- McCarthy partly acknowledged the trouble with Trump's refusal to accept losing the 2020 election.
- But the House minority leader didn't sound too bothered by it, according to a new book.
After the 2020 presidential election, a confidant asked House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy whether '"we're headed down a dangerous road'" with President Donald Trump's refusal to acknowledge his election loss.
"'Maybe,' said McCarthy. 'Maybe so,'" according to a new book, "Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind," released Tuesday.
But McCarthy "did not sound especially bothered by this possibility," author Robert Draper wrote. He looked ahead, instead, to the prospect of gaining a House Republican majority in the 2022 midterm elections, when voters would likely oppose the new president's party on the ballot.
"'The silver lining,' Kevin McCarthy said, 'is that I have a pretty good chance of being Speaker in two years,'" Draper wrote.
McCarthy's office didn't immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.
McCarthy predicted a day before the election that former President Trump would want to say it was "'stolen and the whole thing was rigged'" if he lost, the book says.
"'There are going to be stages of grief,'" he told the confidant who had asked what McCarthy would do if Trump didn't concede.
He said there would come a point at which he and then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would have to issue a joint statement. But after the Electoral College confirmed Joe Biden won the presidency on December 14, 2020, McConnell issued congratulations publicly while McCarthy held back.
"'I'm trying to get through to him,' he said of Trump to his confidant. 'I'm trying to give him time,'" Draper wrote.
McCarthy was among the 147 Republicans who voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election results after a pro-Trump mob stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. That vote came after an angry confrontation he had with Trump, telling him, "They're trying to fucking kill me!" on the day of the attack.
Months after taking that vote, he claimed that Republicans aren't "questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election" and said, "I think that is all over with." Trump and his supporters do, in fact, continue to deny the 2020 election results and perpetuate the lie that it was stolen.
McCarthy says he's confident Republicans will win control of the House in this fall's elections. In an interview published Monday, he told Punchbowl News that if he can't win the gavel after securing a House majority, it's clearly "not God's plan for me to be speaker."