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Happy Wednesday morning.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy was in Wyoming this week for his annual donor retreat, which was loaded with millionaires and billionaires (including Elon Musk, the world’s richest person) who want him to become the next speaker of the House.

Yet McCarthy still stole away from his own event to raise money for Harriet Hageman, the Republican challenger who last night trounced Rep. Liz Cheney in the GOP primary for Wyoming’s at-large House seat. The outcome was never in doubt. Hageman had been up more than 20 points in two public polls, and the race was called within moments of the polls closing.

In a sign of what’s to come for Cheney, sometime early this morning, the defeated Wyoming Republican filed a form with the Federal Election Commission to reorganize her campaign account – flush with $7 million as of the end of July – to be a leadership PAC called “The Great Task.”

Cheney’s defeat was seen as a win for former President Donald Trump, who gloated over the end of her congressional career by posting “You’re fired” on his social media network.

Yet McCarthy was probably just as happy. While the two were never that close, Cheney was a useful ally to McCarthy in the House GOP leadership at one point, an old school Republican who served as a counterweight to more hardline junior members. Cheney even turned down a Senate run in 2020 – a race she’d have easily won – to remain in the House. There was speculation that Cheney could be speaker herself one day.

That’s all over with now. Cheney may run for president in 2024 as an independent. Or mount some other effort to prevent Trump from getting back to the White House, the defiant three-term lawmaker vowed in her concession speech.

The grudge between McCarthy and Cheney has become deeply personal. McCarthy and his allies think Cheney is an opportunist with poor political instincts. And Cheney and her team think McCarthy is a political coward who put his own ambition before the good of the country.

Both members are convinced history will prove them right.

Cheney’s defeat represents the culmination of McCarthy’s calculation that the House GOP needed to remain steadfast Trump allies and will tolerate little or no dissent in the ranks.

Just hours after the Jan. 6 insurrection, even as the tear gas still wafted through a blood-stained Capitol, McCarthy and 146 other House Republicans refused to certify Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory. Just weeks after Trump left Washington in disgrace, McCarthy visited him at Mar-a-Lago, kicking off the process of resurrecting Trump’s national standing. And McCarthy worked to derail a separate House investigation into the insurrection, even repudiating a deal that one of his own Republicans made with Democrats to create a bipartisan commission to look into the Capitol attack.

And now, should McCarthy become the speaker in January 2023, he’ll preside over a conference filled with those either disinterested, unwilling, unable or afraid to speak out against Trump. And the result of that dynamic is that the House GOP will be made up of loud voices who want to impeach Biden, investigate the Jan. 6 select committee’s investigation, defund the FBI and take Trump’s revenge tour to the House floor.

Cheney’s exit – combined with the retirement of Reps. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), Fred Upton (R-Mich.) and other middle-of-the-road Republicans – ensures that there will be practically no moderate check to the conference’s red-meat impulses.

Cheney’s 30-plus point loss to Hageman – who once called Trump a “racist and a xenophobe” and led an effort to block him from getting the 2016 GOP presidential nomination – is the coda to a long, tumultuous period for House Republicans.

Instead of running for the Senate seat being vacated by the late Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.), Cheney decided to stick in the House – much like her father. Cheney was once seen as a rival to McCarthy and House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, a conservative who could push either man aside, as the Wyoming Republican did to Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) when she successfully ran for the GOP conference chair post that CMR held.

But Trump’s behavior in office led the conservative Cheney to become the 45th president’s No. 1 antagonist inside the Republican Party. That, in turn, caused Cheney huge problems with her colleagues.

Cheney survived one attempt by House Republicans to push her out of the leadership. In February 2021, Cheney – with McCarthy’s backing – easily defeated an effort to oust her. That vote was 145-61, largely on the strength of McCarthy’s intervention. Cheney’s team loathes the idea that McCarthy helped her win, but he did.

Cheney, though, seemed to take that outcome as an approval of her independence in the post-Trump GOP, including her vote to impeach the former president. McCarthy was hoping to put the period of unrest behind him.

By May 2021, McCarthy had dropped his support for Cheney. The Wyoming Republican had spent the previous three months continuing to lambaste Trump, much to McCarthy’s chagrin. He preferred the leadership stay focused on winning the majority and ignore the former president. Plus, Cheney’s detractors said she was a paltry fundraiser for the party who was too focused on herself. McCarthy and Scalise paired up to back Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) as Cheney’s replacement in the leadership. This time, Cheney lost to Stefanik, 134-46.

Cheney, though wasn’t giving up her anti-Trump crusade. In July 2021, she and Kinzinger accepted Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s offer to join the select committee looking into Jan. 6. Cheney was tapped as the vice chair, giving her the national platform to continue to rail against Trump while giving Democrats some bipartisan cover for the probe.

In turn, McCarthy rallied GOP support behind Hageman, holding a fundraiser for Cheney’s rival despite the fact that she was a virtual no-name. Scalise, who doesn’t endorse against incumbent Republican lawmakers, held back and didn’t lend his name to the effort.

Cheney was able to raise more than $15 million for the race compared to $4.4 million for Hageman, according to FEC records. But in this case, money didn’t mean much in a state that’s both overwhelmingly Republican and overwhelmingly pro-Trump.

Cheney’s defeat is particularly gratifying to McCarthy, who has staked his political future on his alliance with Trump and sees her loss as a moment of vindication.

Look across the Capitol, and you’ll see no such Trump litmus test in the Senate GOP, where the likes of Cheney – a traditional, Bush-flavored Republican – still can be found. Some GOP senators openly criticize Trump without fear of reprisal. As a matter of fact, many of Trump’s top critics – Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) – have seen their legislative stock rise this Congress.

Perhaps it’s better for Cheney’s goal to be out of the Congress next year. She and Kinzinger can dedicate their remaining time in office to finishing up the Jan. 6 probe and helping write its final report. The “Great Task” will still await them.

“As we leave here, let us resolve that we will stand together – Republicans, Democrats and independents – against those who would destroy our republic,” Cheney told supporters. That doesn’t sound like someone who is going to disappear soon.

Also: Following Cheney’s defeat, it’s instructive to look at how the other nine House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump in 2021 have fared.

→	Kinzinger is retiring.

→	Upton is retiring.

→	Rep. Tom Rice (R-S.C.) lost in a GOP primary.

→	Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.) advanced to the general election in a top-two, nonpartisan primary.

→	Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-Wash.) lost in the primary.

→	Rep. Anthony Gonzalez (R-Ohio) is retiring.

→	Rep. Peter Meijer (R-Mich.) lost in a GOP primary.

→	Rep. David Valadao (R-Calif.) advanced to the general election in a top-two, nonpartisan primary.

→	Rep. John Katko (R-N.Y.) is retiring.

Valadao is facing a tough Democratic challenge in November. It’s very possible that come January 2023, the House Republican conference will only have one member who voted to impeach Trump.

— Jake Sherman, Max Cohen and John Bresnahan

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