Former President Donald Trump was nominated for House speaker on Thursday but lost badly, failing to secure the hundreds of votes needed to pick up the gavel.
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) nominated Trump in the seventh and eighth votes, in protest against Rep. Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), the top House Republican who faced a conservative rebellion over his bid for speaker. Gaetz was the only lawmaker to vote for Trump.
“This ends one of two ways: Kevin McCarthy withdraws from the race, or we make the jacket inevitable,” Gaetz said reporter afterwards.
There is nothing in the US Constitution that says the speaker has to be a member of the House of Representatives. But a non-member being a speaker was considered extremely rare, and Gaetz’s vote was considered a stunt.
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Trump urged GOP lawmakers to support McCarthy, calling out individual members who are resistant to his leadership.
“Republicans, don’t turn a big victory into a big and embarrassing defeat. It’s time to celebrate, you deserve it. Kevin McCarthy will do a good job, maybe a good job – just watch! Trump wrote Wednesday on the Truth Social social media platform.
The anti-McCarthy faction — which includes up to 20 GOP lawmakers — has yet to follow his advice. Nor had he been swayed by some of McCarthy’s reported major concessions to House procedure.
“The president needs to tell Kevin McCarthy that, sir, you don’t have a voice and it’s time to step down,” Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), a staunch Trump supporter, said in a floor speech Wednesday.
Trump is not the first former president to receive a vote in the speaker election. John Quincy Adams accepted two votes in the 1835 speaker election, although he was serving as a representative in the House of Representatives at the time.
However, Trump is the first president to try to overturn the results of a losing presidential election, and thus the first president to do so and then be nominated for the highest position in the US government.
The House has not required more than one ballot to elect a speaker since December 1923. The election ended after nine ballots – and this week’s fiasco in the House is likely to beat that record. In 1855, the process took 133 ballots and two months to complete.