The Memo: McConnell gets swept away by rising Trump tide

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) decision to step down from his leadership role, announced Wednesday, was both shocking and unsurprising.

The shock is rooted in the fact that McConnell has come to seem a permanent feature of the Washington political landscape. He was first elected to the Senate in 1984 and became Republican leader in 2007. He is the longest-serving Senate leader of all time from either party.

But McConnell’s decision to step aside was also foreseeable for a simple, stark reason beyond his age of 82. His party had moved sharply away from him — and toward his intraparty nemesis, former President Trump — even as he remained its titular head in the upper chamber. 

The venom with which Trump attacked him was unignorable. More broadly, the traditional Republicanism of which McConnell was an emblem has been increasingly supplanted by an angrier, more performative style.

The schism between the remnants of the pre-Trump GOP and the MAGA wing was evident in the reaction to McConnell’s decision to step aside as leader after November’s election. 

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), as steeped in the GOP establishment as McConnell himself, paid tribute to the Kentuckian’s “extraordinary record” of being “steadfast in his defense of conservative values.”

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) leaves the Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Sunday, February 11, 2024 following procedural votes regarding the supplemental for Israel, Info-Pacific region and Ukraine during a rare weekend session. (Greg Nash)

President Biden told reporters he was “sorry to hear” McConnell was stepping down. In a later statement, Biden — a Washington institutionalist like the outgoing leader — called McConnell “my friend” and noted that they had been able to work “together in good faith even though we have many political disagreements.”

A more hostile wind blew from other directions.

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), one of the brashest Trump loyalists in Congress, expressed glee on social media at how McConnell had now been “86’d” alongside former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and outgoing Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel.

Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) noted in a statement that he had challenged McConnell for the leadership in 2022. Scott greeted McConnell’s departure as “an opportunity to refocus our efforts on solving the significant challenges facing our country and actually reflect the aspirations of voters.”

Even former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley — the last surviving rival to Trump for the GOP nomination and the kind of Republican who would once have been expected to fall in lockstep with McConnell — offered only a lukewarm tribute. 

Haley said McConnell “did many good things but he is right that we do need a new generation.”

As of late Wednesday afternoon, there was no comment from Trump. It’s a silence no one expects to last.

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McConnell and Trump, temperamental opposites, had tolerated a political marriage of convenience during most of the latter’s White House tenure. But McConnell’s decision to recognize Biden as the victorious president-elect in December 2020 infuriated Trump.

Then, the defeated president’s role in ginning up the mob that rioted on Jan. 6, 2021, provoked a final break.

“There’s no question — none — that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day. No question about it,” McConnell said the following month. “The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president.”

Trump’s critics would note that, even then, McConnell was hardly throwing caution to the wind. His words came as he voted to acquit Trump in the impeachment proceedings that had followed the riot.

Still, the tenor of the speech itself showed McConnell had calculated there was no way back for Trump after Jan. 6.

For all the tactical shrewdness with which McConnell is credited, he was wrong on that score.

It became clear soon enough that the party had no intention of disavowing Trump. The MAGA fever that he stoked did not break. In fact, the GOP’s grassroots supporters held the twice-impeached, four-times indicted former president in far greater affection than they do McConnell. 

They still do.

An Economist/YouGov poll released Wednesday, before McConnell’s decision became public, found 85 percent of Republicans viewed Trump favorably and 14 percent unfavorably. Just 31 percent of Republicans viewed McConnell favorably, while 54 percent viewed him unfavorably.

If his departure as Senate GOP leader will not be mourned by most Republicans, it will be positively celebrated by Democratic voters. His liberal critics view him as a ruthless and cynical obstructionist, citing instances like his decision to block then-President Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland, from even getting hearings before the Senate.

McConnell justified that 2016 decision on the basis that Obama was nearing the end of his term. The same rationale was cast aside roughly four years later when Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett less than two months before the 2020 election.

As for Trump, he is, of course, virtually assured of winning this year’s GOP nomination, having racked up double-digit victories in every primary contest so far.

Trump’s resurgence has left McConnell out on an uncomfortable limb. If Trump were to win in November, he would almost certainly engineer McConnell’s ouster — an inglorious end to such a long career.

Talks have been taking place between the McConnell and Trump camps as to under what circumstances the Senate minority leader might endorse the former president — something he has conspicuously failed to do so far.

One source briefed on those talks told this column that the basic outline would have McConnell endorsing Trump as the party’s de facto leader in return for a quietening of Trump’s attacks.

But the underlying reality, the source added, was that “Mitch McConnell knew that Donald Trump is likely to be the next president of the United States, and so he decided to go at a time of his own choosing.”

In a sense, it wasn’t much of a choice. 

McConnell suffered a bad fall last year and, in the months afterward, twice froze on camera — two embarrassing moments that sharpened questions about his leadership capacity. 

On Tuesday, when the “Big Four” congressional leaders met with Biden at the White House, McConnell was the only one of the quartet not to address the media afterward.

McConnell had once seemed like an immovable object in Washington. 

On Tuesday, he bowed to the apparently unstoppable twin forces of Trumpism and time.

The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.