Jim Jordan is an unyielding combatant, whether grappling on the mat or in the halls of Congress

His wrestlers at Ohio State called him Jimmy and idolized him as an Olympic-level legend in their ancient sport. During the nine seasons that Jim Jordan served as assistant coach, they admired his propriety — they never saw him smoke or drink or heard him swear — and studied his technique and style, from his single-leg takedowns to his odd victory strut, marching in a zombielike circle, straight-legged, arms aloft. But they dreaded sparring with Jordan at practice. He was unforgiving, smothering, taking his would-be disciples to the edge of what was allowed, if not beyond.

With Jordan, it all comes down to wrestling. His history as a combatant is of a piece with his performance in Washington — as powerful Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, creator of a select subcommittee that unselfconsciously employs the term “weaponization” in its title, and former president Donald Trump’s staunchest advocate through two impeachments, four criminal indictments and a retribution-inspired inquiry into ways to impeach President Biden. Whether on the mats or in the halls of Congress, as with his persistent yet futile maneuvering last week to win the speakership, Jordan’s dial is turned to the same setting: relentless aggression.

When Mike Schyck arrived at Ohio State as a prized freshman recruit in 1988, he was tested by Jordan in the wrestling room at Larkins Hall. As Schyck recalled, Jordan pursued him to the end of the mat, pressing him against the wall again and again, the freshman struggling to keep his balance as the pliant wall swayed behind him, until Jordan cut his legs out from under him and thumped him smack on his tailbone. Then Jordan pounced on him and pressed his chest against Schyck’s mouth, crowding it to where he feared he would suffocate.

“He beat the living snot out of me. I mean literally,” recalled Schyck, now a successful high school wrestling coach on Florida’s Gulf Coast. “He’d do this ‘oh gosh, golly gee,’ Opie Taylor off the mat. But on the mat, he was like a pit bull.”

The same in politics. John A. Boehner, a former Republican speaker of the House, saw that characteristic in his fellow Ohioan, so repeatedly undercut by Jordan and his right-wing Freedom Caucus that he finally retired in 2015, wearied by the contention. “He is wound tighter than a baseball,” Boehner said. “You just see him walk. There is an intensity there you just don’t see in other members.” When they passed in the hallways, Boehner would try to defuse Jordan’s fervor by greeting him with the query, “What are you planning to f--- up today?”

Jordan’s aggressive persona has been invariably polarizing. His firebrand defense of Trump has made him a darling of MAGA legions who view him as a stalwart against a changing America, but anathema to Democrats and Never Trumpers who view him as a key agent in the transformation of the GOP into a Trumpian sect endangering democracy. His attacking style — and unwillingness to concede weakness — has created an equal schism in the wrestling world, splitting apart former teammates at Ohio State’s decorated program.

As an assistant wrestling coach and graduate student at Ohio State from 1986 to 1994, he was on campus during the most grievous scandal in the school’s history. Over two decades, Richard Strauss, an athletic team doctor, molested scores of male students and athletes, especially wrestlers, with abuses ranging from excessive fondling of genitals during supposedly routine examinations to anal rape, according to a university report.

When the crimes belatedly surfaced in 2018, Jordan insisted that he had been unaware of Strauss’s behavior. His office issued an uncompromising declaration: “Congressman Jordan never saw any abuse, never heard about any abuse, and never had any abuse reported to him during his time as a coach at Ohio State.” Jordan issued that denial despite the fact that Strauss — often referred to by athletes as “Dr. Jelly Paws” — was notorious according to many members of the wrestling team for lingering nude in the sauna and showers with them, often returning to take a second shower if he saw them coming down from their practice room. He routinely examined them in darkness in his nearby office, stood close by them at the scales when they weighed in naked, and dressed and undressed at a locker adjacent to Jordan’s.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Jordan tensed up during questioning about Strauss and fell back on his mantra-like denial. “Every single coach has said the same thing I have, countless wrestlers have said the same thing I have, and other athletes,” he insisted, adding: “If there would have been something wrong, I’d have done something, okay?” he said. “There wasn’t. That I knew of.”

The Post interviewed 11 former wrestlers from the Jordan era at Ohio State who said Strauss used medical exams to perpetrate molestations or worse. Eight said they had clear recollections of team members protesting Strauss’s conduct either directly to Jordan or within Jordan’s range of hearing. All considered it inconceivable that Jordan did not know about Strauss’s disturbing behaviors.

Jordan entered the wrestling subculture when he was 8 years old, grappling with little brother Jeff in a makeshift gym their father built behind their house in the tiny town of St. Paris in rural Ohio. Few people today understand what a dominant wrestler Jimmy Jordan was. As an Ohio schoolboy legend, he won four straight state championships, followed by two NCAA titles at the University of Wisconsin in 1985 and 1986. He came within one match of qualifying for the 1988 Olympics, only to be bested by his rival, John Smith, who went on to win two Olympic gold medals and four world championships.

On the mat, Jordan was a fury of arms and legs, more will and stamina than brute strength, always on offense, probing weakness, seeking leverage. “He just never stopped. He was on you, on you, on you, constant pressure,” Smith said. “A little bit like he is today.”

In politics, Jordan uses his inquisitor’s voice with the same harrying intent. With the abrasive whine of a dentist’s drill he whirs out assertions and leading questions to score points against Democrats or discombobulate witnesses from the FBI or Internal Revenue Service. As Jamie B. Raskin, the Democratic congressman from Maryland who often finds himself sparring with Jordan, put it: “He speaks in one register — that of outrage.”

Interrogating a witness in committee is “about as close to wrestling as you get,” Jordan said in an interview. “The wrestling room is pretty basic. If you’re not on top, you’re not going to last very long. So I think politics in some ways is like that, too.”

Jordan still has the build of a prowling college grappler, all chest and small waist, with pectorals and forward-hunching shoulders that fill his cotton broadcloth shirt, a belt cinched tight around his slacks. His face at age 59 is lean to the point of concaveness. The physique is a result of workouts in the congressional gym so manic that Trump once joked “the machines start burning.” He exudes an amped metabolic energy that is not soothed by his love of caffeination. He used to drink his orange juice mixed with Mountain Dew, calling it “Go Juice.” His wife, Polly, finally made him quit it. Now, he said, “I drink too much coffee.”

Even seated in apparent relaxation in his office in the Rayburn House Office Building, one of his loafer-clad heels rose and fell in a constant jitter. Each hitch of his leg revealed Republican-red socks with elephants on them. Meanwhile, one hand tapped out a snare-drum beat against an arm of his chair.

This was most apparent when Jordan was asked to explain his actions concerning the wrestling scandal. In addition to the wrestlers who challenged his account, Andy Geiger, a former athletic director at Ohio State, told The Post that while Jordan had “no culpability whatsoever” in the Strauss scandal, he does not believe the congressman’s categorical denials. “To say that you didn’t know or were totally unaware is not credible,” he said.

