Former Representative Liz Cheney said she confronted Representative Kevin McCarthy in 2021 for rushing to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Donald Trump just three weeks after the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
“Mar-a-Lago? What the hell, Kevin?” Cheney asked, according to CNN, which obtained an advance copy of her upcoming book.
“They’re really worried,” McCarthy said. “Trump’s not eating, so they asked me to come see him.”
“What? You went to Mar-a-Lago because Trump’s not eating?” Cheney replied.
“Yeah, he’s really depressed,” McCarthy said.
Trump was considered by many to be politically toxic in the weeks after January 6, when he faced a second impeachment with bipartisan support.
But McCarthy helped to revive the former president’s political fortunes.
Shortly after the attack, he said on the House floor that Trump “bears responsibility.” Weeks later, he walked that back and said that while Trump bears some responsibility, so does “everybody across this country.”
He also insisted that Trump didn’t provoke his supporters into the assault on the U.S. Capitol.
Then, he rushed to Mar-a-Lago for a smiling photo op in a show of support with the former president, which may have ultimately helped him win his brief and ill-fated position as House speaker.
Cheney writes in her book that other Republican lawmakers were “angry and disgusted” by the show of fealty to Trump after January 6.
“Some mocked him, circulating the Trump/McCarthy photo along with the clip from the movie Jerry Maguire where Tom Cruise tells Renée Zellweger, ‘You.. complete… me,’” she wrote.
A spokesperson for McCarthy told CNN that Cheney suffers from “McCarthy Derangement Syndrome.”
See more of the discussion of Cheney’s book on CNN below: