On Wednesday, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy walked up to a microphone in the driveway of the White House, wearing a pink tie, a blue suit, and no mask, because, he said, “I believe in the vaccine.” He and the three other congressional leaders had just met together with President Biden for the first time since he took office—for the first time, in fact, since McCarthy had joined a majority of his House G.O.P. caucus in voting not to accept the results of the election that Biden won. Just before arriving at the White House, McCarthy had presided over a sixteen-minute Republican Conference meeting at which his members booed the Party’s third-ranking House leader, the Wyoming representative Liz Cheney, and dumped her—by voice vote—from her leadership position. Her crime was refusing to go along with Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election.
All of this made McCarthy’s answer to the very first question from reporters truly remarkable. Asked if he accepted the legitimacy of Biden’s win, McCarthy responded, “I don’t think anybody is questioning the legitimacy of the Presidential election. I think that is all over with.” There was no follow-up to this statement, no instant fact check. No one, as far as I can tell, laughed out loud. The press conference moved on, as press conferences do. McCarthy and his Senate counterpart, Mitch McConnell, talked about Biden’s proposed infrastructure bill and their opposition to tax increases to pay for it—a “non-starter,” McCarthy said. They talked about the threat of inflation, blaming it on the trillions of public dollars that Biden and the Democrats want to pump into the economy. It all sounded like Washington as usual.
Except for one thing: what McCarthy said on the White House driveway was not true—not even close to true. In fact, the continued questioning of the legitimacy of Biden’s election by Trump and the Party that embraces him is why getting back to Washington as usual, six full months after the Presidential election that Trump lost to Biden by seven million votes and a decisive Electoral College majority, is nowhere close to happening.
The 2020 Presidential contest, Trump said in one of his many recent statements on the matter from his poolside exile in Palm Beach, was marred by “the greatest Election Fraud in the history of our country.”
It was a “fake Presidential Election,” he said.
It was “The Fraudulent Presidential Election of 2020,” he said.
It was “rigged and stolen from us,” he said.
Not only was the election “the greatest Fraud in the history of our country,” Trump added, it was an “even greater hoax than Russia, Russia, Russia, Mueller, Mueller, Mueller, Impeachment Hoax #1, Impeachment Hoax #2, or any of the other many scams the Democrats pulled!” In other words, he concluded, it was “the Most tainted and corrupt Election in American history.”
And these were just Trump’s comments in the last week. Trump has been banned by both Twitter and Facebook for his ongoing lies about last year’s Presidential race. But that has not stopped the flow of daily e-mails from him, mostly aimed either at questioning the results in various states that Biden won, or seeking revenge against those Republicans, such as Cheney and “BAD NEWS” Mitt Romney, who have chosen to challenge him on this basic question of faith in the American constitutional system.
By my count, Trump has called out Cheney by name in six different statements so far this month. The former President has said she is a “warmonger,” a “big-shot warmonger,” “a warmongering fool,” and a “bitter horrible human being,” but he admitted in one of his rants that his real issue with Cheney has nothing to do with foreign policy and everything to do with his election lies. She “continues to unknowingly and foolishly say there is no Election Fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election,” Trump complained last week, before endorsing Elise Stefanik, who is favored to replace Cheney when House Republicans choose a new Conference chair, on Friday. Stefanik has enthusiastically embraced Trump’s election skepticism; Cheney told reporters in an interview right after her purging from the Republican leadership that the Party risks destroying itself on a “foundation of lies.”
It is in this context—and this one alone—that one must consider McCarthy’s statement in the front of the White House on Wednesday. McCarthy and so many in the Republican Party are amplifying a long-running and extremely successful disinformation campaign, run by Trump, to attack the legitimacy of American elections and even to excuse the assault on the peaceful transfer of power that a mob of Trump supporters carried out on January 6th. Some seventy per cent of Republicans in a recent CNN poll say they do not accept that Biden was fairly elected; this is still the case even though Trump has been cut off from social-media platforms and seen his mentions decline by as much as ninety per cent since Biden’s Inauguration, according to one widely circulated recent study. “I think that is all over with,” McCarthy blithely told the reporters when asked if he accepted the legitimacy of Biden’s win. But, of course, it was not. It is not.
With his bland California smile and fluency in generic Republican clichés, McCarthy does not come across as a conspirator against American democracy. A few months ago, when Cheney’s leadership post was first challenged because of her vote to impeach Trump for inciting the mob that stormed the Capitol, McCarthy had defended Cheney. He insisted that the Republican Party still remained a “big tent” for those with differing beliefs. No more. The Party may be a circus, but instead of a big tent, it has a carnival barker with a bullhorn that he will not give up, now or ever.
This should be a great week for America—and even, one might dare to say, for its often beleaguered government here in Washington. After billions of dollars in federal investment in successful vaccines during the Trump Administration and an impressive months-long campaign to distribute them by the new Biden Administration, there has finally been a sharp drop in COVID-19 cases and deaths in the United States. In some states, as many as seventy per cent of adults are now vaccinated. Vaccinations for twelve- to fifteen-year-olds started on Thursday. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced on Thursday that masks are no longer necessary for fully vaccinated people in most settings, indoors or out. The pandemic, it at least seems fair to hope, is finally almost over. But what kind of country will we reëmerge, unmasked, into?
With Biden in the White House, many people have relished the chance to unplug from Donald Trump—and politics altogether—in recent months, secure in the knowledge that the new President will not tweet us into nuclear war. (“Fire and fury”!) Our late nights and early mornings and weekends are no longer shadowed by the ever-present uncertainty that was the Trump-era news cycle. For those of us who are still paying attention, however, there is a new worry, and it has to do with what Kevin McCarthy and House Republicans did this week. Trump, defeated and disgraced by the events of January 6th, might have disappeared as previous Presidents who lost reëlection did. But his Party’s continued embrace means that Trump will not fade slowly into the Mar-a-Lago sunset. “He’s going to unravel the democracy to come back into power,” Cheney told the “Today” show on Thursday. It is not over, not at all.