Geiger, who served as athletic director from 1994 to 2005, and overlapped with Jordan for several months, added that while he never received an explicit report of sexual abuse, he did field repeated complaints about Strauss’s conduct from head wrestling coach Russ Hellickson, Jordan’s boss, mentor and close friend. Hellickson “reminded me quite often of this problem and this situation,” Geiger said. “The wrestling coach said, ‘We got a problem, and my guys are upset.’” Given how close Hellickson and Jordan were, Geiger concluded, “It would be remarkable if he was in that environment and didn’t know.”

Hellickson declined an interview with The Post, saying in a text message that he found himself “being used too often in politics of late.” In previous public comments, Hellickson has been contradictory on his knowledge of Strauss’s conduct. In a 2018 video, Hellickson acknowledged on camera that he had warned Strauss he was “too hands-on” and spent too much time in the showers with the wrestlers, comments reinforcing Geiger’s recollections. But Hellickson offered a different account after Jordan became part of the story. In July 2018, he signed a joint statement in defense of Jordan with six other former assistant coaches that declared, “None of us saw or heard of abuse of OSU wrestlers.”

George Pardos, a former heavyweight wrestler and later assistant coach, told The Post that he considered Jordan naive, and sometimes chided him about his “choirboy” ways, but added: “The idea that he knew [about Strauss] and covered it up, it is very preposterous.”

An independent investigative report from the law firm Perkins Coie, commissioned by Ohio State, concluded in 2020 that “at least 50 members of the athletic department staff” had some awareness of Strauss’s behaviors, and furthermore, that 22 coaches across the department — including wrestling coaches — were “aware of rumors or complaints about Strauss,” although they were not named. The report came out as several hundred athletes and other Ohio State students were suing the university for its mishandling of the Strauss scandal. Some have since reached settlements; others are still in court, including a number of wrestlers. Their cases were reinvigorated in June when the U.S. Supreme Court allowed their lawsuits to go forward, ruling against the university’s appeal claiming that the statute of limitations had expired. Jordan is not a defendant.

More than how Jordan acted when the abuse was taking place, it was the way he responded when the story broke decades later that left many former wrestlers disillusioned. He went on the offensive with the same ferocity he has shown attacking Trump’s critics. Calling the timing of the wrestlers’ disclosures “suspect,” Jordan challenged the credibility of his former pupils and pounced on their vulnerabilities. His proxies suggested that those who criticized Jordan were part of a conspiracy — even though most of the wrestlers had once looked up to Jordan and shared his conservative political views.

One of those was Schyck, who said he endured several traumatic encounters with Strauss. He came from a conservative family, put Jordan “on a pedestal,” and later marveled at his former coach’s political ascent. But that changed after Jordan portrayed himself as a victim and disparaged many of his former wrestlers.

“Jim Jordan could have been Superman for all of his athletes,” Schyck said. “To stand up and say, ‘I’m here for my guys. This happened.’ And to not do that is beyond me.”

Instead, the combination of Jordan’s wrestling popularity and political clout put pressure on wrestlers who questioned his actions. Those who went public were derided as poseurs and money grabbers. “You are either with Jimmy or not with Jimmy,” said Rocky Ratliff, a former Ohio State wrestler who is now a lead attorney in the lawsuits against Ohio State.

The Jordans are the first family of Ohio wrestling. Not only were Jim and brother Jeff state champs and college stars, but Jeff and family members run influential camps and a prosperous wrestling equipment label. Jim Jordan’s popularity exceeds even that of Trump in Ohio’s 4th Congressional District, the sprawling and disfigured rural district he has represented since 2007 that was inherently red and made more so by legislative gerrymandering.

Trump repaid Jordan’s loyalty by calling out the wrestlers as liars at public appearances. “I don’t believe them at all,” he said. At campaign rallies for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, he has praised Jordan. “You know a great wrestler? Jim Jordan. A great one,” Trump told an audience in wrestling-mad Iowa. “And he’s the same when he goes after these crooked people. He’s up there … One! Two! Boom! Boom! Boom! Same way he wrestled.”

Trump accompanied those words with hand gestures that evoked not wrestling but karate.

In many ways, Jordan is Trump’s opposite. Middle American. Son of a blue-collar autoworker. Clean living. Hard body. Disciplined. Boy Scout. Evangelical. One wife, still married to his high school sweetheart. Friendly and self-effacing in private. But as he faced the two most critical moments of his career — how he would handle the Ohio State scandal and how he would respond to the rise and rule of Trump — Jordan more closely mimicked his leader. Attack and deflect as a means of survival. They were moves perfected over a lifetime as the relentless wrestler.

Wrestling is the art of forcing opponents to relinquish their posture and surrender. To the uninitiated it can seem unintelligible if not ugly — two crouching men, head-locking, entangling and disentangling. “It’s as basic as it gets,” Jordan said. But to those who love it, wrestling is a passion sport. For people from rural or desolate areas, it can provide a more equal stance, a way to gain leverage. As the novelist John Irving, a wrestler in prep school and college, once observed, wrestling offers folks in different weight classes the opportunity “to bump into people your own size, and you can bump them very hard.”

For the Jordan family there were two ways to earn a living around St. Paris: make things or grow things. In manufacturing, the economy always won, and in farming, the dirt eventually threw them on their back, too. This acquaintance with being overmatched ended when the Jordans took to wrestling, which elevated the family fortunes from a long line of ploughmen and industrial workers.

Harrowed brown fields surround Jordan’s hometown, the land so dull colored in winter that a plain lead pencil can sketch the place. Four generations of Jordans tried to claw a living by grain farming, mostly corn and soybeans. When a 1940 census taker asked Jordan’s great-grandfather how many hours he had worked that week, the tired man, a 52-year-old with an eighth-grade education, replied, “Seventy.”

Finally, a Jordan surrendered. Early on the weekday morning of Feb. 18, 1959, Jordan’s grandfather James Philemon Jordan walked out to his farm shed and shut himself firmly inside. According to family belief, every winter, he would take extra work delivering coal to make ends meet. That winter the coal job hadn’t come through. After locking himself in the shed, he turned on his tractor and killed himself by carbon monoxide. His wife, Portia, was left alone to care for four children, the eldest of whom was 14-year-old John Jordan, the future congressman’s father. Portia would die by the age of 50, a waitress in a bowling alley.

Years later, on Jim Jordan’s own 14th birthday, he and his father were driving around town in the family truck. “Well, I don’t have any example now,” John Jordan said to Jim. He was in uncharted waters as a parent since he had lost his own father at that age.

