Only Trump Is Trump

Day after day, we wander together in this newsletter through a desert of discouragement. I get paid to do it, but why you people choose to suffer with me, I’ll never know.

Just kidding. I do know. It’s because you dream that someday the skies will open and shower us with good news. You want to be here when the clouds burst and watch me dance in the downpour.

You want to see what it looks like when Eeyore finally smiles.

Today’s the day. It’s raining.

It’s raining schadenfreude, specifically.

It’s raining in Georgia, where Sidney Powell has copped a plea that requires her to formally apologize for her role in Trump’s failed coup plot—and to testify against her co-conspirators. The prospect of the “Kraken’s” caretaker turning stoolie against MAGA is delightful morally and useful civically. The next time some band of reprobates gets itchy about overturning an election, Powell’s example will caution them that there’s no honor among thieves.

Most of the rain is concentrated in Washington, though, where the public torment of another insurrectionist has supplied our weary country with the feel-good moment it needs and deserves.

As I write this on Thursday afternoon, the only certainty about Jim Jordan’s candidacy for speaker is how humiliating the process has been for him. A third House vote was supposed to be held this morning but was canceled when he still couldn’t find the votes he needed. Republicans proceeded to hold a long, angry conference meeting instead, which may or may not have involved someone lunging at Matt Gaetz. Jordan remains far short of 217 votes and is poised to shed further support on the third ballot, which might happen tonight. Possibly.

At one point this afternoon he reportedly wanted to invest acting speaker Patrick McHenry with power to run the House until January, leaving Jordan as the GOP’s official “speaker-designate” and free to lobby for votes behind the scenes before a permanent speaker is chosen next year. That felt like a satire of how populists approach politics. The unassuming McHenry, with the support of a majority of the House, would do the actual work of legislating on hard matters like Ukraine and government funding, while Jordan—lacking anything close to a majority—would preen about his purity in appearances on Fox News and exult in the leadership stature that the title of “speaker-designate” had granted him.

It would have felt a bit like a father setting up an office playset alongside his own desk in his home office for his 3-year-old. While dad conducts business, Junior gets to pantomime him, banging around with his plastic phone.

Alas, the idea appears to have been scuttled, which is too bad: In a party that’s grown comfortable with minority rule, it would be fitting for its highest-ranking member in the House to be someone who’s been rejected repeatedly by the House majority. But don’t let that spoil the mood. Apart from Trump, no Republican more richly deserves the public weeklong embarrassment to which Jim Jordan has subjected himself—and he’s not done yet.

Candidly, I’m shocked by the whole thing.

“Moderates always cave,” I declared on Monday, when Jordan’s election as speaker seemed likely. Don’t mock me too much for that; traditionally, Republican moderates have always caved. Need I remind you that when Donald Trump tried to overthrow the incoming government of the United States in plain sight, he received a grand total of 10 Republican votes in the House for his impeachment?

Moderates almost always cave, it turns out. But not this time. Why not?

The answer lies in one of the five lessons to be taken from The Humiliation of James Daniel Jordan.

1. Most moderates did cave and are still highly wimpy.

Yes, fine, some normie Republicans uncharacteristically showed a little spine this week. But not all. Most, in fact, did not.

When the GOP conference was polled via secret ballot on whether they would support Jordan in a vote of the full House, 55 said they wouldn’t. Jordan didn’t believe they’d have the nerve to vote against a MAGA heartthrob once they were on the record, though, so he promptly scheduled that vote. Moderates always cave, he assumed, quite reasonably.

When push came to shove, most did cave. In two rounds of House voting on Jordan’s candidacy, no more than 22 Republicans were willing to go public with their opposition. Well more than half of the original anti-Jordan 55 wimped out and supported him despite their misgivings.

Perhaps the 33 in the “vote yes, hope no” bloc concluded that a House led by Speaker Jordan was preferable to the misery of paralysis. Or maybe they were prepared to voice their opposition publicly only if/when their votes were needed to block Jordan from reaching 217.

But it seems more likely to me that Jordan opponents would have begun to fold if he had approached a majority instead of coming out of the woodwork to stop him. After eight years, normie Republicans have lost all benefit of the doubt that they’ll do the right thing at a fateful moment when doing the right thing gets hard. Twenty-two of them deserve praise for having drawn a line this time; the other 33 hung them out to dry, whatever their reasons for doing so.

And as far as I’m aware, just one member of the anti-Jordan group—Ken Buck of Colorado—dared to complain publicly about electing a speaker who supported Trump’s corrosive “rigged election” nonsense. Pretty wimpy, all things considered.

