McCarthy claimed Trump ‘didn’t eat’ after leaving office, Cheney says

Former President Donald J. Trump was “really depressed” in the days after he lost re-election and left office in January 2021, so much so that he “wasn’t eating.”

At least that’s what Kevin McCarthy told Liz Cheney when he tried to explain why he traveled to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, an act of solidarity that many have identified as a pivotal moment in Trump’s recovery the political viability of the former president. .

Mr. McCarthy, the California congressman who was then the Republican leader of the House of Representatives, had condemned Mr. Trump for fomenting the Jan. 6 mob attack on the Capitol and even suggested that he resign, only to to turn around and effectively exonerate the former president by embracing him. him again. In her new book, Ms. Cheney, perhaps the country’s most outspoken anti-Trump Republican, reports that Mr. McCarthy justified the Jan. 28 visit as an act of compassion for a defeated ally.

Ms. Cheney wrote that she was so shocked when she first saw the photo of Mr. McCarthy and Mr. Trump standing next to each other with grins on their faces that she thought it was fake. “Even Kevin McCarthy could be that cowardly, I thought,” she wrote. “I was wrong.” She went to Mr. McCarthy to confront him about rehabilitating the twice-impeached former president who had just tried to overturn an election he lost.

“Mar-a-Lago?” she asked Mr. McCarthy, according to the book. “Well damn it?”

He tried to downplay the meeting, saying he had already been in Florida when Trump’s staff called. “They’re really concerned,” Mr. McCarthy said, according to her report. “Trump doesn’t eat, so they asked me to come to him.”

“What?” she remembered answering. “You went to Mar-a-Lago because Trump doesn’t eat?”

“Yes, he’s really depressed,” Mr. McCarthy said.

Ms. Cheney’s book, “Oath and Honor,” a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times ahead of its publication on Tuesday, delivers a scathing assessment of not only Mr. McCarthy but also a slew of Republicans who her opinions subordinated their positions. integrity to curry favor with Mr. Trump. Her account of his subjugation of the party is a tapestry of hypocrisy, with scenes in the chamber of Republicans privately disparaging “the Orange Jesus,” as one wryly called him, while publicly doing his bidding.

The long-awaited memoir is hitting shelves even as Trump finds himself in a commanding position to win the Republican presidential nomination next year. Ms. Cheney, who represented Wyoming in Congress and led the House Republican Conference, becoming her party’s third-largest member, has attacked him in more visceral terms as an upstart autocrat than most of his challengers before the nomination.

Ms. Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney and a conservative star in her own right who was once on her way to becoming Speaker of the House of Representatives, ultimately paid a price for her opposition to Mr. Trump and her service as Vice Speaker of the House of Representatives committee. which investigated his role in inciting the January 6 attack. Last year, she lost her leadership position and ultimately her seat in the Republican primaries. But she has vowed to do everything she can to prevent Trump from returning to the Oval Office.

She even subtitled her book “A Memoir and a Warning” to make the point that Mr. Trump represents a clear and present danger to America if he gets on the ballot in November. “We will vote on whether we want to keep our republic,” she wrote. “As a nation, we can tolerate harmful policies for a four-year term. But we cannot survive a president who is willing to end our Constitution.”

A re-elected Trump, she said, would face few checks on his power. “Step by step, Donald Trump would tear down the other structures that keep an American president in check,” she wrote. “The assumption that our institutions will protect themselves,” she added, “is pure wishful thinking by people who would rather look the other way.”

When asked for comment on Wednesday, Mr Trump, who has openly called for an “termination” of the Constitution to immediately remove President Biden from office and reinstall himself without waiting for new elections, did not directly address the specific claims by Ms. Cheney, but simply. dismissed her as a disgruntled critic.

“Liz Cheney is a loser who is now lying to sell a book that either belongs in the discount bin in the fiction section of the bookstore or should be used as toilet paper,” said Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump. said by email. “These are nothing more than completely fabricated stories because President Trump is the clear frontrunner to become the Republican nominee and the strongest candidate to defeat Crooked Joe Biden.”

