Few Americans are shedding tears for Kevin McCarthy. The former House speaker engendered little public sympathy as he tried, and ultimately failed, to wrangle a narrow and fractured Republican majority into a functioning governing body. His ouster on Tuesday has, in the short term, paralyzed Congress and increased the likelihood of a prolonged government shutdown in the coming weeks.

Republicans are only now beginning to contemplate the significant political ramifications of tossing McCarthy. Retaining their narrow majority in the House next year was already going to be a challenge. But the GOP will now have to defend its four-seat advantage without a leader who, for all of McCarthy’s political shortcomings, was widely recognized as its best fundraiser, candidate recruiter, and campaign strategist. “They just took out our best player,” a rueful Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma told me on Thursday, referring to the eight renegade Republicans who voted to remove McCarthy.

Cole, the chair of the Rules Committee and a 22-year veteran of the House, was a McCarthy loyalist to the end. He could become his successor if neither of the declared GOP candidates, Majority Leader Steve Scalise and Representative Jim Jordan, the Judiciary Committee chair, are able to secure the votes needed to become speaker. Cole has declined offers to run for the job himself—he told me the chances that the gavel lands in his hands are “very low, and if I have anything to say about it, zero”—but as someone with good relationships across the party, he’s seen as a solid backup.

For now, Cole is, like other McCarthy allies, still seething at the unprecedented vote to overthrow the speaker and is backing efforts to change the House rules so that whoever replaces McCarthy does not face the same ever-present threat. “We put sharp knives in the hands of children, and they used them,” Cole said.

[Read: Kevin McCarthy’s brief speakership meets its end]

In an hour-long phone interview, he told me that the hard-liners’ revolt against McCarthy could “very easily” cost the GOP its majority next year. “I think these guys materially hurt our chances to hold the majority,” Cole said. “That’s just the reality.”

McCarthy is neither a policy wonk nor a brilliant legislator. But his strengths  were underappreciated, Cole said. Committees he controlled raised more than half a billion dollars for the House Republican majority in recent years. McCarthy has also played a leading role in persuading promising Republicans to run for pivotal House seats. “This guy was by far the best political speaker that I’ve seen,” he told me. (Democrats and more than a few Republicans would dispute that assertion, pointing to the fact that Republicans won a much slimmer majority under McCarthy’s leadership in 2022 than they were expected to.)

“This is going to cost us candidates,” Cole said, and “God knows how much money.” The spectacle of an internal leadership war bringing the House to a halt also undercuts the GOP’s credibility as a governing party, he lamented. “They just messed up the House. They had no exit plan, no alternative strategy, no alternative candidate.”

Both Jordan and Scalise are more conservative than McCarthy, as is a third potential candidate, Representative Kevin Hern of Oklahoma, who heads the Republican Study Committee, the GOP’s largest bloc of conservative members. None of them, however, can match McCarthy’s fundraising prowess. Cole told me he’s “leaning pretty strongly” toward Scalise, the second-ranking House Republican. Donald Trump has endorsed Jordan, but Scalise is nevertheless considered the favorite to win the party’s nomination for speaker in a secret ballot based on his years in the leadership and because he’s more palatable to Republicans in swing districts. The internal vote, expected next week, will test how much sway the former president has in a leadership battle that typically plays out more in private than in public. (GOP lawmakers reportedly recoiled at plans for Fox News to host a televised debate between the candidates, who normally make their pitches behind closed doors.)

Scalise is well-liked within his party, but he’s undergoing treatment for blood cancer, which Cole acknowledged was a concern for some Republicans. “People are worried,” he said. “They’re worried that we’re going to put him in a job where he hurts himself.” In 2017, Scalise underwent several months of rehab after being shot by a would-be assassin targeting Republican lawmakers at a baseball practice.

Jordan is by far the more bombastic of the two. A former college-wrestling champion, he helped found the House Freedom Caucus and made his name as a conservative foe of former Speaker (and fellow Ohioan) John Boehner. Jordan’s antagonism toward the leadership alienated many rank-and-file Republicans then, but he struck something of a truce with McCarthy, his onetime rival. McCarthy didn’t stand in the way of Jordan’s promotion to become the top Republican on first the House Oversight Committee and then on the Judiciary Committee, a perch from which he’s launched aggressive investigations into President Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Jordan returned the favor by backing McCarthy’s bid to become speaker, sticking by him during all 15 rounds of voting in January and during this week’s revolt.

[Peter Wehner: Kevin McCarthy got what he deserved]

Scalise would likely have an easier time than Jordan winning the 218 Republican votes needed to secure the speakership in the public House floor vote. Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, who led the effort to topple McCarthy, has said he would support either candidate. Jordan’s close ties to Trump and his disdain for bipartisan compromise could make him a problem for politically vulnerable Republicans, particularly those from New York and California who represent districts that Biden carried in 2020. His nomination would also likely revive questions about his handling of allegations of sexual misconduct against a wrestling-team physician at the Ohio State University when Jordan served as a coach. Jordan has denied wrongdoing, but former student athletes have said he knew about the physician’s abuse and failed to report it.

