The Daily Beast: “Elected in a landslide in 2020 to a seventh term by the voters of Kentucky, McConnell next year will become the longest-serving Senate leader in history, surpassing Democrat Mike Mansfield, a statesman who was beloved by both sides of the aisle. McConnell, for his part, is reviled by Democrats for his blanket refusal to consider the needs of the nation and the brute force tactics that he uses to advance GOP priorities.
At age 80, McConnell, dubbed “the old crow” by Donald Trump, is holding his own against the former president. In an interview last week with The New York Times, the minority leader touted his recent trip to Ukraine and how he is moving the GOP away from its isolationist stance. He boasted about only having 11 GOP senators vote against aid to Ukraine and lauded Sen. Ted Cruz as “courageous” for breaking with the far right and backing the aid package.
Say what you want about his ethics and values, but he’s a political survivor and a masterful tactician. Is there anything that can stop McConnell?
“The threat to his legacy is Trump,” says Jim Kessler, a longtime Capitol Hill veteran, now with the moderate Democratic group Third Way. “He has to steel up his caucus” with loyalists who will keep him in power.
McConnell’s leadership is secure for now, but he’s on Trump’s vendetta list.
“If Trump is the nominee, he will run on removing McConnell as leader, and that is a certainty,” says Kessler. “The question in 2024, do they boot him out because of Trump? I’m sure he’s obsessed with that, and if he isn’t, he’s not as smart as I think he is. [House Minority Leader] Kevin McCarthy came back aboard [after criticizing Trump for inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection] and Trump forgave him. There’s no going back for McConnell.”
A new book, Betrayal: How Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans Abandoned America, describes key moments when McConnell put personal ambition and party over country to do the lasting damage that could yet be his undoing.
The author, Ira Shapiro, sets the scene, a dreary rainy cold day, Jan. 9, 2009, when McConnell brings his caucus together to plan strategy. His mood is bad not because of the weather but because the new president, not yet inaugurated, has a high approval rating. McConnell had to bring him down. “His goal, which he stated clearly, was for Obama to fail and he had no concern about the impact his obstructionism would have on actual Americans, including those who lived in his home state of Kentucky.”
At that moment, by Shapiro’s account, McConnell abandoned the traditional role of a Senate leader who works to overcome partisan divisions, and unambiguously turned into an opposition leader. “He began immediately to transform a Senate struggling unsuccessfully to rise above the polarization of American politics into a bitterly partisan, paralyzed Senate where no effort would be made to overcome the divisions,” Shapiro writes. Where former House Speaker Newt Gingrich declared “politics is war,” McConnell embraced “victory at all costs” to become the Senate’s “architect of division,” doing everything he could to create tension, not legislation.
About the title of his book, Betrayal, Shapiro says he didn’t choose the term lightly to describe McConnell and the caucus he led. “We had an unhinged president during a pandemic, a president making it obvious that he would not accept a loss [in the 2020 election]—and what do they do? They rise from their torpor to confirm Amy Coney Barrett a week before the election.””