Well, Kevin
They know he did it. They were there.
In an expletive-laced phone call with House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy while the Capitol was under attack, then-President Donald Trump said the rioters cared more about the election results than McCarthy did.
“Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are,” Trump said, according to lawmakers who were briefed on the call afterward by McCarthy.
McCarthy insisted that the rioters were Trump’s supporters and begged Trump to call them off.Trump’s comment set off what Republican lawmakers familiar with the call described as a shouting match between the two men.
A furious McCarthy told the President the rioters were breaking into his office through the windows, and asked Trump, “Who the fuck do you think you are talking to?” according to a Republican lawmaker familiar with the call.
Well if it comes to that, who the fuck did McCarthy think he was talking to? Did he expect Trump to be reasonable or truthful or even law-abiding?
The newly revealed details of the call, described to CNN by multiple Republicans briefed on it, provide critical insight into the President’s state of mind as rioters were overrunning the Capitol. The existence of the call and some of its details have been previously reported and discussed publicly by McCarthy.
Trump’s state of mind was yippee hooray these are my people. It wasn’t omigod this is antifa coming to eat our livers, it was haha eat shit democracts they gonna kill you.
The Republican members of Congress said the exchange showed Trump had no intention of calling off the rioters even as lawmakers were pleading with him to intervene. Several said it amounted to a dereliction of his presidential duty.
But they won’t vote to convict him.
Speaking to the President from inside the besieged Capitol, McCarthy pressed Trump to call off his supporters and engaged in a heated disagreement about who comprised the crowd. Trump’s comment about the would-be insurrectionists caring more about the election results than McCarthy did was first mentioned by Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, a Republican from Washington state, in a town hall earlier this week, and was confirmed to CNN by Herrera Beutler and other Republicans briefed on the conversation.
“You have to look at what he did during the insurrection to confirm where his mind was at,” Herrera Beutler told CNN. “That line right there demonstrates to me that either he didn’t care, which is impeachable, because you cannot allow an attack on your soil, or he wanted it to happen and was OK with it, which makes me so angry.”
Yes, it annoys me a good deal too.
I really am surprised at how desperate people like McCarthy are to cling to power. He knows Trump is a monster and deserves to be convicted, but he won’t come out and say it because… he might lose his position as Minority Leader? He’s probably going to lose that anyway. And so what? What’s the worst case scenario? He joins a lobbying firm somewhere, or sits on some corporate boards, or gets hired by one of his family’s companies, leads a comfortable, respectable (ok, give or take your opinion of lobbyists) life, secure in the knowledge that he wasn’t too big a coward to stand up for himself.
Like, at a certain point, what are you in this for? Conservative policy ideas? Please — it’s the party of Trump now, they’re not getting anything significant done any time soon. Ego? How good will it really feel to retain the title and position when you know — and everybody else knows — that you’re a sniveling coward?
I wonder about that often often often.
Maybe it’s all about the power/glory/status – the whatever you want to call it. Being a Member of Congress. Lobbying pays vastly better, but Congress is Congress.
But you’d think that feeling would be a good deal tamped down by the fact that it’s being a totally compromised sleazy Member of Congress.
Yeah, I don’t bat an eye at the usual compromises. Like, if I were somehow a member of Congress, I’m sure I’d vote for things I didn’t really like, bite my tongue about some things, maybe even throw a bone to a good donor here and there. But just completely humiliating myself in the hopes of clinging to power? I feel pretty confident in saying “I can’t go for that, no can do.” (I may be listening to 80s music tonight. Actually, that’s a safe bet generally.)
It would seem that a lot of them are self-selected to be totally compromised sleazy Members of Congress. With just the right jerrymandering, you can be that without having to pass the smell test of a majority of your district’s voters. As long as your base is happy, you’re golden, however deplorable they may be. I’ve often thought the last people to whom one should offer power are those who actively seek it. If the people offering that power are are just as bad, the results are even worse. Trump and his congressional apologists and stooges are the tip of an ugly iceberg that is righteous in its rottenness. The amount of deprogramming required to overcome this decades-long decline of empathy and decency evident in the votes for Trump by tens of millions of Americans is staggering. Not to say that the same problem does not exist in other countries, but it’s particularly visible and virulent in the United States at this time
Here’s the thing though: do you really want Congresscritters that ignore their own voters? They gerrymandered the districts in the first place (bad move) thus grouping the nasties together. I don’t have a magical solution or anything but in impeaching Trump they’d be directly going against the people that elected them.
How much worse are the people that voted for the assholes in Congress than the congressional representatives themselves?
How are California’s congressional districts determined? Couldn’t the Democrats simply gerrymander McCarthy?
There’s an independent commission that does it.
McCarthy’s an ineffectual coward, but I’m not sure he’s any worse than his replacement would be as minority leader.