On the night of Jan. 6, 2023, a beleaguered Representative Kevin McCarthy, desperate to save his bid for speaker after his Republican colleagues had rejected him 13 times in a row, turned to Donald J. Trump for help.
“I’m merging in the president,” Mr. McCarthy told Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona, one of a half-dozen G.O.P. holdouts refusing to back him, on a call.
Mr. Trump, then an ex-president who still held great sway over Republican lawmakers, unloaded on Mr. Biggs, screaming expletives and demanding to know what he was doing as the congressman informed him that he and his ultraconservative anti-McCarthy bloc were “just not going to change.”
Mr. Trump told him bluntly: “I’ll never support you if you don’t support Kevin!” employing more expletives to drive home his point.
The president then demanded to speak with Representative Eli Crane, another Arizona Republican and the sole first-term lawmaker who was refusing to support Mr. McCarthy. He claimed that he had “saved” the newly elected Mr. Crane’s congressional bid, shouting, “I’ll find a challenger to him so fast his head will spin.” (More expletives were included with the threat.)
The calls, detailed in “Glory, Grief and the Gavel,” a new book by a top aide to Mr. McCarthy, offer a rare inside look at how Mr. Trump has kept his iron grip on congressional Republicans with a mix of political favors and raw intimidation.
In the book, which is set to be released next week by the conservative publisher Regnery and was obtained early by The New York Times, John Leganski, who managed the floor for Mr. McCarthy throughout his short and tumultuous tenure, gives a fly-on-the-wall account of the drama of his former boss’s once-in-a-century, 15-round floor fight to win the gavel, a battle that foreshadowed the deep dysfunction that has come to define the House under Republican control.
It is unusual for a top congressional aide to write a tell-all book, and much of Mr. Leganski’s is filled with the kind of wonky detail that only a political junkie would crave. But his real-time account of the arm-twisting sessions that Mr. Trump has employed for years to keep Republican lawmakers in line provides fresh insight into a familiar phenomenon that is seldom recounted on the record by someone who witnessed it firsthand.
Mr. Trump ultimately succeeded in bullying Republicans into doing what he wanted. Mr. Crane and Mr. Biggs, as well as the other holdouts, would all eventually vote “present” for Mr. McCarthy on the 15th ballot, allowing him to become speaker with 216 votes. But the process was ugly and only temporarily papered over deep divides that would eventually doom his speakership. Just 269 days later, Mr. McCarthy was ousted by the same band of holdouts, plunging the House into further chaos.
In an interview, Mr. Leganski, who listened to Mr. Trump’s furious and profanity-filled calls on speakerphone, said hearing them was almost an out-of-body experience.
“It was incredibly intense for the holdouts,” he said. “They could barely get a word in. It did not surprise me that the others began to duck our calls, because I would never want to be on the receiving end of that.”
(Once word got around that a call from Mr. McCarthy’s phone number was actually a call from Mr. Trump, two more holdouts, Representatives Matt Rosendale of Montana and Bob Good of Virginia, dodged them altogether.)
Mr. Leganski began his career on Capitol Hill as an intern for Mr. McCarthy when he was a college student and then joined his team as a staff assistant after graduating from Stanford University. At the age of 25, he became the youngest-ever floor director in the House and the first Republican aide to work the floor for the majority whip, majority leader, minority leader and speaker of the House — all working for Mr. McCarthy.
Throughout Mr. McCarthy’s term as speaker, Mr. Leganski was often a fixture seated next to him on the House floor, often poring over a vote sheet that simply was not working out the way his boss needed it to.
He now works as a partner at Harbinger Strategies, the government affairs firm.
In the interview, he said he wrote the book out of a sense of obligation to offer a document for future House aides who may find themselves in uncharted territory, the way he did.
“There was literally no one alive who was around the last time a multiballot speaker’s election happened who we could consult with,” he said. “I hope all the current and future staffers out there are able to take this and learn from our experiences.”
