When Viktor Frankenstein created the monster, “Frankenstein,” Viktor thought he was doing good. Creating something new and exciting that would accrue not just to his benefit but to that of science. What even this most learned of men did not understand was that his humanoid would soon become an independent agent with his own mind. Who could and would do what he wanted when he wanted. It was not long before Frankenstein could not be controlled by anyone – not even by the man who created him.
Think of Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell as 21st century Viktor Frankensteins. They are not the only ones, but they are typical of the breed. A breed that in my book, The Enablers, I call ”enablers.” For the monster Pence, McConnell, and others of their ilk created is every bit as uncontrollable as the original Frankenstein. His name of course is Donald Trump.
In The Enablers I wrote that once Pence signed on with Trump, he had no choice. Pence had to accept without even a murmur Trump’s complete supremacy. Though it might have seemed unseemly – especially since he wanted one day to run for president himself – for Pence to play the perennial lapdog, the abject underling, so long as he was vice president, he was boxed in. “Trump’s demand for, need for, fealty was absolute, so before all else it was Pence’s fulltime job to fall into line.” If there was an organizing theme to Pence’s vice presidency, it was that he must never give offense to a man whose “emotional antennae quiver at every slight.” Pence was an enabler – a follower who allowed or even encouraged a leader, in this case an American president, to engage in and persist in behaviors that were destructive.
One might argue that for Pence it came with the territory. Vice presidents are supposed to be subordinate to presidents. Not so though senators. They are members of another branch of American government, the legislative branch, and their term of office is six years. So, ostensibly, not only are they are separate from the executive their long term in office protects them from the prevailing political wind.
No matter. Though he had long been a power player in his own right, and though his personal disdain for Trump had long been an open secret, McConnell nevertheless enabled Trump throughout virtually the entirety of his presidency. Writing in The New Yorker, Jane Mayer called the senator Trump’s “enabler in chief.” I noted there was a moment at which McConnell’s support for Trump was pivotal. More than anyone else it was he, then majority leader, who protected the president from political harm during the first of his two impeachment trials. So zealous an enabler was McConnell that he precluded even a single witness from testifying at Trump’s impeachment trial, thereby effectively ensuring the president would serve out his term unimpeded.
This past week Pence finally declared that Trump was “wrong” to insist that he, Pence, had the right to overturn the results of the 2020 election. And, this past week, McConnell finally declared Republican attacks on two of their own, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, both fierce critics of Trump, were inappropriate and wrongheaded.
Too little too late? Well, better late than never. But let’s be clear.
- Frankenstein came close to devouring the American body politic.
- It was types like Pence and McConnell that gave him license to do so.