On America’s Death Pangs: Mitch McConnell Edition

Where is Mitch McConnell? As for where his body might be, I have no idea, although since all evidence points to his having suffered a massive heart attack, it is likely that he will never be what he was before his disappearance, and this is granting that what he was for the last couple of years before his disappearance was, if I may say this of a notorious turtle, barely a shell of his former self. As for his soul, on the other hand, I can tell you where it is: in the White House.

No single Republican was more powerful than McConnell within the party’s hierarchy in the years leading up to the 2016 election. And no single Republican did more — much of it tacitly and through sins of intentional silence — to enable the Trump cult’s takeover of the party, an anti-conservative takeover which he could have nipped in the bud once and for all with one moment’s demonstration of real principle and intransigence against the risk of short-term defeat for the party back in 2016. But he lacked both the principle and the courage to do any such thing, focused as he was so exclusively on long-range calculations of seat maps and head counts rather than on the genuine long-range good of either his party or his country. His partisan pragmatism made him accept Trump in the name of “winning,” which is to say that much like Trump, he was willing to settle for any outcome that would allow him to declare victory, even if it meant embracing genuine defeat. (I should note that partisanship need not be pragmatic in this way, and indeed should not be if a multi-party democracy is to offer any coherent bulwark in defense of freedom; but McConnell, at least in his years of leadership, was utterly pragmatic — that is, lacking in practical and definable political principles — leading to the continual erosion of everything his party had been gradually dragged into standing for during the Reagan era, meaning since Reagan’s landslide win as governor of California in 1966.)

He therefore played his role of Trump’s passive king-maker for various ugly reasons of his own, including most obviously the following:

• He hated the Tea Party with the heat of the thousand suns and had vowed to destroy it by any means possible, and Trump had emerged, in McConnell’s mind, as the most effective means possible.
• He thought that while Trump could control the weak-minded idiots in the grassroots, he himself, the great schemer and strategist from Kentucky, could and would control Trump, thereby in effect defining Trump’s presidency legislatively, and never dreaming that he himself would finally be controlled and defined, in effect, as Trump’s most highly placed lackey and facilitator.
• Mitch McConnell was falling for Trump’s “How to buy friends and demean people” methodology back before it became the universal sell-out of the entire GOP; Trump was a major donor to McConnell’s 2014 “Crush the Tea Party” senate campaign, and publicly endorsed McConnell for Senate Majority Leader (although Trump’s endorsement revealed that he didn’t know the difference between the house and the senate back then — which is not to imply that he knows the difference any better now). Money talks in the world of political schemers and power brokers, of course; McConnell felt that Trump’s anti-Tea Party donations indicated establishmentarian attitudes beneath all the Trumpian showmanship. It never indicated any such thing, but material flattery always works on the weak-minded or power-hungry, as Trump seems to have devoted his public life to proving, with considerable success.

Mitch McConnell has demonstrated consistently and continually for many years that he is neither a conservative nor a moderate, but simply a man prepared to do and say whatever seems most efficacious for his own career trajectory (as evidenced by the fact that he has refused to give up that career all the way to this embarrassing final moment) and his reputation as a great strategist (although no one can show what his great strategies are supposed to have accomplished apart from personal power for Mitch McConnell and a further normalizing of the standards of cynical hypocrisy that have turned most Americans against their own political system). Therefore, I say that the people asking, half-seriously and half-mockingly, “Where is Mitch?” ought to realize that he, as anything other than a badly damaged and deteriorating body, is in the Trump White House. He is, more than anyone but Trump himself, the architect of the catastrophe that was Trump’s rise to a presidential nomination in 2016, and even more shamefully of the double-catastrophe that was the third Trump candidacy in 2024, in spite of the candidate having intentionally undermined and endangered America’s electoral system, the rule of law, and the very physical security of America’s constitutional government, in the name of nothing — no facts, no principles — beyond his own infantile ego’s refusal to accept a world in which Donald Trump is not the winner of every game. This gold-painted fraud and lead-weight stupidity currently sinking the epoch’s defining nation owes its very life, both its first demagogic rise and its final chaotic demise, to Mitch McConnell above all other Republicans.

That will be McConnell’s long-term legacy, and no amount of self-deluded wallpapering by the likes of George Will and other insider game-players will be able to erase it. Which is as it should be.

(See my early prediction, “The Jester Who Would Be King”, my mid-life update, “The Jester’s New Clothes”, and my late-stage reflections, Dignity Be Damned, on all of this.)