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When long-serving Republican leader Mitch McConnell announced Wednesday he would step aside from his Senate leadership post in November, it may have seemed like a natural passing of the baton by a physically frail 82-year-old man. McConnell experienced several public health episodes last fall after suffering a concussion in early 2023.
But in truth, McConnell’s surrender is less of a baton-passing than it is a death rattle of the so-called establishment wing of the Republican Party. Ever since Donald Trump clinched the Republican nomination in 2016, McConnell believed he could control Trump, using him as a tool to pack the Supreme Court with conservative extremists and pass the 2017 tax cuts, which have overwhelmingly boosted the bottom line of America’s wealthiest households.
But while McConnell was giddily ticking off his goals, Trump was stealing the party right out from under the veteran leader’s nose. By the time Trump lost his November 2020 reelection bid, McConnell, facing two January runoffs in Georgia, realized that he likely couldn’t save his Senate majority without Trump’s army of MAGA foot soldiers.
So McConnell began a years-long walk down the plank, fatefully embracing Trump in the Georgia Senate runoffs that resulted in twin losses to Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock and McConnell’s demotion from Senate majority leader to minority Leader. As many predicted, Trump’s incessant grousing about the supposedly stolen election helped suppress Republican turnout in the runoffs, ultimately reducing McConnell’s final years in leadership to permanent minority status.
McConnell had several golden opportunities to write a different epitaph for his career. On Jan. 6, 2021—the day after Georgia voters handed McConnell his walking papers as Senate leader—Trump and his followers executed a deadly attack on the U.S. seat of government, providing McConnell a fresh chance to nail shut Trump’s future in U.S. politics.
But McConnell, the highly vaunted political tactician, misread the politics, believing Trump to be “a fading brand,” according to reporting by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa in their book, “Peril.”
“There is a clear trend moving,” McConnell predicted, toward a Republican Party that isn’t dominated by Trump. “Sucking up to Donald Trump is not a strategy that works,” he added.
But suck up he did. After House Democrats impeached Trump with seven days left in his term, McConnell, still majority leader, delayed the Senate impeachment trial until after Jan. 20, when Democrats took control of the White House and the upper chamber, with the vice president giving Democrats the tie-breaking vote.
McConnell, who didn’t lift a finger to help end the country’s long national nightmare, reportedly reveled in the idea that Republicans could just follow Democrats’ lead. “The Democrats are going to take care of the son of a bitch for us,” McConnell told two of his Kentucky confidants on Jan. 11.
Of course, Trump’s conviction would take 17 Republican votes in addition to the 50 that Senate Democrats provided. And while McConnell eventually paid lip service to the idea that Trump was “practically and morally responsible” for the Jan. 6 riot, he cravenly declined to twist enough arms to muster GOP support for Trump’s conviction. The fact that McConnell himself ended up voting to acquit Trump was just icing on the cake.
McConnell likely figured he could live with one more humiliation on the way to reclaiming the Senate majority in the 2022 midterms, where Republicans had several good pick-up opportunities and history suggested Democrats, with unilateral control of Washington, were doomed.
In fact, at the same confab where McConnell dubbed Trump a “fading brand,” he also imagined mounting fierce opposition to his arch rival if he supported a crop of unelectable losers.
“The only place I can see Trump and me actually at loggerheads would be if he gets behind some clown who clearly can’t win,” McConnell said. “To have a chance of getting the Senate back, you have to have the most electable candidates possible.”
But by October 2021, McConnell would find himself eagerly endorsing the laughably unfit former Georgia football star Herschel Walker as “the only one who can unite the party, defeat Senator Warnock, and help us take back the Senate.”
McConnell and his allies had mounted a feeble public campaign to encourage Walker to sit the cycle out. But in the end, they folded to Trump and embraced his guy, who proved to be an electoral loser alongside a handful of other Trump picks for Senate.
After entering the midterm cycle with a lot of hope and bluster, Senate Republicans not only failed to pick up a single seat in the supposed year of the “red wave,” they actually lost a seat when another MAGA extremist fell short of keeping an open Senate seat in Pennsylvania.
Fast-forward to today, and Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party is nearly complete. Trump is set to handily win the Republican nomination with the steadfast support of his MAGA base. He effectively owns the Republican National Committee, recently engineering the ouster of chair Ronna McDaniel and pushing for his own daughter-in-law to take the helm. He has sucked up the party’s small-dollar donations while hobbling the party committees’ fundraising appeals to big-dollar donors. He has overtaken the infrastructure of state parties, even as some continue to be consumed by internecine warfare.
All the while, McConnell’s resistance to Trump has faded. When Trump recently attacked a bipartisan border deal negotiated by a close McConnell ally, the minority leader acquiesced, helping to kill the deal himself.
And despite McConnell’s avid support of Ukraine’s fight for sovereignty against Russia, Trump and his congressional allies have so far succeeded in blocking and indefinitely delaying a new round of U.S. aid for the effort.
What is perhaps most clear as McConnell prepares to hand the reins to a new generation of leaders is that Senate Republicans, the last bastion of the old GOP guard, are now on a glide path to resembling House Republicans. Not only have many Senate Republicans embraced MAGA policy tenets such as isolationism, they are adopting MAGA tactics, making the caucus more ungovernable with each passing month. In essence, the less McConnell has led, the less his conference has become capable of being led.
When veteran Democratic leader and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced late last year that she and her leadership team would step down, she left House Democrats in very good hands—with a succession plan, a capable leadership team on deck, and a wealth of legislative accomplishments to campaign on as they fight to win back the majority in November.
Pelosi not only left her conference better off, she had done her level best to safeguard the institution of which the leadership had been entrusted to her. And when Democrats are in charge, the House is still functional, even with the slimmest of majorities.
When McConnell steps aside later this year, he will leave behind a conference, an institution, and a party in disarray—and he will be complicit in having either actively or passively gutted the integrity of all three.
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