Outrage, Loyalty, and the Price of Power

Trey Gowdy, former prosecutor and congressman and current author and host of Sunday Night in America on Fox News, reflects on why the ouster of his friend former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy in 2023 still bothers him and what it reveals about modern politics. McCarthy was the first Speaker to be removed by a "motion to vacate" in US history. Gowdy argues that a small faction of attention-seekers undermined majority rule and rewarded disloyalty over leadership. Gowdy traces how narrow margins and media incentives paved the way for McCarthy’s fall and the rise of his successor, the current Speaker Mike Johnson. Along the way, he contrasts today’s political chaos with the rule-bound fairness of the courtroom. The episode ultimately asks whether Americans will keep rewarding outrage or start incentivizing integrity.

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Transcript

Michael Lee : [00:00:00] When we disagree is a show about arguments, how we have them, why we have them, and their impact on our relationships and ourselves. When someone bumps into you, do you assume it was accidental or intentional? People with hostile attribution bias consistently assume malicious intent even in ambiguous situations.

This cognitive pattern identified in research on aggression terms, neutral events into perceived attacks. And escalate conflicts unnecessarily in disagreements. Hostile attribution makes every oversight seem like deliberate disrespect. Your roommate forgot to clean the kitchen. They must be passively aggressively punishing you.

Your boss assigned you extra work. Clearly they're trying to make you quit. Your friend didn't text you back. Obviously, they're giving you the silent treatment. Every ambiguous action gets interpreted through a lens of assumed hostility. What might an accident? An oversight or incompetence becomes an [00:01:00] enemy action in family dynamics.

Hostile attribution bias creates cycles of conflict. A parent's concern gets interpreted as criticism or a sibling's joke becomes a deliberate insult. Even a partner's distraction becomes intentional neglect once someone develops hostile attribution bias towards family members. Every interaction can become a potential combat zone.

The family can be a battlefield where everyone's actions hide aggressive intent Understanding, hostile attribution bias helps us pause before assuming intent. When something negative happens. Consider multiple explanations before settling on malice. Ask clarifying questions rather than launching counter attacks first.

And most importantly, recognize that your interpretation of intent might say more about your mindset than their motivation. I'm Michael Lee, professor of Communication and Director of the Civility Initiative at the College of Charleston. Our guest today on When We Disagree is Trey Gowdy. Trey has been a [00:02:00] state and federal prosecutor, and he's a bestselling author.

And a TV and podcast host. He spent eight years in the House of Representatives and he's also a husband and a father. Trey. Tell us an argument story. 

Trey Gowdy : Wow. Let me preface it by saying that lawyers have pretty thick skin. We argue for a living and then we go to dinner afterwards. And is what frustrates, my father, who's a doctor, doesn't understand it.

Some of my best friends I actually was against, and death penalty cases where the stakes are about as high as they can get the story. I guess the argument, the disagreement that I'm having a hard time getting out of my head is the way that speaker Kevin McCarthy was treated both as he began the process of becoming speaker and then less than 12 months later.

Ushered out by eight members of the [00:03:00] Republican Party and lockstep with all Democrats. But frankly, I didn't expect the Democrats to bail em out. That's not their job. I think for folks who talk about how important democracy is, I think folks who complain a lot about Senate rules on filibuster and how it takes 60 votes.

I find it, bitterly ironic that really one person led the charge to get rid of Kevin McCarthy and it was it because he is a personal friend. Yes. I have a personal stake in that also thought I was manifestly unfair. And it evidenced, that word fairness, when you think you have been treated unfairly or someone you care about has been treated unfairly, it tends to recalibrate whether you view fairness as a virtue and how you view fairness.

So [00:04:00] that's the, it happened. Look, Kevin's doing great. Kevin's happy. Kevin's doing really well on the private sector. I just think it rewarded all the wrong things in politics and some people in particular, Kevin, went out of his way to help them get elected and since when did we start rewarding dis ingenuity and a lack of loyalty in politics, but yet, in some areas it's been rewarded.

Michael Lee : For those of us who don't follow Congressional politics as closely as you do, or Intraparty squabbles, can you lay out the movement of his intro and his exit and the unfairness and where I'm gonna eventually get is to push you to talk more about whether all is fair and love and war and politics.

But first, let's start with the facts of the case. If you don't mind. 

Trey Gowdy : Sure. Kevin I'll go back maybe a little farther than what you want. Kevin did not, was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth. I'm not even sure he had a [00:05:00] spoon in his mouth. He was denied a job working for his own congressman.

His father was a firefighter. He died early. He really worked his way through the California assembly into Congress. He, along with Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor wrote that book called Young Guns. Kevin had every leadership position you can have in congress whip, minority leader, majority leader. So it was only natural that he become speaker.

Why does it matter? When you have the roles that Kevin had, you spend 99% of your spare time helping other people. Money is the lifeblood of politics. You help 'em raise money. You travel all around the country, going to other people's districts there's a lot that goes into being in leadership.

