The Morning Briefing: Kevin McCarthy, Amplifying Donald Trump's Insanity, and More Student Debt Forgiveness

By Dustin Rowles | Politics | October 4, 2023 |

By Dustin Rowles | Politics | October 4, 2023 |

It’s official: Kevin McCarthy has been ousted as Speaker of the House. Currently, there is no Speaker of the House. The House has gone on recess until next Tuesday, and it’s unlikely that there will be another Speaker until next week, if then.

Truthfully, there aren’t many candidates suitable for the job. Candidates qualified to be Speaker would be smart enough to realize that they should not be Speaker, which only leaves the unqualified, ambitious candidates. Names that have been tossed around are Steve Scalise, who is undergoing treatment for blood cancer; Tom Emmer, who prefers his seat on the powerful House Financial Services Committee; Elise Stefanik, a very ambitious Congresswoman who is the fourth-ranking Republican in the House and took a hard turn into MAGA territory in 2016.

It’s unlikely anyone, however, will be able to wrangle the 8-10 hardliners, who are essentially members of another party, which is ironically the party of Trump. Neither Lauren Boebert nor Marjorie Taylor Greene voted against Kevin McCarthy, which shows just how far right these Freedom caucus members are. In fact, the GOP may be best off nominating a Speaker candidate palatable to the Democrats, like Tom Cole of Oklahoma, because this eventual House speaker will almost certainly need Democratic support to maintain her or his job.

In the meantime, there are 44 days until the country faces another government shutdown. It may take 44 days for the House to find a new Speaker. The only thing for certain right now is that the House Republicans hate Matt Gaetz — he is an asshole — and Matt Gaetz holds a lot of power. It’ll be interesting to see how his ethics investigation plays out. Will he be politically capped by the House for creating this chaos? The other interesting thing is that Matt Gaetz is essentially the Trump of the House, and much of the hatred he’s getting from his Republican colleagues is also how they more quietly feel about the former President but are too afraid to say so. I will also say that Matt Gaetz is proof that the enemy of your enemy is not always your friend.

— In other news: Over the weekend, I read a Brian Klaas piece, The Case for Amplifying Trump’s Insanity, which basically argued for something I’ve been thinking (and sometimes writing): We should be reporting on his Truth Social tweets. We should be reporting his violent rhetoric on the campaign trail. He’s reportedly tied with Biden in the polls, and I think that part of that is because the only time the press talks about him now, it’s related to his 91 indictments or the civil trial against him. Unfortunately, because we live in a backward, messed-up country, news coverage of the indictments helps him. Meanwhile, Joe Biden stumbles over a word, and everyone starts screaming, “He’s lost it! His mind has gone!” Read Trump’s Truth Social tweets. That’s a man whose mind has gone.

Anyway, Klaas’s piece stressed the need to cover Trump’s deranged and violent rhetoric. Last week, he specifically said that shoplifters should be shot and that Army Gen. Mark Milley, the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman in 2020, should be “executed” for treason because he did not support Trump’s attempted coup. That is far scarier than Joe Biden almost tripping. The interesting thing is that, over the last two days, I have seen several mainstream news reports that are finally amplifying Trump’s insanity, specifically on Axios and the NYTimes. However, Maggie Haberman could only muster up enough courage to say that his language was “sharp.”

The remark urging people to “go after” a top elected official in New York, by a former president whose invective has become a familiar backdrop of American life, was part of a pattern of increasingly sharp language from Mr. Trump.

Days earlier, he told hundreds of Republican activists in California that shoplifters should be shot. Not long before that, he insinuated that the military general he personally appointed as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should be executed for treason.

Finally, though the Supreme Court would not approve his debt forgiveness plan, Joe Biden continues to do as much as possible to wipe out student debt. This week, he has forgiven another $9 billion in student debt, mostly through more “fixes” to the income-driven model that wipes out student debt after 20 years of payments (which cleared my debt a few months ago) and other fixes to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which should finally clear out my wife’s student debt, as well. My family will have about $100,000 less debt at the end of Biden’s first term than when it started.