Why Mitch McConnell Dumped Donald Trump
By Jane Mayer, The New Yorker
23 January 21
After the Capitol assaultand after losing his perch as Majority Leaderthe
senator finally denounced the outgoing President. Was it a moral reckoning
or yet another act of political self-interest?
On the afternoon of January 6th, less than an hour before a violent mob
supporting President Donald Trump broke into the Capitol, causing mayhem
that led to the deaths of five Americans, Mitch McConnell, the Senate
Majority Leader, gave the most powerful speech of his life. In a cold
disavowal of Trumps false claims about rampant election fraud, McConnell, a
Republican from Kentucky, stood behind the Senate dais and stated the
obvious: despite two months of increasingly malign lies from Trump, and from
many of his supporters in Congress, Joe Biden had won the Presidency.
McConnell, in his dead-eyed, laconic manner, listed the damning facts,
citing numerous federal judges and state officials who had rejected Trumps
baseless assertions that the election had been rigged against him. The
voters, the courts, and the states have all spoken, McConnell said. If we
overrule them, it would damage our republic forever. Then, in a final jab,
he pointed out thatcontrary to Trumps ludicrous claim that hed won a
second term by a landslidethe election actually was not unusually close.
Trump had lost by seven million votes in the popular ballot, and 306232 in
the Electoral College.
In the days after the Capitol attack, as horrifying footage emerged of
marauders ransacking the building and chanting, Hang Mike Pence! and
Treason!, McConnell, through a series of anonymously sourced reports in
major news outlets, distanced himself even further from the President. As a
prominent Republican strategist noted, Nothings ever happenstance with
McConnelland so each report was taken as a Delphic signal. On January
12th, the Times published a headline declaring that McConnell was said to
be pleased about the Democrats intention to impeach the President a second
time. Unnamed associates revealed to reporters on Capitol Hill that
McConnell was no longer speaking to Trump, and might vote to convict him if
the impeachment process moved to a Senate trial. On January 13th, ten
Republican members of the House of Representatives joined the Democrats in
impeaching Trump, for incitement of insurrection. Soon afterward,
McConnell made clear to his Republican colleagues that he regarded
impeachment as a matter of individual conscience, not one of party loyalty.
And on January 19th, the day before Biden was sworn in as President,
McConnell shocked political circles by denouncing Trump even more directly.
Speaking from the Senate floor, he said, with extraordinary bluntness, The
mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the President and other powerful
people.
McConnells denunciation of Trump won grudging praise from many corners,
including people who rarely support him. Norman Ornstein, a political
scientist and an emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, who
has been fiercely critical of McConnell, told me, I was surprised at
Mitchs comments. They were more forthright than I expected. Good for him!
But nobody who has watched McConnell closely over the years views his split
with Trump as a genuine moral reckoning. There is no way that McConnell has
had an epiphany and will now change his fundamental approach, Ornstein
said. He will always act ruthlessly when it serves his own interest.
Indeed, the most remarkable aspect of McConnells rupture with Trump may be
not that it happened but, rather, that it took so longand that the leader
of the Party in Congress countenanced so much damage along the way.
Adam Jentleson, a former top Democratic Senate aide and the author of Kill
Switch, a new book about the Senate, said, of McConnell, He should be
deservedly held accountable for spending more than a month giving credence
to Trumps claims of election fraudon the Senate floor. Jentleson added
that McConnell, by failing to speak out earlier, had offered legitimacy to
Trumps war on the truth: Other Republicans took their signals from
McConnell and continued to fan the flames. You can blame the rioters, but
the entire Republican Party was telling them their claims were legitimate.
