Kevin McCarthy’s job as Speaker of the United States House of Representatives is a complicated one. The ambitious Republican from California has to honor the demanding institutional mandate of the position while, in order not to lose it, he must continually give in to the extreme pressure of the twenty ultras and Trump supporters who, over the course of four days and 15 votes, made him sweat and promise them innumerable perks and changes before giving him the vote: something they did, by the way, after Donald Trump asked them to.
On Tuesday, in an interview with the CNBC channel, the parliamentary leader dared to question whether the former president is the best candidate for the 2024 presidential elections. “Can he win that election? Yes, he can win it,” McCarthy stated. “The question – he continued – would be: is he the strongest to win the elections? I don’t know that answer,” he acknowledged.
The intervention put Trump supporters in the lower house on a war footing. It had not been a day since CNN had exposed the former president with the recording of a talk in which two years ago he admitted the “highly confidential” nature of one of the secret documents that he hid in his house in Mar-a-Lago. (Florida) after leaving the White House: an appropriation for which the Prosecutor’s Office has just charged him with 37 charges for seven serious federal crimes. The audio is bad news for Trump ahead of the corresponding trial. So, from the perspective of the fans of the defendant and candidate for reelection, this was not the best time to question him from his party.
McCarthy seemed to panic as he perceived the impact of his words on the Trumpist ranks. It must be borne in mind that, thanks to one of the regulatory changes that the ultra group wrested from him before giving him the vote, the extremists could easily force his dismissal as the country’s third authority.
McCarthy nearly knocked his gearbox out of gear by suddenly reversing in three screeching motions. The political embarrassment called Trump to apologize, The New York Times reported. He also gave an interview to the right-wing website Breitbart News to retract his statements to CNBC and ensure that Trump is “stronger today than in 2016”, a rectification that was accompanied by accusations against “the media” for “trying to drive a wedge between Trump and the House Republicans,” he said. “The only reason Joe Biden is using his armed federal government to persecute Trump is that he is his strongest political opponent, as the polls show,” he added, referring to a recent Morning Consulting poll that for the first time gives an advantage. to the former president
But McCarthy could not appease the ultra wing, so he opted to send emails and text messages to Republican donors, through his fundraising campaign, with the slogan “Trump is Biden’s strongest rival.” Pathetic? Maybe. Especially if it is true that, as Politico reported, the famous repentant angered Trump’s team for using his name without permission. The former president’s men would have even asked him to withdraw the messages.
A full-blown humiliation, and a good indicator of how muddy and slippery the Republican field is with less than a year and a half to go until the 2024 election.