John Jordan was Jim’s first and most important coach, and he was “old, old school,” according to Jim. He had gone to work as a factory assembler at the age of 17, straight out of Graham High School, Class of ’62. The yearbook shows a boy with promise, strong-featured, football MVP, homecoming escort, class officer, but his options were limited by the necessity of wage earning. There was little work in St. Paris, a town of red-brick, two-story storefronts, population 1,800. It had been a prominent enough rail stop in 1865 that Abraham Lincoln’s funeral car paused there, but the depot closed. John Jordan had to drive 30 miles south to find work in Dayton, at a Frigidaire plant. A year after graduating, he married his high school girlfriend, Shirley Ann Bishop, daughter of a Dayton Power and Light man. Just 7½ months later their first son, the eventual congressman James Daniel Jordan, was born on Feb. 17, 1964. Jeff was born a year later.

For more than four decades, Jim Jordan’s father commuted to Dayton to work night shifts, first for Frigidaire and then for General Motors. “I mean he worked his tail off,” Jordan said. On his breaks, he had “a little side-hustle coffee business,” to make extra cash.

In his spare time, John Jordan somehow found the energy to coach his boys. They were too little for football. “You can obviously see that the good Lord had other designs because I’m 5-7½ on a good day,” Jim Jordan said. But there was a sport that offered compensating opportunities for stature-challenged featherweights: wrestling. You didn’t need expensive equipment to do it, either.

Wrestling was hugely popular in Ohio — the annual high school state tournament drew crowds of 20,000 — and a well-known route to a college scholarship. St. Paris didn’t have a youth wrestling program, so John Jordan and his younger brother Bob started one. John laid down a practice mat in the basement. Four times a week, Jimmy Jordan would practice with the team, and then afterward his father would lead him downstairs for a private session.

Every Saturday in the fall, the grade-schooler Jimmy was hustled out of bed early in the morning to compete in cross-country for fitness. “All Jordans rise and shine!” his mother would say, flipping on the lights. His father was in charge of their morning prerace meal. It, too, was “old, old school”: a beefsteak, cooked rare, because “that was the way the tough guys ate it,” his father explained. It was followed by a glass of milk. Two hours later, Jimmy would try to run a mile and a half through thick woods with a bloated stomach. At the quarter-mile mark, he had “a tremendous urge to vomit,” Jordan recalled in a book he wrote as a young man, “Victory at the Training Table.”

His father built a training shed on to the garage, using the cash from his coffee business. Boys from the area came to train with the Jordans. “All our buddies were afraid of my dad,” Jordan said. “They were like, ‘Your dad is so big and so tough.’ And my dad’s shorter than me. But he had that persona.” Nevertheless, the boys flocked to him, scenting aspiration. The crowd included a boy from up the road named Andy Stickley, whose sister Polly would eventually become Jim’s wife. They met in the fourth grade.

Jordan worked out almost religiously. “He was just your classic all-American apple pie boy, who would get up in the morning and go for his run and come back and do his pushups and situps — and he did that every day,” his brother Jeff recalled in a wrestling training video.

Jordan’s thrumming metabolism suited him for the sport. Wrestlers experience such a deep muscular burn that their lactate concentrations, a biochemical marker of limb fatigue, soar above 15 millimoles per liter during a match — a person’s normal level is 1 or 2. Their heart rates gallop at cadences of 175 to 180 beats per minute, maximal loads.

John Jordan may have been old, old school, but his methods worked. The Jordans would become the regnant wrestling dynasty in the state, with family members combining to win 24 state titles and 14 collegiate all-American honors. Jimmy was the best of them all. He went 150-1 in high school. He won his first state title in 1979, though he was “truly scared,” as he related in a 2021 polemic-autobiography titled “Do What You Said You Would Do: Fighting for Freedom in the Swamp.” His response to fear was to yank his opponent by the leg and then ride his back for dear life.

By the time Jordan enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, he had legitimate Olympic potential. He chose the school because the head coach, Hellickson, had been a silver medalist at the 1976 Summer Games. The collegiate Jordan was abstemious and shy. His closest friend among the wrestlers was his brother Jeff, who followed him to Wisconsin after a year. Jordan’s only other confidante was his fiancée, Polly Stickley, a track athlete and aspiring painter. They wed in his junior year.

Jordan stood apart from his rowdier beer-swilling teammates. He was self-denying, sometimes training three times a day, even as he worked toward a degree in economics. “One thing I want to do with my wrestling is be meaner,” Jordan announced as a sophomore. In wrestling, as Andy Baggot, who covered the team for the Wisconsin State Journal, observed in a story about Jordan in 1984, “The more you starve, the meaner you get.” Jordan starved himself. His diet mostly consisted of whole-grain bread and water. He sweated so hard to drop weight that he’d sometimes get shuddering chills, which he cured with a cup of coffee.

Small wonder he was such a clawing antagonist. In the spring of 1985, Jordan was spotted in the shadowy depths of the Wisconsin football stadium all alone, jumping rope until he was in a lather. Just four days later, he became the NCAA champion in the 134-pound weight class. The opponent he beat in the final was Smith, his archrival, wrestling before a huge home crowd in Oklahoma City. “He schooled me so bad,” Smith recalled.

Jordan beat Smith with his signature move, the “single-legged takedown,” a technique by which he dived low at his opponent’s knee, got his forearms locked around it, and then jerked upward while driving his head and shoulders forward, upending him. “He just pestered you,” Smith said. “If he didn’t finish it the first time, he’s coming at it three and four and five times.” The match ended with Smith floundering on his belly, like a fish.

That NCAA championship was the peak of Jordan’s career. Though he would win a repeat title and pursue an Olympic berth for three more years, he would ultimately fail. He was taken down by Smith, who spent his collegiate career studying Jordan and then swept him off the mat in the 1988 Olympic trials. “I just wasn’t good enough,” Jordan said. He started seeking a different career. At first it seemed it might be coaching.

A parochial school basement was a more comfortable atmosphere than the wrestling program at Ohio State’s Larkins Hall, an old brick and peeling-paint pile where Jordan took his first job as assistant coach in 1986. He would remain there until the end of 1994, when he stepped straight out of its dank, insular world and into public office.

As a young coach, Jordan seemed to take literally one of his favorite quotes from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: “In this world a man must either be the anvil or a hammer.” Jordan hammered his athletes. David Range recalled that on his first day of practice, the coaches drove the team 10 miles into the countryside — and ordered them to run back. Jordan set the pace and beat them all to campus. “Nobody could keep up with him,” Range said.

Ohio State’s new assistant coach was “strait-laced, super religious,” Range recalled. “He’d talk about how you shouldn’t drink or do drugs and fornicate, all kind of stuff like that.” On road trips Jordan sat quietly at the front of the team bus, and he rarely if ever showed up at the team dinners. “It was kind of a wall,” Range said. “Nobody knew him outside of practice.” The only staffer he seemed close to was Hellickson, a big man with a square haircut, sideburns and a jawline that made him resemble a star of a 1970s cop show. Jordan trailed him around so dutifully that the team nicknamed them “Batman and Robin.”