McConnells accusation that the insurrectionists had been fed lies was
couched in the passive voice. It skipped over the fact that he hadnt even
acknowledged the outcome of the election himself until December 15thsix
weeks after it took place, and following the Electoral Colleges
certification of Biden as the winner. McConnell, in a brief speech on the
Senate floor, congratulated him, calling him President-elect. But
McConnell did not publicly confront Trumps continued denials that he had
lost until after the January 5th runoff election in Georgia, in which the
Democratic Party gained two Senate seats, giving it control of the Senate
and toppling McConnell from his position as Majority Leader. By then,
according to some polls, as many as eighty-two per cent of Republican voters
believed Trumps false claims of fraud, and when his enraged supporters
gathered on the National Mall many of them were determined to use force to
override the official election results. The ensuing assault and ransacking
of the Capitol was not only the most serious attempt at an anti-democratic
coup in the countrys history; it also deepened the crisis of the Republican
Party. Additionally, it triggered the flight of a striking number of its
major corporate backersa development that, if it continues, could make it
considerably harder for McConnell to retake the Senate in 2022.
Still, given Trumps continuing popularity among Republicans, many people in
Washington were surprised that McConnellwho is by far the most powerful,
and often the most inscrutable, member of the Party in Congresswas willing
to openly revolt against him. But John Yarmuth, a Democratic representative
from Louisville, Kentucky, who has known McConnell since the late sixties,
told me hed long predicted that the alliance between Trump and McConnell
would end once the President could no longer help McConnell. Three years
ago, I said hed wait until Trump was an existential threat to the Party,
and then cut him loose, Yarmuth said. Hes been furious with Trump for a
long time. Many who know him have talked with him about how much he hates
Trump. But, Yarmuth noted, McConnell, focussed on Republican judicial
appointments, made a Faustian deal for all those judges. Since 2017,
McConnell has played an oversized role in helping Trump install more than
two hundred conservative federal judges, including three Supreme Court
Justices.
For four years, McConnell and others in the establishment wing of the
Republican Party embraced the conceit that they could temper Trumps
behavior, exploit his popularity, and ignore the racist, violent, and
corrupt forces he unleashed. Ornstein observed that McConnell, in a cynical
bargain, used Trump to accomplish his goals of packing the courts and
getting tax cuts. (Since 2016, the top corporate tax rate has been nearly
halved, to twenty-one per cent.) In exchange for these gifts to the Partys
corporate backers, McConnell stayed largely silent in the face of Trumps
inflammatory lies and slurseven though, according to insiders, he privately
held the President in contempt. He covered for Trumps political
incompetence, eventually passing budgets and pandemic relief, despite
Trumps tantrums and government shutdowns. And he protected Trump from
accountability during the first impeachment trial, in early 2020, announcing
in advance that there was zero chance a Senate under his leadership would
convict the President.
But any pretense that McConnell could maintain control over Trump or over
the Partys fate unravelled after the 2020 election. McConnell was caught
between denouncing Trumps lies and alienating his supporters, thereby
risking the loss of the two Senate seats in the Georgia runoff. Faced with a
choice between truth and self-interest, McConnell opted for the latter. He
knew he had to keep the team together for Georgia, a former Trump
Administration official close to McConnells circle told me. For him, being
Majority Leader was the whole ballgame. Its hard to overstate. Its pretty
obvious that for McConnell one of the reasons he was so indulgent of Trump
was Georgia.
It is impossible to know whether McConnell would have confronted Trumps
election lies earlier, had his own powerful job not been in play. But, in
the weeks after November 3rd, McConnell continued to lend tacit support to
Trumps increasingly dangerous claims that he was the true victor. In a
combative Senate speech six days after the election, McConnell declared that
Trump was a hundred per cent within his rights to look into allegations of
irregularities and weigh his legal options. He went on to scold the many
public figures who were demanding that Trump concede. Lets not have any
lectures about how the President should immediately, cheerfully accept
preliminary election results from the same characters who just spent four
years refusing to accept the validity of the last election, McConnell said.
As he surely knew, it was a false equivalence: Democratic politicians had
raised many questions about the effects of Russian interference on the 2016
election results, but Hillary Clinton had conceded the race the morning
after the vote.
With only a few exceptionsmost notably, Mitt Romney, the lone Republican
senator who voted to convict during Trumps first impeachment trialthe vast
majority of the Republican caucus in the Senate followed McConnells lead.
