Mitch McConnell was on his way to becoming not only the longest serving Senate Republican Leader in American history – a record he can still claim – but one of the most successful. In an alternate universe he would’ve announced his retirement this week with mixed pleasure but immense pride.
Instead, this once enormously powerful legislative leader veritably slunk off the political stage (though formally not until November), admitting that the ground had shifted under his feet. That the Republican Party “at this particular moment in time” not only had changed nearly beyond his recognition but was inhospitable to someone of his moderate temperament.
To be clear, McConnell was a right-wing politician who did what he could to shape American politics in his image. For example, he is credited with shaping the Supreme Court in a way that will drive the left and most of the center crazy for years if not decades. But in his temperament, he is and always was moderate. Soft spoken, tending to taciturn and courtly in his manner; willing, sometimes, to compromise, to work across the aisle; and an internationalist; he was always far, very far, from being a right-wing nut job.
One measure of McConnell’s moderate temper was his well-concealed loathing of the man who finally swallowed him whole, Donald Trump. But notwithstanding how McConnell felt about Trump in private, for reasons of his own the senator did what he could to enable the president. First to escort Trump into the White House, and then to keep him there. Until the January 6th insurrection, McConnell was so supportive of Trump that he was labeled by Jane Mayer, in an April 2020 article in The New Yorker, “Enabler in Chief.”
McConnell – whose wife, Elaine Chao, was, not incidentally, a member of Trump’s cabinet – plays a similarly important part in my 2021 book, The Enablers. In the book I wrote that McConnell “personally and politically protected Trump during the first impeachment trial.” It was McConnell then who “made it possible for the president to finish his term without the proceedings upending or even significantly impairing him.” Further, as Mayer pointed out, McConnell stayed “largely silent about the president’s lies and inflammatory remarks,” and propped up the administration with legislative and judicial victories.
McConnell though had a fatal flaw – that led to a fatal error. He was so hungry for power he could not see straight. He could not see that Trump would stop at nothing and no one to get his way and save his skin. Which meant that unless something or someone stopped him, Trump would inevitably, inexorably, go from bad to worse.
And so it came to pass that the monster swallowed his creator.