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In this episode of You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet…

Before the seventh round of voting for the next Speaker of the House began on Thursday — which Kevin McCarthy lost — the embattled Republican Party Leader was asked on his way to the House floor about his plan if he again failed to secure the 218 votes necessary to secure the gavel:

We’re just gonna keep working til we solve it. Look, look you’re going to go in here, we’re gonna have votes; nothing is going to change. What we’re doing is we’re having really good progress in conversations. … Nothing is agreed to until everything is agreed to. I wouldn’t read anything into the votes today.

Translation: McCarthy remains in it to win it, no matter how long it takes.

Meanwhile, Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz, who voted on Wednesday for fellow Floridian Byron Donalds, on Thursday voted for Donald Trump, while Trump diehard, Colorado’s Lauren Boebert and Fox News host Sean Hannity — forever in Trump’s back pocket — engaged in a hissy fit debate over her refusal to support McCarthy. Hence, the stand-off continues — with no predictable end in sight.

Translation: Gaetz, Boebert, and like-minded holdouts are in it to win it, no matter how long it takes.

Obviously, this thing has to end somewhere — with hard feelings on both sides of the GOP internecine war presumably even more bitter.

Reality begs the question:

What have we learned — whether Republican lawmakers have learned anything or not — about what the battle itself portends for the broader fight to come, which will begin in earnest this spring as the race for the GOP presidential nominee begins to heat up?

And, like it or not, what lies ahead for Trump and the MAGA Republicans — who’ve laid bare their differences for the first time over the McCarthy battle?

In a related Wednesday article, I asked if Trump has lost his touch, given that his multiple calls for House Republicans to fall in line behind McCarthy have failed — now after seven votes. Has Trumpism failed, or has the former president lost control of Trumpism to the likes of Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, and like-minded Trump diehards?

I’m sure the majority of MAGA Republicans reject the notion but is MAGA in the process of kicking Trump to the curb? These are valid questions that need to be asked, and more importantly, answered — with an eye to the future vs. the past.

To be fair, as opined by Bruce S. Thornton, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, Trump has been brutalized by the left, including the “mainstream” media sock puppets and the TDS-riddled Democrat Party:

• The Dems had weaponized the FBI and DOJ to peddle the Russia collusion hoax, and a Democrat House held multiple show-trial hearings and staged two impeachments that criminalized political differences.
• The political establishment and media were despicably unfair to Trump, indulging preposterous double standards like “election denier,” an epithet never applied to two noisy and bitter “deniers” like Hillary Clinton and Georgia’s Stacey Abrams.
• The Dem House made preposterous charges of fomenting an “insurrection” on January 6, based on specious evidence and hear-say, with the committee stacking the deck to make sure no Republican could cross-examine dubious witnesses.
• The bankrupt media, dead-tree and social, before the election colluded with the FBI to keep hidden the bombshell scandal of Hunter Biden’s laptop, which is filled with evidence of the Biden family corruption—a huge in-kind contribution to Biden’s campaign.

The above — all of it despicable — considered, Republican voters must be honest (those who are capable, that is) about Trump’s self-inflicted unforced errors. Regardless of how one views Trump, as I wrote on New Year’s Day, only Donald Trump can do to Donald Trump what the Republican establishment could not: bring an end to the former president’s political career.

We’ve covered Trump’s recent missteps ad nauseam — yours truly, included — which I’m not going to repeat in this article. The bottom line here is Trump no longer has a vice grip on the Republican Party. That is a fact — and it becomes increasingly evident.

Also evident, as revealed by the Speakership battle, the Republican Party — in my not-so-humble opinion — is desperately in need of a new vision and new bold policies. Why? It should be obvious to the objective among us.

Non-stop rehashing of the 2020 presidential election — regardless of on which side one stands — and ad hominem attacks against potentially promising candidates, as was the case in 2016, aren’t going to work in 2024. That shtick is old and tired. Moreover, the relentless claims about the “stolen” 2020 election no longer rally a sufficient number of Republican voters — or critical independent voters — to win in 2024.

In the end, the Republican Party will choose a 2024 presidential nominee, determined by which candidate receives the requisite number of delegates. In other words, voters will decide the outcome of the 2024 election, as it should be.

Given the disastrous state of America under the Democrat Party, let’s hope Republican voters make a wise choice in the primaries.