Kevin McCarthy: ‘If you don’t want to govern, why be a part of it?’

As we settle into our seats at The Monocle, a steak and seafood restaurant a stone’s throw from the US Capitol, Kevin McCarthy points out a small plaque on the wall, just above the salt and pepper shakers. It reads: The Speaker’s Booth. “Once a Speaker, always a Speaker,” he says with a smile.

Does he have to share the table with Louisiana’s Mike Johnson, the newly elected Republican Speaker of the House? McCarthy points out that the plaque has a second line: “55”.

McCarthy, a California Republican, was until recently the 55th Speaker of the US House of Representatives, a job that put him second in the line of presidential succession and made him arguably the most powerful member of his party in Washington. But when the 58-year-old meets me this week, he is newly unemployed and contemplating his professional future at the start of a critical year for American politics.

McCarthy made history last October when he became the first Speaker to be voted out of the job. It was a stunning moment for Congress, one that unleashed chaos on Capitol Hill as House Republicans for weeks afterwards failed to coalesce around a successor. In the end, after churning through three other candidates, the party rallied behind Johnson, a low-profile member of Congress best known for his fealty to Trump. McCarthy stepped down as a member of Congress at the end of the year.

We are sitting down for lunch with less than a week to go until the Iowa caucuses, the official start of the presidential primary process, and every large poll suggests Republican voters are gearing up to once again select Donald Trump as their nominee for the White House, even as the former president faces mounting legal woes.

McCarthy has long been loyal to Trump, who has over the years been known to call him “my Kevin”. In December, McCarthy publicly endorsed the former president’s bid for the White House, and expressed a willingness to serve in a future Trump cabinet.

The two men have nevertheless had their ups and downs. In the days after the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol, McCarthy reportedly told Republicans: “I’ve had it with this guy.” But two weeks later, Trump’s team released a photograph of him smiling widely alongside the then president at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida.

Is it fair to say their relationship has been rocky at times, I ask. McCarthy replies by asking if I am married.

“Have you ever fought [with your husband]? Have you ever expressed your opinion? Because you love this person, would you express it stronger than you would express to somebody you met on the street?”

He goes on: “Every relationship has its ebbs and flows. Those relationships that are closer have more emotion . . . I couldn’t have a relationship with President Trump where we smiled at each other every day.

“Have I had tough conversations with him? Yes, but only because our bond is strong,” he adds. “I will say things to him that I think other people won’t. Now, will it make him mad? Yeah. But will he respect me more? I believe so. Do I respect myself? Yes.”

It is a cold, rainy winter day in Washington, and without looking at the menu, McCarthy asks our waiter what soup is on offer. The server recites the day’s specials: split pea or shrimp bisque.

McCarthy shakes his head, and says he would like a salad to start: “But all I want on it is the bacon, lettuce and cheese, nothing else, no dressing.”

Earlier in our conversation, the waiter asked McCarthy if he would like a Coca-Cola, and McCarthy requested Diet Coke, saying he has “got to cut back”. But after he took a sip, he changed his mind, and asked the server if it could be exchanged for regular Coca-Cola. He will later concede he is a “picky eater”. But for now he goes on to order his main, again without consulting the menu.

“Do you have the New York?” he asks, as the waiter nods with a smile. “Is that the one I like the most?” Scanning the menu, I conclude that McCarthy has selected a 10oz New York sirloin steak, with crispy french fries. I choose the paradise salad, with hearts of palm, tomato and avocado, as a starter, followed by a crab cake served with steamed vegetables and a red pepper sauce. Unlike McCarthy, I prefer Diet Coke, so I order one for myself.

Our conversation moves to McCarthy’s modest upbringing in Bakersfield, in California’s Central Valley. McCarthy’s father was a firefighter, and the family had no money for him to attend a four-year university. After high school, he enrolled in community college, but dropped out after he won $5,000 in the California state lottery.

