'Feed the beast or be eaten by it': Kevin McCarthy has painted House GOPers into a corner for 2024
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's decision to turn over thousands of hours of never-seen-before video taken at the Capitol during the Jan. 6 riot incited by Donald Trump to a Fox News personality could have the unintended consequences of ending the California Republican's speakership after the 2024 general election.
That is the opinion of political analyst Paul Waldman who predicted House Republicans will be put in the position of having to still defend Trump's actions up to and after the day that shocked the nation almost four years after it happened.
With the sheer volume of GOP candidates who lost in the 2022 midterms running on election fraud conspiracy theories as a background, Waldman suggested that Fox's Tucker Carlson will selectively use Jan. 6 clips to keep those conspiracies alive even though Fox News is realistically looking at losing a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems.
That, in turn, would force GOP House members to stay on the 2020- election-was-stolen train lest Carlson target them and kill their chances in the primaries.
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As Waldman explained, the clips will "only further convince Carlson’s audience to deny the truth about Jan. 6, and punish any Republican officeholder who disagrees."
"As for McCarthy," he wrote, "will this exercise help him by making it more likely that Republicans will reinforce his thin House majority in the next election — or take the Senate or the White House? Quite the opposite. It only makes it more likely that voters will view his party as extremists and loons who are far more interested in the obsessions of a spectacularly unpopular ex-president than in the genuine problems the country faces."
"Like the trembling dissemblers of Fox News, McCarthy must feel that he has no choice: Feed the beast or be eaten by it. Winning the future is an idea they cannot latch on to because they are so frantic to survive one more day," he continued.
He then lectured, "Republican elites are not powerless. They helped make this mess and could nudge their base back toward reality if they chose. But they’re too afraid to try."
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