GOP MINORITY LEADER, WHO HAD SUPPORTED TRUMP, NOW TRUMP IS ANTI THE MINORITY LEADER

 

… This is the way many Americans see the current Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell

 

McConnell will only be supportive, if he thinks an individual will help him keep his power.

 

The Minority Leader Senator from Kentucky had spent the past four years as one of Trump’s chief enablers.  (He did this, boosting Trump’s election, by keeping a Supreme Court seat open, and pushing through Trump’s agenda with party-line votes)  McConnell also did this by supporting Trump for weeks as Trump falsely claimed the 2020 election was stolen.

As those President Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, the Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell was whisked by the Secret Service to a hidden location as he was kept with a handful of other top lawmakers.

But that former marriage of political convenience quickly disappeared when Trump exploded at McConnell for acknowledging President Joe Biden’s victory.

Safely huddled with Democratic leaders as they watched video of the Capitol police battling Trump supporters, McConnell then reacted with anger and revulsion against the president and his supporters.  This is according to Senator Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), who was also in the same secure, hidden location.

“I thought to myself, 'This could be a transformative moment. He appears to have taken this very seriously,’ ” recalled Durbin, who spent hours that day holed up with the Republican leader.

But when it came time to hold Trump to account, as with many other Republicans, Mitch McConnell also backed off.  While seven GOP senators voted to convict Trump following his impeachment by the House for inciting an insurrection, McConnell supported Trump’s acquittal, ensuring Trump would face no formal penalty for inciting an insurrection.

Ten months later, Trump is once again dominating the Republican Party, expected to run again in 2024, and Trump is utterly disdainful of the Senate leader who helped save him. Trump dismissed McConnell as a “stupid person”.  Trump also suggested his favored 2022 Senate candidates should oust McConnell from his leadership post when they get to Washington.

Trump recently told the Washington Post:  “Mc Connell is not a real leader because he didn’t fight for my presidency,”

For many of his 36 years in the Senate, Mitch McConnell has cultivated an image as a master political and legislative tactician.  He has been a total insider who knows how to gain power and to use it to the fullest. He was credited with masterminding Republican victories when he ran Senate campaign strategy in the late 1990s, rising to party leader and leveraging chamber rules to thwart much of President Barack Obama’s agenda.  He also blocked a number of judicial nominees, including a key Supreme Court seat.

He used his fundraising prowess to support favored Senate candidates with the best chances of winning while undercutting those figures who might be less acceptable. Under Trump, McConnell helped hundreds of conservative judges to the federal bench, an achievement many saw as an indication of McConnell’s ability to work his influence over a highly inexperienced Trump administration.

Yet in the months since the Jan. 6 attack, a different portrait of McConnell has taken shape.  At 79, safely reelected last year to a seventh term and in his 16th year as the Senate’s top Republican, McConnell is nonetheless increasingly playing the role of a conflicted booster of Trump’s interests.  That being, not a GOP leader with his own vision.

McConnell’s vote on impeachment, which infuriated some of his closest backers, made clear his calculus that he couldn’t challenge Trump, even at the former president’s most vulnerable moment.  This is a sign of the MAGA hold on the party electorate and many in McConnell’s own caucus. 

McConnell opposed a bipartisan Jan. 6 investigation, blocked three bills Democrats put forward to counter restrictive GOP voting laws driven by Trump’s false fraud claims.  He also endorsed a Trump-backed 2022 Senate candidate who echoed the false claim that the election was stolen.

To top it all off, McConnell has pledged to vote for Trump if he’s a 2024 nominee.

Asked by The Post in the interview whether he would support Trump as the nominee “no matter what he’s done,” McConnell said he would “obviously” back the GOP’s presidential pick. How could he square that pledge with saying Trump had caused an insurrection?  McConnell said it was “pretty simple,” because he would just follow his party’s wishes.  In other words, he is owned by the current Trump/GOP party!

“My guess is what happened is the tides changed and he realized there wasn’t support [to convict] in the caucus,” said Trey Grayson, Kentucky’s former secretary of state, whom McConnell once unsuccessfully endorsed in a Senate race against Rand Paul. “Sometimes leaders lead, and sometimes they have to follow some people that are trying to lead. And I guess that’s what happened.”

This account of how one of Washington’s longtime Republican power players succumbed to the power of Trump is based on interviews with McConnell.  Plus, his former and current Senate colleagues, and others who have known him over the years, as well as with Trump and other officials.

The Post reviewed McConnell’s memoir, his writings, speeches, tweets and other pronouncements, and his Senate record.  That examination found that McConnell’s actions after Jan. 6 followed a long pattern in his political career, which began as a congressional intern in 1963.  He has changed course on everything from campaign finance to voting rights, moving hard right as the Republican Party changed around him. His guiding principle has only been for holding power and acquiring and keeping it.  "He does not have an ideological adherence to policy." This is from those who knew him early in his career.

McConnell said in The Post interview that he is proud of the stands he has taken, pointing to some of his positions against conventional Republican thinking.  Such as opposing a ban on burning American flags and supporting the Democrat’s infrastructure bill. Those stands mean that “the extreme elements of your own party are not going to like it,” he said. “And there are other times when you are engaged in activities that are applauded by them.”

Just two years ago, seemingly at the pinnacle of his power, McConnell could hardly have foreseen himself in such a precarious position.  Midway through Trump’s term, the veteran lawmaker released a new version of his autobiography, which of course, described his rise in the Senate, "in heroic terms." The new book opened with a bizarre glowing foreword penned by then President Trump, who lavished praise on McConnell as his “ace in the hole” and Trump wrote that he “couldn’t have asked for a better partner.”

Except Trump never actually wrote those words.  That is at least according to the ex-president, who now mocks McConnell’s role in pursuing his agenda.  In an interview with The Post, Trump said McConnell actually wrote that foreword and simply used the president’s name on the passage.

Trump said he told McConnell, “Why don’t you write it for me and I’ll put it in, Mitch? Because that’s the way life works.”

McConnell, was asked if Trump’s account was accurate, and he did not dispute it. “I really don’t have anything to add related to him,” McConnell said.

This pretty much says, all we need to know, about both Donald Trump and Senator Mitch McConnell.

Copyright G. Ater 2021