He recalls taking his parents out to dinner with his winnings — they ordered steak Diane — and says he invested the rest in a single stock that gave him a return of some 30 per cent in a matter of weeks. Can he remember the company?

“Fur Vault. They sold furs to Neiman Marcus or something,” he says. “Remember, this was the 1980s. This was the time of Dynasty.”

It was also the time of Ronald Reagan, whom McCarthy cites as one of his political heroes. McCarthy notes that the first presidential election he ever voted in was in 1984, when Reagan won a landslide victory over Democrat Walter Mondale. 

Soon after, following a brief stint as a deli owner — he says he created a “house special” sandwich of turkey, cream cheese and artichoke hearts — McCarthy enrolled at California State University, Bakersfield, where he became the leader of the college Republicans. He was initially rejected for an internship in the office of Bill Thomas, the local Republican member of Congress, who would later become a mentor. McCarthy succeeded Thomas in representing Bakersfield, when he was first elected to Congress in 2006.

What would Reagan make of the modern Republican party? “He would have a problem with the anger,” McCarthy says. “If you believe your principles bring people more freedom, that is not a reason to be angry. You need to be a happy conservative.”

McCarthy references one of Reagan’s famous lines: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” “But he believed in government, in a conservative way,” McCarthy says. “He wanted to . . . make [the government] efficient, effective and accountable.

“The new form, they don’t believe in doing anything,” he adds, in a thinly veiled reference to Republican House members such as Florida’s Matt Gaetz and Colorado’s Lauren Boebert, who he says are more concerned with celebrity and their own fundraising than with policymaking. “There comes a point when you come here, if you don’t want to govern, why be a part of it?” he says. “You have to have a system that rewards different behaviour.”

What if voters only elect more agitators in the future, I ask. “What if? What if? In the end, I always trust the voters,” McCarthy replies. “Winston Churchill said you can always [count on] an American to do what’s right after they have exhausted every other option. We’re just exhausting our options.”

Throughout our nearly two-hour lunch, McCarthy is gregarious and affable, characteristics that his allies say served him well in Washington. Our conversation is interrupted several times by well-wishers, including the restaurant’s owner, who at one point arrives to show me a framed photograph of McCarthy with the owner’s fluffy Havanese dog, Lupo.

But McCarthy stiffens as he talks about his removal from a role that he had spent more than a decade working to realise.

Last January, McCarthy, who long walked a political tightrope to appease the various warring factions of the Republican conference, persevered through 15 ballots and ultimately won over enough members of his own party to seize the Speaker’s gavel. Along the way he made several major concessions, most notably changing the House rules to allow any single member of Congress to introduce a “motion to vacate”, or trigger a vote of no confidence in the Speaker.

Ten months later, in October, Gaetz led a rebellion to remove McCarthy, ostensibly in protest at the Speaker’s efforts to cut a deal with Democrats to avert a costly government shutdown. In the end, seven Republicans joined Gaetz and all of the House Democrats present in voting McCarthy out.

I ask McCarthy what he thought this month, when his successor Johnson announced he had struck a deal with congressional Democrats on a new budget framework for the federal government. The deal inched lawmakers one step closer to avoiding another costly shutdown — but was nearly identical to an earlier agreement McCarthy himself hatched last year with President Joe Biden.

“The deal is my deal,” McCarthy says with a laugh. “I think it is a smart deal.”

Johnson has already come under fire from rightwing, fiscal-hawk House Republicans, who have called the budget framework a “total failure”. But will he face the same fate as McCarthy? “No, they can’t throw him out,” McCarthy says, shaking his head. He adds that his own removal was “about me personally”.

McCarthy tells me he will soon write his memoirs. But how will the history books remember him?

He says he delivered for his district in Bakersfield, recruited hundreds of new Republican candidates, helped his party elect more women and minorities, and led Republicans to take back control of the lower chamber of Congress.

“The time as Speaker, they will say, was not long. But . . . as time progresses, they will show what these eight members, and what the Democrats did, was wrong.

