Who is Jim Jordan, Trump’s ousted choice for Speaker of the House?
Eric Garcia chronicles the career of the Ohio Republican, once called a ‘legislative terrorist’ who helped Trump try to overturn the 2020 election, and who failed to replace Kevin McCarthy
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Your support makes all the difference.Early in the morning of 6 October, former president Donald Trump threw his support behind Rep Jim Jordan in the race to become speaker of the House. The endorsement was not entirely surprising given Mr Jordan, an Ohio congressman, occupied the same lane in the House of Representatives that Mr Trump has as a presidential candidate and president – as an expression of conservatives who were dissatisfied with Republican leadership and a candidate who channelled their rage.
Mr Jordan is now out as the nominated speaker of the House Republicans after losing an internal ballot by a large margin. According to Rep Kat Cammack, Mr Jordan lost by 112 votes to 86.
This comes after Mr Jordan lost further support on the third ballot of the full house. On the first vote, 20 Republicans voted against Mr Jordan, 22 did so on the second, and 25 on the third. Mr McCarthy took 15 rounds of voting before he managed to get across the line in January.
Acting Speaker Rep Patrick McHenry said on Friday afternoon said Republicans will return on Monday for a candidate forum following the removal of Mr Jordan.
The “election process” will then begin on Tuesday morning, he added.
“The reason why I made that decision is, we need space and time for candidates to talk to other members,” he told the press.
A large and growing number of Republicans were starting to make calls to sound out fellow members about who they might support.
A product of the Tea Party wave and founder of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, Mr Jordan’s tenure in the House led to the ouster of former speaker John Boehner, which set the stage for Kevin McCarthy’s downfall earlier this month, despite his steadfast support for the speaker.
In addition, as a previous chair of the House Oversight Committee and now the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, he has defended Mr Trump vociferously. Fast-talking, pugnacious and prone to inflammatory rhetoric that veers into outright falsehoods, Mr Jordan often can be seen roaming the halls of the House not wearing a suit jacket.
But he also played a significant role in Mr Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and spreading misinformation since then. He’s faced further scrutiny about whether he refused to report the sexual abuse of wrestlers he coached while at the Ohio State University.
With a thin legislative record and a much larger trail of antagonising his colleagues, Mr Jordan could face significant challenges as he goes for a third attempt at the speakership.
Here’s a breakdown of Mr Jordan’s career:
How has he gotten to this point?
Prior to serving in Congress, Mr Jordan attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he became a champion wrestler in Division I of the National Collegiate Athletics Association. Shortly thereafter, he received a master’s degree from Ohio State University and a law degree from Capital University Law School, though he never took the bar exam and never practised law, telling NPR in 2018, “I'm just a wannabe”.
He later served in both chambers of Ohio’s General Assembly before he won a seat in the US Congress in 2006. In the following years, he became one of the loudest voices in the Tea Party movement that served as a backlash to Barack Obama’s presidency.
The ‘legislative terrorist’
Mr Jordan holds few legislative accomplishments and he criticised leaders in his own party as often as he criticised the Obama administration and Democrats. Rather than focusing on the work of governing, he focused more on raising his objections in the media.
After Republicans won the majority in the House of Representatives, he turned down a position on the House Appropriations Committee, which allocates money to various programmes and has long been considered the most prestigious committee in the House. Rather, he chose to lead the Republican Study Committee, an ideologically conservative focused on advancing conservative policies.
In 2013, he and a handful of Tea Party conservatives teamed up with Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX) in an effort to shut down the government if Congress did not defund the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. The effort would never be successful since Democrats controlled the Senate at the time and Mr Obama still occupied the White House. But it burnished Mr Jordan’s credentials as a conservative warrior.
In 2015, he became the founding member of the House Freedom Caucus, serving as its inaugural chairman. Ultimately, his colleague Mark Meadows, a congressman from North Carolina who would go on to serve as White House chief of staff, filed a motion to vacate the chair during John Boehner’s tenure as speaker. The vote never came but it was enough to end Mr Boehner’s time as speaker. Later, Mr Boehner would criticise his tactics. “Jordan was a terrorist as a legislator going back to his days in the Ohio House and Senate,” before dubbing him “a legislative terrorist”.
Climbing the ranks in the Trump era
Mr Boehner’s ouster gave Mr Jordan increased political clout. During Paul Ryan’s speakership, Mr Jordan continued to criticise the House GOP leadership. When Donald Trump became president, Mr Jordan quickly became a fixture in conservative media criticising attempts of the “deep state” to undermine Mr Trump.
On the House Judiciary Committee, Mr Jordan served as one of the chief apologists during Mr Trump’s first impeachment trial, aggressively questioning witnesses who alleged that Mr Trump sought to have Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky investigate Joe Biden’s son Hunter in exchange for aid to Ukraine as a means to help him win re-election.
When Mr Meadows left the House to become White House chief of staff, Mr Jordan became chairman of the Oversight Committee before resigning that post to become chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.
When Mr Ryan left the speakership in 2019, Mr Jordan became a trusted ally of then-minority leader Kevin McCarthy. He also became a welcome fixture at the White House and led efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. On 5 November 2020, he participated in a rally to “Stop the Steal” at Pennsylvania’s state capitol in Harrisburg.
The House select committee that investigated the January 6 riot found that on 21 December 2020, Mr Jordan and a handful of House Republicans met with Mr Trump to discuss efforts to object to the election results and Mr Trump held the event to “disseminate his false claims and to encourage members of the public to fight the outcome on January 6”. He also admitted that he spoke with Mr Trump on the day of the January 6 riot.
In 2021, when the House organised the select committee to investigate January 6, Mr McCarthy selected Mr Jordan and Rep Jim Banks (R-IN), two allies of Mr Trump, as two of his five selections for the committee. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected Mr Banks and Mr Jordan, which led to Mr McCarthy pulling the rest of his members.
Over time, Mr McCarthy continued to elevate him, having him lead a subcommittee on the “weaponisation” of the federal government. Earlier this year, when many critics of Mr McCarthy opted to support him, he encouraged them to support Mr McCarthy, saying “I think Kevin McCarthy’s the right guy to lead us. I really do, or I wouldn’t be standing up here giving up this speech”.
In turn, Rep Matt Gaetz (R-FL), who nominated Mr Jordan, said the speech made him just the right candidate to lead the House, adding, “Maybe the right person for the job of speaker of the House isn’t someone who wants it so bad”.
When Mr Gaetz filed a motion to vacate, Mr Jordan voted against it.
The Ohio State accusations
Aside from being a right-wing firebrand, Mr Jordan has faced serious allegations from his time as a wrestling coach at Ohio State University. In 2018, former athletes who he coached at the university told NBC News that Mr Jordan failed to stop the team doctor, Richard Strauss, who died in 2005, from sexually abusing them.
Mr Jordan denied the allegations, saying he did not know about the abuse when he coached from 1986 to 1994. Dunyasha Yetts said he told Mr Jordan about the abuse, saying “For God’s sake, Strauss’s locker was right next to Jordan’s and Jordan even said he’d kill him if he tried anything with him.” The New York Times later reported that Mr Jordan called the parents of Mark Coleman, one of the athletes he coached, and asked him to change his story.
Gustaf Kilander contributed to this report
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