And so fast forward Republicans retake the house. There really is no [00:06:00] other candidate other than Kevin, but his own side held him hostage and wanted, concessions We want. Our person put on this committee, we want the, lay aside, the fact not a single one of those persons could have won the speakership themselves, but the margin was so narrow.

You have to get 218 votes to become speaker. And I think they had what, a four or five vote margin. So all of a sudden six people were, had all the power in the world, but it could have been any six people. It just happened to be this handful wanted to extract concessions that were disproportionate to their representation among the conference.

And he did win. You could argue he was neutered and weakened, but he won. And to my knowledge, president Trump had no complaints with his stewardship as the speaker. They actually got more passed than people thought with that narrow of a margin. [00:07:00] Then a former member of the house named Matt Gaetz filed what's called a motion to Vacate, which under house rules, a single member talk about anti-democratic.

A single member can file a motion to vacate the speaker's chair, and then so you revote again, I like this. I like hearing the phrase anti-democratic. You get elected for two years, but apparently you can have a speaker's race every day. Because one person, and so eight people voted with the Democrats to get a new speaker.

Nothing changed, nothing improved. Other than, I think Gates in particular was under ethics investigation, and he wanted the, you go back and look three, four months earlier. Congressman Gates gave an A plus to Kevin McCarthy in terms of the job he was doing an A [00:08:00] plus I. You're a professor, not me.

I think that's pretty good. I never got any, but I think it's good of the time. Few months later, he's leading the charge to get rid of him. Something happened. What was that? Something Kevin would not intervene and stop an ethics investigation into Matt Gates and. Do I have high expectations for Gates?

No, I have next to no expectations. For someone that morally bankrupt, I do have high expectations that people would've been able to see through what was happening. And there were seven members of Congress that couldn't see through it or chose not to including one from Charleston. And then there were people in the media who somehow celebrated.

The fact that the house was an utter disarray for months. How many different people did they cycle through? Jim Jordan was nominated. He didn't get it. Tom [00:09:00] Emer, Steve Scalise. That's how we wound up with Mike Johnson. Mike Johnson didn't wanna be the speaker of the house. He was a relatively obscure congressman from Louisiana.

It's just after a month, somebody's gotta do it. And Mike was able to get the different coalitions to come together, but in candor and I'll, I think the world of Mike Johnson, but what has changed? What did you accomplish by getting rid of someone who spent, over a decade of his life doing really nice things for other people who have zero memory?

Michael Lee : What do you make of these minor rules? Like this idea that you can get elected for two years, but then have a speaker's race every single day. So my question is that rule or that possibility pre-exists this incident by many years, but the use of it and the increasing use of these kinds of really aggressive nuclear tactics seems to be increasing.

What do you make of that increase and what that [00:10:00] says about congress? 

Trey Gowdy : The people claim to love a democracy. They claim to love majority rule until they're not in the majority, and then they start searching for ways. To have really faction rule. This was a really small faction that was able to undo.

I'm not great with math, but if you have 220 something members. And 210 or 12, like what you're doing, that's what, over 90%, probably close to 95% of the will of the conference was overruled by eight. Now contents, so just explain to me how you can love democracy and 8% can trump the 92%. I don't get it.

Michael Lee : I guess what I'm pushing on is the kind of where this fits into the history of both Congress and the party [00:11:00] system. So my understanding is that parties were even more factionalized. There were more factions in the seventies or the forties, right? There's way more inconsistency between the parties and the use of these kinds of anti majority tactics.

Having a speaker's race this often was a lot less. 

Trey Gowdy : I would have. To defer to you on the history of it. I would say two things. If indeed there were more factions, we didn't know about it. 

Because we didn't have 24 hour news cycles. Incumbency probably mattered more, then we had less people who were, quote influencers.

And I'm putting that in quotes. Yeah. You can. You can be a defacto participant in politics without ever having your name on the ballot. Now and let me just tell you, having talked about it and done it, doing it is a lot harder. I would also say there is a little bit of a misunderstanding about the way Congress operates.

[00:12:00] There are multiple factions within the Republican party. They're Blue State Republicans. They're people in districts that couldn't lose no matter what they did. They're appropriators, they're people that focus on defense. It is not a monolith, but you litigate all of that in November when you nominate your speaker.

All of that is litigated then. And then you nominate someone and then, and that's your party's representative in the speaker's race. So imagine like for all the people who said, how dare you not vote for Trump? And the general, if he runs the primary, if he wins the primary, you just did the exact same thing.

Kevin McCarthy won the primary and you chose to support someone else in the general election. It is the duplicity. I think that drives me nuts. 

Michael Lee : Yeah, and I think it's important to maybe ask it as a question rather than make it as a statement. There are so many people who study [00:13:00] Congress and polarization and the rise of these kinds of nuclear tactics.

Hostage taking or hostage holding techniques who look back and say, John F. Kennedy is in the same political party for some time as a Strom Thurmond, for instance. And so Factionalization was much greater back in the day, but these nuclear tactics were less. And so what has changed in the sense of the parties becoming a little bit more internally consistent ideologically and.

