Before entering politics, Mr. Crane served five wartime deployments and 13 years in the military. He then started Bottle Breacher, a company featured on the reality show “Shark Tank,” whose signature product was a .50-caliber bullet fashioned into a bottle opener and marketed as a gift for men and groomsmen. He became a brand ambassador for Sig Sauer, the firearms manufacturer.
With tattooed arms and dark, slick-backed hair, Mr. Crane stands out in the sea of suits that is the Republican Conference, where he is now bent on disrupting the status quo simply for disruption’s sake.
“He’s a new breed of MAGA,” said Stephen K. Bannon, the former adviser to Mr. Trump, who is close with Mr. Crane. “Smart, tough, lethal.”
Late last Friday night after the 14th vote, the remaining holdouts were Mr. Biggs, Representatives Bob Good of Virginia and Matt Rosendale of Montana, and Mr. Crane. Representatives Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Matt Gaetz of Florida, two of the most vocal opponents in the final days, had finally relented and switched their votes to “present” on the second-to-last ballot.
“Everybody was pressuring,” Mr. Crane said. As the group of defectors shrank from 20 to four, he said, “the pressure just kept escalating.”
Mr. Crane was something of a wild card because he had said little, at all, throughout the process. And he was the sole freshman in the group.
“The consensus between the group was: ‘We came this far together. If we go out, we’re going out together,’” he said. “When the suggestion was made to put this thing to bed when we knew we could not win, I wanted to make sure I did not leave those that had stood to the end.”
