“We were all here. We saw what happened,” McConnell said of the attack on the Capitol. “It was a violent uprising aimed at preventing the peaceful transfer of power from one government to another after a legitimately certified election.”
If McConnell is playing a “long game,” as he called his memoir, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is playing a short one — as he likely depends on Trump’s blessing to become a speaker if the GOP wins the House majority in November.
The California Republican apologized for the RNC language contained in a resolution condemning GOP representatives Adam Kinzinger of Illinois and Liz Cheney of Wyoming for joining the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurgency.
“Anyone who broke in and caused damage was not asked. Those people, we said from the start, should be in jail,” McCarthy told DailyExpertNews’s Manu Raju, claiming the resolution referred to subpoenas from the commission to RNC officials who were in Florida during the attack on the Capitol.
But the censorship resolution made no such distinction. And the committee has been empowered by the Democrat-led House to investigate events through January 6, 2021.
Trump May Distract GOP From Biden Attacks
The RNC’s whitewashing of the true nature of the insurgency is typical of the cult-like servility that many in the party still show to Trump. It made it clear that the price of admission to the 2022 Republican campaign is now not just an acceptance of Trump’s stolen electoral frenzy, but a willingness to deny the truth of the worst attack on democracy in modern American history.
But such radicalism threatens to turn the midterm campaign into yet another public therapy session for the ex-president, who still cannot accept his 2020 election defeat. It will not have escaped McConnell’s attention that Trump’s post-election tantrum cost the party two US Senate seats in Georgia’s second election, which would have made him a majority leader.
This time, Trump’s anger threatens to drown out the scorching attacks planned by Republican strategists on Biden’s presidency and remind critical suburban voters why they soured the GOP during Trump’s presidency.
McConnell’s strategy
The clarity of McConnell’s language, which is rare in a party fearful of contradicting Trump, is to be commended. It reflects his mastery of the conference and confidence that he will not face any internal threats, despite the ex-president’s multiple attempts to provoke a Senate uprising against him.
The minority leader’s words also typified McConnell’s tendency to give his senators political cover—one of the reasons his leadership position is so secure. Senators questioned about Jan. 6 can now refer directly to their leader’s comments without getting caught up in politically damaging quotes that could alienate them from supporters in their own country.
Critics may argue that McConnell’s comments were too little too late. The Kentucky Republican has previously made his own home with Trump, despite his disdain for the ex-president. His willingness to tolerate the lawlessness of the Trump presidency helped secure the Supreme Court’s conservative majority that will stand for years — and for which McConnell and Trump will be remembered for generations. He strongly condemned Trump for his role in instigating the Capitol uprising.
Several McConnell colleagues on Tuesday were explicit about the party’s strategic path, expressing anger at the RNC’s self-inflicted wound.
sen. Thom Tillis said the moment protesters entered the Capitol, it was “no more discourse. It was rioting.”
The North Carolina Republican tried to refocus the attack on the Biden administration, saying: “I think as a party we need to recognize that people are concerned about the economy, they are concerned about the ongoing battle with Covid, they are looking move forward, and that’s what they want us to do.”
A split that promises to broaden
Republicans have a simple task in the fall: to hammer Biden on high inflation, defaulting on his promise to end the pandemic and for perceived weakness abroad. History, which is almost always unfriendly to presidents in midterm elections, could do the rest. But while McConnell sees the absurdity of Republicans losing sight of the target, events on Tuesday showed that the GOP’s march towards extremism will never slow down while Trump is dominant.
But after making his choice, McCarthy’s hands are tied. Any deviation from course would anger Trump, and he has already been warned by the ex-president’s acolytes. His hopes of being elected speaker by his conference depend on total loyalty. Given that millions of Republican voters believe Trump’s lie that he won the last election, McCarthy may be making a good political game, albeit a cowardice laced as he condones an attack on his own workplace that his colleagues and the then vice president Endangered Mike Pence.
Trump Usually Wins Republican-on-Republican Battles
The RNC’s political malpractice in handing the media a days-long story that offloads the Biden administration’s political problems has baffled many mainstream Republican strategists.
“It’s a big mistake,” Scott Jennings, a former special assistant to President George W. Bush, told DailyExpertNews’s “Newsroom” Tuesday.
“It’s an unforced mistake. As a political issue, it’s a huge distraction from what would be the right political strategy for the Republican Party right now — talking about the future, talking about the state of the country,” Jennings said.
RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel, a Trump loyalist, may acknowledge that the attempt to pay tribute to the former president has backfired, as she misrepresents what the resolution says since it was passed this Saturday.
In an op-ed on Townhall.com Tuesday, she falsely accused the “corporate media” of inaccurately reporting the resolution. And she accused the House select committee investigating the riots, which led to the deaths of four people and in which police officers were beaten by Trump supporters, of “potentially destroying the lives of innocent people.” She also accused Kinzinger and Cheney of “cheating the events of January 6 by joining Nancy Pelosi’s partisan commission.” (House Republicans originally agreed on the need for a September 11-style independent commission to investigate the uprising. But after Trump complained loudly, McCarthy helped derail the plan.)
Given the unusual spectacle of Republican senators openly contradicting the language of RNC censorship, it might be tempting to wonder if the first cracks are emerging in the ex-president’s grip on his party. McConnell’s criticisms came less than a week after Pence labeled Trump’s claims that he could have prevented the certification of Biden’s election victory as “un-American.”
One day, Trump’s hold on the GOP may loosen. But every clash since 2015 — between his increasingly extreme and autocratic movement and the party’s establishment — has resulted in a victory for the former president. The lesson of the past seven years is that when it comes to a choice between appeasing its leader and losing power, most of the GOP is always in agreement.
And despite his sharp criticism of the RNC on Tuesday, no one expects McConnell to take a similar path as Cheney and Kinzinger, who sacrificed their future in the party — and power — to challenge Trump.