It was no great surprise that, in response to the historical drubbing the Republican Party suffered in last week’s midterm vote, President Donald Trump resisted even a semblance of any accommodation to a new political order. In lieu of shaking up his cabinet or announcing a new ethos of bipartisan deal-making, Trump elevated racist edgelord policy savant Stephen Miller to chief of staff, pretended (or unsuccessfully attempted) to appoint UFC Dana White as his new press secretary, and cheered on his murderous and incompetent defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, who survived an impeachment vote in the House on Tuesday.
What did prove somewhat surprising is that the House GOP conference voted to anoint Ohio Representative Jim Jordan, the present chair of the Judiciary Committee, as its new leader in the 120th Congress. Jordan previously put in for the GOP speakership in 2023, after Kevin McCarthy was cashiered for making a deal with Democrats to keep funding the government, but lost to all-purpose bobblehead Mike Johnson. Jordan, a fierce MAGA demagogue in his own right, was undone in part by his own divisive role in fomenting rancor in the party; long before his rise to the ranks of senior leadership, former speaker John Boehner—a longtime Buckeye state colleague—dubbed him a “legislative terrorist.”
Yet in today’s GOP, that description is a credential. It was indeed Jordan’s bombthrowing profile as a leader of the House Freedom Caucus that earned him a top slot on the leadership team McCarthy assembled during his short-lived tenure as speaker in 2023: Jordan was plumping for the chair of the Oversight Committee, but McCarthy instead set him up as the head of the chamber’s new manufactory of persecution agitprop, aka the Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. As the panel’s title indicated, its brief was to gin up any and all hints of the Deep State’s mania to undo the virtuous forces of Trumpian governance—including the campfire tale of the 87,000 IRS commissioners that Joe Biden sought to unleash on the MAGA faithful, the phony charge that Attorney General Merrick Garland designated activist parents in the right’s crusades against critical race theory and DEI as “terrorists,” and various January 6 fantasies too wooly to recount in detail. When Jordan lost out in his bid to succeed McCarthy, he was rewarded with the chairmanship of the House Judiciary Committee—a post that allowed him to continue flogging the same demented tales of Deep State perfidy from a bigger stage, unruffled by his own failure to honor a subpoena from the House Select Committee on the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol. Charging a law-defying purveyor of MAGA lies like Jim Jordan with oversight of law enforcement and the judiciary was something like designating William Burroughs drug war czar.
Jordan also carried a more troubling résumé entry that today’s GOP also feels entitled to disregard: a serious role in a far-reaching and repellent sexual-abuse scandal. When he served as assistant wrestling coach for Ohio State University from 1987 to 1995, the squad’s doctor, Dr. Richard Strauss, was sexually abusing the wrestlers in his charge; during Strauss’s tenure, which ran from 1979 to 1996, he abused more than 177 team members. Jordan has denied any knowledge of Strauss’s predations, but at least half a dozen former wrestlers have publicly claimed otherwise. “There’s no way unless he’s got dementia or something that he’s got no recollection of what was going on at Ohio State,” former OSU wrestler and UFC fighter Mark Coleman, who was Jordan’s roommate on many wrestling team road trips, told The Wall Street Journal. Jordan disingenuously claims that the state’s inquiry into the Strauss scandal exonerated him, but it simply didn’t mention him—and it did stipulate that discussion of Strauss’s predations was widespread among people in the team’s orbit.
That the House GOP conference has named Jordan its leader is further evidence, if any were needed, that there will be zero post-election introspection on the MAGA right. Jordan’s elevation is the same lurch into fuck-you impunity that the House GOP assumed in anointing Mike Johnson—a key architect of the bid to overthrow the results of the 2020 election in Congress. With Johnson at the helm, the party has lost 42 seats (and counting) with little in its policy playbook that could arrest its hemorrhaging. In lieu of using its leadership votes to chart a new course, the Republican conference pinned its hopes on the same leadership candidate who was too divisive and scandal-plagued to prevail over Mike Johnson.
In addition to keeping the MAGA right on a collision course with public opinion, Jordan’s win poses an important test for the leaders of the new Democratic majority, who are already signaling a reversion to caretaker form and unleashing stale gusts of bipartisanship and “kitchen-table” rhetoric. Exit polls in the wake of the midterms blowout saw voters naming corruption as a key issue driving their decision—a factor only outstripped by the skyrocketing cost of living. That’s a signal that the opposition overlooks at its own risk. Jim Jordan is the very avatar of Trump-era corruption—which is why his Democratic counterparts need to make Dr. Richard Strauss as much of a household name as Jeffrey Epstein and continue reminding voters that the man who turned a blind eye to that scandal will continue stonewalling Trump’s own well-documented Epstein fraternizations. Like Trump’s postelection embrace of Stephen Miller and Pete Hegseth as his spirit animals, the House’s decision to throw in with Jim Jordan is a confession of utter moral bankruptcy. If Democrats on Capitol Hill are serious about consolidating their election gains into a long-term governing majority, they can’t afford to let voters forget it for one minute.