They avoided any acknowledgment of Bidens victory and declined to denounce
Trumps flagrant lies or his outrageous, and potentially criminal, efforts
to pressure officials into nullifying the votes in Georgia and in other
swing states.
Several Republican advisers argued to me that McConnell had no reasonable
choice. If he had confronted Trump before the Georgia runoff, they said,
Trump would have launched a civil war within the Party, possibly even
commanding his supporters not to vote. It could have been worse, the
former Trump official said. Trump could have attacked the two Republican
Senate candidates, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, or the National
Republican Senate Campaign Committee. As one of the advisers put it,
McConnell was trying to keep the wheels on the train for a few more hours.
The price of Trumps coöperation, however, grew ever higher. According to a
well-informed Republican insider, Trump made unconscionable demands behind
the scenes. He threatened to withhold his support for Loeffler and Perdue,
and refused to campaign for them unless they joined his attacks on Georgias
election officials and repeated his false claims of widespread election
fraud. Days before the runoff, the insider said, the President forced Perdue
to leave the campaign trail for a secret meeting at Mar-a-Lago, Trumps
private club in Palm Beach, Florida. There, Trump coerced Perdue not just
into taking his side on election fraud but also into supporting an increase
in the size of pandemic-relief checks to two thousand dollarsa figure that
McConnell and Senate Republicans opposed. If Perdue refused, Trump made
clear, he might withdraw his support. At the time, a spokesman for Perdues
campaign denied that Trump had pressured Perdue. But, soon after the
Mar-a-Lago meeting, both Perdue and Loeffler began echoing Trumps call for
larger relief checks, placing themselves and McConnell in an embarrassing
political bind. Trump, meanwhile, went on Twitter and attacked McConnells
opposition to the bigger relief checks, calling it a death wish. The
Presidents behavior toward the candidates led the insider to a simple
conclusion: Trump is a thug.
On January 3rd, the Washington Post reported that Trump had made a
threatening phone call to Georgias secretary of state, demanding that he
find enough votes to overturn the states Presidential results. The
newspaper soon released a recording of the shocking call, leaving no doubt
as to its authenticity. Despite the escalating provocations from the Oval
Office, McConnell and all but a few renegade Republicans in the Senate
remained studiously silent. They ducked or feigned ignorance when reporters
asked them about death threats that Georgias election officials were
facing, and they ignored dire warnings from those officials, and many
others, that bloodshed would result if Trumps lies werent confronted.
As it turned out, the Republican leaderships complicity with Trump was not
only cynical; it also may have been an egregious miscalculation, given that
voter data suggests his unchecked behavior likely cost the Republican Party
the two Georgia seats. The chaos and the intra-party warfare in the state
appear to have led large numbers of moderate Republican voters in the
suburbs to either vote Democratic or not vote at all. And in some deeply
conservative pockets of Georgia where the President held rallies, such as
the Dalton area, Republican turnout was unexpectedly low, likely because
Trump had undermined his supporters faith in the integrity of American
elections.
By dawn on January 6th, it had become clear that Loeffler and Perdue were
both going to lose. The personal and political consequences for McConnell
were cataclysmic. Stuart Stevens, a Republican strategist who helped lead
Romneys 2012 Presidential campaign and was a founder of the anti-Trump
group the Lincoln Project, told me, McConnell had a forty-eight hours like
no one else. He became Minority Leader and his Capitol was invaded. Domestic
terrorists got inside it this timeunlike on 9/11. (On that day, Al Qaeda
had planned to crash a United Airlines flight into the Capitol, but the
plane went down after passengers overwhelmed the hijackers.) Stevens went
on, And what happened in Georgia was incredible. Hes scared to death, too,
at how corporate America is responding. Supporting the overthrow of the U.S.
government isnt good for business.
