If you’re not thrilled with it so far, you’re shit out of luck because that’s as good as it’s going to get
On Tuesday evening, California Republican Kevin McCarthy was ousted as Speaker of the House of Representatives, a mere ten months after it took a record 15 ballots to secure what would end up being a tenuous hold on power. Essentially, he was doomed before he took the gavel, having given away the farm before he had a chance to plant anything, let alone reap the harvest.
Any sense of schadenfreude over the bitter infighting within the Republican Party was quickly subsumed by the realization that a mainly powerless speaker was the best we were going to do with the new Maga-controlled cohort. As bad as McCarthy was, and let’s be clear about how dishonest and duplicitous he was, he is the best we will ever see again from a party that has embraced fascism, white nationalism, and theocratic oligarchy.
When Donald Trump announced his candidacy in 2015, he launched his white nationalist anti-immigration agenda by saying that the countries refugees were coming from “were not sending us their best.” On the other hand, he promised to “drain the swamp” and “hire only the best people.”
Trump went on to turn almost everything he touched to shit. The opposite of the Midas touch. He added nearly $8 trillion to the national debt, imposed costly tariffs on Chinese imports, had dalliances with several authoritarian regimes, alienated most of our allies, weaponized the Justice Department, and was the direct cause of the deaths of over a million Americans due to his intentional neglect concerning the pandemic.
McCarthy, for all his deficiencies, was as good as it was going to get.