washington’s biggest problem these days isn’t partisanship. It’s that far-right lawmakers are living in their own reality.
Extremist Republicans have broken off from the rest of their party to create an alternate universe in which they’re in charge, empowered by Donald Trump’s followers. This disconnect is fueling an internal GOP fight in the US House of Representatives that has the federal government careening toward a shutdown at midnight on Sunday, October 1. As he claws and scrapes in an attempt to negotiate federal spending legislation, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy seems to be realizing that his rank-and-file Republicans now occupy a different universe than everyone else.
“This is a whole new concept of individuals that just want to burn the whole place down,” an exasperated McCarthy told the congressional press corps last week. “That doesn’t work.”
McCarthy’s far-right foes say their bomb-throwing ways are working. They’re being rewarded in kind. With the fifth slimmest majority in history, McCarthy can afford to lose only four GOP votes. If he reaches across the aisle, his speakership will likely be challenged. While his Republican agitators don’t have any replacement waiting in the wings, the speaker hasn’t dared negotiate with Democrats.
The meme-centric culture that swept former president Donald Trump into power is now increasingly mainstream in the Republican Party. On the surface, McCarthy’s struggle is to persuade an estimated seven to 10 conservatives to avert a government shutdown. In reality, the speaker’s battling against a nameless army of tens of thousands of angry antiestablishment voices whose frustrations have increasingly become Republican orthodoxy and mirrored by the powerhouses of conservative media—many of whom remain niche figures, even as they’re followed by hundreds of thousands of fans.
“We’re beyond the alt-right and the fringe-right. The fantasy-right is making policy,” former Virginia congressman Denver Riggleman tells WIRED. “It’s the fantasy-right. It is a cult. It is a religious belief system. It is a way of living. It’s that simple. It is the party.”
McCarthy’s paradox is the same one facing the Republican Party and America’s two-party system as a whole: Which reality does he govern in? While he campaigned for Speaker of the House with Trump’s backing, will he—can he—govern from Planet Trump? Like all party leaders who preceded him, McCarthy is tasked with leading a diverse, divided, yet ultimately United States. That’s dismissed as “normie” nonsense in Trump’s angry, amped, and very online GOP. A few of Trump’s biggest supporters in Congress, some of which have more social media followers than the speaker himself, are demanding McCarthy embrace their new minority-rule vision for America.
Under Trump, the far-right Freedom Caucus proved loyal lieutenants who held the line for his border wall funding for 34 days on Capitol Hill. That period stretched from the waning days of Paul Ryan’s speakership in December 2018 through the kickoff of Nancy Pelosi’s second act as speaker in January 2019—and holds the dubious record as the US’s longest shutdown in history. It ended without Trump getting his wall. But the former president has also remade the Republican Party in his own image, one that party leaders have tried to mirror, remaking themselves in the process. Since recapturing the House, Trump’s ranks of loyal soldiers in Congress have expanded. Still a relatively small band, they’re emboldened now, especially since Trump indictments stacked up this summer.
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