The long march toward the Uniparty in Washington continues.
With Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s health on the decline, there’s still a reason he seems to be clinging to power in Washington and it’s a five-letter word: Trump
For whatever reason, McConnell is under the impression that he can wrestle the GOP away from the hands of the MAGA faithful and restore it back to a Bush-Cheney version of the Republican Party with a little John McCain mixed in for good measure. In other words, a throwback time to the idea of interventionist neo-cons. In a lengthy article from POLITICO, McConnell makes it clear that there’s one main reason he’s staying focused on the 2024 election. Defeating Donald Trump and just about everything he stands for:
Mitch McConnell has made it his practice to dodge questions about Donald Trump. Whether it be Trump’s bid to reclaim office, the mounting indictments leveled against the former president or even Trump’s racist mockery of McConnell’s wife, the Senate Republican leader avoids engaging a man he disdains.
Which is why it was so striking last month to sit in McConnell’s Capitol office and have him repeatedly steer our conversation toward Trump. I was there to discuss his forceful and out-of-vogue campaign to keep Republicans defending Ukraine and, more broadly, on the Reaganite path of projecting strength abroad. And at every turn, McConnell made plain it was his way of battling what Trump has done to the party.
From the Senate floor and Washington fundraisers to awards banquets and congressional delegation trips overseas, Addison Mitchell McConnell is on what could be his final political mission. And the results may illuminate what has become of his party.
After a relatively harmonious first half of this year, House and Senate Republicans are on a collision course this fall over four issues, three of which pertain to McConnell’s quest: spending, supporting the Ukrainians and Trump’s candidacy. (The fourth is impeaching President Joe Biden, which is intended as retribution for Trump’s impeachment over, well, spending and Ukraine.)
In McConnell’s worldview, sending billions upon billions of dollars to a corrupt Ukraine in a proxy war with Russia is the way to the average American’s heart. There’s apparently no better way to spend that money domestically or not at least a way that McConnell and the Washington establishment can think of. Finishing a complete border wall and strengthening our national sovereignty would’ve cost a fraction of the billions sent to Ukraine by now.
Addison “Mitch” McConnell is really about emboldening the political establishment and clutching power back from the grassroots of the GOP, a group firmly in the camp of Donald Trump’s worldview rather than that of a lifetime career politician in DC.
In McConnell’s view, Trump’s foreign policy is akin to isolationism:
Of all the ways Trump has reshaped the Republican Party, it’s clear that McConnell sees the drift toward isolationism as the most pernicious — particularly at a moment when the fate of Ukraine and perhaps even NATO countries could be determined by the resolve of the Republican Party.
“I think, and this got me attacked by Tucker Carlson back when he was still on his show, I think the most important thing going on internationally right now is the Ukraine war,” McConnell told me.
Maybe, but Russia, in its various forms, has been fighting over Eastern Europe for centuries. Ukraine is hardly the sterling bastion of democracy it’s made out to be, and the money America sends is not being audited or accounted for in any way.
Trump’s aversion to messy conflicts isn’t so much an isolationist view as it is a whiplash reaction to the Bush-Cheney era of the Iraq War and the war in Afghanistan. Voters of all stripes eventually felt uneasy about Iraq, to say the least, but the mission in Afghanistan was also becoming less defined by the time Republicans were debating the issue in 2016.
Trump’s view is more about using American might when necessary, deterring foreign adversaries as the primary objective, and only getting involved in things that directly make sense for American security and interests. It’s arguable the war in Ukraine could meet some of those checkmarks but the unending blank checks heading east aren’t something most Americans are comfortable with.
The more McConnell speaks, however, the more it seems like his personal beef is with Donald Trump directly rather than his foreign policy standpoints:
One was the degree of McConnell’s focus, to borrow what may be his favorite word and practice. In public and private, he’s waging a determined campaign to defend Ukraine, protect NATO and bequeath a Republican Party that’s as committed to what he calls “peace through strength” as the one he found in Washington after he was elected to the Senate in 1984 thanks in part to Ronald Reagan’s landslide reelection.
Trump has made “peace through strength” a cornerstone of his speeches and policies for years now, perhaps from the very beginning.
After the events of January 6, 2021, McConnell wrongly predicted Trump’s decline and started dancing on his political grave
McConnell’s assessment late on the night of Jan 6 that, with his conduct that day, Trump had “put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger” has proven wildly wrong or at least wholly dependent on the whims of a federal jury.
The party’s drift on foreign policy wouldn’t have been reversed, but Trump would not have the same authority on this, or any, issue had McConnell sought 10 more Senate Republicans to convict the former president of his second impeachment and barred him from seeking office again. He said at the time that he was convinced by constitutional arguments about impeaching a president no longer in office, but clearly his caucus’s lack of appetite for conviction weighed on him.
By avoiding a confrontation with Trump then, he’s effectively raised the stakes on his longer-distance clash with Trumpism now.
In other words, McConnell held off on trying to round up Republican votes for impeachment in January 2021 because he thought Trump basically self-imploded. What that really means, however, is that McConnell has been calculating Trump’s decline and removal from the party for years leading up to that day and beyond.
McConnell, not a reference to his age, is a dinosaur in Washington. Just like Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and Joe Biden. These people are the “old guard” of politicians focused mostly on enriching themselves and consolidating their own power.
Let’s boil this down to the most binary decision GOP voters could make: If the 2024 Republican primary was a choice between Trump and McConnell, it’d be a landslide win for the former president without a doubt.
McConnell may still well get his wish, and Trump could falter somehow in the primary, but that remains less likely by the day. On the other hand, every time a figure of the DC establishment comes out formally against Donald Trump, the former president’s poll numbers and support seem to harden and expand.
Maybe McConnell should cut a campaign commercial for Ron DeSantis. Trump’s support might go up five points.