Similarly, Mr McCarthy denied nothing in the book, copies of which have also been made obtained by CNN And The guard. His office released a statement saying, “For Cheney, first it was Trump Derangement Syndrome, and now it’s apparently McCarthy Derangement Syndrome, too.”

According to Ms. Cheney, Mr. Trump knew he had lost the 2020 election even though he told the public he had not — and she cited none other than Mr. McCarthy as a witness. Just two days after the November election, she said, Mr. McCarthy told her he had spoken to Mr. Trump. “He knows it’s over,” she quoted him. “He has to go through all the stages of grief.”

That could theoretically make Mr. McCarthy a key witness in the federal or state criminal cases against Mr. Trump, rebutting any defense by the former president’s lawyers that he acted in good faith in the belief that fraud affected the election. had stolen it.

Also depicted as a Trump acolyte is Representative Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican who jumped from the backbench to the speakership in recent weeks after Mr. McCarthy’s support for Mr. Trump failed to save him from a right-wing rebellion.

Mr. Johnson took the lead in efforts to build support for Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. He sent an email to all Republicans in the House of Representatives telling them he had spoken with the president, who expected them to sign a friend-of-the-court brief to the Supreme Court. “He said he will eagerly await the final list to review,” Mr. Johnson wrote.

Ms. Cheney took that as a veiled threat and said she was surprised at Mr. Johnson, whom she had considered a friend. “He seemed particularly sensitive to Trump’s flattery and strove to get somewhere in Trump’s sphere of influence,” she wrote. “When I confronted him with the flaws in his legal argument, Johnson would often relent, or say something along the lines of, ‘We have to do this one last thing for Trump.’”

Initially, Mr. McCarthy agreed with her that the pro-Trump briefing went too far and told her he would not sign it because it would hamper states’ power to organize their own elections. “It federalizes too much,” he told her. But a day later his name was added to the assignment.

Mr. Johnson did not back down, even after the Supreme Court unanimously dismissed the case and sent Ms. Cheney a Fox News poll showing that 77 percent of Trump voters and 68 percent of Republicans believed the election was stolen. “These numbers are big,” Mr. Johnson said, “and something we have to deal with as we monitor the reporting.”

Ms. Cheney noted that Mr. Trump’s supporters believed the election was stolen because Republicans such as Mr. McCarthy and Mr. Johnson repeated his lies.

Other Republicans were willing to set aside traditions, norms and constitutional processes in the name of satisfying Trump’s desire to stay in power. When a Republican said at a rally that they should not claim the election was rigged when there was no evidence, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, one of Mr. Trump’s closest allies, said, “The only thing that matters is winning.”

She similarly attacked Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, for trying to set aside the counting of Electoral College votes on January 6 while a committee was examining election results that had already been recounted and certified. “It was one of the worst cases of dereliction of duty over personal ambition that I have ever seen in Washington,” Ms. Cheney wrote.

In some cases, she found that Republicans remained loyal to Trump out of outright fear. A colleague told her he was concerned for the safety of his wife and baby if he spoke out.

But behind the scenes, other Republicans cheered her on. After she became one of only 10 Republicans in the House of Representatives to vote to impeach Trump for his role in the Jan. 6 attack, former President George W. Bush sent her a note. “Liz, courage is in short supply these days,” he wrote. “Thanks for yours. You showed strong leadership and that doesn’t surprise me. Lead on. 43.”

Her vocal criticism of Mr. Trump rubbed off on other Republicans and highlighted what she called their “scourge of cowardice” in the face of the former president. When she contradicted Mr. McCarthy at a joint news conference about Mr. Trump’s future role in the party, Mr. McCarthy complained to her privately afterward.

“You’re killing me, Liz,” he said.

“Kevin, this is about the Constitution,” she replied. “Think about what Trump did. Just think how shocked any of our previous Republican leaders would be about this. How would Reagan have responded to this? How would Bush have reacted? Think of my father.”

Mr McCarthy rejected this line of thinking. “This isn’t their party anymore,” he said.

On that, she wrote, she had to agree.