CNN screenshot
Mitch McConnell met with Donald Trump on Thursday for the first time since the Capitol insurrection, which the Senate minority leader blamed on the former president.
“There’s no question — none — that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day,” McConnell said on the Senate floor in February 2021. “No question about it. The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president.”
In response, Trump has fired a barrage of missives not only at McConnell, but at the senator’s wife Elaine Chao, who was Trump’s Secretary of Transportation.
After Republicans failed to retake the Senate in the 2022 midterms, Trump – whose handpicked mutant crop of Senate nominees were roundly rejected by voters as too freakish – blamed McConnell and mocked Chao, who was born in Taiwan.
“He blew the Midterms, and everyone despises him and his otherwise lovely wife, Coco Chow!” Trump wailed.
It was just one in a long line of insults Trump hurled at the husband and wife, whom he has suggested are in the pay of China. McConnell never publicly responded to the attacks. Meanwhile, Chao went on CNN and responded – sort of. She accurately called Trump’s attacks on her “racist” and asked the media not to amplify them, an eminently reasonable and understandable request.
Despite the relentless salvos, McConnell has endorsed Trump. And on Thursday, the minority leader was one of many Republican lawmakers to meet with him during what was the former president’s first trip to the Capitol since he watched it get violently overrun by his supporters and refused to do anything to stop it. For good measure, McConnell was photographed shaking hands with his longtime tormentor.
“We had a really positive meeting,” McConnell stated afterward.
Upon seeing the photograph on air, CNN political commentator Gloria Borger said, “It’s just something that Mitch McConnell has to do.”
Here’s the thing. It really isn’t.
First of all, McConnell has agency. He does not have to shake Trump’s hand, or endorse him, or pretend he’s anything other than a narcissistic cretin who tried to invalidate an American presidential election, among other offenses to decency. Secondly, of all the people in Congress right now, McConnell arguably has the least to lose. The senator is 82 years old and has announced he is stepping down as Senate Republican leader in November. He is well past his political peak, has no higher office to strive for, and may not – as his fellow Kentuckian James Comer probably hopes – run for reelection in 2026.
McConnell is not even remotely in the same boat as say, Ted Cruz, another senator whose wife Trump disparaged as ugly while also threatening to “spill the beans” about her, whatever that was supposed to mean. For good measure, Trump suggested Cruz’s father was involved in President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
An opponent of Trump’s for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination at the time, Cruz blasted him in no uncertain terms, telling him, “Donald, you’re a sniveling coward and leave Heidi the hell alone.”
When Trump wrapped up the nomination, Cruz took a gamble with his speech at the Republican National Convention by refusing to endorse Trump and telling attendees to vote their consciences. He was booed mercilessly. Cruz was banking on Trump getting blown out. In Cruz’s calculation, he would run again in 2020, clinch the nomination, and heroically wrest the country from President Hillary Clinton.
But the polls tightened and come fall, there was Cruz on Twitter, phone in hand, making calls urging people to vote for Trump. One user deemed it “the final humiliation.”
Trump won and Cruz never looked back.
As undignified as it is to give your testicles to Trump for him to keep at Mar-a-Lago in a jar stored next to classified documents, Cruz did so with an eye to his political future. He wants to be president. At a minimum, he does not want to be run out of Congress à la Liz Cheney or Mitt Romney. This is not to defend Cruz in the least. After all, he’s as oleaginous as they come in D.C. But at least there is a discernible calculation to it, however debasing.
McConnell’s case, though, is seemingly inexplicable. Trump has ruthlessly attacked him, mocked his wife, and questioned their loyalty to the United States. In an earlier era, McConnell would be challenging Trump to a duel, not endorsing him for president and glad-handing for the camera. Having passed the apex of his political power and drawing ever closer to shedding his mortal coil, McConnell has every reason to tell Trump to shove it.
That he is doing the opposite nicely encapsulates the state of the Republican Party, which is now characterized by reflexive deference to a crook who is patently unfit for office.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
