Kevin McCarthy appears at a rally with Donald Trump in 2020. DAVID MCNEW/GETTY IMAGES
McCarthy lamented to the New York Times that Trump “goes up and down with his anger”—then covered for him on Fox News, saying falsely that Trump intervened in the riot as soon as he could.
A week after armed supporters of Donald Trump stormed the Capitol, Kevin McCarthy laid blame for the deadly insurrection at the feet of his party’s leader. “The president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters,” he said in a floor speech. “He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding.” The scolding was ultimately meaningless, considering the House Minority Leader—who’d promoted the president’s election fraud claims—still voted against certifying the election and later against Trump’s impeachment. But it seemed to reflect a fear, on the part of McCarthy and other GOP leaders, that the party could bear a political cost for the attack if it didn’t at least pay a little lip service to contrition.
The notion that Trump—who urged his supporters to “fight” and to march to the Capitol, and who reportedly watched with glee as they followed his orders—was somehow unaware of what was going on just down the road from the White House is laughable, as is the notion that he quickly sought to put an end to it. That McCarthy himself is aware of this privately, but will not say so publicly, is both embarrassing and indicative of where the party stands One ally after another has gone on the record to describe how frustrated McCarthy was as Trump peddled the self-serving fictions that would lay the foundation for the Capitol Hill violence. “Every day seemed worse than the day before,” Republican pollster Frank Luntz told the New York Times on Sunday. But McCarthy is unwilling to abandon Trump—or his deranged acolytes like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz—and draw ire from the MAGA base whose support he’ll need if he wants to ascend to House Speaker in the future. “[Trump] goes up and down with his anger,” McCarthy told the Times in a revealing interview published Sunday. “He’s mad at everybody one day. He’s mad at me one day.”
It’s all a political calculation for McCarthy, who is aware that his own ambitions require staying in the former president’s good graces. But indulging Trump’s lies about the election is precisely what allowed the attack, which McCarthy told a colleague left him “depressed,” to transpire. Peddling new lies now could come with its own consequences. “[McCarthy] added a new chapter to revisionist history,” as CNN’s John Berman put it. “Or tried to erase a chapter of actual history. Or maybe he just made stuff up.”
Navy Vet
Article URL : https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/04/kevin-mccarthy-now-lying-about-capitol-riot-to-make-trump-like-him