He has soared through the ranks largely untested in the art of bipartisan deal-making -- evident in his failed battle with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) to put his slate of Republicans on the committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.

"He's all hat, no cattle," said one former Republican congressman. "Blatantly transparent."

But McCarthy's ideological flexibility and his fraught, often humiliating efforts to manage Donald Trump have made him an asset to House Republicans as they head into next month's midterm elections. He is a master at the machinery of electoral politics. Perhaps no one in Washington is more attuned to the races playing out across this clamorous land. He has traveled to dozens of states since August and raised far more money than Trump has for his fellow Republicans this cycle. When most of his colleagues are sleeping, McCarthy is likely flying over some starlit corner of the republic, mapping out designs to elevate himself and return his party to power.

A skilled pragmatist and an establishment politician, he is navigating the crosscurrents of a viscous new America while holding together a fractious and combative caucus that encompasses the incendiary fictions of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and the rebel defiance of Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.). But he is reviled in many quarters as a Trump apologist. His critics regard him as an equivocator whose ambition has blinded him to the threats against the country and bound him to a former president inciting a politics of victimhood, lies and persecution.

"I don't see him as recognizable anymore. He's not the same person," said Mike Madrid, a Republican consultant who has known McCarthy for decades and describes him as a classic conservative -- small government, low taxes, free market. "He's dealing with a countercultural movement within the party. He has to pivot to leading a fiery mob. ... The old Kevin McCarthy would have protected the party from the mob. He has been overrun."