Mitch McConnell, an Enabler of President Trump

[lpetrich]

How Mitch McConnell Became Trump’s Enabler-in-Chief | The New Yorker - "The Senate Majority Leader’s refusal to rein in the President is looking riskier than ever."

The article described how he ran back to an event in his home state rather than work out an aid package for getting through the coronavirus pandemic. At that event, he joked that his opponents "“occasionally compare me to Darth Vader."

McConnell, a voracious reader of history, has been cultivating his place in it for many years. But, in leaving Washington for the long weekend, he had misjudged the moment. The hashtag #WheresMitch? was trending on Twitter. President Trump had declared a national emergency; the stock market had ended one of its worst weeks since the Great Recession. Nearly two thousand cases of COVID-19 had already been confirmed in America.

Eleven days later, the Senate still had not come up with a bill. The Times ran a scorching editorial titled “The Coronavirus Bailout Stalled. And It’s Mitch McConnell’s Fault.” The Majority Leader had tried to jam through a bailout package that heavily favored big business. But by then five Republicans were absent in self-quarantine, and the Democrats forced McConnell to accept a $2.1-trillion compromise bill that reduced corporate giveaways and expanded aid to health-care providers and to hard-hit workers.

When the bill finally passed, he tried to portray his involvement in it as a success.

Many have regarded McConnell’s support for Trump as a stroke of cynical political genius. ... Indeed, some critics argue that McConnell bears a singular responsibility for the country’s predicament. They say that he knew from the start that Trump was unequipped to lead in a crisis, but, because the President was beloved by the Republican base, McConnell protected him. He even went so far as to prohibit witnesses at the impeachment trial, thus guaranteeing that the President would remain in office.

That's been the case for Trump's entire Presidency. Bill Kristol describes him as “a pretty conventional Republican who just decided to go along and get what he could out of Trump.” “Demagogues like Trump, if they can get elected, can’t really govern unless they have people like McConnell,” he noted -- someone with a power base who is willing to enable him. “There’s been too much focus on the base, and not enough on business leaders, big donors, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page,” and “The Trump base would be there anyway, but the élites might have rebelled if not for McConnell. He could have fundamentally disrupted Trump’s control, but instead McConnell has kept the trains running.”

The two are very unlike in temperament. Trump is impulsive, and he almost can't control what he says. McConnell is much less talkative, and intent on playing the long game, as he himself describes it. Trump is very low in the Big Five trait of conscientiousness, while McConnell is likely at least average in it, making him much more typical of successful people than Trump is.

 

[lpetrich]

I can't imagine MMC having a very high opinion of Trump. To MMC, Trump must seem hopelessly undisciplined, someone who can't keep his mouth shut when he has to do so, and someone incapable of formulating plans or strategies.

When Trump ran for President, he frequently derided “the corrupt political establishment,” saying that Wall Street titans were “getting away with murder” by paying no taxes. In a furious campaign ad, images of the New York Stock Exchange and the C.E.O. of Goldman Sachs flashed onscreen as he promised an end to the élites who had “bled our country dry.” In interviews, he denounced his opponents for begging wealthy donors for campaign contributions, arguing that, if “somebody gives them money,” then “just psychologically, when they go to that person they’re going to do it—they owe him.”

He sounded like some Bernie Sanders Democrat. But he left that all behind when in office.

McConnell, by contrast, is the master of the Washington money machine. Nobody has done more than he has to engineer the current campaign-finance system, in which billionaires and corporations have virtually no spending limits, and self-dealing and influence-peddling are commonplace.

Both politicians need each other, it seems. Trump needs MMC to govern, and MMC needs Trump to rally the base and keep lots of Republicans in the Senate.

The Republican Party is a coalition of expediency between global corporate elites and downscale white social conservatives, and MMC and Trump symbolize that coalition very well.

Although the two men almost always support each other in public, several members of McConnell’s innermost circle told me that in private things are quite different. They say that behind Trump’s back McConnell has called the President “nuts,” and made clear that he considers himself smarter than Trump, and that he “can’t stand him.”

He likely is smarter than Trump -- a *lot* smarter.

He has three daughters, and they have all departed from him politically. His youngest one, Porter, is the campaign director of Take On Wall Street, an anti-Wall-Street activist group. She has also criticized the Senate's appointment of Justice Kavanaugh, and MMC's middle daughter Claire's husband has done likewise. His oldest daughter Eleanor is a registered Democrat. Their mother, Sherrill Redmon, got divorced from MMC in 1980, and ended up collaborating with Gloria Steinem on the Voices of Feminism Oral History Project. But she seldom talks about her ex-husband.