2. The GOP truly is two parties now.

Regular readers are already familiar with this lesson given that I write about it every 72 hours or so. The Republican Party is an unhappy coalition of the MAGA Party and the Conservative Party, and the one that calls the shots is the one that’s not afraid to blow up the coalition and let Democrats get elected if it doesn’t get its way.

You and I know that, but the fact that House Republicans are coming up on three weeks of being unable to fill a vacancy in the speaker’s chair has demonstrated the party’s split personality in a vivid way. Jonathan Martin writes in Politico:

There is no longer a cohesive Republican Party. There’s a pre-Trump GOP and a post-Trump GOP, living together uneasily. They may be roommates but they’re not married.

…

“It’s basically a bifurcated coalition government,” former House Speaker Paul Ryan said of the Republican conference he once led.

…

“This is a political-leaning conference right now, not a policy-leaning conference,” Ryan told me. Which makes sense, he added, because “our party is a populist-leaning party right now, not a policy-leaning party.”

What Jordan’s humiliation revealed was that the Conservative Party still remains enough of a force in Congress, even in its lowly state, to work its will on the MAGA Party. Which has left me with surprisingly mixed feelings.

On the one hand, yay for normies! They’ve kept an unfit populist out of power and may have averted a constitutional crisis in January 2025 by so doing. They showed America’s conservative voters this week that there’s still a place for them in the Republican Party.

But that’s how Trump gets reelected. Populists drive the political train on the right these days. As Martin puts it, it’s less the case in 2023 that MAGA is a virus infecting a traditionally conservative host than vice versa. Electing Jordan as speaker would have laid that bare. Thwarting him means maintaining the illusion that the GOP isn’t the dangerous post-liberal movement it’s become, false reassurance to traditional Republicans that responsible actors in the party can and will act as a brake on Trump if he returns to the White House.

If you want to force traditional conservatives to confront how morally hollowed out the party has become at all levels, the spectacle of Speaker Jordan would have provided unusual clarity.

3. Jordan was (is?) willing to sell out for the sake of power.

It will be forgotten sooner than you think that Jim Jordan, Mr. Purity, the most uncompromising populist in the House, was reportedly prepared to make all sorts of deals to win the votes of his GOP colleagues that would have angered the MAGA base—in principle.

I say “in principle” because Paul Ryan is right. The Republican conference doesn’t care much about policy because the Republican base doesn’t care much about it. As Trump proves every day on topics as far afield as abortion, Israel, and federal spending, the grassroots right will indulge its heroes with all manner of heresy on policy. Every instance of them selling out to the RINOs or to the left can be spun as a matter of compromising near-term for the sake of electability so that the right’s culture war can triumph in the long term.

Allegedly, Jim Jordan was willing to stick $6 billion in funding for Ukraine in a supplemental bill providing aid to Israel in order to entice the Republican holdouts into voting for him. Allegedly, he met with naysaying Republicans from New York and vowed to raise the cap on deducting state and local taxes, a tax break for wealthy blue-state libs that would have eviscerated a key revenue-raising provision in the Trump tax cuts.

Allegedly, his plan to empower McHenry as acting speaker for a few months while he figured out a path to winning the next speakership vote in January left his populist colleagues up in arms during Thursday afternoon’s conference meeting. MAGA Republicans see that as a recipe for bipartisan governance in the House, marginalizing the right as Democrats supply decisive support on everything from Ukraine to averting a government shutdown.

I doubt Jordan will pay a price for any of it from adoring fans who base their politics mainly on how much they enjoy a member’s Newsmax appearances. But it’s gratifying to see how quickly his purity collapsed once real power was within arm’s reach. Even the fire-breathers will turn down the heat when ambition requires it, it seems. 

4. Jordan is terrible at backroom politics.

Two weeks ago I wrote about the contrast in skill sets between Jordan and his top rival for the speaker nomination, Steve Scalise. Scalise is an inside operator, someone who makes friends within the conference by raising money and building relationships. Jordan is an outside operator, skilled at leveraging grassroots opinion to help him achieve his objectives. To the extent he has any actual objectives.

When the time came for Jordan to demonstrate some insider skills of his own to get to 217, he botched the process so horribly that it may have cost him the job.

Remember how this all went down. On the first vote among House Republicans to nominate a candidate, Scalise defeated Jordan. But it became clear that Jordan’s bloc wouldn’t support Scalise in a vote of the full House; in fact, Jordan reportedly offered to make the nominating speech for Scalise on the House floor but only if Scalise, once he failed to win a majority, promised to then drop out and nominate Jordan.

To Scalise’s allies, it seemed like their man was being set up to fail. The Jordanaires planned to tank him in the House vote, then turn right around and demand that he be a “team player” for Jordan.