The scandal could haunt Republicans come election time if Jordan is the speaker, but the issue animating the leadership race is whether to, as Cole put it, “take away the knives” and restrict the procedural tool, known as the “motion to vacate,” that Gaetz used to remove McCarthy. “We’ve driven out three speakers now with this weapon,” Cole said. Boehner resigned in 2015 after it became clear that he might lose the speakership in a floor vote, and his successor, Paul Ryan, was under increasing pressure from his right flank when he chose to retire three years later.

The Main Street Caucus, a coalition of more pragmatic and ideologically flexible Republicans, is pushing to change the rules, and a few members have said they’ll only support a candidate who promises to do so. Currently, any single lawmaker can force a vote on a motion to vacate. To raise that threshold, Republicans might need votes from Democrats, who refused to help rescue McCarthy. “I think it would get a lot of Democratic support,” Cole said. “We’d have to endure another hour of ‘I told you so.’ That’s fair enough.” Though he was critical of Democrats for voting to remove McCarthy, he said he understood why they did. “If we had the opportunity to take out [Nancy] Pelosi,” Cole said, “we probably would have done the same thing.”

He recounted a conversation with a long-serving House Democrat, Representative Bill Pascrell of New Jersey, who alluded to worries that dissident Democrats could use the same tactic to oust a future speaker in their party. “We have our nuts too,” Cole recalled him whispering in an elevator. (Pascrell did not respond to a request for comment.)

The outcome of the rules debate could determine when Republicans are able to elect a speaker, reopen the House, and repair the harm they’ve done to their chances in next year’s elections. For his part, Cole is hoping that whoever they choose can quickly win a majority in a floor vote next week. And if they don’t? “Then,” he said, “it’s really a chaotic situation.”

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Sam Bankman-Fried’s image as a man indifferent to authority helped him ascend. Now, on trial for fraud, the onetime enfant terrible of finance is colliding with an arena of American life where decorum counts.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Trump reportedly divulges nuclear secrets. Comedians only care about comedy. The standard advice for concussions is wrong.

The Rules Apply

Sam Bankman-Fried’s parents looked on, stony-faced, as a former employee and friend of their son testified against him in federal court on Wednesday. Asked to identify the defendant, the witness described Bankman-Fried as the man wearing a suit and a purple tie. A year ago, Bankman-Fried was the golden boy of the tech world; observers had no indication that he would wind up in court facing federal fraud charges. That he would appear in a suit and tie, having traded his shaggy curls for close-cropped hair, seemed likewise improbable. The onetime maverick of Silicon Valley looked, from where I was sitting a few rows back in the courtroom, like any other defendant.

The rules, for a time, didn’t apply to Sam Bankman-Fried. Throughout his rise as a crypto leader, Bankman-Fried eschewed formality, consciously cultivating a messy, zany persona. He met with dignitaries in cargo shorts. His hair, constantly unkempt, became a sort of synecdoche for his unbothered attitude (when FTX was gaining renown, he reportedly told a colleague that it was important that his hair stay long so that he would look “crazy”). Now he is confronting a corner of American life reliant on decorum and fact. After FTX’s implosion last year, Bankman-Fried faces seven charges of financial crimes including wire fraud (he has pleaded not guilty to all charges). If convicted, he could face decades in prison. The law, though often unevenly enforced, can at its best serve as an equalizer, where even the powerful must face consequences if they cross lines.

In court this week, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, a federal-court stalwart who presided over E. Jean Carroll’s case against Donald Trump and other high-profile trials, seemed to epitomize the dignified institution Bankman-Fried is facing. Kaplan did not seem inclined to throw his weight around on behalf of the defendant. On Wednesday afternoon, after the jury filed out, Mark Cohen, one of Bankman-Fried’s defense lawyers, beseeched the judge to help get his client his full prescribed dosage of Adderall. “My problem, of course, is that the last I know, I don’t have a medical license,” the judge snipped, advising that the lawyers contact the Bureau of Prisons about the matter. Bankman-Fried has exasperated this judge in the past: In August, Kaplan ordered the defendant to jail after various infractions (among other things, Bankman-Fried leaked the diary entries of his ex-girlfriend, former Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison, to The New York Times).

Bankman-Fried ascended in part based on the idea that he was different from everyone else—smarter, more trustworthy, uniquely able to make sense of the byzantine complexities of cryptocurrency markets. His pedigreed past—he’s an MIT graduate with Stanford Law–professor parents—added to his persona as a disruptive whiz kid. Now the crux of the government’s case against him is that he isn’t so different after all: Bankman-Fried, prosecutors charge, committed good old-fashioned theft.

