As I have written before, Trump has never had as much juice with the congress as people said he did. After all, he had both the House and the Senate in his first two years and basically only got tax cuts for the rich done, which was the GOP’s Holy Grail. Everything else was just rescinding and withdrawing Obama’s policies and executive orders.
They really don’t care about him now.
After Kevin McCarthy failed to win enough votes to become House speaker on Tuesday, former President Donald J. Trump held a call with Mr. McCarthy and Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, one of the key Republican members of Congress blocking Mr. McCarthy’s bid.
Mr. Trump’s goal was to break the logjam. But if Mr. Trump had wanted Mr. Perry to quickly flip, it wasn’t to be: The next day, Mr. Perry voted against Mr. McCarthy three more times.
Mr. McCarthy’s inability to corral enough votes this week has underscored the limits of Mr. Trump’s political potency inside a party that has not controlled the Senate since 2018, lost the White House in 2020 and failed, so far, to identify the next leader of their narrow majority in the House.
Even if Mr. McCarthy is eventually successful, Mr. Trump has, once again, struggled in his role as his party’s kingmaker. His handpicked candidates failed to usher in the red wave Republicans had hoped for in the midterm elections in November. His attempt to install a new Republican leader in the Senate was crushed. His third consecutive presidential campaign, launched six weeks ago, has underwhelmed.
Now, Mr. Trump’s sway over many of his own loyalists in the House has fizzled in the most public of ways and on the most public of stages — a reminder that the insurgency in Congress isn’t so much a creature of his creation but a force that predated him and helped fuel his political rise.
For over a decade, a group of House Republicans has sought to disrupt the establishment leadership. The House Freedom Caucus evolved out of the vestiges of the Tea Party, playing a key role in the ouster of John Boehner in 2015 and blocking Mr. McCarthy’s efforts to become the Republican leader at the time.
Today, most of the 20 Republicans who have blocked Mr. McCarthy’s speakership are clear Trump loyalists, including several who have already effectively endorsed his 2024 White House bid. And even among them, a small group — including Mr. Perry — have been involved in negotiations with Mr. McCarthy’s team.
Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado, who unseated a fellow Republican in 2020 who she said wasn’t supportive enough of Mr. Trump, openly defied the former president from the House floor on Wednesday, saying he should tell Mr. McCarthy to withdraw from the speaker’s race instead of directing his focus on the insurgents. In an interview later with Sean Hannity on Fox News, Ms. Boebert appeared to try to soften the blow, saying, “I love President Trump. You’re not going to turn me on him, you’re not going to pit him against me.”
And in another show of belated deference, Representative Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican who had mocked Mr. Trump’s endorsement of Mr. McCarthy on Twitter, voted on Thursday for Mr. Trump to be the House speaker.
Mr. Trump has backed Mr. McCarthy’s effort for weeks and held separate rounds of calls to holdouts who have adamantly opposed the move. The former president appeared surprised that some of his loyal lieutenants in the House were not responsive to him, according to two people familiar with the calls who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Mr. Trump, who often tries to avoid limiting any options for himself, stopped making aggressive calls after that. But he was forced to be more public in his support than aides had planned when he picked up his ringing cellphone on Tuesday and gave a muted comment to a reporter from NBC News, prompting questions about whether he still backed Mr. McCarthy.
So he made a public declaration on Wednesday morning. But even that failed to move the roughly 20 House members who have dug in against Mr. McCarthy.
“It’s a combination of them realizing his influence is not what it was, and also his heart doesn’t seem to be in it,” said Peter T. King, the former Republican congressman from Long Island.
Trump hasn’t been putting everything he has into this for good reason. His record is terrible and he doesn’t want to be blamed for McCarthy failing. He’s doing as little as he can get away with.
Frankly, he could have done what anyone else would have done which is simply say that this is up to the House and he doesn’t think it’s appropriate to weigh in. But he doesn’t know that and he can’t keep quiet even if someone advised him to do it.
I don’t think this means as much as some do.As I said, he’s never been particularly good at moving congress. He doesn’t understand how it works and he sees himself as more of a monarch than a president anyway. He certainly doesn’t care about “the party.” But it still has to hurt to see Matt Gaetz vote for him and not one other Republican follows him.