This is unraveling for Kevin McCarthy
It’s difficult enough for a party leader to keep the members of that party united and productive under the best of conditions. When you’re talking about the Trump-infested Republican Party, whose elected members consist of extremists, loose cannons, fraudsters, and just plain weirdos, it can be even trickier. When the leader in question is an inept deer in the headlights like House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, it can be downright impossible.
McCarthy has shown no ability to rein in the most embarrassingly unprofessional members of his House Republican caucus. Nor has McCarthy been able to navigate the ongoing feuding between the numerous pro-Trump extremists and the handful of anti-Trump Republicans within his caucus. Now he has a real problem.
Earlier this month House Republican Madison Cawthorn was caught on video calling Ukrainian President Zelenskyy a “thug.” This comes at a time when the majority of Americans in both political parties view Zelenskyy favorably, so it’s not a position that the Republican Party can get away with holding. Accordingly, some prominent Republicans have pushed back against Cawthorn’s words.
Now that the Republican Party is sorta kinda pushing back against Cawthorn, he’s claiming that respected unnamed people in Washington DC have invited him to orgies and done cocaine in front of him. Given that no one in the Democratic Party would want to associate with Cawthorn in any way, Cawthorn is presumably leveling these allegations against Republican political figures.
We have no way of knowing whether Cawthorn is telling the truth about this. But either way it’s a real problem for the Republican Party. If Cawthorn is making this up just to cause problems for the Republican Party after it pushed back against his Zelenskyy attack, then it’s a real problem for the party. If Cawthorn is telling the truth, and he can corroborate any of it, then it’s an even bigger problem for the Republican Party.
Now Kevin McCarthy says he’s going to sit down with Cawthorn to discuss the matter. No kidding. It’s all fun and games for the Republican leadership when the extremist loose cannons in its ranks are saying deranged things that further the party’s agenda. But when those extremist loose cannons turn their fire inward on the Republican Party itself, it’s far too late for a House Republican “leader” like Kevin McCarthy to finally decide he wants to show some leadership.
The Cawthorn debacle, which can only serve to hurt the Republican Party’s midterm prospects no matter who’s telling the truth, is just one example of the serious problems that Kevin McCarthy has been ignoring within his caucus in the hope they wouldn’t get any worse. As this all gets uglier, it’ll only unravel further for McCarthy, who was never cut out for the job to begin with.
