A coping mechanism I’ve adopted since the election of Donald Trump, a man more deserving of prison than the presidency, is to look for reasons for even the slightest optimism about the nation’s governance over the next four years. To that end, this Thanksgiving I’m grateful for the Republican “Grim Reaper,” Mitch McConnell.
Really.
Yes, I’m saying I’m thankful for the sour senator from Kentucky who’s built a turkey of a legacy: Fighting for years, up to a conservative Supreme Court, to successfully decapitate limits on campaign contributions from corporations and special interests. Stuffing that court and lower benches with far-right jurists. Finally, engineering Trump’s Senate acquittal after the House impeached him for inciting an insurrection that trashed the Capitol McConnell professes to revere.
Opinion Columnist
Jackie Calmes
Jackie Calmes brings a critical eye to the national political scene. She has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.
It’s because of that last McConnell “achievement” that we face Trump 2.0. Had the Senate convicted Trump in February 2021, it probably would have followed with a vote to bar him from running for office again, as the Senate has for impeached and convicted judges.
So here we are, and McConnell too.
At 82, the longest-serving party leader in Senate history is voluntarily surrendering his crown to mentee Sen. John Thune of South Dakota. He will serve the last two years of his seventh and perhaps final term among the rank and file of the Republican majority. It’s McConnell’s just deserts to take a demotion as Trump returns to the summit: For all of McConnell’s past services to the once and future president, since Jan. 6 the two men have loathed each other more than I loathe marshmallows on sweet potatoes.
Familiar as he is with power, McConnell is well aware of who holds it now. Still, he won’t be without clout in Trump’s Washington. He won’t retreat to the backbenches or bend the knee. He even relishes the schoolyard nickname Trump gave him — “Old Crow” — doling out bottles of the Kentucky bourbon with his mug on the label.
McConnell may be stooped with age, but he’s suggesting publicly and privately that he’ll rise to the occasion as leader of a Republican resistance in the Senate, providing cover to others, should Trump overreach. The president-elect already has done so with some grotesque Cabinet choices, preceded by his anticonstitutional demand that senators forfeit their “advice and consent” power and instead be rubber stamps. McConnell’s nearly immediate response amounted to “No way.”
If Trump, as president, carries through on his threat to illegally impound funds that Congress approves, expect McConnell to cry foul, and even back a court challenge. Most of all, look for McConnell — who will chair the defense spending subcommittee — to stand for continued U.S. leadership in the world, especially in support of Ukraine and NATO. That posture will surely ruffle the feathers of an “America First” president enamored of dictators and disdainful of allies.
“Opposition to Ukraine is about as much nonsense as [saying] Biden wasn’t legitimately elected,” McConnell says in a bite at Trump in a new biography, “The Price of Power.”
I’m not naive. McConnell will go along with many Trump actions, including serving up a bounty of unaffordable new tax cuts to the wealthy and corporations, urging Americans to gorge on fossil fuels and, again, stuffing the courts with right-wing ideologues.
Yet recall the ancient proverb: The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
As ruthless and rule-bending as McConnell has been on judicial confirmations and more, I’m betting he’ll respect institutional and constitutional lines that Trump scornfully crosses, and recruit a few other Republican senators to help hold those lines. A few Republicans are all that’s needed when the party’s majority is a narrow 53 to 47; Trump can lose just four votes if Democrats are united in opposition. I count up to a dozen Republicans who could take turns to buck Trump occasionally, which would dilute the political pain of Trump’s wrath.
On Trump’s nominations, for instance. Ex-con Stephen K. Bannon, among other MAGA militants, blamed McConnell (“You gotta give the devil its due”) for whipping up opposition that forced the unsavory former Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida off the menu as Trump’s nominee for attorney general. Publicly, too, McConnell was no chicken, as he countered Trump’s call to let nominees slide through as recess appointments.
“Each of these nominees needs to come before the Senate and go through the process and be vetted,” McConnell said two weeks ago. The institutionalist in him knows that, under the Constitution, the Senate’s power to confirm nominees is equal to a president’s in naming them.
Among those he could help defeat are Trump’s worst picks: Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the candidates to head intelligence, defense and health, respectively. A polio survivor, McConnell surely chokes on Kennedy’s anti-vax rhetoric. Likewise for Gabbard’s and Hegseth’s echoes of Trump’s skepticism and Vladimir Putin’s talking points on Ukraine.
McConnell has little to lose. He’ll be liberated in the new Congress, he told his biographer, Michael Tackett, no longer required as party leader to attend to the appetites of moderate and MAGA Republicans alike. He’s not expected to seek reelection in 2026. Sure, he’s unpopular nationally, in both parties. But inside the Senate, most Republicans respect and even like him. His outsized standing there will parallel that of former House Speaker and GOAT Nancy Pelosi, whom he praised last month: “I think Pelosi has done a pretty good job as a former speaker, still being able to express herself and have an audience.”
Similarly, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina predicted of McConnell, “When he speaks, people will listen.”
Forget the turkey. I’m bringing the popcorn. And rooting for the Old Crow.