“They threw me out because I kept the government open?” he says. “I think they will say I am right. And in the end, I think they will see that [removing me] was a political decision, and I don’t think political decisions weather well in the long term.”

As we finish our main courses, I bring up January 6, when, nearly three years to the day before we meet, violent mobs of Trump’s supporters stormed the US Capitol in an effort to interrupt the certification of Biden’s Electoral College victory.

Trump is now facing a criminal trial in Washington related to the attack and his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Next month, the US Supreme Court will consider whether his actions on January 6 should see him banned from being on the presidential primary ballot in Colorado. Critics have argued that Trump should be removed from the ballot under the 14th amendment to the US Constitution, which says anyone who “engaged in insurrection” should be barred from holding higher office.

McCarthy rejects the idea that Trump could be found guilty by a jury of his peers. He says the president’s 91 indictments, across four criminal cases, are “driven politically”. 

As for January 6, I suggest history will also remember how McCarthy responded. Hours after the protesters had been removed from the Capitol, then House minority leader McCarthy joined 146 fellow House Republicans in voting to invalidate Biden’s election.

But, days later, he gave a speech on the House floor saying Trump bore “responsibility” for the attack. Two weeks after that, he was smiling alongside the president in Mar-a-Lago. Thomas, his former mentor, labelled him a “hypocrite”.

McCarthy corrects me, noting he said Trump bore “some responsibility” for the attack. “I had nothing to do with January 6,” he says, his tone sharpening. “I didn’t support January 6, I didn’t like what happened on January 6, and it was wrong . . . The first thing I did when I got out, they took me somewhere, I called the president and said, ‘You need to tell these people to get away.’ So I think history will be very kind to me.” 

Did he go to Mar-a-Lago because Trump was too depressed to eat, as former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney claims McCarthy told her in her new memoir? Cheney and McCarthy fell out very publicly over January 6 and Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election.

“Liz Cheney,” McCarthy sighs. “You know, this is a challenge. Everybody knows people, some people get Trump syndrome.”

I ask what he means. “The press has Trump syndrome,” he says. “How many times did you guys ask me about Trump when Trump was not in office and I’m trying to run Congress? You are fixated on him. He is in your head. He loves that.”

As for the now infamous Mar-a-Lago visit, McCarthy insists he did not go to Palm Beach with the intention of seeing Trump. He says he originally flew there to host a fundraiser with former US commerce secretary Wilbur Ross, and was later “asked” to see the president.

“One thing you’ll learn, if you really study me, when someone gets in trouble, even if I’m not your friend, I’m one of your first phone calls,” McCarthy says. “Because if you have ever been in this business, it’s tough and everyone goes through the battle.”

The next year will be the stage for many more political battles, most notably the US presidential election in November, when control of both chambers of Congress will be up for grabs. McCarthy is bullish on Trump’s ability to clear the primary field and beat Biden in the general election.

“If Biden stays on the ticket, Republicans have a really good year,” he says, pointing to the incumbent president’s poor approval ratings and advanced age. “We have an easier chance of adding seats in Congress than we did the last two cycles.”

Meanwhile, he says, Trump needs to focus his campaign on “rebuilding, restoring and renewing America, not revenge”. 

I note the president’s stump speeches tend to focus mostly on the latter. “So I tell him,” McCarthy says. When did they last speak? It has been a “couple of weeks”.

But while McCarthy says he will be supporting the former president and campaigning and fundraising for Republican House candidates in 2024, he is also pondering a life outside of politics. He reminds me that he has an MBA from California State, and says he wants to try working in “start-ups”, and is particularly interested in artificial intelligence.

“I loved every minute of the job [as Speaker]. But I always looked at it like this . . . I knew I was going to leave it sometime,” he says. “I will have other careers. I may fail, but I will be successful in the end because I won’t give up.

“Nobody is going to say this career wasn’t successful,” he adds, with a nod in the direction of the Capitol building. “I couldn’t get an internship, and I ended up Speaker of the House.”

Lauren Fedor is the FT’s US political correspondent

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