After the January 6th insurrection, dozens of the largest corporate campaign
donors, including A.T. & T., Comcast, and Honeywell, used their cash to send
a message: their political action committees would no longer contribute to
the hundred and forty-seven Republican representatives and senators who had
opposed certification of the Presidential election even after the Capitol
riot, on the spurious ground that the process had been less than fair. Even
Koch Industries, the huge oil-refining conglomerate that has served as the
conservative movements piggy bank for decades, said that it was
reëvaluating its political contributions. McConnell, who once infamously
declared that the three most important ingredients for political success in
America are money, money, and money, was reportedly alarmed. A
spokesperson for McConnell denies this, but, according to the Associated
Press, he spent much of the weekend after the Capitol assault talking with
colleagues and the Republican Partys wealthy corporate donors, promising
that he, too, was finally done with Trump.
Still, with another impeachment trial looming in the Senate, its unclear
whether McConnell will truly end his compact with Trumpism. His recent
denunciation of Trump sounded unequivocal. But he and his Republican caucus
could make the same miscalculation that they made in Georgia, choosing to
placate the Trumpian base of the Party rather than confront its retrograde
values and commitment to falsehoods. So far, McConnell has been
characteristically cagey. Although he let it be known that he regards
Trumps behavior as potentially impeachable, he also signalled that he
hasnt personally decided whether he will vote to convict him. He explained
that he wants first to hear the evidence. He also rejected Democrats
requests that he bring the Senate back from a winter recess to start the
impeachment trial immediately, saying he prefers that the Senate trial begin
in mid-February. Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, has said
that she might start the trial process by sending the article of impeachment
to the Senate as early as January 25th. Either way, it will be left to Chuck
Schumer, the leader of the new Democratic majority in the Senate, to take on
the politically perilous business of presiding over the trial of a former
Presidentan unprecedented event in American history.
I think McConnell is trying to have it both ways, Stevens told me. He
absolutely doesnt want to impeach and convict Trump. It would split his
base and cause members of his caucus to face primary challengers. Stevens
contended that McConnell, by signalling his openness to impeachment without
committing to convicting Trump, was trying to avoid a meltdown of the
Republican Party. Stevens likened McConnell to the top engineer at
Chernobyl, who, after the power plant malfunctioned, thought that he could
micromanage a nuclear disaster: He tried to take the rods out. Stevens
added, If he really wanted an impeachment conviction, hed have done the
trial right away.
At first, political observers from both parties considered it possible that
McConnell was merely using the threat of an impeachment trial as a
brushbacka way to hold Trump in line as he left office. Then McConnell
directly accused Trump of having provoked the mob. Jim Manley, who served
as the senior communications adviser to Harry Reid, the former Democratic
Majority Leader, told me, There is no going back now. He has decided to cut
his losses, and do what he can to make sure Trump is no longer a threat to
the Republican Party. McConnell and other Republican leaders, Manley
suggested, have gotten as much out of Trump as they can, and its now time
to make sure Trump is damaged goods.
But the risks for McConnell and other Senate Republicans are high. Its
never good for a party leader to get out too far ahead of his caucus
membershe risks losing their fundamental support. Senator Lindsey Graham
has criticized McConnells decision to blame Trump for the Capitol riot and
has warned that, without Trumps help in 2022, we cannot take back the
House and the Senate, adding, If youre wanting to erase Donald Trump from
the Party, youre going to get erased. McConnells maneuvers have also
stirred the wrath of such powerful right-wing media figures as Sean Hannity,
the Fox News host known for his unyielding sycophancy toward Trump. Hannity
has called for McConnell to step down from the Partys leadership in the
Senate.
But if McConnell can muster the additional sixteen Republican votes
necessary for a convictiondoing so requires the assent of two-thirds of the
Senate, and the fifty Democratic senators are expected to vote as a bloche
will have effectively purged Trump from the Party. Moreover, after a
conviction, the Senate could hold a second vote, to bar Trump permanently
from running for any federal office. Such a move might strengthen
McConnells clout within the Party and help his wing of traditional
Republicans reëstablish itself as the face of the G.O.P. Al Cross, a veteran
political reporter and the director of the Institute for Rural Journalism,
at the University of Kentucky, said, of McConnell, I think he sees a chance
to make Trump this generations version of Nixon, leaving no doubt who is at
the top of the Republican heap. Banning Trump would also guarantee that a
different Republican will secure the Partys nomination for President in
2024. Otherwise, Trump threatens to cast a shadow over the Partys future.
He has discussed running again, and, shortly before flying to Florida on
January 20th, he stood on a tarmac and vowed, We will be back in some
form.
