UPDATE (March 7, 2024 10:45 a.m. E.T.): Mitch McConnell officially endorsed Donald Trump on Wednesday morning, hours after Trump's Super Tuesday victories and immediately after Nikki Haley announced she was dropping out of the race.
“I have many faults. Misunderstanding politics is not one of them,” intoned Sen. Mitch McConnell on Wednesday as he announced he would be stepping down as Senate Republican leader. “That said, I believe more strongly than ever that America’s global leadership is essential to preserving the shining city on a hill that Ronald Reagan discussed.”
McConnell appeared in his surprise announcement to be contemplating his legacy, saying he had reached a moment “when I am certain I have helped preserve the ideals I so strongly believe.”
But it’s hard to believe that the longtime Kentucky lawmaker believed what he was saying.
It’s hard to believe that the longtime Kentucky lawmaker believed what he was saying.
McConnell’s announcement came just days after we learned that he was poised to join his fellow Republicans in bending the knee to Donald Trump. McConnell has few illusions about what a second Trump presidency would mean: our allies abandoned, our enemies appeased. In Trump 2.0, Reagan’s shining city on a hill will likely be remembered as America’s great broken promise.
McConnell’s office declined an NBC News offer to comment on the reporting.
None of this was inevitable, and all of it was avoidable. But at every inflection point, McConnell has made the same decision. And he seems to be about to make it again, even though he knows that it means the abandonment of so many of the “ideals” he claims to believe in so strongly.
Just three years ago, McConnell described Trump as “practically and morally responsible” for the attack on the U.S. Capitol. Trump’s actions, he said, were “disgraceful” and a “dereliction of duty.”
“Fellow Americans beat and bloodied our own police,” he declared from the Senate floor (after voting that Trump was “not guilty” on the impeachment charge of incitement of insurrection). “They stormed the Senate floor. They tried to hunt down the speaker of the House. They built a gallows and chanted about murdering the vice president. They did this because they had been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth — because he was angry he’d lost an election.”
In their book, “This Will Not Pass,” Alex Burns and Jonathan Martin describe a McConnell who was clearly convinced of Trump’s guilt and his unfitness for office. “If this isn’t impeachable, I don’t know what is,” he said in the aftermath of the insurrection, according to the authors. In his speech to the Senate, McConnell insisted: “We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.”
But, as we all know, McConnell refused to convict Trump in the Senate. Did he really think that this is a man who would simply disappear into the mist?
In the ensuing years, we’ve learned more about the extent of Trump’s efforts to use the “big lie” to overturn the 2020 election and of his inaction during the attack on the Capitol.
McConnell has watched Trump embrace the Capitol rioters as American heroes, calling them “hostages” and pledging to pardon seditionists and rioters alike. He’s watched Trump muse about the death penalty for Gen. Mark Milley, called for terminating parts of the Constitution and continued to mock the memory of John McCain.
He’s watched Trump and his legal team try to claim what amounts to almost absolute immunity, even for using SEAL Team Six to murder political opponents.
McConnell has watched Trump embrace the Capitol rioters as American heroes, calling them “hostages” and pledging to pardon seditionists and rioters alike.
For McConnell, many of Trump’s attacks have been personal. Repeatedly, Trump deployed racist slurs against the leader’s wife, Elaine Chao, deriding her as his “China-loving wife, Coco Chow.” In one Truth Social post, he accused McConnell of having “A DEATH WISH,” a thinly veiled but ominous threat.
As Peter Baker and Susan Glasser reported in their book “The Divider,” Trump “reserved special fury” for McConnell, calling him a “disloyal son of a b----,” a “schmuck” and a “stiff” with “no personality” who was “like a dead fish.”
But there was so much more.
Since 2021, McConnell has watched Trump fawn over Russian President Vladimir Putin, even after his invasion of Ukraine and even after activist Alexei Navalny mysteriously died in prison. Trump compared himself to the dead dissident while refusing to condemn the leader whom Navalny’s family and activists around the world hold responsible for his death.
McConnell has watched as Trump has been found liable for sexual abuse, fined hundreds of millions of dollars for fraud and indicted on 91 felony counts, including conspiracy to illegally overturn the election — precisely the sort of charges that McConnell once seemed to endorse.
McConnell has watched all of this. He knows all of this.
Last month, Trump signaled he might be OK abandoning our NATO allies in the face of Russian aggression.
In other words, Mitch McConnell knows as well as any member of Congress what a second Trump presidency would mean. He knows what it means for the Constitution, for the country and for our standing in the world.
And he's ready to tell us that he’s fine with it.
According to The New York Times, “people close to both men are working behind the scenes to make bygones of the enmity between them and to pave the way for a critical endorsement of the former president by the highest-ranking Republican holdout so far.”
By now, the story of GOP capitulation is familiar, even tedious. The path of self-humiliation is well-trodden by political invertebrates like Sens. Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham. Just days ago, John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, fell in line behind Trump, despite years of sharp criticism. When Trump publicly suggested suspending the Constitution to re-install himself in the presidency, Thune predicted that the former president’s attack on the Constitution “will be the grist of the campaign” for the GOP nomination this year. After the insurrection, Thune said, “What former President Trump did to undermine faith in our election system and disrupt the peaceful transfer of power is inexcusable.”
Now, Thune is ready not only to excuse the inexcusable, but also to restore Trump to the office he abused. Enter McConnell.
As The New Republic notes, McConnell’s surrender is consequential, because it will be seen as “an incredible vote of confidence amid unparalleled legal troubles for a presidential candidate, suggesting to Republican voters and (more importantly) donors that the frontrunner could still have a shot at retaking the White House.”
In the last few weeks, McConnell has tried to resist isolationism and betrayal. Even as he acknowledged the political headwinds, he reiterated his commitment to America’s role as a global leader.
None of that will matter if Trump is re-elected.
The story McConnell will tell himself is that he acted as a clear-eyed politician who did what he had to do to protect his caucus and regain the majority. But how will it end? With McConnell gone, a GOP majority will be a toothless stooge for Trump’s ambition.
Maybe McConnell imagines that his party can survive the forces he has appeased, that the Senate will serve as an effective guardrail on a Trump presidency. Perhaps he tells himself, his colleagues and his wife that he can still control the ugliness that he has done so much to unleash.
But he can’t and he won’t. At some level he already knows, which is why he’s surrendering now and choosing humiliation over principle once again.