McCarthy visited Mar-a-Lago after January 6 because staffers said Trump was ‘not eating,’ Liz Cheney writes in forthcoming book

• In her forthcoming book. Liz Cheney explains why Kevin McCarthy visited Mar-a-Lago after Jan. 6.
• Cheney McCarthy wrote that Trump was “distressed” and not eating after the attack on the Capitol.
• McCarthy faced heavy criticism for standing by the former president following the attack.

In her upcoming book, “Oath and Glory.” Former Wyoming GOP Rep. Liz Cheney In the year In the wake of the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol, Kevin McCarthy said his criticism of his stay at Mar-a-Lago stemmed from concerns that former President Donald Trump was “distressed”.

McCarthy made the controversial trip to the South Florida resort three weeks after the shooting that killed five people, sparking anger from political allies and opponents who said the visit was ill-timed.

“Mar-a-Lago? What is it, Kevin?” Cheney asked the then-House Minority Leader following his visit from California. CNN He reported an excerpt from her book.

“They’re really worried,” Cheney told McCarthy, then chairman of the House Republican Conference. “Trump doesn’t eat, so they asked me to come.”

“What? You went to Mar-a-Lago because Trump didn’t eat you?” Cheney responded.

“Yeah, he’s really worried,” McCarthy said, according to Cheney.

McCarthy representatives – as well Little, Brown & Co., The publisher of Cheney’s new book – did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

McCarthy has since He defended his decision to visit with Trump.They said at the time that their meeting was an effort to unite the party before mid-2022.

In the book, the former congresswoman wrote that many other Republicans were “angry and disgusted” by McCarthy’s visit, with some members at one point mocking their leader during the trip.

“Some scoffed, circulating the Trump/McCarthy photo with a clip from the movie Jerry Maguire, in which Tom Cruise told Renee Zellweger, ‘You…whole…me,'” Cheney wrote in the book, CNN reported.

Republicans when the photo was taken They have started planning their strategy. In the 2020 elections, they won more than a dozen seats and a few seats with a majority to win back the House.

In the book of journalists Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin “This will not pass: Trump, Biden and America’s future war”, the couple reported that McCarthy told the parliament personally that he did not expect to take a photo with the former president. .

“I didn’t know they were going to take pictures,” McCarthy said, according to the book.

After the GOP won a razor-thin House majority in the 2022 election, McCarthy was the natural line to be the next speaker, but he faced pressure from several conservative stalwarts. Opposition from many far-right Republicans forced McCarthy to go through 15 rounds of voting in January before finally getting the required majority. Consider the speaker.

Trump, at the time, wanted to take credit for McCarthy’s ascension by saying that He did “a big favor”. Elevating the California Legislature to a higher level role.

But McCarthy’s tenure lasted less than a year.

It was McCarthy after Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida filed to resign in October. Removed from the speakerIn their push for massive budget cuts, they failed to eliminate many hardliners.

Cheney, seen for years as a future leader in the party, clashed sharply with Trump after Jan. 6, serving as vice chairman of the top House committee that investigated the attack that day. She wanted to be re-elected in 2022, but she was. He was eliminated in the Wyoming GOP primary Now – Republic. Harriet Hageman.

The book was released on December 5.