By Noah Rothman
Wednesday, June 28, 2023
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy committed an
unforgivable sin this week: He told the truth. He may never live down the shame
of it.
The unforgivable offense occurred during a recent
interview with CNBC host Joe Kernen, who asked the speaker if it would be “good
thing for the Republican Party if Donald Trump is the nominee” given the
candidate’s criminal indictments. McCarthy played the role of phalanx
dutifully. He said that former president Trump “can beat Biden.” He insisted
that Trump’s policy preferences were better for the country than Biden’s. In
regard to the criminal liabilities Trump faces, McCarthy said that they had
“complicated” the equation, but Trump can still “win that election.” All the
trouble followed when McCarthy expressed the faintest hint of uncertainty in
his own predictions.
“The question is, is he the strongest to win the
election?” the speaker asked rhetorically. “I don’t know that answer, but
can anybody beat Biden? Yeah, anybody can beat Biden.” That momentary doubt —
this barely perceptible crack in the hollow bombast to which Trump’s courtiers
are prone — was enough to send the president’s enforcers into fits.
“Trump world flipped out,” Politico reporter Rachael Bade revealed. “Some
called McCarthy a ‘moron,’” she continued. “McCarthy, they feel, has taken
advantage of the former president when it benefits him and failed to show
unflinching loyalty in return.” Bade’s dispatch asserts that, “In every
conceivable way, the House speaker owes his gavel to Trump,” and it implies
that Trump can take back what he has so beneficently bestowed. McCarthy
appeared to agree with that assessment because he performed an immediate
about-face and turned in one of the more obsequious performances we’ve seen from
him in days, if not weeks.
“Mr. McCarthy also called Mr. Trump Tuesday, according to
three people familiar with the exchange, two of whom characterized the
conversation as an apology,” New York Times journalist Annie Karni reported.
It wasn’t enough. McCarthy ran to Breitbart News —
a venue increasingly dedicated to prosecuting the turf war among the very-online capos
loyal to the Right’s competing cults of personality — to revise the record.
By reporting his remarks verbatim, which were delivered
on camera and broadcast in real time, “the media is attempting to drive a wedge
between President Trump and House Republicans,” McCarthy said with utter disregard for the strain his
remarks place on your rolling eyeballs. “Trump is stronger today than he was in
2016,” McCarthy continued. “The only reason Biden is using his weaponized
federal government to go after President Trump is because he is Biden’s
strongest political opponent, as polling continues to show.”
But that is not what the polls show. The latest NBC News survey of registered voters ahead of the 2024
general election finds Trump losing to Biden nationally by four points, while
the race between Ron DeSantis and Biden is tied at 47 percent apiece. A
recent Yahoo!/YouGov poll also shows Trump underperforming
DeSantis in head-to-head matchups against Biden.
Not every recent poll of the national political
environment has been unfriendly to Trump. A mid-June Harvard/Harris poll showed DeSantis edging out Biden
by one point while Trump bests the president by a six-point margin. But if you
look under that poll’s hood, it contains some eyebrow-raising
assertions. The survey found Trump defeating the incumbent Democratic president
among women by eight points. It shows Trump winning the youth vote over Biden.
It finds Trump securing a full quarter of the African-American vote while Biden
struggles along with the support of a bare majority of black voters. Among
anyone with a passing familiarity with American political dynamics, doubt is
the only rational response to results like these.
Since there is no such thing as a national presidential
election, nor is the national popular vote a metric of any value beyond
rhetorical point-scoring, the place to really test the proposition that Trump
is the strongest candidate Republicans can put up against Biden is at the state
level. There, polling has shown for some time that the former president is in
no way better positioned than his most viable GOP opponent to beat Biden next
November.
As of mid May, DeSantis regularly outperformed Trump in polls of
general-election matchups in several key swing states. A Public Opinion
Strategies poll found Biden leading Trump but trailing DeSantis in Arizona and
Georgia. A subsequent POS survey of Pennsylvania showed DeSantis carrying
Pennsylvania and Trump losing it. Surveys have shown DeSantis running
competitive races in Nevada and Virginia — two states Republican presidential
candidates haven’t won since 2004. Complementary polling has also shown that a
DeSantis nomination would boost the prospects of the GOP’s candidates
farther down the ballot in races for state and federal offices. By contrast, a
Trump nomination would impose a drag on GOP candidates across the board.
The Republican nominating contest is still in its early
stages. Most voters haven’t tuned into the race yet, and they are likely basing
their still unformed views of the candidates’ relative strengths and weaknesses
on the assessments rendered by sources they trust who are more plugged into the
data — sources like Kevin McCarthy. That likelihood renders the speaker’s
sycophancy not just humiliating but irresponsible, too.
It’s not hard to understand why Trump and his allies
would enforce information blackouts around DeSantis’s obvious polling
advantages with the kind of zeal evocative of the Chinese Communist Party.
McCarthy isn’t obligated to participate in that deceptive project, and he could
come to regret it. Indeed, by voluntarily setting fire to his credibility,
McCarthy hasn’t actually done Trump any favors.
The Trump camp’s sensitivity to something as harmless as
an expression of doubt about the unknowable trajectory of the 2024 election
exposes deep insecurities inside the former president’s campaign and Trump’s
vulnerability to the “electability” question. They’re worried. We didn’t know
just how worried until they put the screws to McCarthy. And we didn’t know how
serious the threat to Trump really was until McCarthy caved.
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