In the days following the January 6 attack on the Capitol building, two top Republicans in Congress, Kevin McCarthy and Senator Mitch McConnell, told aides they believed President Trump was responsible for inciting the deadly uprising and vowed to oust him from politics. .
Mr McCarthy went so far as to say that he would force Mr Trump to resign immediately: “I had it with this man,” he told a group of Republican leaders.
But within weeks, both men gave up the total battle with Mr Trump because they feared retribution from him and his political movement. Their desire to act quickly faded, as it became clear that this would mean difficult voting, which would put them at odds with most of their colleagues.
“I failed to be a leader by voting with five people in the conference,” said a friend, Mr. McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate.
Confidential expressions of outrage from Mr McCarthy and Mr McConnell, not previously reported, illustrate the huge gap between what Republican leaders have said in private about Mr Trump and their public respect for a man whose influence on the party has been virtually uncontested for half a decade.
The rapid retreat of leaders in January 2021 is a capitulation at a time of extreme political weakness for Mr Trump – perhaps the last and best chance for mass Republicans to regain control of their party from a leader who is inciting a revolt against the United States itself. democracy.
This account of private discussions between Republican leaders in the days after the January 6 attack has been adapted from a new book, It Won’t Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future, based on hundreds of interviews with lawmakers and officials. and contemporary recordings of key moments from the 2020 presidential campaign.
Mr McConnell’s office declined to comment. Mr Bednar, Mr McCarthy’s spokesman, denied that the Republican leader had told colleagues he would force Mr Trump to step down. “McCarthy never said he would call Trump to say he had to resign,” Bednar said.
No one embodies the outspoken adjustment to Mr Trump more than Mr McCarthy, a 57-year-old Californian who has long set out to become Speaker of the House of Representatives. Publicly after Jan. 6, Mr. McCarthy rebuked Mr. Trump, saying he was “responsible” for the mob that tried to prevent Congress from officially certifying the president’s loss. But he refused to condemn him in harsher language.
In private, Mr McCarthy went much further.
During a telephone conversation with several other senior Republicans in the House of Representatives on Jan. 8, Mr McCarthy said Mr Trump’s behavior on Jan. 6 was “brutal and completely wrong”. He accused the president of “inciting people” to attack the Capitol, saying Mr Trump’s remarks at a rally at the National Mall that day “were not correct in any form or form” .
During that conversation, Mr. McCarthy asked about the mechanism for invoking the 25th Amendment – the process by which the vice president and cabinet members can remove a president – before concluding that this was not a viable option. Mr McCarthy, who was among those who opposed the election results, was uncertain and hesitant, fearing that Democrats’ drive to impeach Mr Trump would “fuel more fire” in the country’s divisions.
But Mr McCarthy’s resolve seems to have hardened as the gravity of the attack – and the potential political consequences for his party – sank. Two members of Mr Trump’s cabinet have resigned since the attack, and several moderate Republican governors have called for the president’s resignation. Videos of the riot continued to appear online, making the brutal brutality of the attack increasingly high in the public mind.
On January 10, Mr. McCarthy spoke to management again, and this time he had a plan in mind.
Democrats were pushing for an impeachment resolution, Mr McCarthy said, and they would have the vote to pass it. Now he was planning to call Mr. Trump and tell him it was time to leave.
“What he did was unacceptable. “No one can defend this and no one should defend it,” he told the group.
Mr McCarthy said he would tell Mr Trump about the impeachment resolution: “I think this will pass and my recommendation is to resign.”
He acknowledged that Mr Trump was unlikely to follow suit.
Mr McCarthy spent four years in Mr Trump’s presidency as one of the most obedient supporters of the White House in Congress. Following Mr Trump’s defeat, Mr McCarthy reassured far-right members of the House, some of whom are close to the former president. Mr McCarthy may need their support to become a speaker, a vote that could happen next year if the Republican Party runs for the House in November.
But in a brief window after the storming of the Capitol, Mr McCarthy is considering a total rift with Mr Trump and his most outspoken supporters.
