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There were moments, last week, when—if not for the first time—Donald Trump seemed out of control. On Monday, at a rally in Derry, New Hampshire, he compared himself to Nelson Mandela; said that he had to save the country from fascists, Marxists, Communists, and “sick people”; mimed a fistfight with Joe Biden (“Poom! Poom! Poom! I’d hit him right in that fake nose!”); and went on a rant about seeing six-month-old McDonald’s containers in the streets of Washington, D.C. “Being in real estate,” he said, “I always kept clean properties, I like clean, clean, well-run, you know, tippy-top, we say tippy-top. We want them to be tippy-top. Well, our capital is the opposite of tippy-top! It’s a shithouse.”
Two days later, he stomped out of a New York City courtroom, after Judge Arthur Engoron refused to deliver a mid-trial verdict in his favor in a civil case alleging that he had fraudulently inflated the valuations of his tippy-top properties. During a break, he’d told reporters that the judge was a partisan, “with a person who’s very partisan sitting alongside of him.” Engoron’s clerk was sitting next to him; on Truth Social, Trump had described her, fantastically, as the girlfriend of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. That post had led to a narrow gag order. Now, asked by Engoron to take the stand, Trump claimed that the “very partisan” person he’d referred to was actually his former fixer, Michael Cohen, who was testifying that day; Engoron told Trump that he wasn’t credible and fined him ten thousand dollars. It was an ignominious and bizarre prelude to the four criminal cases Trump is facing, in D.C., Florida, Georgia—where the prosecution recently secured four guilty pleas from his co-defendants—and New York. (He has denied any wrongdoing.)
But the comments that Trump made during another courtroom break last Wednesday suggest that, in one respect, he is very much in control. “This time yesterday, nobody was thinking of Mike,” he said, referring to Representative Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana. “And then we put out the word and now he’s the Speaker of the House.” That is a fair statement. Trump is delusional on many subjects, but Johnson’s strange ascent suggests that he is clear-eyed about the hold he has on congressional Republicans.
The G.O.P. House caucus had seemed to be in a state of anarchy in the past few weeks. On October 3rd, in a coup engineered by Representative Matt Gaetz, Kevin McCarthy was voted out as Speaker, ostensibly because he had worked with Democrats to keep the government open; but the maneuver may simply have been a product of Gaetz’s demonstrated narcissism. (Although Gaetz denies it, it might also have been a reaction to a pending ethics inquiry, which he has portrayed as politically motivated.) He didn’t seem to know who might replace McCarthy—it just had to be a thorough Trumpist.
Next came the fight between Steve Scalise, the Majority Leader, and Jim Jordan, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, both of whom are in Trump’s camp. Scalise has a more senior role, but apparently he had an enemy in McCarthy, for reasons having to do with each man’s ambitions. Jordan had been deeply involved in Trump’s efforts to hold on to power after the 2020 election, and Trump gave him the nod, which helped scuttle Scalise’s bid. However, some Republicans balked at Jordan; there was talk of his being a bit too January 6th-associated for swing districts, but the real problem seems to have been his loud style and the thuggish approach his allies took to lobbying for votes.
By the time Jordan was voted down, the dysfunction was embarrassing. Congress’s inability to move forward on any legislation in the absence of a Speaker was causing concern internationally, leaving further aid for Ukraine and Israel (and for civilians in Gaza) uncertain. The trouble was that the Republicans’ next candidate, Tom Emmer, while being a Trump supporter, had voted to certify the 2020 election. He tried to make up for that last week by abasing himself before Trump. After Trump informed reporters that Emmer had “called me yesterday and told me, ‘I’m your biggest fan,’ ” Emmer hurried to post a video of the remarks on X, adding, “Thank you, Mr. President.”
It wasn’t good enough. On Truth Social, Trump wrote, “I believe he has now learned his lesson, because he is saying that he is Pro-Trump all the way, but who can ever be sure? Has he only changed because that’s what it takes to win?,” and he dismissed Emmer as a “Globalist RINO.” Emmer dropped out within hours. The message was that it is not sufficient to pay homage to Trump—you have to really feel it.
Mike Johnson seems to really feel it. He was elected as a freshman in 2016 and gained a foothold in the House by championing Trump on matters ranging from the would-be “Muslim ban” to the first impeachment trial, in which he was part of Trump’s defense team. He spoke ecstatically about the President returning his calls, and got to fly on Air Force One. He, too, was involved in Trump’s strategizing after the 2020 election, which Johnson suggested had been rigged with the help of Dominion voting machines—a thoroughly discredited conspiracy theory. Johnson rallied a hundred and twenty-five colleagues to sign on to an amicus-curiae brief in a case brought by Texas to invalidate the electoral votes of Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. (The Supreme Court declined to hear it.) If the 2024 election is contested, one can imagine how Trump might insist on Johnson using the Speaker’s gavel to help him.
Before running for office, Johnson was a lawyer for conservative Christian causes, and has written that he views homosexual relationships as unnatural. The climate crisis, on the other hand, is something he has presented as natural—not chiefly to be blamed on human activity. On Thursday, he told Sean Hannity that the issue with mass shootings was “not guns.” Supposedly, the Party was willing to elect him without a single dissenting vote because he is very friendly. But Johnson’s affability is just another version of Jordan’s irascibility or Gaetz’s awfulness: a personal factor that fuels or settles squabbles within a closed, Trumpist circle.
Despite the spectacle of infighting, there is a sense in which the G.O.P. has rarely been so unified—behind Trump. He may be the only thing that brings the Party together, even as he imbues it with his own brand of nihilism. The Speakership race is not the only Republican contest he has been in control of. He was in New Hampshire the day of the rally to file his paperwork for that state’s Presidential primary. He’s still more than forty points ahead of any other Republican candidate in national polls. ♦
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