President Donald Trump is reportedly pushing House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy to make Rep. Jim Jordan the ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee. | Alex Wong/Getty Images Congress Jordan touts Freedom Caucus bona fides in GOP leadership bid

Rep. Jim Jordan, the former chairman of the House Freedom Caucus who is running to be the next House Republican leader, said Wednesday that the GOP lost its majority in the House because it failed to match the "intensity" of President Donald Trump.

Jordan (R-Ohio), widely considered to be the underdog candidate against Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) in Wednesday's leadership elections, held up his bona fides as a leader of the arch-conservative Freedom Caucus as one of his top qualifications for the job of GOP leader.


“Two years ago the American people elected President Trump to come to this town to shake it up and he's done just that. But I don't think they've seen this same intensity from House Republicans,” he said in an interview on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends.”

Jordan cited conservative priorities like repealing the Affordable Care Act, building Trump's long-promised wall along the southern border and overhauling welfare programs as areas where Republicans came up short, despite control of both houses of Congress and the White House. Those failures, he said were the reason for Republicans’ trouncing on Election Day, when they lost at least 34 seats.

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“I think that was the biggest problem we had, because we lost so many races by the slimmest of margins,” he said. “If we get the things done that we told them we were going to do, I think we win many of those races and we would have stayed in the majority.”

The Ohio Republican's comments come in the wake of behind-the-scenes efforts by Trump to bolster Jordan's standing within the House, reportedly pushing House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), the odds-on favorite to be minority leader in the next Congress, to make Jordan the ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee.

Jordan argued Wednesday that the Freedom Caucus’ reputation for punching back at leadership will make for a useful quality in what Jordan said would be a hostile, Democrat-controlled chamber, a situation many House Republicans have not experienced.

“We got to understand the environment we're going into is something we've never seen,” he said, ticking off a list of likely Democratic committee chairs. “We’re gonna have to be to be prepared with the right attitude to come to this town to fight every single minute of every single day defending the truth as they're attacking everybody. That's the environment we're going into.”