By Defying Trump, MAGA Gained a New Hold on Republicans

Just 213 days ago, former President Donald Trump wasn't just a member of the Republican Party—he was the face of the Republican Party.

Polling showed him as the party's leading candidate for president. Republican primary elections were defined by who supported him more than the other guy. And those he supported were generally accepted as the correct fit for the GOP of the future.

This included then-House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican who, on the cusp of an anticipated red wave, earned Trump's endorsement 213 days ago on June 4, 2022, for another term in Congress, a move to silent the whispers of dissent building against him.

"In Congress, Kevin is a tireless advocate for the people of Bakersfield and the Central Valley," Trump wrote on Truth Social at the time. "He is working incredibly hard to Stop Inflation, Deliver Water Solutions, and Hold Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi Accountable for their catastrophic failures and dereliction of duty. Kevin McCarthy has my Complete and Total Endorsement."

It didn't work. After his party's underwhelming performance in the 2022 midterm elections, McCarthy once again attracted the ire of his party's right flank, attracting open challenges from hardline members of the House Freedom Caucus in defiance of the party's moderates and even Trump himself.

"I love President Trump. I'm gonna vote for him in 2024. I'm gonna campaign hard for him. But HR was not always his best thing," Florida Representative Matt Gaetz, a McCarthy rival, told Turning Point USA's Charlie Kirk in December.

"We ought to have a choice come out of the House that represents the conservative center of our caucus," added Gaetz. "I'll be for Trump for president. But I will not follow him in supporting Kevin McCarthy for speaker."

About 20 others—per an initial ballot January 3—were of the same mind, pledging their allegiance to Arizona Republican Andy Biggs and robbing McCarthy of a clear path to the speakership.

On its face, the vote seemed to be a defection from the former president by nearly two dozen figures who had supported him the most. But in reality, the vote reflects the flexing of a factional brand of politics that will likely come to define the new Republican majority of the 118th Congress the way it did during the tenures of Republican leaders like Eric Cantor, John Boehner and Paul Ryan.

"Factions can potentially have more influence if majorities are slim and their members can manage to stay together," Danielle Thomsen, a professor of political science at the University of California-Irvine, told Newsweek. "We are seeing this band of conservatives test the limits of their influence and strength at the outset. One goal is to extract rules concessions, but another goal is to attract front-page media coverage for playing hardball with the establishment."

Call it the MAGA movement incarnate, call it the Tea Party 2.0.

People like University of Oklahoma professor Rachel Blum—author of the 2020 book How the Tea Party Captured the GOP—have seen it before.

"The Freedom Caucus attitude that existed before MAGA that, perhaps, gave MAGA a structure is still there, and is still trying to assert itself," Blum told Newsweek. "It's basically telling the party, 'You've forgotten about us, and the party is still not where it should be.'"

Entering the day's vote, some wondered where it'd already fallen short.

McCarthy, in a series of meetings with members of his caucus over the weekend, offered numerous concessions to those who opposed his leadership. Prior to that, his agenda closely resembled demands of party activists, including planned inquiries into President Joe Biden's FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.

In recent years, McCarthy has also given a larger platform to outspoken members of the conference like Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, a leading figure of the far right who has since aligned herself with McCarthy.

So what is it the party hardliners are looking for? Part of it is the effort to create the perception of being above the swamp of D.C. politics.

With a Democratic president and a Democratically-controlled Senate, Republicans in the House are bargaining from a position of weakness, with their ability to govern inherently requiring the ability to compromise—something McCarthy, as minority leader, accomplished as effectively as his minority allowed in the first two years of Biden's term.

His harshest critics, meanwhile, occupy some of the safest, reddest districts in the country, whether they were drawn to their advantage by GOP-led statehouses or by the sheer nature of their region's politics. In that way, they are almost preconditioned to battle with leadership.

"Conventional wisdom tells us members of Congress are single-minded seekers of reelection, which is a little trite, but they have their own career ambitions by virtue of being there," said Blum. "The thing that has made this faction in the Republican Party really distinct is that they have consistently tried to battle for the soul and identity of the Republican Party in a no-compromises kind of way."

That in itself, however, could hurt the Republican brand.

While party hardliners have professed that a less compromising brand of politics is key to their party's success nationally, many of the party's candidates for the U.S. House and Senate this cycle faltered as they sought to defend GOP priorities around issues like abortion, which ultimately tempered Republicans' expectations of a "red wave" in this year's midterm elections.

Dragging the party further to the right with additional litmus tests might be a good way to avoid primaries in the country's reddest districts, notes Johns Hopkins University's Steven Teles, but it also creates a race to the bottom that more vulnerable members may be unable to win.

"Moving up in the status hierarchy within that ideological space is a little bit like the horror movies," he said. "With every movie you watch, you need even more extreme things to get the same effect you had with the last one you watched."

"You keep having to go deeper into that zone of things that were previously unthinkably extreme," he added. "Because if everybody's doing the other thing, you can't really distinguish yourself."

Congress has weathered factions before. Democrats following the 2018 "blue wave" had to navigate the progressive wing of their party to build passable legislation, while President Joe Biden had to fight to gain progressives' support on the campaign trail.

In the last Congress, moderate Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema used their position in their party's slim majority to gain numerous concessions from party leadership.

Like for the Democrats in 2018, the new conservative faction could force leadership to draw the party further to the right to effectively command the Republican conference—at the risk of its ability to govern.

"Whatever McCarthy offers won't be enough because they've publicly committed to oppose 'the swamp' and spent the past months bashing McCarthy as a RINO," Ruth Bloch Rubin, an expert in political factions at the University of Chicago, wrote in an email. "For other folks, maybe this is about extracting committee assignments, or they just don't like or trust the guy and see an opportunity to get a win."

"The problem for McCarthy is that despite having different end goals, his opponents have managed to stick together," she added. "Often having different objectives is a source of leverage for leaders—you can co-opt people. That's what Pelosi did to secure her speakership the last time around. But here McCarthy has struggled."