Kevin McCarthy Says GOP ‘Will Unify’ Despite Divisions Over Donald Trump
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said Thursday that the Republican Party will find a way to unify in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s presidency.
Per The Washington Examiner, speaking to a group of reporters, McCarthy reassured conservatives that the efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election have not created a permanent rift in the Republican Party.
“At the end of the day, we will unify because our policies are right, which will unify us around,” McCarthy said, explaining that Republicans will hold a conference next week to resolve their differences and discuss the direction of the party going forward.
McCarthy said that Republicans “allow differences of opinion inside our conference” and noted that many expected the GOP to lose seats in the House this election, but the opposite happened.
“This is the same leadership team with the ranking members and others who came five seats away from winning the majority, and everybody in America thought we were going to lose 20 seats.”
Trump spent months rejecting the results of the election and did so even after courts across the nation dismissed his campaign’s voter fraud lawsuits as baseless. His refusal to accept the outcome of the presidential race culminated on January 6, when a violent mob stormed the U.S. Capitol.
Trump’s actions were endorsed by a large group of Republican lawmakers, but others rejected them, with party leadership condemning the former president for inciting violence and putting the lives of elected officials in danger by urging his supporters to fight for him.
Ten Republicans in the lower chamber voted to impeach Trump for inciting what was described as an insurrection.
Notably, House Republican Conference Chairwoman Liz Cheney voted for impeachment as well. “There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution,” she said after casting her vote.
This, apparently, angered some of Cheney’s colleagues, who signed a petition calling on her to resign.
McCarthy made it clear that he does not support removing Cheney from her position, but stressed that Trump will remain an influential voice in conservative politics for years to come.
“Going forward, every former president still has a role within their party,” McCarthy said, noting that Trump “brought people to the party that hadn’t been involved before.”
Polling suggests that Republican voters overwhelmingly support Trump and his actions in the days leading up to the Capitol riots.
As previously reported by The Inquisitr, in a recent Axios-Ipsos poll, 64 percent of Republican voters said that they approve of Trump’s behavior and more than half of them said that he should run again in 2024.