In part, Jordan was too busy to socialize. He and Polly had the first of four children in 1987, and he was also pursuing a master’s degree in education, followed by a law degree, while trying to compete internationally. He had no time to carouse on Columbus’s High Street with roisterers like fellow assistant coach Mark Coleman, a cocky bruiser who won an NCAA title at 190 pounds and would become an Olympian and the first heavyweight winner of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Coleman was nicknamed “the King.”

At the end of practice, Coleman sometimes offered a challenge: $10,000 to any man who could take him down. Coleman was 6-1 and built like a fountain statue. Nobody could win the bet. Until one day, Jordan piped, “Hey, King. Let me do it.”

Coleman recalled gesturing him to the mat.

“Not for ten thousand though. I don’t bet,” Jordan said.

“It’s got to be for something,” Coleman replied.

“How ’bout lunch?” Jordan said mildly.

Coleman had five inches and at least 50 pounds on Jordan. But as they grappled, Jordan suddenly did a 180 with his body and sat in the middle of Coleman’s back, facing his legs. Jordan snatched one of Coleman’s feet and wrenched it sideways and backward until his leg bent double, almost tearing his toe off. With his other arm, Jordan reached back and wrapped an elbow around Coleman’s jaw and neck and yanked his head back. Jordan had Coleman in what is known as a “bow and arrow” hold, a reverse cradle position. “And he squeezes and crunches,” Coleman said.

Fearing that his knee might blow, Coleman had one choice: to “roll over like a sissy,” and surrender. “He was king for the day,” Coleman recalled. “And he could have ended my season. It didn’t matter. That’s Jimmy.” As a competitor, he said, Jordan was “100 percent of the time in your face.”

As a coach, Jordan did everything with his athletes. He even sat in the saunas cutting weight with them. Notions of conditioning in the sport were so primitive in that era that wrestlers would drop pounds by pedaling furiously on a stationary bike in plastic suits or layers of sweatshirts until drenched, then return to the sauna. Jordan and his charges would become so slick with sweat that sometimes they raked the liquid off their chests and limbs with Popsicle sticks.

The regimen left them continually sore and frequently injured or sick — and thus exposed to the abuses of Strauss. The team physician for 17 sports at Ohio State, Strauss got his hands on scores of young athletes in Larkins Hall between 1979 and 1998. Wrestlers needed his services regularly.

The wrestlers were housed in a cinder-block room with rickety steel lockers and a communal shower area of yellowing glazed tile. Larkins was also the main campus recreation facility, its doors open to anyone. It was notorious as a place where voyeurs would leer at nude young men in showers — or worse. There were incidences of public masturbation, peeping Tomism and sex in its dingy corners and stalls. It was a “sexualized and at times predatory environment,” the investigative report commissioned by the university confirmed. The leading predator was Strauss, a slight, mousy man who haunted the showers.

Strauss’s groping exams and omnipresence in the showers were so infamous that even women athletes knew about him. “The females heard about it as much as the guys, it was a standing thing,” says former fencer Csilla Smith, whose mother, Charlotte Remenyik, coached both the women’s and men’s fencing programs.

Strauss’s interest in the wrestlers was such an open if grim joke that freshmen heard about it on their first day in the program. As Schyck stood in line waiting for his initial physical, upperclassmen did loud catcalls. “Ohhh, Strauss is going to like you!” someone teased. During the exam, Schyck recalled, Strauss manipulated his penis for almost five minutes while massaging his buttocks. Schyck bore it with teeth gritted. Toward the end of the exam, he made the mistake of mentioning that he had once had a blood infection. Strauss flicked off the lights and went over Schyck again, in the dark. When Schyck finally came out, the team was whistling at him. “Doc found his favorite new guy!”

After practices, Strauss “would take 30-minute showers, then dry off, staring at people,” Coleman recalled. Range remembered that Jordan would come out of those communal showers “grumbling and pissed off” about Strauss. “He hated being that close to Strauss,” Range said.

“This doctor was testing everybody,” Coleman recalled. “He was daily obsessed with trying to see how far he could get with another man. And unfortunately for a lot of people, they were scared. They got a scholarship on the line. They’re trying to win, and they’re not sure if this is normal or not. And he’d get further and further with some guys. And it made us real angry.”

Strauss sat naked in the sauna with the wrestlers, his legs dangling open. “He would come in and he would be wrapped in a towel and take the towel off and just sit with his legs spread on the opposite side of us, with his penis showing and everything,” remembered former wrestler Tito Vazquez.

On one occasion, Vazquez went to Strauss for a bloody nose. Vazquez recalled that Strauss told him to drop his pants, and for three or four minutes, fondled him before tending to his nose. When Vazquez returned to the practice room, he said, he met Jordan and a cluster of other wrestlers. “Dr. Strauss’s hands are cold as f---. He was grabbing my balls and everything,” Vazquez recalled complaining. According to Vazquez, some of the wrestlers erupted in laughter, but Jordan just put his hands up and said, “I’ve got nothing to do with that.”

Mike Flusche, an older wrestler who came to Ohio State after military service, recalled standing in the locker room doorway one afternoon when another wrestler complained in the presence of Jordan how Strauss had groped him. Jordan responded, “If he’d have touched me like that, I’d have broke his neck like a piece of balsa wood.” Flusche said he could not forget the specific language Jordan used. “It just sticks with you because it’s just a weird phrase.”

Jordan declined to comment on the specific accounts from former wrestlers, other than to repeat his blanket denial. Asked about accounts involving Jordan, the congressman’s spokesman, Russell Dye, said in a statement, “Chairman Jordan never saw or heard of any abuse, and if he had, he would have dealt with it.”

No one complained more loudly about Strauss than Dunyasha Yetts, a highly regarded transfer from Purdue University in 1993. When he entered Strauss’s exam room, the lights were off, and Strauss pushed himself on a rolling stool until his face was virtually in Yetts’s crotch. “Dude, back up,” Yetts said he demanded. Instead for the next few minutes Strauss fondled Yetts, “looking and pulling and lifting and tugging.”

Yetts burst out of the examining room screaming in fury. “I literally almost hit Jimmy with the door,” Yetts said. By his account, he began cussing to both Jordan and Hellickson about Strauss’s fondling and threatened to go back to Purdue. Hellickson, he recalled, tried to calm him by explaining that it was a routine examination. Yetts protested that it was like no exam he’d ever experienced.

When Yetts injured his thumb in a sparring match with a teammate, he had to see Strauss again, and again the doctor told him to disrobe. “It’s my thumb,” Yetts protested. Yetts fled the exam and slammed back into the locker room, livid. This time, according to Yetts, at least two other teammates witnessed his protest to Hellickson and Jordan. One of those teammates, who confirmed the exchange but refused to be named, heard Jordan respond something mollifying to the effect of, “He’s a doctor.”

