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A pair of new book excerpts show Kevin McCarthy lashing out and under massive pressure from the fallout of Donald Trump’s supporters attacking the U.S. Capitol on January 6th.
Politico Playbook got an early look at Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind, the upcoming book from New York Times Magazine writer Robert Draper. The book delves into the GOP’s continued subservience to Trump after the 2020 election, and in a chapter called “The Enabler,” it explores the phone call where McCarthy begged Trump to call off his rioting supporters who laid siege to Congress.
From the excerpt:
“Well, Kevin,” President Trump said to McCarthy by phone shortly before three in the afternoon on January 6, “I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.”
“More upset?” McCarthy yelled back incredulously, according to an account he gave a few hours later to a Republican colleague. “THEY’RE TRYING TO F*CKING KILL ME!”
The detail adds a new revelation to McCarthy’s reaction to the events of Jan. 6 before he wound up falling back in line behind Trump. Months ago, the House GOP leader came under major scrutiny when audio emerged of him calling for accountability over the Capitol attack, bashing Trump’s conduct, considering asking for Trump’s resignation, and he also suggested that Republican election-deniers should be de-platformed from social media.
Republican sources have previously spoken about the reported fury between Trump and McCarthy during their January 6 call. Indeed, another account from a recent book details McCarthy as being enraged with one of his Republican colleagues who talked to the media about the conversation.
According to the Washington Post’s previews of Unchecked: The Untold Story Behind Congress’s Botched Impeachments of Donald Trump — authored by Politico’s Rachael Bade and the Post’s Karoun Demirjian — McCarthy allegedly made Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-WA) cry as he stormed at her for telling the media about the Trump call.
“After all the work I have done for the Republican Party, the money I have raised!” McCarthy raged. “After all the work I have done for you!…I alone am taking all the heat to protect people from Trump! I alone am holding the party together! I have been working with Trump to keep him from going after Republicans like you and blowing up the party and destroying all our work!…You should have come to me! Why did you go to the press? This is no way to thank me!”
“What did you want me to do? Lie?” Herrera Beutler responded. “I did what I thought was right.”
McCarthy and Herrera Beutler denied the account in a joint statement to the Post, calling the description inaccurate and “dramatized to fit an on-screen adaptation, not to serve as a document of record. We know it’s wrong because we were the only two in the room for this conversation.” The Post reported that Bade and Demirjian verified their reporting with multiple sources, and that they stand by the story.
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