McCarthy claimed Trump was ‘not eating,’ Cheney says
Justified trip to Mar-a-Lago in January 2021
WASHINGTON — Former president Donald Trump was “really depressed” in the days after losing reelection and leaving office in January 2021, so much so that he was “not eating.”
At least, that is what Kevin McCarthy told Liz Cheney in trying to explain why he had traveled to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, an act of solidarity that many have identified as a pivotal moment in reviving the former president’s political viability.
McCarthy, the California congressman who was then the House Republican leader, had condemned Trump for fueling the Jan. 6 mob attack on the Capitol and even suggested that he resign, only to turn around and effectively absolve the former president by embracing him again. In her new book, Cheney, perhaps the country’s most vocal anti-Trump Republican, reports that McCarthy justified the Jan. 28 visit as an act of compassion for a beaten ally.
Cheney wrote that she was so shocked when she first saw the photograph of McCarthy and Trump standing side by side with grins on their faces that she thought it was a fake. “Not even Kevin McCarthy could be this craven, I thought,” she wrote. “I was wrong.”
Cheney’s book, “Oath and Honor,” a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times before its scheduled publication Tuesday, offers a scathing assessment of not only McCarthy but an array of Republicans who in her view subordinated their integrity to curry favor with Trump. Her account of his subjugation of the party presents a tapestry of hypocrisy, with inside-the-room scenes of Republicans privately scorning “the Orange Jesus,” as one wryly called him, while publicly doing his bidding.
The much-anticipated memoir arrives on bookshelves even as Trump is in a commanding position to win next year’s Republican presidential nomination. Cheney, who represented Wyoming in Congress and led the House Republican Conference, making her the third-ranking member of her party, has assailed him as a budding autocrat in more visceral terms than most of his challengers for the nomination.
The daughter of former vice president Dick Cheney and a conservative star in her own right who was once on track to become House speaker, Cheney ultimately paid a price for her opposition to Trump and her service as vice chair of the House committee that investigated his role in instigating the Jan. 6 attack. She lost her leadership position and eventually her seat in a Republican primary last year. But she has vowed to do whatever she can to keep Trump from returning to the Oval Office.
Indeed, she subtitled her book “A Memoir and a Warning” to make the point that Trump represents a clear and present danger to America if he is on the ballot next November. “We will be voting on whether to preserve our republic,” she wrote. “As a nation, we can endure damaging policies for a fouryear term. But we cannot survive a president willing to terminate our Constitution.”