“There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood leads on to fortune. . . . On such a full sea are we now afloat.”
– Brutus to Cassius, Julius Caesar, Act 4
The last time I talked with Mitch McConnell, I suggested that our next conversation be about the future of the Republican Party (after Donald Trump). I didn’t use the last three words, since it was just before the election.
He was noncommittal, as usual, but he was surely thinking about how he would deal with Trump if the voters ended their political marriage of convenience. The voters did not only that; they gave Democrats control of the Senate.
And then came the tide, the flood, the mob, that ransacked the Capitol and gave McConnell the chance to remake his fortune – not just as Senate minority leader, but as the pre-eminent leader of the Republican Party. That wouldn’t just be good for him or the party; it would be good for the country, considering the alternative.
McConnell had publicly divorced himself from Trump as Congress met to count the electoral votes, but he had to be worried about Trump’s continued disruptive influence in the party, as exhibited by the 13 Republican senators who initially said they would object to votes from states that were key to Joe Biden’s victory.
The insurrection that interrupted the count, and the impeachment it caused, gave McConnell an opening for a power play.
Al Cross (Twitter @ruralj) is a professor in the University of Kentucky School of Journalism and Media and director of its Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues. His opinions are his own, not UK’s. He was the longest-serving political writer for the Louisville Courier Journal (1989-2004) and national president of the Society of Professional Journalists in 2001-02. He joined the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame in 2010.
NKyTribune and KyForward are the anchor home for Al Cross’ column. We offer it to other publications throughout the Commonwealth, with appropriate attribution.
First, he said he had an open mind about convicting Trump – and, presumably, disqualifying him from office, a punishment that the Senate could impose, after conviction, with a simple majority vote.
Then he essentially endorsed the charges in the impeachment resolution, saying Tuesday, “This mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the president and other powerful people.”
McConnell, who usually observes the maxim that you don’t get into trouble for something you don’t say, has been saying a lot lately. It’s hard to believe that he would have, in effect, declared war on Trump without some reasonable expectation that 16 other Republican senators would join him and all 50 Democrats to provide the two-thirds of the Senate needed to convict.
In doing so, they would go against a huge majority of the Republican base, as reflected by some local Kentucky party officials’ effort to get the state party’s ruling body to tell McConnell to stick with Trump. But McConnell just got re-elected and is unlikely to run again, so he is insulated from voter retribution.
Also, when it comes to topics that are critical to him, McConnell always knows more than just about anybody else. As a top Senate leader, he probably has access to intelligence and investigative information about the insurrection that could persuade wavering senators to convict and disqualify Trump.
McConnell’s play goes against type, because one of his prime directives as Republican leader has been to avoid dividing his caucus, but the caucus was already splitting into Trump and anti-Trump factions. Looking ahead, even successful votes to convict and disqualify Trump could leave McConnell in a minority of his caucus, not a good place for a leader. And even if Trump were disqualified, he could play martyr and form a third party that could cripple the GOP.
But when a president refuses to concede an election he clearly lost, repeatedly lies about it, and fosters a violent attack on Congress, he needs to be barred from public office, as the Constitution’s 14th Amendment says.
Mitch McConnell is the most political of political animals, but he knows that his political alliance with Trump, and toleration of his outrages, has permanently stained his reputation.
At nearly 79, how does McConnell want to be remembered? As the chief political enabler of the worst president in history, or as someone who helped re-establish norms of democracy that president trashed?
Some of McConnell’s critics say he’s just trying to help Republicans escape any culpability for the riot. Also, it’s easy to reduce this episode to a simple power struggle between him and Trump, but it’s a lot more than that.
It’s about the future of the Republican Party, of which he is now chief steward, and whether it will return to the norms of democracy or keep playing footsie with an anti-democratic, white-supremacist insurgency that U.S. intelligence agencies identified last year as the main terrorist threat to the United States.
Longtime Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, who has reported extensively on extremist groups, wrote before Inauguration Day: “Among the insurgents, ‘Leaders are telling followers: “Don’t do D.C. We’ll live for another day”,’ says one official who’s involved in security planning and familiar with intelligence reports.”
That gives you some idea of what’s at stake: a major party, and maybe our country. I’ll take McConnell over Trump.
I agree with Al; I’ll take McConnell over Trump. Trump will be fighting legal and financial gremlins for several years and will slowly fade away in the news. There is a danger however that someone else will assume the leadership of his cult. As for McConnell, he will try to carefully breakaway from the Trumpsters; maybe even vote to convict. His future lies with the 2022 Senate elections. If he can’t turn the Senate back red then I wouldn’t be surprised if he chooses to retire before his term is over.
I don’t agree with Al. For 4 years Trump’s enabler in chief was none other than Mitch McConnell. He was willing to abide Trump’s chronic and habitual lying about everything from the size of his inaugural crowd to the results of an election he clearly and decisively lost. He put up with his siding with white supremacist and right wing extremists groups, his buddying up to Putin and other authoritarian tyrants at the expense of our closest and natural allies. Only when Trump could not be politically useful to him in his insatiable quest for power did McConnell turn on him. As long as Trump could help him stack the Judiciary with right wing extremists many of whom were rated unqualified by the ABA and help him maintain his position as Majority Leader of the Senate, no outrage was too great for him to endure. McConnell deserves to go down with Trump in infamy as I am sure he will in history. The people of Kentucky should be ashamed to have elected such an evil person as Mitch McConnell, who has never truly represented them but rather, the big corporations and rich donors who made him and kept him in power at their expense.