When Speaker Mike Johnson said last week that he would “strongly request” that a damning congressional ethics report on the conduct of former Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida be kept under wraps, it was a full-circle moment for the man at the center of the controversy.

After all, Mr. Gaetz was the one who orchestrated the coup against the last speaker, Kevin McCarthy, that made room for Mr. Johnson, a little-known Louisiana Republican, to ascend to the top job in the House. And Mr. McCarthy always claimed his nemesis moved against him because he refused to halt the very same House Ethics Committee investigation into sexual misconduct and illicit drug use allegations against Mr. Gaetz. (Mr. Gaetz has long denied the charges.)

Now Mr. McCarthy is long gone, Mr. Gaetz is the president-elect’s choice to run the Justice Department, and Mr. Johnson is doing what Mr. McCarthy never would — intervening to try to make sure the damaging material on Mr. Gaetz never sees the light of day.

It is a fitting coda to two years of tumult in the Republican-led House, disorder that was exacerbated by bad blood among individual members.

The chaos has been driven by big-picture political dynamics: a polarized Congress where compromise is a lost art, a G.O.P. split between center-leaning conservatives and the hard right, and a too-small majority that gave outsize power to rebels like Mr. Gaetz.

But that public drama was also fueled at least in part by more personal and petty feuds, chief among them the one between Mr. Gaetz and Mr. McCarthy over the ethics inquiry.

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