Kevin McCarthy’s Rebranding Tour

Kevin McCarthy is a history buff. References to America’s past litter his public remarks, and the portraits of historical figures like Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan that hung in his office on Capitol Hill were frequently mentioned in his stump speeches. A riff where he discussed the reproduction of Washington Crossing the Delaware in his conference room was so often repeated that it became a punchline in McCarthy world. Joe Biden has his Scranton roots, Donald Trump has his border wall and Kevin McCarthy has Emanuel Leutze.

Six months after his ouster as speaker of the House, McCarthy is trying to write his own history. Although still comparatively young at 59 in an era of octogenarian politicians, it’s hard to imagine a world in which the first line of his obituary is not that he was the first speaker ever removed from office. So now, McCarthy seems to have set himself to the task of shaping how future generations remember that moment and the eight months he spent wielding the gavel — even if it requires a selective retelling of what happened with a few big omissions.

This past Tuesday, McCarthy brought his effort to shape his legacy to a windowless auditorium on the campus of Georgetown University for an event called “How Strong Is Our Democracy? With Kevin McCarthy.” If the name of the event is any indication, he wants to be remembered as someone who buttressed American democracy during his time in public service.

In the late-arriving crowd of around 100 students, one could see the full range of those who would stay inside on the first warm spring night of the year to listen to a retired politician. There were those clad in suits who sat close to the stage to listen while others were busy multitasking, working on assignments or playing word games with their laptops open.

After the customary introduction, McCarthy, along with former Democratic operative and current Georgetown professor Mo Elleithee, who served as the interlocutor, sat down on the stage and began the program with polite jokes before asking the former House speaker why trust in democracy was so low in the United States.

Even at an event about the strength of American democracy, there was little urgency in how McCarthy spoke. At a time when both Democrats and Republicans — for very different reasons — warn that “democracy is on the ballot” in 2024, he didn’t seem to have that level of concern about the stakes. Instead, McCarthy offered a broader critique of modern American politics that mixed platitudes about media and the fragmented state of the two main parties with a healthy dose of whataboutism offered in a friendly, self-deprecating manner. He mourned the siloing of how Americans consume media. “You can go home, and you get your news from an outlet that philosophically agrees with you” that offers opinion rather than reporting, he said. “You have social media that's providing something very quickly. There's no editor in charge of what somebody says.”

And when he had to specifically apportion the blame, McCarthy tried to strike a pose as detached from partisanship as possible for someone who spent the past half decade leading a political party in Congress. For him, the failed lawsuit to throw Trump off the ballot in Colorado and the suppression on social media of the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop were threats just as real as January 6 — an event he took pains to condemn. “What happened on January 6 was wrong; I don’t apologize for anyone who did it,” he said. But it was a critique of those who stormed the Capitol, not those, including Trump, who spent months egging on MAGA loyalists to do so. He bemoaned the increase in partisan politics in Washington. It could have been out of the No Labels handbook, save for the fact that he only blamed Democrats and of course the member of Congress he holds most responsible for his ouster, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.).

He conflated Democratic election denialism and Republican election denialism as he waxed on about what he described as Democratic efforts to overturn past presidential elections, ranging from the hanging chads of 2000 to comments Hillary Clinton made about the 2016 election, before finally addressing his vote against the certification of the 2020 presidential election in Arizona and Pennsylvania.

McCarthy argued that his vote was simply about expressing some concern over procedural changes during the Covid pandemic rather than any desire to change the result of the 2020 presidential election. It was part of the normal cut and thrust of politics. In contrast, he argued, the Democrats were the ones who tried to overturn elections.

“The one point I would raise to you is, those who questioned the race when George Bush won challenged Ohio. Had they been successful, Bush would not be president,” said McCarthy, referencing an effort after the 2004 election by a handful of congressional Democrats without the backing of John Kerry to protest voter irregularities, including long waits, for many voters in the state. In contrast, McCarthy argued, “had Republicans who challenged the 2020 race been successful in their two challenges, Joe Biden would still be president. He just wouldn’t have the same electoral votes. A challenge doesn’t mean you’re overturning something. A challenge is a challenge.”

That wasn’t quite the whole story. Trump allies had initially planned significantly more challenges than just to the electoral votes of Arizona and Pennsylvania, including Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin. This would have been sufficient to overturn the election. However, the number of challenges was pared back after the debate on the first challenge was delayed for 10 hours due to the violent invasion of the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.

McCarthy also offered his defense of the infamous picture of him with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in the weeks after Trump left office. The visit was viewed as a dramatic boost to the former president’s political fortunes in the immediate aftermath of his second impeachment trial. For McCarthy, this was just supposed to be a quiet visit to a friend going through a tough time.

