Democrats have long been trying to paint the Republican Party as a collection of far-right extremists who put their own agenda ahead of what’s best for everyone else. Extremists aren’t popular in America, which explains Donald Trump’s reaction to the ouster of Kevin McCarthy: “Why is it that Republicans are always fighting among themselves, why aren’t they fighting the Radical Left Democrats who are destroying our country?”
It was a muted reaction for a man who has been busy calling for the execution of Gen. Mark Milley, the shooting of shoplifters, not to mention the attacks on the law clerk of the judge presiding on his fraud trial in New York. And it didn’t stop the ringleader of the ouster of McCarthy (who Trump had supported for House speaker) from claiming that Trump was on his side. “My conversations with the former president leave me with great confidence that I did the right thing,” Rep. Matt Gaetz told reporters after the vote.
Gaetz succeeded in making the Democrats’ case for them. That case is that the Republican Party is incapable of governing, that their far-right colleagues are holding them hostage, and that even a Trumper like McCarthy is powerless to stand up to them.
McCarthy’s great failing, according to the extremists, was that he did what the country wanted and needed: worked with Democrats exactly twice, once so that the United States could pay its bills by lifting the debt ceiling and a second time by passing a stop gap spending bill to avert the shutdown of the government.
But the chaos the right wing has fostered is not likely to end with the unprecedented ouster of McCarthy. That ouster was made possible because McCarthy, in order to get elected speaker in the first instance, caved to Gaetz’s insistence that the rules be changed so that any member could trigger a vote to oust the speaker. That compromise doomed McCarthy and will haunt whoever takes his chair.
And the compromise that McCarthy made to keep the government from shutting down completely only provided for 45 days of funding. The extreme right, this time with Trump’s backing, was in favor of shutting down the government, and they can be counted on to try to accomplish that goal come November.
Good for the country? Definitely not. The reason that McCarthy worked with Democrats was because he understood that Gaetz was wrong, as is Trump, about shutting down the government. It will hurt people who depend on government services and will hurt the party that is considered responsible for that suffering, in this case the Republicans. That a band of eight doesn’t see it that way is the problem Republicans will have to face, again. Holding the country hostage to the will of a small minority is a recipe for electoral humiliation, which is what the Republicans faced when they shut down the government in the 1990s.
Trump is wrong about who is “destroying our country.” It is not the “Radical Left Democrats” who he tried to blame. The Radical Left Democrats don’t control the House of Representatives. The Republicans do, and their inability to put their own differences aside in order to govern was on full display in the ouster by them of one of their own. The hostage-takers won, and it is only the beginning of what is sure to be a long civil war that can only be ended by giving control back to what was, last week, a united Democratic Party that had no reason to save Republicans from themselves. So long as Matt Gaetz is calling the shots, the Republicans will find themselves in a circle shooting each other, which is not the way for a party to present itself. And Trump, like it or not, cannot escape from the crossfire.
