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One of the most important things to know about House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is that he occasionally slips, tells accidental truths, and then scrambles to deal with the consequences of his unintended candor.
Indeed, this has been a staple of the California Republican’s congressional career. In 2015, for example, McCarthy accidentally told the truth about the political purpose of the GOP’s Benghazi committee, sparking an intense backlash from his ostensible allies. About a year later, in comments he didn’t know would reach the public, McCarthy joked to House Republicans that Donald Trump was on Vladimir Putin’s payroll, adding, “Swear to God.” This, too, caused a bit of a stir.
In the aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, McCarthy privately told his colleagues that he was prepared to tell Trump he should resign the presidency. Another controversy soon followed.
This pattern came to mind yesterday. As The New York Times summarized:
Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Tuesday declared Donald J. Trump the “strongest political opponent” against President Biden, rushing to make clear his loyalty to the former president just hours after suggesting in a televised interview that Mr. Trump might not be the Republican presidential candidate best positioned to prevail in the 2024 election.
The trouble began roughly 24 hours ago, when Congress’ top Republican appeared on CNBC and appeared skeptical about the strength of Trump’s 2024 candidacy. McCarthy initially expressed confidence that the former president could prevail in a rematch against President Joe Biden, before he shifted his electoral analysis a bit.
“Can [Trump] win that election? Yeah, he can,” McCarthy said. “The question is, is he the strongest to win the election? I don’t know that answer.”
The comments were reportedly not well received among the former president’s aides.
A variety of obvious questions soon followed. Would Trump condemn McCarthy’s apostasy? Would the former president’s congressional acolytes rally to his defense? Would the House speaker feel the need to grovel, the way he did in January 2021, when McCarthy traveled to Mar-a-Lago to effectively kiss Trump’s ring?
We didn’t have to wait too long for an answer. From the Times’ report:
The comment irked Mr. Trump’s allies, setting off an urgent effort by Mr. McCarthy to walk it back. He contacted Breitbart News, the right-wing news outlet, to offer an exclusive interview in which he said the former president was “stronger today than he was in 2016” and blamed the media for “attempting to drive a wedge between President Trump and House Republicans.”
Evidently, as the speaker described it, journalists were “attempting to drive a wedge between President Trump and House Republicans” by quoting what McCarthy had said hours earlier to a national television audience. The nerve of some people.
What's more, according to the Times' report, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, McCarthy also called Trump yesterday, and "people familiar with the exchange ... characterized the conversation as an apology."
This won't do much to change the House speaker's reputation for weakness.
But the developments also served as a timely reminder: The problem is not that McCarthy is incapable of occasional displays of courage; the problem is that McCarthy appears incapable of following through on these displays.
The GOP leader will occasionally speak his mind, and tell the public what he’s actually thinking, but one of the tragic things about McCarthy's career is that he invariably has to abandon these truths soon after he accidentally blurts them out.