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Happy Friday morning. Welcome to The White House Correspondents’ Dinner weekend. Please stay safe.

We’re going to spend a few moments this morning digging into what has been a challenging week for the House Republican Conference and its leader, Kevin McCarthy.

To review: The NYT’s Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns reported that McCarthy informed other House GOP leaders he was going to tell former President Donald Trump he should resign rather than be convicted by the Senate for his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection. McCarthy denied making the comments – until JMart and Burns released the tape.

McCarthy also said that some of his GOP colleagues – namely Reps. Matt Gaetz (Fla.) and Mo Brooks (Ala.) – were endangering other lawmakers with their inflammatory rhetoric leading up the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. House Minority Whip Steve Scalise said on the tape that Gaetz may have been breaking the law by verbally targeting other lawmakers. Scalise apologized to the Florida Republican.

McCarthy and Scalise got through the week banged up yet still on track to be speaker and majority leader if Republicans take the House in November.

At this moment, though, the GOP leadership is on edge. We’ve gotten numerous queries about what else may come from the JMart-Burns book. There’s serious angst in the leadership about who taped these private phone calls. There’s also lots of finger pointing over who’s to blame for this period of upheaval.

Our focus is always on power – how it’s gained and wielded – and we’re going to dig in a bit to the dynamics McCarthy faces during the coming months. Again, we don’t have a crystal ball, but it looks increasingly as though Republicans are going to win the House majority, so we’ll work under that hypothesis.

The four dynamics working in McCarthy’s favor

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Fundraising. McCarthy’s life is, and has been, the House Republican Conference. He’s a prolific fundraiser, and his members know that. Not only does McCarthy raise a lot of money for himself and the National Republican Congressional Committee, he also raises money for the Congressional Leadership Fund and American Action Network (under strict limits), as well as GOP candidates and state and local parties. Put simply, the House GOP political operation is kept flush because of McCarthy’s fundraising and travel. If Republicans win the majority, McCarthy will have a lot of chits with a lot of members who are coming to Washington on the back of his hard work.

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Any opposition is small and unorganized. McCarthy doesn’t really have formal opposition among Republicans at this point. Questions and doubts? Yes, sure. There’s a lot of chatter right now among members, and between lawmakers and reporters. But are Republicans committed to voting against McCarthy? No. Gaetz is the only GOPer actively agitating against McCarthy probable ascension to speaker. Gaetz, though, is under federal criminal investigation for child sex trafficking, so his position doesn’t really carry a lot of weight inside the conference.

Yet as we’ve seen in recent House GOP history, in order to knock off a speaker (or speaker to be), you need to have an alternative candidate for the job, plus a large bloc of GOP lawmakers organized around that alternative. Scalise is backing McCarthy, as is House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (N.Y.). Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who has opposed McCarthy in the past, is his close ally at the moment. Remember the old maxim of leadership races – you can’t beat someone with no one. As of right now, there’s no one but McCarthy.

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History is on his side. If Republicans take the majority, McCarthy will have led the GOP to two consecutive winning cycles. The majority would be his, in a large sense. This isn’t 2015, when the then-50-year-old McCarthy was trying to succeed then Speaker John Boehner during the middle of a cycle. It’s incredibly difficult to see the GOP dumping McCarthy after he led them to the majority. As McCarthy says, it really doesn’t make sense to change the coach after the Super Bowl.

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Time is on McCarthy’s side. The reason this week was so filled with drama is because Congress was in session. The House GOP had a conference meeting and reporters were at the ready with questions. But now the House is gone until May 10. And when McCarthy is out of Washington, good things happen for him. The majority – and the speaker’s gavel – will be won out there, not in D.C.

Consider this: The House will only be in session for eight weeks – 32 legislative days – between now and the start of the August recess. There are only 43 legislative days until the midterm elections. In other words, there isn’t a ton of time left for hijinx.

The four dynamics working against McCarthy

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Trump. Remember the president who sent his team to Capitol Hill to negotiate legislative packages, only to threaten to veto those packages when Fox News said something nasty? Yes. Trump is simultaneously McCarthy’s biggest asset and liability. Trump presumably knows that McCarthy is likely to win the speakership, and that’s why he’s backing him. But maybe McCarthy’s grip weakens in the coming month, giving Trump an opportunity to play games. Sure, Trump and McCarthy have been useful to each other during the last six years. But also remember that Trump has absolutely zero loyalty to anyone besides blood relatives.

There’s one human being who knows what Trump is really thinking, and that’s Trump. Oftentimes, as we all know, even Trump doesn’t seem to know what he’s going to do until he does it. Team McCarthy and its allies took pains to get the message out this week that the 45th president was feeling just fine about McCarthy. But who knows what Trump really feels? Trump is susceptible to – how do we say this nicely – outside influences. So, in the heat of the moment in November, December or January, who knows if Trump plays up McCarthy’s by then two-year-old musings that he should resign.

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The other shoe. The House Republican Conference has given McCarthy a pass here. But who knows what else will come out in the next few months? If anything does drop, it’s feasible to think that McCarthy’s fellow GOP colleagues won’t be as charitable to him as they were this time. This isn’t 2015 for McCarthy. But he’s also got to carry the burden of that as well.

→	Why McCarthy? McCarthy’s spent decades in politics, as a staffer, state legislator and member of Congress. He has a solid conservative voting and leadership record.

Yet McCarthy isn’t known for any major legislative achievement or victory. He’s not an expert in any one policy area or topic, and he’s never chaired a major House committee – or a minor one either. Consider the last three speakers: Nancy Pelosi was an appropriator, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee and served on the Ethics Committee. Paul Ryan chaired the House Ways and Means and Budget committees. Boehner chaired the Education and Workforce Committee and was responsible for negotiating No Child Left Behind, in addition to being a successful businessman before entering Congress.

McCarthy’s specialties are politics and relationships. Every party leader must have the ability to build those alliances, but in many ways, this is McCarthy’s chief claim to the top rung of leadership. He understands members and politics, he has good instincts, especially on how members will vote. What would McCarthy do if he were in charge? And what would he be like?

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The press. Let’s put it simply – McCarthy’s once cordial relationship with the D.C. press corps has deteriorated badly. There are lots of reasons for this, and we don’t need to review all of them. The last three speakers – Pelosi, Ryan and Boehner – all had generally good relationships with reporters. Not all the time, of course. All three went through ups-and-downs with the Hill and broader national press corps.

McCarthy, though, is definitely on a downward trend with reporters right now. He can stick to friendly interviews on conservative media, but the mainstream press is still going to write about him all the time, like it or not. And other members – the Republicans who will have to vote for him in January – have to deal with the press. Donors read what the press writes. There’s also that one very notable consumer of all things TV and social media – Donald Trump.

Remember this: Politics – especially congressional politics – isn’t a morality game. At least not right now with the Trump-aligned GOP. At worst, McCarthy lied. At best, McCarthy is guilty of making declarative statements when he shouldn’t have. Either way, today’s House Republican Conference wants him as its leader. For now.

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