None of the athletes interviewed suggest that Jordan had the power to intervene against Strauss. He was a lowly assistant coach, while Strauss was employed by the Student Health Center and a professor in the College of Medicine. As former wrestler and whistleblower Mike DiSabato acknowledged, “Jordan was just a kid himself, not that much older than us.” Few of them recognized Strauss’s exam room transgressions at the time as outright “sexual abuse.” Those who experienced the worst molestations said they were locked in silent shame.

But confusion over the nature of sex abuse in a medical exam does not amount to being categorically ignorant of Strauss’s conduct, as Jordan has claimed.

When Geiger became athletic director in 1994, he said, he began to receive regular complaints from both Remenyik, the fencing coach, and Hellickson about the milieu in Larkins in general, and also about Strauss specifically. Though Geiger does not remember Hellickson complaining about Strauss’s genital exams, “He was very concerned about the situation in the showers.” Hellickson was so exercised on the subject that Geiger does not believe he would have kept it from his right-hand man, Jordan. “That’s not credible,” Geiger repeated. “I know Russ Hellickson and he would not have been quiet about it in his office with his staff.”

Geiger’s recollection is consistent with the investigative report, which said complaints from wrestling reached such a peak that in 1992-1993 the head of Ohio State’s entire sports medicine department, Bob Murphy, asked another physician to perform the annual wrestling physicals because of “issues” with Strauss. Those “issues” included Strauss’s genital exams and presence in the showers with wrestlers, the report stated.

Strauss would not be fired until 1996, and he died by suicide in 2005, more than a decade before his crimes were publicly revealed. The university bureaucracy was not as attuned to complaints about Strauss as it should have been, Geiger acknowledged, and cumbersome university procedures governed allegations of misconduct. In terms of protecting young people from predators, Geiger said, “We weren’t as good at it. I freely admit that.”

Jordan does not admit it. He is sticking to his story. Asked by The Post if he believes anything happened to his wrestlers, Jordan replied, “I mean, you’d have to ask them. I don’t know any of it.”

On the brink of his 30th birthday, in 1994, Jordan had tired of the unlucrative grind at Larkins Hall. “It was time to try something different,” he recalled. “You know, married, four kids. It was like, ‘I don’t think I want to be an assistant coach my whole life.’”

His answer was to seek a career in public office. A disdain for government power was sparked in high school when a teacher introduced him to Milton Friedman’s “Free to Choose” lectures. Jordan believed that government should be “as small as possible.” Instead, it was an overactive referee that unfairly interfered with people’s ability to compete. “In wrestling, you step on the mat, you shake hands, you beat that guy, you earn it, you win it,” he said. “It’s sort of the same. The way it’s supposed to work, like, you know, government shouldn’t be telling you what to do, taking all your money, giving it to someone else.”

Overactive or not, the government had paid his salary for the past nine years and would continue to do so for decades to come. His political immersion began in January 1994 in his living room in West Liberty when he and Polly helped found the Mad River Valley Young Republican Club. They also joined the Right to Life society and Citizens Against Government Waste. And, following a trend among evangelicals, they started home-schooling their young children. Later that year, when the state representative from their district decided to retire, Jordan told Republican leaders that he wanted to run.

“You’re a nice young guy, but you don’t have a chance,” he was told. To which he replied, “We’ll see. That’s why they kick the ball up on Friday night to play the game.” He was 20 years younger than his opponent in the Republican primary, a veteran county commissioner. But Jordan launched an insurgent campaign: Ads lauded his wrestling record and pointed out that he had been voted “most dedicated” by his teammates. An army of volunteers, home-schooling advocates and contacts from high school wrestling programs knocked on doors. The result was lopsided. “We beat the pants off the guy,” he recalled.

There was, to be sure, a larger force at work in Jordan’s campaign. In the general election, his Democratic opponent was Dick Ansley, a public high school teacher from Anna who was spending his savings on the race. Ansley said he quickly realized that he was up against a well-funded Christian conservative coalition. At every campaign stop, one of the first questions from the crowd was, “Why don’t you belong to Right to Life?” He began to hear of Christian schools holding prayer meetings to support “Jimmy,” and of a phone campaign questioning his views on abortion. “I know it was coordinated, and I couldn’t do anything about it,” Ansley recalled. “It was very well organized and very fervent.”

In the state legislature, Jordan joined a group that called itself “The Caveman Caucus” and was determined to force moderate Republican leadership to the right. Jordan offered a bill to give parents the right to consent before their child was taught sex education. He passed a bill limiting welfare recipients to only two years. And he fought his own party’s governor, Bob Taft, over a plan to use a $400 million budget surplus to shore up public schools, instead demanding a tax cut that would net middle-income families about $66 each.

Jordan was not one to socialize around Capitol Square cultivating influence. He drove home every night, about an hour’s drive, while other legislators stayed in nearby hotels and schmoozed with lobbyists at dinner. He spent his lunch hours in the stairwells, running interval sprints up and down.

Going against the established crowd was Jordan’s means of ascent. In 2000, he activated his conservative Christian coalition again, this time to outflank a prominent conservative named Jim Buchy for a state Senate seat. Jordan won by painting the veteran legislator as a sellout to monied interests. “I’m just Joe Bag-o’-Doughnuts, the wrestling guy, but I’m the first guy that has a chance to beat ’em,” Jordan said during a speech in Sidney, Ohio. In truth, Jordan was hardly a bag of doughnuts. He was heavily backed by his own set of influential business executives, including David Brennan, an Akron industrialist known as “the wizard of Main Street.” Brennan’s pet cause was school vouchers: He had a company that managed charter schools, and he profited from their expansion.

Jordan became the tip of the spear on that and other social conservatism issues. He turned a routine reappointment to the State Medical Board into a public siege because the appointee had performed four abortion surgeries over his career — all cases in which the life of the mother was threatened. But Jordan could be cooperative with those he respected across the aisle. Marc Dann, a Democrat from Shaker Heights, was the ranking member of the state Senate’s Judiciary Committee when Jordan chaired it and found Jordan accommodating on most matters — unless they were his bedrock social conservative ones. “On those issues he was immovable and passionate, and it seemed in a sincere way,” Dann said.

John A. Boehner had heard from legislative friends in Columbus “what a pain in the ass” Jordan was. By the time Jordan in 2006 entered the race for an open seat in the 4th Congressional District, Boehner said he could only think to himself “the last guy we want representing Ohio in Congress is Jim Jordan.”

During their first term together in Congress, Boehner thought he had misjudged Jordan, who showed signs of being a team player. As House minority leader, he called the freshman into his office to tell him he was doing a good job and to keep it up. “That was the kiss of death,” Boehner soon realized.

Soon enough, Jordan returned to the pesteringly attacking style he perfected as a wrestler. He slept on a cot in his office and spent his early mornings exercising on the elliptical machines in the House gym “like a madman, maniacal,” as one fellow congressman noted. And he spent the rest of his time calculating ways to prevent House Republicans from compromising with Democrats.