More nuclear tactics at the same time, whether it's the filibuster in the Senate or these kinds of hostage holding techniques in the house, 

Trey Gowdy : I, I would I put my finger on redistricting more than I do anything else. We, and we're seeing the push right now to, to reapportion and redistrict, even not at the time of the census, because if we can maximize our advantage, we have essentially.

Six solidly red districts in South Carolina [00:14:00] and one solidly blue. And a Republican's never gonna be Jim Clyburn and a Democrat's never gonna win in the district I used to have, and I don't care what the Republican does, they're not going to win. So there is no almost no incentive to want to work there.

First of all, there's no incentive to appeal. To the other side, you don't need their votes to win. Never once was I asked, why don't you work across the aisle more in eight years? Never once was I asked that question, 

Michael Lee : not one time. 

Trey Gowdy : Often ask, why don't you fight more? And I'm like, what? What? How do you define fight?

I never got a good definition for fight. I was asked, why don't you put somebody in prison? And I had to remind 'em that was my old job, not my current one. So I think there's a little bit of civic misunderstanding of what members of Congress can do, what our job [00:15:00] are. Our jobs are constituent service legislation oversight.

It's not to become Instagram influencers and political Kardashians. I don't think that's part of our. Job description. You're right, John F. Kennedy. And Strom Thurman were in the same political party and nominally Yes. And then Strom Thurman, formed his own party, if memory serves me correctly.

And yeah, that's right. I think he may have actually gotten some electoral votes, although maybe I'm wrong about that. I he was a dixiecrat when he ran. 

Michael Lee : That's right. 

Trey Gowdy : I think he genuinely changed. And I celebrate people that, that see the light and genuinely change. I'm not, I don't always as a prosecutor, I'm sometimes suspicious of the motive, but I do celebrate the change Right now, there's really not that much need in South Carolina to fight with Democrats, so we fight among ourselves [00:16:00] as Republicans.

Something is wired in us to want to fight, and I'm not an anthropologist. I don't know what that is, but people just like a fight. 

Michael Lee : You started talking about an incident with Kevin McCarthy's Ouster. That was unfair, and now we've pivoted to a different F word, which is the incentive to fight, and I want to talk about that pivoting out of the past and into the present.

In light of that, you talked about the incentives that y'all have in Congress or maybe even as public figures to fight, and the incentives don't seem. To be about fairness, if I'm putting words in your mouth. They seem to be about more fighting. The incentives are all there to provoke, to get attention, to make an enemy of somebody to blast somebody, whatever.

And so let's pivot back to why this is such a sticky memory. Is this such a sticky memory? Because it really crystallizes and encapsulates this incentive to fight and not to be fair, or not to be loyal. 

Trey Gowdy : There was no [00:17:00] fairness at all. When I go back and look at the list of grievances that they had against Kevin McCarthy, they were either nonsensical or they were they were faults, but they're really, who is the arbiter of the truth now?

Who do we look for to referee fights? The reason I liked the courtroom and didn't like Congress is there was a judge. There was a, I'd rather have a bad umpire than no umpire. There was an umpire, a judge in the courtroom, and therefore there was more civility in a death penalty case than you would have in your normal congressional hearing.

Now, most of it is sound and fury signifying nothing. It is, look at the congressional hearings now. They talk about fake eyelashes, they talk about breast augmentation. They talk about body types. I just, I wonder how any of that impacts people's lives in South Carolina. How does whether or not somebody has real or fake eyelashes have [00:18:00] any impact on the, on bettering the lives of any of your constituents?

But the goal is not fame in the honorable way. Fame, when I think of Arlington fame, when I think of people who sacrifice it is notoriety. And we've lost the ability to distinguish between the two. 

Michael Lee : Last question is a big one, as is usual on this show. You mentioned not having any judges like you do in court and politics, and that is largely true, but they could also say that we have hundreds of millions of judges and the American people are these judges.

And my question for you is how do we encourage the American people to incentivize fairness? Not necessarily just fighting, especially partisan fighting or infighting in their evaluation of politicians. 

Trey Gowdy : The end does not justify the means and when we get to the point where we think it does then we're an [00:19:00] endangereds ground as a republic.

The reason again, I like the courtroom is you had to reach the right result, but do it the right way. You had to honor the Fourth Amendment. You had to respect the right to counsel. There are rules. My, my favorite rule is the rule of completeness. I can't put in part of what you say without putting all of what you say.

You think we have the rule of completeness and politics. Do you think it's ever been possible to take a quote out of context and intentionally not include what was said before or after? It happens all day every day. So yes, elections are juries meeting but we need the jury to incentivize fairness.

You can win and do it the right way. And for the betterment long term of our republic, you have to marry the result with the process. When you get to the point that says, I wanna win no matter what, it doesn't matter [00:20:00] how I do it. I really do worry about the foundations of the republic. 

Michael Lee : Hey Gowdy, thanks so much for being on when we disagree.

Trey Gowdy : Yes, sir. Thank you.

Michael Lee : When We Disagree is recorded at the College of Charleston with creator and host Michael Lee. Recording and sound engineering by Jesse KZ and Lance Laidlaw. Reach out to us at When We disagree@gmail.com.