As McCarthy described his philosophy of friendship: “Whether I like you or dislike you, if something bad happens in your life, I want to be the first person to call you. … The first thing that happens when something bad happens, [is that] everyone abandons you. I want to call you. … I just want to know how you’re doing as a person.”

In the former speaker’s telling, he just happened to be in Palm Beach for a fundraiser when he got a call asking him to visit Trump. McCarthy turned down dinner but said he could “come by for lunch.” But then, 30 minutes later, the New York Times knew about the visit, which was supposed to be private. As McCarthy said, “I didn’t tell my staff.”

(In former Rep. Liz Cheney’s 2023 book, Oath and Honor, she said McCarthy told her that he went because Trump “wasn’t eating”: “They’re really worried,” McCarthy said. “Trump’s not eating, so they asked me to come see him.”)

McCarthy then recounted a conversation where Trump quizzes him immediately after sitting down together for lunch. Trump asks the following questions to McCarthy:

“Did you leak it?”

“Did your staff leak it?”

“Do you think my staff leaked it?”

Each time, McCarthy answered in the negative.

Finally, the former president asked him ‘Who do you think leaked it?’”

McCarthy replies “You” to laughter in the room of Georgetown students. Then, in the former speaker’s telling “[Trump] looks at me, and he goes, ‘Well, it’s good for both of us, you know.’” As he was telling the story, McCarthy shrugged, eliciting even louder laughter from the crowd.

The faux-intimate revelation of these private conversations added to McCarthy’s appeal to the crowd. What went unremarked was how simply resigned McCarthy apparently was to the fact that Trump leaked the story and the sense that dealing with the former president was more akin to managing a tantrum-prone child and a political ally — after all, McCarthy once infamously presented the then-president with handpicked Starburst candies to ensure that he only received his favorite flavors.

Yet for all the emotional support that McCarthy may have provided after Trump left office, the former president also left McCarthy dangling when he was ousted as speaker. This, too, went unmentioned.

He was diplomatic when asked about more controversial parts of Trump’s record. “I didn’t know that he had a fake electors scheme,” McCarthy said when asked about the former president’s actions in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election. When asked about Trump’s references to immigrants poisoning the blood of our country, McCarthy said “I’ve never heard him say that.” He added eventually, “I don’t think that’s what President Trump believes in my time around him. Never heard it.” Trump has repeatedly used the phrase in recent months, including in a March interview on Fox News.

And as for his ouster in 2023? At one point, he asked, “Want another inside story?” to the crowd, after which he reiterated a familiar complaint that Democrats had betrayed him by supporting the effort. He also blamed the vote as driven by the bad-faith efforts of Gaetz. Gaetz, he said, had a vendetta because McCarthy did not “stop an ethics complaint because [Gaetz] slept with a 17-year-old.” (The Justice Department dropped its investigation into Gaetz for sex trafficking in 2023, and the Florida Republican has denied having a relationship with a minor.)

It was all part of a tale that put the best spin possible on his political career.

At least at Georgetown, McCarthy’s act worked among a crowd where many experienced Trump’s first election before they experienced puberty. The ambitious students all were hesitant to use their names with the typical caution of online undergrads. One junior from Connecticut leaving the event clutching a bag of Sour Patch Kids found McCarthy, “actually really funny, very personable guy.” A Democrat, she said “she didn’t have a lot of expectations” from the event and was just curious to hear the “other side of the aisle’s thoughts going on in Congress and his personal experience.”

Another sophomore from California, leaving the event in a Zach Bryan t-shirt, also left with a more favorable opinion of McCarthy. He described himself politically as “center-left leaning” and said that while he didn’t agree with McCarthy’s politics, he thought that what the former speaker said about “different people having different experiences and you have to understand that was important.”

A single event at a college campus won’t determine what goes in the history books. McCarthy held an event the following night at Harvard Kennedy School — this one was called “The 2024 Election, Trump, and the Future of American Democracy” — which went very similarly to the Georgetown event; at times, McCarthy repeated himself word for word. Eventually, they add up. History is a slippery thing, and the way in which figures are enshrined in historical memory constantly changes. Heroes often turn to villains, and sometimes, villains even turn into heroes.

It’s hard to imagine what values Americans will hold in the 22nd century or if they will even know Kevin McCarthy’s name.

A House Republican colleague sniped to me last year that all McCarthy cared about was whether he’d become speaker and have his portrait hung in the speaker’s lobby alongside all of his predecessors. But it’s clear he cares about more than that. It’s not just that the portrait is there but that someday, someone will think it will be worth hanging in their office, too.