By the time Boehner took over as House speaker in 2011, Jordan belonged to a band of conservative rebels including Tom Price of Georgia, Jeb Hensarling of Texas and Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin who called themselves the Jedi Council. They met regularly, often in Jordan’s office, to study the Bible — and plot ways to antagonize Boehner. Over the next four years, Ryan and some other Jedis recalibrated their methods, focusing more on results than performance, but Jordan persisted as an anti-compromiser, becoming a founder of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus.

Jordan and Boehner shared working-class Ohio backgrounds — one father an assembly worker, the other a barkeeper — but otherwise no two Republicans seemed less alike. Boehner had no interest in the sweaty gristle of wrestling, preferring country club golf. Unlike Jordan, he smoked and drank fine merlot, and as a political traditionalist sought common ground with colleagues, including Democrats.

Hard as he tried to understand Jordan’s motives, Boehner couldn’t. Jordan seemed to Boehner more interested in obstructing legislation than constructively working on it — an impression validated by a study from the Center for Effective Lawmaking, which scored Jordan tied for dead last in legislating by Republicans in the 114th Congress. Boehner said he came to think of Jordan simply as “an anarchist” who wanted to tear everything down.

One thing Jordan successfully tore down was Boehner’s speakership. In July 2015, the Freedom Caucus initiated a motion to vacate the speaker’s chair. Boehner resigned two months later. The new speaker was Ryan, who would find Jordan just as dicey to deal with but understood him better.

Then down the gold-plated escalator came Trump, a big city, celebrity TV bossman. Trump’s disruptive nature fit Jordan’s own style, and the prospect of “draining the swamp” of establishment types, and the “Make America Great Again” motto, resonated strongly with Jordan’s constituents and reminded him of the ethos of his father. Most of all, what Jordan seemed to see in Trump was a wrestling mind-set.

The adoration was so strong that nothing Trump did could shake it. When the Access Hollywood tape was revealed weeks before the 2016 general election showing Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women, Jordan denounced Trump’s comments as “completely reprehensible” and added that he would “never want Polly and our daughters treated that way.” But ultimately, he did not waver in his support, and neither did Polly, who campaigned for Trump in North Carolina that weekend.

After Trump won the presidency and swamped Democrat Hillary Clinton in Ohio’s 4th Congressional District with 64 percent of the vote, Jordan swiftly became a Trumpian supplicant on Capitol Hill. He seemed entranced by Trump’s aura, once explaining, “There is an energy, there is a charisma about the president that is contagious.” He talked on the phone with Trump several times a week. At Trump’s urging, he took a lead role in attacking special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, who was investigating Russia’s election interference; vilified Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from the probe; and introduced impeachment articles against Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who had appointed Mueller.

Jordan’s stature within the Republican firmament grew. He was still a master of aggressive disruption, but it was now with the encouragement of the president. Where earlier he mostly operated in the background, he became a fixture on Fox News and one of the party’s leading fundraisers. By the first half of 2018, there were intimations that he could move up in the House.

Then along came the ghost of wrestling past.

Fourth of July, 2018. Bret Adams, an Ohio-based sports agent, was spending the weekend at his country place. He was riding on his tractor through farm fields when the cellphone buzzed. It was Jordan calling in distress. The night before, NBC News reporter Corky Siemaszko ran a story quoting DiSabato, the former Ohio State wrestler and whistleblower, saying that Jordan was “absolutely lying if he says he doesn’t know what was going on,” with two teammates amplifying the accusations.

The Ohio State sex scandal had been unfolding in public for a few months, but now the harsh floodlights focused on the powerful congressman. At the time, Jordan was contemplating a bid to become the next speaker of the House. Reporters peppered Jordan with questions. “In light of what was said yesterday, it’s just not accurate,” he said. Then he went into wrestling mode, taking the offensive, looking for leverage.

One of his first calls was to Adams, seeking help. “He said, ‘I can’t believe Mike’s doing this,’” Adams recalled.

Jordan and Adams both had once been friends with DiSabato, but now were estranged from him. As Adams recalled, he and Jordan talked for an hour about how to defuse the situation, discredit DiSabato and gain testimonial support for Jordan’s denials. Adams said he saw his mission as to send emails to the media and other wrestlers saying of DiSabato, “Hey, this guy is out of his f---ing mind with what he is saying.’”

Like many whistleblowers, DiSabato was a complicated figure, his moods uneven, prone to depression, his actions at times crude and self-defeating. He was being sued for defamation by Adams, one of many former allies he had alienated over the years. But if it had not been for DiSabato, the scandal might never have come to light.

One day seven months earlier, in December 2017, DiSabato and Coleman were discussing the scandal at Michigan State, in which Larry Nassar, a team doctor, was soon to be sentenced to life in prison for sexually abusing 156 female gymnasts. Coleman recited statements of victims in that case. One gymnast said she was assaulted when she went to Nassar for back pain. Another recounted how Nassar put a finger inside her during a routine examination of her hips.

It suddenly struck DiSabato that Strauss, like Nassar, had used his stature as a nationally respected figure in sports medicine to molest athletes. “He said two words. Finger. Vagina,” DiSabato recalled of Coleman. “And it triggered me. Wow, this is exactly what Strauss was doing. I just didn’t recognize before that what Strauss had done to us was sexual abuse.”

Looking for leverage against the most powerful institution in the state, DiSabato filed public records requests for documents regarding Strauss. He queried former teammates and other Buckeyes, amassing anecdotal evidence. One of the people he contacted was Jordan. He reached the congressman by phone and spent 45 minutes detailing how he was trying to get Ohio State to take responsibility for what had happened. By DiSabato’s account, Jordan listened silently, then concluded the call by saying, “Just keep me out of it.”

DiSabato amassed enough testimony to force Ohio State to start an internal investigation and took his findings to the press. He released a video called “Scarlet X” quoting wrestlers, a nurse and Hellickson talking about Strauss’s behavior. He sent it to the university and said that he and other Strauss victims were hoping to help Ohio State avoid a “public relations nightmare” by reaching a settlement that would compensate them and deal with “the individuals that knew of this situation and chose to do nothing about it.”

When the story broke on that July Fourth, Jordan and his allies called Hellickson seeking a statement of support. In a voice message that Hellickson intended to leave on the phone of a Jordan aide but accidentally left on the phone of a wrestler, he said his first effort at a statement was “too wishy-washy when I talk about Jim being the most competent. … Maybe if it can be admired, respected and competent. I don’t know. Whichever way you think it reads better.”

One of Jordan’s many calls that weekend was to DiSabato’s brother Adam, who had been captain of the wrestling team in the early 1990s. Mike and Adam DiSabato were embroiled in a feud over a business deal gone wrong and had not spoken in a decade. Bret Adams and others had told Jordan that the younger DiSabato hated his brother and suggested Jordan could enlist him.

