Trump Endorses Jordan as Hunt for Support in House Speaker Race Continues

WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump, long known for his penchant for the wee small hours, delivered a Friday morning eye-opener when he threw his support behind Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, in the race to become the next House speaker.

Though the endorsement is no surprise — Jordan was a key ally of Trump’s during both of the ex-president’s impeachment hearings — the statement posted to his personal social media platform is a clear signal to his far-right followers in Congress of how he expects them to vote.

“Congressman Jim Jordan has been a STAR long before making his very successful journey to Washington, D.C.,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social message posted shortly after midnight. 

“He will be a GREAT Speaker of the House, & has my Complete & Total Endorsement!” the former president said.

However many, if any, votes Trump’s endorsement brings to Jordan, it is still unclear whether he or Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., the current House majority leader, will be able to cobble together enough votes in the fractious caucus to succeed ousted former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif.

As of late Thursday, only about a quarter of the 221 Republicans in the House had committed themselves one way or another, this after a full day of both candidates working the phones — and the hallways and the staircases and the elevators — of the Capitol trying to garner support.

On Friday, Scalise and Jordan will again be making the rounds, having scheduled meetings with the House Freedom Caucus, the Western Caucus, and members of the freshmen class of Congress.

The plan right now is for members of the Republican conference to gather for a closed debate between the two candidates Monday night, with a vote, among GOP members only, to follow sometime Tuesday.

If these pieces come together in a relatively smooth manner, an election on the House floor could follow as soon as Wednesday. If not, the process could potentially drag on into the following week.

For both men success in the speaker’s race will require them to pull off a balancing act that McCarthy never mastered.

In the case of Jordan, a co-founder of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, that will mean finding some way to convince mainstream, centrist Republicans that he’ll be reasonable and able to advance a GOP agenda.

Though also a conservative, Scalise is philosophically closer to the center than Jordan, so his challenge will be to garner the support of the angry right-wing faction of his party.

If neither succeeds, it would effectively throw the speaker’s race wide open.

In the meantime, 45 House Republicans have signed a letter to the conference seeking to void or at least dramatically rewrite the motion-to-vacate rule that McCarthy agreed to in January and which cost him his job some 269 days later.

“Earlier this week, eight Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives joined in an alliance with 208 Democrats to adopt a motion to vacate the speaker of the House,” the letter says. “That translates to less than 4% of our Republican conference joining with all Democrats to override the will of the remaining 96% of House Republicans on one of the most consequential votes the House has taken in over a century.

“Worse still,” it continues, “just last Friday, seven of these eight individuals also joined with Democrats to defeat the most conservative funding and border security package in history.

“Ashamed and embarrassed by what happened on the floor this week, we refuse to allow the eight members who abandoned and undermined our conference to dictate every outcome in policy and personnel for the remainder of this Congress, including the upcoming selection of the speaker of the House,” the signers said.

“We cannot allow our majority to be dictated to by the alliance between the chaos caucus and the minority party that will do nothing more than guarantee the failure of our next speaker,” the letter continues. “The injustice we all witnessed cannot go unaddressed — lest we bear responsibility for the consequences that follow. Our conference must address fundamental changes to the structure of our majority to ensure success for the American people.”

The fallout from McCarthy’s downfall is also having repercussions for bipartisanship, with several Republican members of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus threatening to leave the group after their Democratic colleagues failed to act to save the former speaker’s job.

During an interview with Fox News Friday morning, Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., the Republican co-chair of the Problem Solvers Caucus, said as the hours ticked down toward a potential government shutdown, a deal was struck to keep the government open and at the same time, potentially give McCarthy a chance to save himself.

“We don’t believe in government shutdowns,” Fitzpatrick said of the caucus. “We issued a framework for avoiding one, and the deal we pulled together was , in many ways, consistent with our framework.

“Then Speaker McCarthy pulled a rabbit out of his hat and saved our country from a shut down. The Senate stood down and took up the House bill,” he said.

“Now, we were under the assumption, the logical assumption, that that kind of behavior would be rewarded, particularly from our colleagues across the aisle,” Fitzpatrick said. 

Instead, three days later, Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., made good on his threat to introduce the motion to vacate the chair.

“It all happened so quickly,” Fitzpatrick said, seeming to still be in a daze from the fast-paced series of events.

“So we went to our colleagues and said, ‘Can you at least buy us some time? Forty-eight hours. Because we can’t rewrite a 300-page rules package to make the House work in a more bipartisan manner in the eight hours we have [before this vote]. It’s impossible,’” he said.

“Our request was simply that they vote to table the motion. And not even that, to simply vote ‘present’ on the motion. That would have bought us some time,” Fitzpatrick said.

“In the end, that didn’t happen, and that’s why there are so many Republicans in our group that are very, very upset — and add me to that list,” he said.

Fitzpatrick said the Problem Solvers Caucus plans to get together next week to discuss its future.

“This is a member-driven group, and we’re going to decide, as a group, as a family, how to proceed,” he said, adding, “I don’t think the group is going to end. There needs to be some forum where Democrats and Republicans talk, particularly with the close margins in divided chambers … but I would say that the members are going to decide what that’s going to look like going forward.”

Dan can be reached at [email protected] and at https://twitter.com/DanMcCue