victor won by more than 10 points, with the average margin of victory in all races working out to about 28 points. Nearly 95% of incumbents won reelection. On the Senate side, Cook Political Reports rated nine of the 35 races as potentially competitive; ultimately, all incumbents won their seats back.Congress, all told, isn’t a place most are ultimately forced to leave either by elections or as a matter of their age. Term limits and age limits have been floated as solutions to all this, but another complementary remedy, if we dare to dream, might be party leaders taking it upon themselves to work our representatives harder.The tasks of legislating are now well beyond the capacities of individual legislators alone, yes, but setting the expectation that they should shoulder more of the burdens now foisted upon their staffers would discourage older legislators and incumbents from sticking around too long ⁠– Feinstein might have retired long ago if she’d actually had to do more of her job herself ⁠– and help dissuade layabouts and grifters from seeking office.We’ll never be fully rid of them, of course, and we’d scarcely recognize Congress without them. But making the work of politics feel like work seems worth a try.
      Osita Nwanevu is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Kevin McCarthy is as responsible as anyone for his own downfall | Andrew Gawthorpe

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      This week, Kevin McCarthy became the first speaker of the House of Representatives in history to be voted out of office. It was a fitting end to his speakership, one in which McCarthy had served only at the pleasure of a nihilistic bloc of far-right Republicans. It was little wonder, then, that he seemed almost jolly as he announced at a press conference that he didn’t intend to run for the office again.Far more galling was McCarthy’s attempt at the same event to present himself, in contrast to those who ousted him, as some sort of force for moderation and reasonableness. The truth is that McCarthy has been at the cutting edge of his party’s descent into madness, encouraging its worst instincts and indulging its most destructive personalities. People sometimes say that the congressional Republican party has become “ungovernable”. It’s more accurate to say that it has been deliberately radicalized – and that Kevin McCarthy played a key role in that process.Take a look down the list of recent Republican outrages and you’ll find McCarthy implicated at every turn. Flirting with birtherism? Check. Joking about physically attacking Nancy Pelosi, even after a violent mob stormed the Capitol to search for her? Check. Angrily demanding that other Republicans defend Donald Trump after the leaked “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Trump seemed to admit to committing sexual assault? Yep, that was Kevin.Perhaps most egregious have been McCarthy’s attempts to aid Trump in subverting the 2020 election, and then to minimize the January 6 insurrection which followed. Just hours after the deadly attack on the Capitol, McCarthy voted to reject Biden’s lawful election, citing spurious conspiracy theories. Although McCarthy briefly condemned the violence of that day, he soon moved to reconcile with Trump and became a firm opponent of imposing any sort of accountability on those responsible. In one of his most outrageous acts, he released thousands of hours of Capitol security video to Tucker Carlson, allowing the Fox News host to cherry-pick footage and spin the attack as merely a peaceful protest.McCarthy also defended and elevated the very worst members of his own caucus, declining to endorse their opponents in primaries or to marginalize them once they made it to the chamber. He was an early supporter of Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Republican who has supported QAnon conspiracy theories, called for prominent Democrats to be executed, and made racist and antisemitic remarks. Once she was seated, Greene emerged as one of McCarthy’s closest allies and his conduit to the Trumpian base. When Trump, Greene and other Republicans called for an inquiry into the possibility of impeaching Joe Biden over spurious allegations of corruption, McCarthy was happy to oblige.Even on the more mundane issues of taxing and spending which ultimately led to his ouster, McCarthy did nothing to quiet his party’s worst instincts. The speaker supports the practice of using the annual vote on raising the debt ceiling to hold the government hostage, threatening an economy-wrecking default in order to leverage policy concessions. After using that tactic earlier this year to force Democrats into a deal which would cut spending, he then reneged on it and sent the country hurtling towards a government shutdown. His management of the chaos which ensued proved to be his downfall.By actively working to radicalize the Republican party in so many different ways, McCarthy now bears as much responsibility as anyone else for the abject state in which the Republican party finds itself. Embittered and delusional, Republicans cannot pull themselves together enough to perform even the most basic tasks of governing. The speaker’s chair is vacant as the country heads towards another government shutdown, and Republican congressmen have gone back to their districts to nurse their wounds for a week. When they return there’s no guarantee that they’ll be able to cohere around a new choice for speaker – or that whoever they pick will do a better job than McCarthy did.Nobody should welcome this paralysis in the nation’s legislature. But if there’s a bright spot in all of this, it’s the fact that Democrats are well-placed to make hay from the Republicans’ self-inflicted wounds. Voters’ rejection of the Republican party’s radicalization is one of the reasons that Democrats did so well in the 2022 midterm elections. For all of the schadenfreude currently directed at Republicans, it’s Democrats like Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi who deserve credit for denying Republicans a bigger majority and putting them in this bind to begin with. The struggle against Maga extremism has proven motivational for many voters, and McCarthy only helped Democrats to make the case.Ultimately, though, a two-party democracy cannot survive and prosper if one of its parties becomes so consumed by nihilism. It’s no surprise that Republican attacks on democracy and the basic norms of common decency make it so hard for them to navigate any task requiring compromise or reasonableness. But the corrosion that is eating away at their own ranks is unlikely to stop there. It’s also threatening to damage the country, be it through a catastrophic debt default or another outpouring of violence. That threat will remain until a critical mass of Republicans and their leaders will stand up and say: no more. Kevin McCarthy wouldn’t. Will anyone else?
      Andrew Gawthorpe is a historian of the United States at Leiden University and the creator of America Explained, a podcast and newsletter More

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      Republicans Jim Jordan and Steve Scalise launch House speakership bids

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      Jim Jordan of Ohio and Steve Scalise of Louisiana announced Wednesday that they would seek to succeed Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the US House of Representatives, after the Californian was brutally removed by his own Republican party on Tuesday.Jordan is chair of the powerful judiciary committee, while Scalise is the majority leader. Both had been named as potential successors to McCarthy, and they confirmed their intentions to run for the top House job a day after the speakership was declared vacant.Pitching his candidacy in a “Dear Colleague” letter, Jordan pledged to unify his fractious conference, which has repeatedly stumbled under the weight of a razor-thin majority.“We are at a critical crossroad in our nation’s history. Now is the time for our Republican conference to come together to keep our promises to Americans,” Jordan said. “No matter what we do, we must do it together as a conference. I respectfully ask for your support for speaker of the House of Representatives.”But Scalise argued he had the experience needed to unite the conference, after serving as part of the House Republican leadership team for the past decade.“I have a proven track record of bringing together the diverse array of viewpoints within our Conference to build consensus where others thought it impossible,” Scalise said in his own “Dear Colleague” letter. “We have an extremely talented Conference, and we all need to come together and pull in the same direction to get the country back on the right track.”Weighing in on the speakership race, Joe Biden expressed concern over the “dysfunction” in the House and emphasized the importance of continuing funding to Ukraine, which has become a source of outrage among hard-right lawmakers.Asked for his advice to the next House speaker, Biden laughed and said: “That’s above my pay grade.”Ukraine could become a central focus of House Republicans’ speaker candidate forum, which is scheduled for next Tuesday. Asked about his stance on approving more funding for Ukraine, Jordan said: “I’m against that … The most pressing issue on Americans’ mind is not Ukraine. It is the border situation, and it is crime on the streets.”Another sticking point for Republicans involves the mechanism that Matt Gaetz used to oust McCarthy, the motion to vacate. Under current House rules, any single member can force a vote on removing the speaker, and some of the more moderate House Republicans want to raise that threshold to avoid a repeat of Tuesday’s spectacle.“The ability for one person to vacate the speaker of the House will keep a chokehold on this body through 2024,” the Republican Main Street caucus, representing the the more centrist House Republicans, said in a statement. “Personal politics should never again be used to trump the will of 96% of House conservatives. Any candidate for speaker must explain to us how what happened on Tuesday will never happen again.”Jordan and Scalise are both hardline conservatives who may struggle to attract support from moderates – a fact not lost on observers after Gaetz and seven other hard-right Republicans chose to make McCarthy the first speaker ever removed by his own party.Scalise’s hard-right views – which have even seen him linked to the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke – and his personal health could pose challenges as he seeks the gavel. Scalise, 57, walks with a cane, having survived a shooting at congressional baseball practice in 2017. He is also in treatment for mutliple myeloma, an aggressive form of cancer. He has said the treatment is going well.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAs Republicans weigh their options, hard-right lawmaker Andy Harris of Maryland suggested Byron Donalds as the next speaker, but it is unclear whether the Florida congressman will throw his hat in the ring. Kevin Hern of Oklahoma, chair of the Republican study committee, was named as another potential candidate.“I didn’t volunteer to do this,” Hern told reporters on Capitol Hill. “People have asked me about looking at an alternate choice. And so I’m going around talking about this issue with other groups of people and see if their votes are there.”Three House Republicans and Fox News host Sean Hannity have pitched a different wildcard option: elect Donald Trump as speaker. The speaker does not have to be a member of Congress, though no speaker has ever filled the role without holding a seat. But House Republican rules say anyone indicted and facing two years or more of prison time cannot hold a leadership role, which would render Trump ineligible.Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Trump, who is in New York for a trial involving allegations of massive fraud at his company, said he was keeping his focus on his presidential campaign. He also denied encouraging Gaetz to push for McCarthy’s removal.In the Senate, the Democratic majority leader, Chuck Schumer, urged the next speaker to embrace bipartisanship, even though hard-right Republicans will probably feel emboldened following McCarthy’s ouster.“You cannot allow a small band of [‘Make America Great Again’] extremists, which represent just a very small percentage of the views of the country, to tell the overwhelming majority of Americans what to do,” Schumer said in a floor speech on Wednesday. “Maga extremism is a poison that the House GOP has refused to confront for years, and until the mainstream House Republicans deal with this issue, chaos will continue.” More