Using frank language stripped of euphemism, a prosecutor explained to the jury on Wednesday the state’s case of how Bankman-Fried committed fraud on a mass scale. In his opening statement, the government lawyer used, by my count, a version of the word lied 26 times, stole 12 times, took 23 times, and fraud 13 times. Bankman-Fried, the lawyer explained to jurors, stole billions of dollars of customer deposits in order to furnish a lavish lifestyle, make political and charitable donations, and facilitate the purchase of luxury real estate, such as a penthouse in the Bahamas. (A spokesperson for Bankman-Fried did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) That the case revolves around such a complex financial mechanism as crypto is almost incidental; to the prosecution, this was simple fraud, fueled by deception.

Then, in language peppered with metaphors and strained wordplay, Cohen argued in his opening statement that his client acted in good faith trying to run FTX. “There was no theft,” Cohen insisted. Running a start-up, Cohen said, relying on a well-worn tech truism, is like flying a plane as you’re building it. That metaphor was key to the defense’s attempt to explain why Bankman-Fried and his team made such stunning management errors as failing to hire a chief risk officer.

The plane metaphor, which Cohen later repeated, was a bit forced, but it helped to conveniently elide Bankman-Fried’s potential responsibility. The plane was flying into storms while it was being built, his lawyer said; in other words, these were circumstances beyond the defendant’s control. Most of all, Bankman-Fried didn’t intend to steal, Cohen argued. “The defense’s opening statement focused a lot on SBF’s fundamentally good motives and character—as an innovator who made a mistake because the industry and culture are about moving fast and breaking things,” Yesha Yadav, an expert on financial regulation at Vanderbilt Law School, told me over email.

In their opening statements, neither side waded into the complexity of how crypto markets work. The world of crypto is confusing, and, indeed, Bankman-Fried benefited from the perception that he was uniquely qualified to crack it. When it served him, Bankman-Fried relied on his image as a generational genius, a visionary leader who could remake the world of finance. Now his defense is presenting a different narrative: Bankman-Fried might have been “a math nerd,” but he’s also just an overextended businessman who lost track of things as his company ballooned.

Over the next several weeks, the government will need to convince all 12 members of the jury that beyond a reasonable doubt, Bankman-Fried committed fraud. Whether Bankman-Fried will take the stand in his own defense is a big, open question here. In the past, Bankman-Fried has been his own most visible advocate. But in court, where gravity and propriety reign, how his renegade attitude will play—even with his new look—is a wild card.

Related:

Sam Bankman-Fried pushed one boundary too many. The cults of Sam Bankman-Fried

Today’s News

The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Narges Mohammadi, an Iranian activist who is currently jailed in Tehran. Republican candidates for House speaker have pulled out from a planned forum on Fox News after calls to keep discussions internal. A glacial lake burst through a major hydroelectric dam in northeast India, killing at least 42 people.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Gal Beckerman discusses a new translation of The Iliad, an epic poem that his 10-year-old daughter adores. Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf asks readers what America will be like in 2050, and delves into “solarpunk.”

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Pierre Buttinon

What the Longest Study on Human Happiness Found Is the Key to a Good Life

By Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz

Turn your mind for a moment to a friend or family member you cherish but don’t spend as much time with as you would like. This needn’t be your most significant relationship, just someone who makes you feel energized when you’re with them, and whom you’d like to see more regularly.

How often do you see that person? Every day? Once a month? Once a year? Do the math and project how many hours annually you spend with them. Write this number down and hang on to it …

Thinking about these numbers can help us put our own relationships in perspective. Try figuring out how much time you spend with a good friend or family member. We don’t have to spend every hour with our friends, and some relationships work because they’re exercised sparingly. But nearly all of us have people in our lives whom we’d like to see more.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The Nobel winner whose writing speaks to everyone A robot’s nightmare is a burrito full of guac. Photos of the week: masked witness, right whale, stormy gorge

Culture Break

Universal

Read. Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs, by Kerry Howley, is about the “deep state,” but it is so well written that our staff writer Olga Khazan would have read it even if it had been about anything else.

Watch. The Exorcist, William Friedkin’s 1973 film (streaming on Max), is one of the biggest movies ever made. Why are all of the attempts to sequelize it so baffling?

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

FTX was, in some ways, an intensely personal affair: Bankman-Fried lived with several fellow executives, including his sometimes-girlfriend Ellison. His parents, with whom he lived while on house arrest, had ties to the business, and his brother’s pandemic-prevention nonprofit was the recipient of massive donations. As one of its exhibits on Wednesday, the prosecution showed the jury the now-infamous FTX 2022 Super Bowl ad starring Larry David. Apparently, Joseph Bankman, the father of the defendant, appears in the ad as a signer of the Declaration of Independence, shouting “yes!” after David asks whether “even the stupid ones” should be allowed to vote. After the video played in court, the government lawyer asked a witness to explain who Larry David was. At that point, Joseph Bankman cracked a brief smile, and then his face fell again.

— Lora

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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