But it got worse. After Jordan replaced Scalise as nominee and fell short of a majority in the first House vote on Tuesday, the two men met. Jordan reportedly asked Scalise for help in uniting the conference behind him but Scalise declined to commit, unsurprisingly. Jordan’s allies promptly leaked those details to reporters, attempting to make Scalise a scapegoat for their man’s failure to win the speakership. That enraged Scalise’s supporters again. Bad enough that their candidate would be sunk by the disloyal underhanded Jordan bloc, but smearing Scalise himself as disloyal and underhanded was adding insult to injury.

“For Jordan allies to pick a fight with Scalise with Jordan’s vote count where it is defies all logic,” Punchbowl’s Jake Sherman tweeted afterward. But that’s wrong. The logic was straightforward: Jordan, the outside operator, is a bully and a demagogue so naturally he resorted to demagogic bullying with Scalise. Upon finding himself in a political jam, he reverted to his one neat trick as a politician to try to wriggle his way out. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. 

In a universe where Scalise had chosen not to run for speaker, where Jordan hadn’t had occasion to foolishly remind the conference who he is and how he operates, maybe those 22 Republican holdouts would have come aboard. As it is, his colleagues are making snarky jokes about how fickle, hypocritical, and cutthroat his demands for unity are.

The icing on the cake is that, by forcing Republicans to go on the record in a floor vote, Jordan placed both factions of the conference in a no-win situation. Those who opposed him are now ripe for primary challenges from the right, while those in swing districts who supported him are already being targeted by the left. (“Rep. Steel Supports Extremism.”) The first rule of leading a conference is not to put your own members in a situation where the party can only lose, especially if nothing productive—like electing a speaker—is apt to come from it. Jordan broke that rule in his very first vote as the man in charge.

5. Only Trump is Trump.

This is the grand lesson of the week and why, to answer my question from earlier, the moderates didn’t cave this time.

Jordan’s strategy to take the gavel could be summarized simply as “Be Trump.” Step one: Usurp the existing GOP leadership. That was accomplished when Matt Gaetz and seven other Republicans joined hands with Democrats to oust Kevin McCarthy.

Step two: Dare your Republican detractors to go on the record with their opposition to you. That was accomplished when Jordan called a vote of the full House on his candidacy, trusting that moderates would do what they always do and wimp out. Gaetz contributed to the effort by sending an email to his donors accusing disloyal RINOs of, uh … joining hands with Democrats to block Jordan.

Step three: If your detractors won’t budge, strong-arm them. Rely on the feral grassroots right to pressure or outright threaten them into capitulating to your wishes.

That too was accomplished—partly. Since Wednesday, various House Republicans who refused to support Jordan have reported receiving threats. Some appear to be political in nature; others are old-fashioned fascist “vote for my hero or I’ll kill you” death threats, a phenomenon with which congressional Republicans have become familiar.

This is all standard operating procedure in Donald Trump’s GOP. So why hasn’t it worked for Jordan? Why has he been reduced to the un-Trumpy spectacle of begging his grassroots fans to back off as his opponents angrily refuse to capitulate?

He isn’t sorry about his colleagues being threatened. If he wanted to spare them, he would have stuck to his original plan of not holding any House floor votes for speaker until the Republican conference mustered 217 votes for a nominee. The whole point of taking the fight to the House floor before he had a victory locked up was to dare the holdouts to antagonize his populist fans.

And Jordan knows what happens when populists are antagonized. He was there on January 6. Heck, he made it happen.

My guess is that his tactics failed partly because he lacks the cultish juice with right-wing voters that Trump enjoys and his enemies know it, and partly because the Republicans opposing him have reached their absolute limit with being governed through intimidation.

Their statements about the threats they’ve received had the feel of a pressure valve finally releasing. For years they’ve lived the hard new reality of right-wing politics: Opposing Trump on anything important, no matter how stupid and wrong he might be, means risking your job and potentially your family’s welfare. They suffer with that every day in silence. When Jordan pulled it on them, they couldn’t resist shaming him.

Maybe that’s because Trump can’t be shamed whereas Jordan can. (Possibly? Sort of?) Maybe they felt obliged to draw a line in the sand for institutional reasons, not wanting Trump-style intimidation politics to infect how the House does business. But their calculation rests on the belief that, no matter how much MAGA voters might enjoy Jordan’s showboating in right-wing media, they’re just not going to smash up the Capitol to spare his tender infantile ego from the pain of an electoral defeat.

It was safe-ish in this case to treat Jim Jordan (and Matt Gaetz) the way they wish they could treat Donald Trump, so they did.

Jordan isn’t Trump. Only Trump is Trump. His failure to recognize that will probably end up costing him the gavel.