But as strained as the brotherly relationship was, the family bond proved stronger. “Jordan knew about this split, but he miscalculated the strength of the Italian family,” said Ratliff, the lawyer who represented Adam DiSabato and other wrestlers. “Adam was mightily upset at Mike, but he was not about to go against his brother. Jimmy thought he could find the other brother to speak in his defense against Mike — that Adam would say Jimmy didn’t know. Wrong.”

For two years after that call from Jordan, Adam DiSabato kept silent. He finally described his conversation with Jordan while testifying before an Ohio legislative committee. By then, 350 men had signed on to lawsuits charging Ohio State with negligence in failing to stop Strauss. The room sat stunned as Adam DiSabato began to speak. “Jim Jordan called me crying, groveling, begging me to go against my brother, begging me, crying for a half-hour,” he said. “That’s the kind of coverup that’s going on there.”

Jordan turned to others to try to regain his leverage. Shirley & Banister Public Affairs, a Washington-area firm billing itself as “the right’s pitch perfect conservatives,” created a website listing former wrestlers and wrestling coaches who vouched for the congressman and spread the word to reporters that Mike DiSabato and other wrestlers had ulterior motives. Campaign finance records show that in July 2018 Jordan’s campaign paid the firm formerly known as Shirley & Banister $15,000 and then paid the firm an additional $11,500 every month through the end of November. Craig Shirley, the firm’s founding partner, said, “As far as a political scandal it was the equivalent of a hangnail.”

Reg Brown, an influential lawyer-lobbyist at Kirkland & Ellis, advised Jordan on messaging. Years earlier, Brown had helped another Republican, Rep. Jim Kolbe of Arizona, clear his name after he was confronted with a somewhat similar situation — accused of knowing about Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert’s past as a sexually predatory wrestling coach in Illinois, a scandal that forced Hastert from Congress and into prison.

Nevertheless, a drumbeat of accusations continued. The Wall Street Journal followed the NBC story with one of its own, and this time it was Coleman who decided to go public, frustrated that so many wrestlers were remaining anonymous, for fear of repercussions. “So I say, ‘Look, my name’s Mark Coleman, and the only way Jim Jordan didn’t know is if he had dementia,’” he recalled telling the newspaper.

The next day, Jordan appeared on Fox News with Bret Baier. He noted that DiSabato had been arrested for threatening a lawyer, and he criticized other networks for “rushing to put someone on TV who’s had a criminal record.” He said he “felt sorry” for Coleman and responded “not true” when asked about a new assertion from wrestler Shawn Dailey that he had witnessed Yetts’s loud complaints about Strauss to the coaches. Jordan expressed frustration that Yetts would turn on him after all he said he had done to help the wrestler.

If the Baier interview helped Jordan with Fox viewers, it had the opposite effect on many former wrestlers. Nick Nutter, a heavyweight who said he had been drugged and sexually abused by Strauss, admired Jordan. But watching Jordan on Fox, he was deeply disappointed. “I am faithful,” Nutter said, but he added, “He threw people under the bus like Coleman and Yetts, my buddies.”

In a recent interview, Yetts, who had briefly served time in prison in 2007 for financial fraud, said he understood that his imprisonment might resurface, but that likelihood did not deter him. “I didn’t care because I knew what I was going to say was the truth, so if the result be they attack me on TV, so be it,” Yetts said.

Coleman’s vulnerabilities included struggles with alcohol and drugs going back to 1993, when he was fired as an assistant coach after his arrest for growing 371 marijuana plants in his campus apartment. When he went public to the Journal, he was still drinking too much and estranged from a girlfriend. As part of his mission to help Jordan, Adams tried to get Coleman to “move to Jim’s side of the fence” and went through the girlfriend to reach Coleman.

As Adams and Coleman recounted, they met at a Waffle House with the girlfriend. Adams presented Coleman with an affidavit to sign asserting that Jordan had no knowledge of Strauss. Coleman balked. At that point, Adams said, the girlfriend threatened to reveal damaging information about his taxes if he refused to cooperate. “All of a sudden the pressure on me from the world ... I couldn’t believe it. And I was an active drunk at the time,” Coleman recalled.

Coleman agreed to say he had no “personal” knowledge of anyone telling Jordan that they had been sexually abused by Strauss. But in his recent interview with The Post, Coleman, who said he had been sober for two years, retracted his retraction. “I was only doing it because I was scared of what people told me might happen.” he said, adding: “Jim having dementia was just a smartass stupid thing I said. But if [Jordan] wants to stand there and say, ‘No, I thought it was perfectly normal for Doc Strauss to stand there and take 30-minute showers and stand there at weigh-ins two feet away — if he wants to say that, then he’s a f---ing idiot. If he can’t say that, then he’s a liar. I mean he can say that, but it makes him the most clueless f---ing guy alive. No. Jim Jordan is not clueless.”

In time, the national media would move on. Ohio State settled with some victims in 2018, and stalemated others, fighting them all the way to the Supreme Court.

But a core group of wrestlers would not let the past go, and neither would Colleen Marshall, a popular anchor at Columbus’s NBC affiliate. Marshall had two children who went to Ohio State. She could not stop thinking about the victims of sexual abuse as someone’s son or daughter. She kept reporting, and in 2019 she finally secured an interview with a wrestler named Dan Ritchie, who told a story that showed just what the wrestlers were up against in trying to contradict Jordan. Ritchie revealed that Strauss had molested him, but he had not told a soul until the story broke on that fateful Fourth of July, when he confided in his wife and tried to tell his parents. His wife was comforting. His parents were not. “Because at the time Jim Jordan was in line for speaker of the House. And we are conservatives. We’re Republicans. My father is, you know, very political,” Ritchie said in Marshall’s report. “And his concern was, ‘How is this going to affect Jim Jordan?’”

Ritchie said his father wasn’t listening to him. “And I got to a point where I’m like, ‘This has nothing to do with Jim Jordan. I don’t care about Jim Jordan. I’m trying to tell you something.’ And his argument back was, ‘Well, maybe Jim didn’t know.’”

“Of course Jim knew,” Ritchie told his father wearily. “Everybody knew.”

By the spring of 2021, Schyck felt so overwhelmed by the Ohio State trauma that he decided to escape into the wilderness. In late March, he started off from Georgia on a trek up the Appalachian Trail, hoping that walking 12 hours a day would ease his mind. Instead, he only became more obsessed, fretting over his belief that Hellickson and Jordan were not supporting the boys they had once coached. It all comes down to Russ and Jimmy, he thought.

Deep in the woods in Pennsylvania, he pulled out his cellphone and organized a conference call with a group of former teammates. “The bottom line was we need to get Russ and Jimmy on board, and we need to have these guys say something,” Schyck recalled. They wanted their coaches to validate what they had endured.

