Kevin McCarthy Looked Miserable During State Of The Union

It took four days and 15 votes, as well as a near-altercation, but Kevin McCarthy did it: He got elected Speaker of the House. His reward? He had to sit behind Joe Biden, a president deeply unpopular amongst the GOP, during his second State of the Unio. He had a tough job to do: He had to never, ever, ever applaud or smile or make any facial expressions whatsoever when Biden touted the many good things that have happened in America under his watch. And so he spent 80 minutes looking like a miserable robot.

It began upbeat. Biden and McCarthy, who have had meetings about the debt ceiling that McCarthy has said have gone well, shared a clearly jovial rapport after Biden congratulated him on the new gig. “I don’t want to ruin your reputation, but I look forward to working with you,” Biden cracked. McCarthy laughed.

But as soon as Biden moved onto things like low unemployment, McCarthy knew he had to shut down and hold as blank an expression as possible, lest some Fox News dork wanted to make a molehill out of him applauding, lets’s say, affordable insulin.

In fact, there were a lot of times when McCarthy didn’t applaud objectively good things.

Rather than pay sole attention to Biden’s speech, people started scanning McCarthy’s face, to see if they could scan moments when he was wondering when he should applaud and how much that would enrage his easy-enraged base.

McCarthy’s resting misery face reminded a lot of people of a recent awards show look.

There were other jokes.

For the record, he did appear to shush the many GOP hecklers (possibly Marjorie Taylor Greene that time) during one of her many, many outbursts that evening.

In short, McCarthy spent the entire 80 minutes of Biden’s speech looking like he was zoning out, doing absolutely nothing while on live television, beamed to millions of TVs across the nation. And yet he somehow found time to tweet.

“One hour into this speech, and President Biden hasn’t mentioned China or our border once,” he “wrote.” Of course, it was his social media team, who were tweeting out his thoughts while he was literally doing nothing, in front of the entire country. Did they think GOP voters wouldn’t notice?

What’s more, they tweeted it just as Biden had talked about the border.

Did McCarthy even listen to Biden’s speech? Maybe he can catch up on it later, after he finds out that one of his new minions appeared to get into it with a GOP senator.