Mitch Connell: A Profile In Fear And Cowardice

McConnell hasn’t just appeased Trump, he has actively enabled his worst tendencies that have created an existential threat to the Republican Party.

by Ben Cohen

Mitch McConnell was featured in The New York Times this past weekend in a piece that examined the delicate balance he has been forced to maintain working with Trump while protecting his own career. In what was ostensibly an even handed profile of the Senate Majority Leader, Times reporter Glenn Thrush exposed McConnell for what he really is: a deeply cowardly man who has sacrificed every ounce of integrity he may have had left to keep himself in office and escape the wrath of Trump’s base.

McConnell, reports Thrush, speaks with Trump on an almost daily basis and now serves almost exclusively as a yes man — a subservient, amoral operative who enforces party discipline and enacts the president’s “policy” objectives regardless of how he feels about it:

Seeking little credit — and getting even less — Mr. McConnell has expedited virtually everything Mr. Trump has asked of him since 2017, rolling back Obama-era regulations, ramming through a giant tax cut that has driven up an already high budget deficit and playing wingman to the White House on contentious nominations, even those he had questioned, like Brett M. Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court.

But critics say Mr. McConnell’s acquiescence — he even strong-armed Senate rule changes to ease the president’s nominations to confirmation — has only encouraged Mr. Trump to go further out of the mainstream. While other Republicans have openly questioned Mr. Trump’s intention to nominate a former pizza magnate, Herman Cain, and a conservative commentator, Stephen Moore, to the Federal Reserve Board, Mr. McConnell has held his tongue. He has scarcely mentioned last week’s jarring shake-up at the Department of Homeland Security.

And Congress has left for a two-week spring recess without passing a popular and much-in-demand disaster relief bill, in large part because Mr. McConnell does not want to provoke Mr. Trump by adding money for Puerto Rico that Democrats are demanding but the president is refusing.

McConnell, who has objected privately to most of Trump’s insane proposals, does nothing because he is afraid. Afraid he might lose his Senate seat in his upcoming race in pro-Trump Tennessee. Afraid he might damage his wife, Elaine Chou’s position as Trump’s Secretary of Transportation. Afraid he might enrage Republican voters who are now firmly behind Trump.

McConnell has stood up to Trump on one issue though, and that is the president’s mad proposal to destroy the Affordable Care Act right before the 2020 election:

On health care, he [McConnnel) was direct; he called Mr. Trump to deliver a verdict — “no way” would he go along with a new effort to repeal the health law.

“I told him that this was not going to be on the agenda,” Mr. McConnell informed senators week at a recent Tuesday lunch.

While Thrush does not delve further into the issue, it isn’t hard to work out why McConnell chose to use whatever leverage he has with the president for this. The fact is, the vast majority of Americans want to keep almost every aspect of the ACA intact, from preventing health plans from denying coverage for pre-existing conditions and charging unhealthy people more money for coverage. This means Obamacare is not just popular with Democrats, it is extremely popular with Republicans too - a fact Mitch McConnell is well aware of.

McConnell would love nothing more than to destroy Obamacare and boot millions of Americans off their health plans, but he knows it isn’t a vote winner. So he talked Trump into promising he would repeal Obamacare after the 2020 election when Republicans “gain full control of Congress” (and ostensibly the presidency).

A heroic act indeed.

McConnell, who has been in the Senate for 34 years and is the longest-serving Republican leader in Senate history, has basically decided to throw his legacy away by saddling up to Trump. Following the majority of elected Republicans who have submitted to the president over time, McConnell hasn’t just appeased Trump, he has actively enabled his worst tendencies that have created an existential threat to the Republican Party. As Never Trump Republican Steve Schmidt aptly put it:

“The Republican party of Teddy Roosevelt and John McCain and Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush is dead. It’s over. It doesn’t exist anymore. It has been taken over, lock, stock, and barrel. For there to be any redemption of a right of center conservative party in the United States of America means the party of Trump must be destroyed politically.”

And that destruction is coming. The country turns browner, younger, and more liberal, meaning future generations of conservatives will have to move towards the center to remain viable. When this happens, McConnell will inevitably be seen as a traitor to the GOP and an appeaser of Trump’s abhorrent ethno-nationalism. And he won’t be seen as just an enabler of the destruction, but an architect who planned the party’s implosion for his own short term political gain.

For someone who has dedicated much of his life to the Republican Party, it will be a remarkable achievement to have helped wreck it too.

(image via Shutterstock)

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