That night in his tent, Schyck tapped out a text message to Hellickson. “What happened … happened! We all dealt with Strauss,” Schyck wrote. But “for whatever reason you have chosen not to speak on our behalf and worry more about your legacy (and one singular person in all of this … Jim Jordan.)”

Texts went back and forth until Hellickson relented to a meeting. He gathered with more than 20 wrestlers at a high school on the outskirts of Columbus. The wrestlers arrived with two goals: to bring Hellickson to their side and to find a way to get their message to Jordan. They thought Jordan needed a lifeline, a way to retreat from his hard-line denials.

The meeting became a group therapy session. One by one, they told stories about Strauss. Some related traumatic experiences for the first time. When Hellickson kept denying that he knew anything about Strauss’s behavior, one wrestler stormed out in anger. Schyck, upset that Hellickson seemed only concerned about himself and protecting Jordan, made a bearlike bluff charge at his old coach, only to be pulled back by a friend. Near the end, Hellickson asked how many had undergone counseling because of the abuse. Every man in the room raised his hand.

At first, the wrestlers thought the meeting had accomplished what they had hoped. But over the next few days, the optimism faded. Hellickson told Schyck that he had decided to stay out of it. The wrestlers read it another way. They suspected that his reluctance was to protect his favorite son, Jordan.

Inside a spacious suite on the first floor of the Rayburn House Office Building, Jordan’s inner sanctum is covered by a tundra of carpet with pieces of well-used brown furniture, a desk flanked by flags and a large Chesterfield sofa. Jordan sleeps in the office. But workaholism, frugality and proximity to the congressional gym apparently are not the main reasons he chooses to bunk there.

Security is.

“I prefer not to get shot,” he said.

It was not big-city crime but America’s bitter political divide that Jordan said made his life perilous. In 2017, the FBI found his name on a list of legislators kept by James Hodgkinson, the domestic terrorist who shot up the Republican congressional baseball practice, wounding Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana and four others.

For years, Jordan and Polly had kept a small apartment on Capitol Hill near the Tortilla Coast restaurant. But the three-block walk to work became unpleasant if not threatening, especially during the Trump impeachment in 2019. “People swearing at you,” he said. “People swearing at my wife.” They gave up the apartment.

When asked about the role his own aggressive style played in exacerbating that divisiveness, Jordan said, “Well, I wish there were less of that,” before arguing that he was only doing what he promised his constituents he would do. “I’m not trying to get personal with the Democrats, attack them personally,” he said. “I try to think of it as, like, I never had any hatred for my opponents on the mat. If you’re a wrestler, you shake hands, and you try to kick their tail. But when you’re done, you shake hands again. God bless America. You move on.”

The most savage political violence in the U.S. Capitol was promulgated not by Democrats but rampaging Trump supporters who stormed the building on Jan. 6, 2021, hoping to force Vice President Mike Pence and the Congress to overturn election results that showed Trump had lost to Biden.

As the rioters neared the House chamber that day, Jordan approached fellow Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and said they needed to get “the ladies” away from the aisle. Outraged by Jordan’s role in pushing the election fraud lie, Cheney smacked his hand and said, “Get away from me! You f---ing did this!” Cheney, who co-chaired a House select committee investigating the Capitol attack, would later assert that “Jim Jordan knew more about what Donald Trump had planned for January 6 than any other member of the House of Representatives.”

After House members were escorted to the safety of a holding room, Democratic Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard approached Rep. Eric Swalwell, her California colleague, and said she was concerned that Jordan and a gaggle of Freedom Caucus Republicans were not wearing masks. At 79, Roybal-Allard felt vulnerable to covid, and she asked Swalwell to make an announcement urging everyone to put their masks on. “I said if I make it, it will make it worse, so I asked the sergeant of arms to do it. He did,” Swalwell recalled. He said Jordan and some other lawmakers rolled their eyes at the request. “It is seared in my memory because of how cruel it felt,” Swalwell said.

Later that night, Jordan was among 147 Republican lawmakers who voted to overturn the election results. A week later, he was in the Oval Office receiving from Trump the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Back in committee the next day, he insisted that he never said the election was stolen, an act of word-parsing that mirrored his carefully constructed denials in the Ohio State case. Even as judges throughout the nation rejected lawsuits seeking to overturn the results, Jordan had spoken at Stop the Steal rallies, called for a congressional probe “amid troubling reports of irregularities and improprieties,” and declared on Fox News that “I don’t know how you can ever convince me that President Trump didn’t actually win this thing based on all the things you see.”

When his party regained control of the House in 2023, Jordan rose to chair the Judiciary Committee. Now the erstwhile disrupter was part of leadership. While many Freedom Caucus members opposed the speakership of Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, Jordan nominated McCarthy and spoke in his favor throughout a contentious 15 ballots.

This month, Jordan tried belatedly to assume the posture of party unifier after McCarthy was undone by eight of his rebellious acolytes, mounting a bid for House speaker based on the claim that only he could pull Republicans together. But Jordan was as responsible as any single member for ruptures in the Republican conference with his years of divisive tactics, and he reaped what he sowed in floor votes. Twenty-two Republican colleagues voted against him on the second ballot, 25 on the third ballot, some colleagues specifically recoiling from what they called his pressure campaign. “One thing I cannot stomach, or support is a bully,” Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa) said in a statement. Down but not out, Jordan calculated that clawing tenacity would wear out opponents in the end, as it often has for him — until Friday afternoon, when House Republicans voted by secret ballot to cast him aside as their speaker nominee.

Jordan’s aggressive approach to the opposition has defined his tenure. He was so eager to spar with Raskin on Judiciary that he asked the Maryland Democrat if he intended to join the “weaponization of government” subcommittee.

“No such luck,” Raskin said.

The very name of the “weaponization” subcommittee astonished Raskin, who called it “a complete psychological projection. … In fact, they are in the process of weaponizing the committee to go after their opponents. So it’s like a political confession.”

It all starts and ends with wrestling. In the Old Testament, Jacob wrestled all night with a man who turned out to be God. In ancient Greece, there were elite wrestling schools, or palaestras, in Olympia and Athens. Wrestling was woven into the mythology through which Greeks translated the world. Hercules wrestled one antagonist after another. And in the unsettling realm of modern American politics, wrestling is the way to understand Jordan, and his relentless defense of Trump.

Trump is the pro wrestler, straight out of WWE, enrapturing audiences at visceral and symbolic levels. Whether he plays the role of hero or villain, a “face” or “heel” in the lexicon of that world, it matters not to his fans; he is the outsize character providing entertainment to the masses. Jordan is down there sweating on the mats, toughing it out, looking for single-leg takedowns. “Killing the other guy on the mat, making them scream uncle,” Raskin said, “and then walking off with the spoils of victory.” And doing it again and again.