Jentleson, the former Senate aide, thinks that McConnell and his party are
in a very tricky spot: The glue that kept the Tea Party and establishment
Republicans together during the past few years was tax cuts and judges. And
McConnell cant deliver those anymore. So you could basically see the
Republican Party coming apart at the seams. You need to marry the forty per
cent that is the Trump base with the ten per cent thats the establishment.
McConnell is like a cartoon character striding aside a crack thats getting
wider as the two plates drift farther apart. They may not come back
together. If they cant reattach, they cant win.
There is another option: McConnell could just lie low and wait to see if the
Democrats self-destruct. A divisive Senate impeachment trial may undercut
Bidens message of bipartisan unity, hampering his agenda in the crucial
early months of his Presidency, when he needs momentum. McConnell has
already seized on the fifty-fifty balance between the parties in the Senate
in order to obstruct the Democrats. Hes refusing to devise rules for moving
forward on Senate business unless Schumer yields to his demand not to alter
the filibuster rule. Reviled by progressives, the rule requires a
supermajority of sixty votes to pass legislation, rather than the simple
majority that the Democrats now have if Vice-President Kamala Harris casts a
tie-breaking vote. McConnell, who wrote a memoir titled The Long Game, is
a master at outwaiting his foes. And, as Jentleson observed, one can never
overestimate the appeal for politicians of kicking the can down the road,
especially when confronted with tough decisions.
McConnell could conceivably make a play that would avoid a direct showdown
over convicting Trump. A conservative legal argument has recently been
advanced by J. Michael Luttig, a prominent former federal appeals-court
judge: the Senate, he says, has no constitutional authority to hold an
impeachment trial after a President has left office. Luttigs argument has
been challenged by numerous constitutional scholars, some of whom have cited
an instance in which a lesser official was impeached after leaving office.
But this politically convenient exit ramp is alluring, and Luttig is held in
high regard by conservatives. The Republican senator Tom Cotton, of
Arkansas, a Harvard Law School graduate, has eagerly embraced the theory,
arguing, The Founders designed the impeachment process as a way to remove
officeholders from public officenot an inquest against private citizens.
So has Joni Ernst, of Iowa, who is a member of McConnells leadership team.
Christopher Browning, a historian of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany, told me
that McConnell has been almost Houdini-like at escaping his own devils
pact with Trump. In a widely admired essay in The New York Review of Books,
from 2018, Browning called McConnell the gravedigger of American
democracy, and likened him to elected officials in Weimar Germany who
struck early deals with Hitler, mistakenly believing that they could contain
him and his followers. When I asked Browning if he still regarded McConnell
in this way, he said that the new Minority Leader had cut a better deal
than most. McConnell was lucky that Trump was so lazy, feckless, and
undisciplined. Hitler didnt go golfing, Browning pointed out. But Browning
found little to celebrate in McConnells performance. If Trump had won the
election, Mitch would not be jumping ship, he noted. But the fact is Trump
lost, and his coup failed. And that opened an escape hatch for Mitch.
Browning warned, however, that the McConnell wing was ready to embrace
Trumps usurping of democracyif Trump could pull it off.
If McConnell does vote to convict Trump of high crimes and misdemeanors, it
wont be the first time that, out of political convenience, he has turned on
his partys leader. In 1973, when McConnell was an ambitious young lawyer,
he wrote an op-ed in the Louisville Courier-Journal which referred to
Richard Nixons Watergate scandal and denounced the corrupting influence of
political money. Given McConnells later embrace of unregulated political
funds, it may seem hard to square the author of that high-minded piece with
the McConnell of today. But what remains consistent is that then, as now, he
was acting in his self-interest. He later confessed to a biographer that the
newspaper column was merely playing for headlines. McConnell was planning
to run for office, as a Republican, and one thing was certain: he needed to
protect himself from the stain of a disgraced President.
