Courtesy of Northern Kentucky Tribune
This column was written before McConnell’s Thursday announcement that he would not seek reelection next year.
Donald Trump has been back in office one month, and his job-approval ratings are his highest ever — but lower than for any new president in polling history (except for him in 2017). That caveat doesn’t temper dismay among Democrats and other Trump critics who can’t understand why more Americans don’t realize or care that he is wrecking or warping much of the government and making fundamental changes in foreign policies that have made our nation the leader of the world for 80 years.
Recall that Trump’s stock in trade is simple answers to complex problems, and that the first month of his second term has focused on attacking things many voters have long found unpopular: illegal immigration, key to his elections; foreign aid, interruptions of which are killing people and weakening America’s case overseas; and government itself, which is widely viewed as inefficient, wasteful, prone to corruption and out of touch.
Much of what the administration says about government is off base; 11 of its 12 claims about the Agency for International Development are misleading, lacking context, or outright wrong, says Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler. But such traditional news sources are being out-shouted by the pro-Trump media system that tells his followers what they want to hear.
So, it’s a frustrating time for Democrats, who can’t figure out how to get leverage when Republicans are distressingly compliant to Trump and the only major obstacle to autocracy seems to be the courts — along with the hope that Trump won’t defy judicial orders and cause a constitutional crisis.
In the absence of a strategy, many Trump critics spend time blaming his return on Sen. Mitch McConnell and what they call his failure to get Trump convicted on impeachment for the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and then disqualify him from holding office.
That is a charge not proven. It relies mainly on the McConnell mythology that the Senate’s longest-serving party leader, who kept a Supreme Court seat vacant for 14 months, surely could have persuaded nine more Republicans to vote against Trump. Only seven did, and 17 were needed to reach the 67 needed for conviction. McConnell said Trump was “practically and morally responsible” for the insurrection but voted against conviction, using the unproven legal theory that impeachment is not constitutional after an officeholder leaves office.
From the start, McConnell called the vote one of conscience, on which he didn’t try to persuade any colleagues. Then he told his latest biographer, Michael Tackett, that he couldn’t have gotten to 67.
Could he have done it? “It’s the great what-if of our time,” Jonathan Martin, top columnist for Politico, told me. “My guess is he would have had a shot, but it would have been difficult . . . especially a month later.” (McConnell rejected then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s call to reconvene Congress for impeachment and a quick trial during Trump’s final week in office.) I agree with Martin, based on the number of Republicans in Trump states who ran for reelection in 2022, and polling in the days after Jan. 6.
Polls showed Republicans’ approval of McConnell and then-Vice President Mike Pence, Trump’s main target on Jan. 6, fell sharply, but Trump lost just a few points. Senators could see he still had a grip on their voters, and it would have taken an all-out effort by McConnell to get nine votes to go with his own.
If he had fallen short, Trump supporters would have ruled the Republican caucus by more than 2-1, with Trump still eligible to run and exercise great influence. That’s not a recipe for remaining as leader, or regaining a majority in the 2022 midterm elections. And if he had succeeded, having almost two-thirds of his caucus opposed to him on such an elemental issue would have caused similar problems.
That said, I wish my senior senator had been willing to risk his political imperatives for the sake of the country. But he thought the Democrats would “take care of the son of a bitch for us,” as he said early on the morning of Jan. 7. That was a lost gamble — ironically, due to Merrick Garland, whom he kept off the court. As attorney general, Garland waited so long to appoint a special counsel to investigate Trump that the former president couldn’t be tried on any of the charges before the election.
If McConnell didn’t realize then that Trump is an existential threat to the republic as we have known it, I hope he does now. He’s no longer Republican leader, but an intellectual force among GOP senators and chairs the defense appropriations subcommittee, where he says he will resist Trump’s isolationist impulses. He has long favored foreign aid, as does then-Trump Defense Secretary James Mattis, who said “If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition.”
So, as Democrats look for some sort of counterforce to Trump, they should wish their old adversary McConnell well. He turned 83 on Thursday.
This commentary is republished from the Northern Kentucky Tribune, a nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism.
