Kevin McCarthy's Trump gaffe exposes Republican dilemma

Spare a thought for Kevin McCarthy, the Republican Speaker of the House, who this week is tying himself in pretzels over Donald Trump.

On Tuesday, McCarthy caused a political firestorm when he told a television interviewer that he didn't know whether Mr Trump is the strongest Republican candidate for the 2024 presidential election. But within a day, Mr McCarthy was backtracking, telling Breitbart News that "Trump is stronger today than in 2016".

The Speaker's critique was pretty mild, the reaction from Trump supporters was anything but. "McCarthy stepped in it," says Bryan Lanza, a former Trump staffer who remains close to the former president. "[McCarthy] can't afford to be seen as soft on Trump or he loses his Speakership."

Mr McCarthy is not the only one to have doubts about Mr Trump. Many in the party's leadership are worried that Mr Trump will win the nomination only to lose the presidential election. They feel he has too many weaknesses. They would love to see an alternative, someone who America's swing voters might prefer.

At the moment, however, that alternative doesn't look likely. Indeed, McCarthy's swift, public clean-up operation tells us a lot about Trump's hold on his party.

Despite being twice indicted, plagued by scandals and ongoing legal investigations, and up against multiple rivals, Mr Trump is still the overwhelming favourite to win his party's nomination for the presidency. A poll this week from NBC News showed him with 51% support among Republican voters, that's up from 46% in April.

Here are three things that help explain what is going on:

Donald Trump has been found liable of sexual assault, and he has been charged under the Espionage Act with keeping classified documents after he left the White House. He is also facing charges in New York over alleged payments made to a porn star during his 2016 presidential campaign.

None of those things have ever happened before. And there could be more indictments coming, on whether he tried to steal the election in Georgia and over his role in the 6 January Capitol riot. That's a lot of legal headaches.

But the more legal charges he faces, the more Mr Trump can persuade his supporters that he is the victim of a political vendetta. "The indictments helped him with the base and helped him with fundraising," Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee and now a vocal opponent of Mr Trump, told me. "And when the indictment comes out of Georgia, his poll numbers will go up again," he adds.

Of course, this could change in a general election campaign when swing voters may decide they don't want to support someone who's accused of committing crimes.

As of today there are more than a dozen Republicans running for president. Some are running as the alternate-Trump, some are running as the anti-Trump and some are just trying to ignore him. Polls suggest about half of Republican voters don't love the former president, but for now they are splitting their allegiance pretty evenly between all those other candidates. Divide and conquer was a successful Trump strategy in 2016 - it seems to be working again.

But what about Ron DeSantis, the Florida Governor, who was supposed to be the big challenger to Trump? Well, so far, his numbers are falling, not rising. It's no secret in Republican circles that Mr DeSantis has been a weak candidate, the more people see of him on the trail, the less they like him, not more. "None of the other candidates matter," is Mr Steele's conclusion. It would, he says, take an act of God to dislodge Trump from the nomination.

The days of Ronald Reagan's optimistic Morning in America campaign are over. This Republican Party is looking for someone who can fight for them on cultural issues, like abortion and transgender rights, and who isn't afraid to take on even the Republican establishment. There is no better fighter than Donald Trump, the man who physically took on another billionaire, and won, at a 2007 wrestling match. No candidate commands attention and whips up crowd anger like Mr Trump.

Remember that at this same stage in the 2016 election campaign, he was polling at a mere 6% in the Republican field. But rally by rally, debate by debate, he pushed the other candidates off the stage. He did it by attacking them hard (with words that may have sometimes felt like punches) and by telling voters he was as mad as they were about the state of America.

Still, all the while, the alternative candidates to Mr Trump continue to hope that primary voters will tire of the chaos surrounding the former president or that his legal troubles will drag him down - and by proxy - raise them up.

That doesn't worry the Trump camp. "No one is beating Trump," Mr Lanza, the former Trump staffer, says confidently. "I assume everyone still running is auditioning for a Cabinet position [in a Trump White House]."