Republican Agony

GOP shocked as face-eating leopards eat their faces.

“Ray of sunshine” and “Rick Wilson” are words rarely in the same sentence, but with the political happiness bar set as low as it is, you should consider some up notes in the news lately. After today’s ritual flensing of Kevin McCarthy, I thought I’d summarize just some of the good news.

Kevin McCarthy’s Ouster

First, Kevin could wear what I call normie drag. He could pretend in boardrooms, greenrooms, and wealthy donors' homes that he was moderating the worst impulses of MAGA. In 2022, he told friends of ours at a Texas fundraiser that he needed their help to get more non-MAGA Republicans elected. As such, he was able to raise enormous sums of money. Staggeringly effective as a fundraiser, he was staggeringly terrible at controlling the House.

Whoever replaces him has a much higher fundraising hill to climb.

“I never expected face-eating leopards to eat my face,” Kevin McCarty, former Speaker of the House, now Night Manager of the Bakersfield Waffle House.

Next, America gets to stare at the crazy in its bleary, twitching eyes. The big private equity donors and Wall Street bros who were so generous to Kevin could tell themselves it was all fine. After all, they weren't giving directly to Gaetz, Biggs, Gosar, or the other edge-case whackdoodles; they were giving to good ol’ Kev!

Not any longer.

Third, expect candidate recruitment to plummet in both quality and quantity. Who wants to go through the agony of the campaign when Torquemada Gaetz and his minions are there to crush any sign of dissent from the orthodoxy of MAGA?

At this writing, I’m not sure who the patsy in line for the Speakership next is, but with Matt Gaetz and the Chaos Caucus still hunting, they might want to get a food taster and NIJ IV body armor. McCarthy’s departure leaves a massive hole in the political and fundraising efforts of the NRCC.

As an aside, McCarthy richly and fully deserves his fate. He was an enabler of Donald Trump, even after the January 6th attacks.

My Everything Trump Touches Dies rule continues its winning streak; McCarthy sacrificed everything for Trump, who didn’t lift a finger to save him.

MAGA Failed To Shut Down The Economy

Really, it wasn’t about cutting spending or fiscal discipline. Those as old tropes they use in the MAGA equivalent of the Latin Mass. It sounds lovely, and the old priests and congregants still find it stirring, but no one in the crowd speaks Latin.

It was about causing economic chaos so they could attack Biden on it. They failed. The MAGA suicide squad in the House didn’t get their chaos party, weakening them against both the Senate and Kevin McCarthy. (If you look weak versus Kevin McCarthy, you look weak.)

Impeachment Reached Peak Cringe

The massive nothingburger of impeachment is going just as well as expected. With McCarthy’s ouster, expect a reset on this one to feed the MAGA monkey cage some red meat, but the political power of impeachment relies on some kind of actual crime being committed (e.g. Trump, twice) and not on reading posts from CatTurd or AyranFan1488 claiming that Hunterz Laptop is full of evidence of…something.

I expected it to be bad, but between Jim Jordan and Jim Comer, they barely packed enough substance in their low-wattage festivities to even get Fox News to cover it.

Bannon’s Meat Puppet RFK Jr. Turns On MAGA

For months, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was the idol of the new right. Boosted by Steve Bannon, Fox News, Joe Rogan, and the rest of the constellation of MAGA media, scamfluencers, ranting anti-vax loonbuckets, pro-Russia cheerleaders, thinly (very) disguised anti-Semites, and Time For Some Game Theory political amateurs, RFK Lite was supposed to split off a healthy slice of older Democrats.

This was the predicate for Bannon et al. as they cheered for RFK the Lesser as a fresh new voice on the American political firmament: split the Democratic vote in a painful primary, running a repeat game of Pat Buchanan’s 1992 playbook.

Mediaite’s Aidan McLaughlin and Diana Falzone reported this week on the story in ‘This is Going to F*ck Trump’: RFK Jr. Campaign Insider Says Independent Run Will Help Biden. It's well worth a read to see how quickly a group of amateur political strategists on the right found out the monster they promoted to attack Biden turned on them.

Almost every public poll to date showed that a 2024 Kennedy campaign voter looks a lot more like MAGA than Camelot. From vaccines to Bitcoin to Ukraine, Kennedy was singing the Fox/Bannon tune. RFK Nano can’t win as an independent, but he can spoil, this time hurting Trump.

Mediaite covers the wailing and agony of the same people who were cheering RFK 2.0. Jesse Watters, Jack Posobiec, Charlie Kirk, and the rest just a week ago, and I am here for it. Expect Kennedy to absolutely disappear from Fox and the rest of the MAGA media ecosystem. The idiots promoting him are already memory-holing their tweets and articles.

Who knew that setting up a political bank shot with a sex addict, former heroin aficionado, conspiracy theorist, and well-known loon could backfire?

Everyone except the aforementioned new right mooks, apparently.

The Youngkin Boomlet Will Flop

As noted previously, the Glenn Youngkin boomlet is now rising up from the depths of the Republican Extended Donorverse. Ron DeSantis leech grifter mega-consultant Jeff Roe ran Youngkin’s successful 2021 campaign and abandoned him to work for Governor Charisma. Now that Ron and Casey are counting down to their last private jet ride, Roe is beating the political war drums with megadonors for Youngkin. It’s everywhere in the political rumor mill.

Roe controls the DeSantis SuperPAC, which still remarkably has a few dollars left in it, and a Virginia source tells me he’s offering to convert it for Youngkin’s use. “Turnkey operation!” was the phrase used, though offering Youngkin the keys to the 1978 Trabant isn’t quite the gift Roe thinks it is.

The megadonor community is furious with DeSantis for his abject failure to break through. They’ve decided that Nikki Haley lacks the thing and that Tim Scott isn’t quite the fit either. (Scott was too busy with his Canadian supermodel girlfriend, who isn’t on social media, to comment.)

These donors have never met an actual MAGA primary voter in their lives and are willing to burn down more of their money for…Glenn Youngkin. Set aside the logistics of scaling for the primaries, which are considerable, and just focus on the simple reality that Youngkin will fall just as fast and hard as the rest of the Trump competitors in the field.

But enjoy the bonfire.

All right. That’s quite enough good cheer.

Back to work, all of you.