Genus Republica Pullum Shitus

At Mar a Lago days after McCarthy’s conversation with Liz Cheney about getting rid of the man standing next to him.

You reach fruitlessly for descriptions of Kevin McCarthy’s recent dive off the high board of political hackdom, but they are inadequate: hypocrite, coward, craven simpering perfidious deceitful dissembler, throbbing treasonous prevaricating poltroon…

I’ve been watching these guys who occupy what you might call the top tier of our political life for a long, long time.  I go back to Nixon, for crying out loud.  But never in all my days had I seen such a complete break not with political norms, but with sanity itself as represented by McCarthy’s behavior over the last two days. Listen to him on the tapes when he was telling Liz Cheney he was going to tell Trump to resign.  You could hear how offended he was by what had just happened at the Capitol.  The president of the United States had incited an assault on McCarthy’s place of business, the office he went to every day the way other men might take the train to Wall Street or open the gas station in the morning. 

It was his house that was attacked, his life that had been put in jeopardy, all at the behest of a man who lost an election.  McCarthy has been in political life for 20 years. He won his first election to the California State Assembly in 2002.  He won election to Congress in 2006.  As a professional politician, McCarthy has certainly known dozens – maybe as many as a hundred – people who have lost elections to offices both big and small.  As a leader of the Republican caucus since he became deputy minority whip in 2008, he has personally watched Republicans come and go from the House of Representatives.  To professional politicians like McCarthy, running for office and losing is just part of life, like having your car break down.  It’s maddening, it wouldn’t have happened if you’d had that oil change or gotten your tie-rods checked, but you call the tow truck and you pay the man at the garage and you get back in your car the next day and you drive.  You do the things that need to be done and you go on.  Even Richard Nixon, when he lost a presidential election many historians say was stolen from him, bit the bullet, so to speak, ran for the governorship of California – and lost – and in 1968, ran again for the presidency and won.  That’s the way American politics has always worked.

Until Donald Trump came along and upended not only one of our two major political parties, but the American electoral system itself by attempting a coup that would have overthrown the election results and kept him in office after he lost the election of 2020.

I don’t think McCarthy was bothered by the constitutional issues, or matters of Trump’s style, or even by some Republicans’ failure to toe the line like Liz Cheney. I think the thing that offended McCarthy after the 1/6 insurrection was this: because of his hold on Republican voters, Trump got to be a regular politician, and other Republican office holders didn’t.  There is a real divide in the Republican Party between the professional politicians – among them I would include Mitch McConnell – and the Republican base voters who love Trump.  The professional Republican political class is terrorized by him.

Take Mo Brooks in Alabama.  MAGA all the way after Trump lost in November, repeating the Big Lie at rallies, politically chained to the man.  Trump endorses him in his race for the Senate in Alabama…and then he doesn’t.  It’s not about loyalty.  Politicians change their mind and stab each other in the back all the time.  That’s part of the game, too.  It's the terror of knowing that Trump can do whatever he wants in the Republican party and get away with it because of his base, but the regular politicians can’t.

Look what it does to them.  McCarthy, and yes, McConnell too, knew that what Trump did on January 6 was unacceptable on every single level they could think of.  Amongst themselves, they knew he had to go.  But within days it sunk in that it wasn’t Trump who was going to go if they went after him, it was them.  Struck by the terror of that realization, McCarthy drummed out of the party the person with whom he had discussed getting rid of Trump, Liz Cheney.  McConnell gave a big, noble speech on the floor of the Senate about how Trump was “morally and practically” responsible for the insurrection at the Capitol, and then not only voted to acquit him at his impeachment trial but said he would vote for him in 2024 if he ran for president.

These men are not the kinds of politicians you or I would vote for.  They stand for things we abhor.  But they are politicians other people would vote for, thus they are part of the American political system. 

Or they were.  Now they live in terror, and because they do, they tell absurd lies like McCarthy was just shown to have done with the tape of his conversation with Cheney, and like McConnell, they cringe and cower in fear of the man who has taken their party from them and when confronted about it, they run and hide.

It has never happened before like this in American political life and I so struggled to find the words to describe what has transpired with McCarthy and McConnell and the rest of Republican professional politicians over the last six years but especially over the last 48 hours. I had to go straight to Latin to find the root word for chicken shit – Republica Pullum Shitus.