During the same January 10 conversation, when he said he would call on Mr. Trump to resign, Mr. McCarthy told other Republican leaders that he would like big tech companies to deprive some Republican lawmakers of their accounts. on social media, as did Twitter and Facebook with Mr. Trump. Members like Lauren Bobert of Colorado had done so much to fuel paranoia about the 2020 election and made insulting comments online about the Capitol attack.
“We can’t put up with that,” Mr McCarthy said, adding: “Can’t they take away their Twitter accounts?”
Mr McCarthy “never said that certain members should be removed from Twitter”, Mr Bednar said.
Other Republican leaders in the House of Representatives agreed with Mr McCarthy that the president’s behavior deserved swift punishment. Louisiana’s Steve Scalis, the second Republican in the House of Representatives, said in a phone call that it was time for the Republican Party to consider a Republican House after Trump, while House of Representatives Tom Emmer of Minnesota, head of the House Committee’s campaign committee, offered a reprimand. of Mr. Trump.
Yet none of the men followed their heavy conversations in these private conversations.
In the days that followed, Mr. McCarthy heard some Republican lawmakers recommend that you not stand up to Mr. Trump. In a group interview, Ohio spokesman Bill Johnson warned that conservative voters at home were “ballistic” in response to criticism of Mr Trump, urging Republicans to instead train their denunciations of Democrats such as Hillary Clinton and Hunter Biden.
“I’m just telling you, that’s what we’re doing, our base,” Mr Johnson said.
When only 10 Republicans in the House of Representatives joined the Democrats to support Mr Trump’s impeachment on January 13, the message to Mr McCarthy was clear.
By the end of the month, he was pursuing a rapprochement with Mr. Trump, visiting him in Mar-a-Lago and posing for a photo. (“I didn’t know they were going to take a picture,” Mr McCarthy told a disappointed MP, somewhat apologetically.)
Mr McCarthy has never repeated his denunciations of Mr Trump;
In the Senate, Mr McConnell’s turn was no less revealing. Late on the night of January 6, Mr. McConnell predicted to his associates that his party would soon break sharply with Mr. Trump and his supporters; the Republican leader even asked a Capitol reporter if the cabinet could really pursue the 25th Amendment.
When that didn’t happen, Mr. McConnell’s thoughts turned to impeachment.
On Monday, January 11, Mr. McConnell met for lunch in Kentucky with two longtime advisers, Terry Carmack and Scott Jennings. Feasting Chick-fil-A at Mr. Jennings’ office in Louisville, the Republican leader in the Senate predicted the impending political demise of Mr. Trump.
Consequences of Capitol Riot: Key Developments
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Signs of progress. The federal investigation into the January 6 attack appears to be gaining momentum. The Justice Department has recruited a respected new prosecutor to help conduct the investigation, while a high-ranking witness – far-right TV cameraman Alex Jones – is seeking an immunity agreement to provide information.
Weighing the changes in the Uprising Act. On January 6, some members of the House of Representatives committee began discussions on rewriting the Uprising Act in response to the events that led to the Capitol riot. The law currently gives presidents the power to deploy an army in response to a riot, and some fear it could be misused by a president trying to incite a riot.
Discussion of criminal referral. The composition of the House of Representatives was divided over whether to refer former President Donald J. Trump to the Ministry of Justice, although he concluded that he had enough evidence. The debate focuses on whether the referral would have the opposite effect by politically tarnishing the expanding federal investigation.
Continuing election doubts. More than a year after trying and failing to use the final count of congressional votes on January 6 to cancel the election, some of Trump’s allies have been pushing false legal theories to “desertify” the 2020 vote and continue to fuel a fake story that resonates among Mr Trump’s supporters.
“The Democrats will take care of the son of a bitch for us,” Mr McConnell said, referring to the forthcoming impeachment vote in the House of Representatives.
After the House of Representatives impeachments Mr. Trump, it will take two-thirds of the Senate vote to convict him. This will require the votes of all 50 Democrats and at least 17 Republicans in the Senate – very difficult, given that Mr Trump’s first impeachment trial in 2020 ended with only one Republican senator, Mitt Romney of Utah. , voting in favor of the sentence.
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