 

[lpetrich]

There's a widespread notion that MMC was once some idealistic Rockefeller Republican, but some people disagree. They have found it hard to find any animating ideological principle in MMC's career, anything other than getting power. Nothing like AOC's "In a modern, moral, & wealthy society, no American should be too poor to live."

When McConnell tells the story of his first campaign—for student-council president—what leaps out is that he seemed far more interested in winning the title than in doing anything with it. As an underclassman, he was an introvert who sat by himself in the back of the auditorium at assemblies, and he was dazzled by the student-council president, who “had the envy of everyone.” When he confided this to his mother, she encouraged him to run for the position. He told her, “I don’t have even one friend.” But, McConnell writes, he went ahead, realizing that he could hustle endorsements from popular cheerleaders and athletes by giving them the “one thing teenagers most desire. Flattery.” He won. He writes that, upon having his first taste of the respect that comes with holding elected office, “I was hooked.”

That is something that he and Trump seem to have in common -- they both crave political power for the sake of political power.

He set his sights on becoming a US Senator, and he interned with one after college, then went on to law school. He ran for the state legislature, but he ran afoul of residency requirements. Ever since then, he has been very careful about official rules, like the Senate's arcane rules.

In 1973, during the Watergate scandal, McConnell wrote an op-ed in the Louisville Courier-Journal denouncing the corrupting influence of money on politics as “a cancer,” and demanding public financing for Presidential elections.

He would later exemplify that corruption, becoming a defender of big money in politics.

Abortion has never been a big issue for him, one way or the other.

According to two people who have been close to McConnell, he attends church but isn’t especially religious, nor does he care about abortion; but, as one of the sources put it, he “will never take any position that could lose him an election.”

He married his second wife, shipping-company heiress Elaine Chao, in 1993.

When McConnell presided over Trump’s impeachment trial, in which the President was accused of trying to extort Ukrainian officials into helping him smear his political rival Joe Biden, he allowed Republican senators to keep insisting that the “real” Ukraine scandal was the Biden family’s enrichment from their connections with the country’s rulers. Yet McConnell must have known that virtually any criticism one could make about the Biden family could be made as well about the Chao family. In fact, such criticisms had been made in the book “Secret Empires,” by the conservative writer Peter Schweizer. Republicans who promoted the book’s accusations against the Biden family evidently skipped the adjoining chapter on McConnell and the Chao family.

EC is now Transportation Secretary in the Trump Admin.

 

[lpetrich]

"It can be a danger for affluent Washington insiders to appear out of touch, and Kentucky is one of America’s poorest states." MMC has been careful to give the appearance of a plebeian lifestyle, though EC has been less vigilant in that regard.

After being a county judge / executive for a while, he moved on to the US Senate. In 1984, he ran against Democratic incumbent Walter "Dee" Huddleston. Nobody expected an obscure county official to do very well, and indeed he didn't, until the last weeks of the campaign. He scored an upset victory, the only Republican that year to do so against an incumbent Democratic Senator.

Nobody expected an unprepossessing, little-known local official to defeat Huddleston, but in the final weeks of the campaign McConnell surged to an upset victory, thanks, in large part, to a television ad created by Roger Ailes, the Nixon media adviser who later became the mastermind behind Fox News. Ailes was helped by Larry McCarthy, a virtuoso of negative campaign ads who later made the racially charged Willie Horton ad, attacking the 1988 Democratic candidate for President, Michael Dukakis. The McConnell ad depicted a pack of bloodhounds frantically hunting for Huddleston, ostensibly because he’d missed so many Senate votes while off giving paid speeches. It was funny, but Huddleston’s attendance record, ninety-four per cent, wasn’t out of the ordinary, and his speeches violated no Senate rules. Yet, as McCarthy proudly told the Washington Post, “It was like tossing a match on a pool of gasoline.”

Two years later, he went on a lucrative 11-day speaking tour of the West Coast.

In 1990, he ran for re-election, and "Ailes helped McConnell paint his Democratic challenger, Harvey Sloane, as a dangerous drug addict." Someone who had used prescription drugs without valid prescriptions. MMC's approach to campaigning: “If they throw a stone at you, you drop a boulder on them.”

Most politicians find fund-raising odious, but Alan Simpson, the former Republican senator from Wyoming, who served a dozen years with McConnell, told MacGillis that fund-raising was “a joy to him,” adding, “He gets a twinkle in his eye and his step quickens. I mean, he loves it.”

There are some rooms near the Capitol building where Congresspeople go to hit up big donors for donations. They often spend much of their working day doing that. Like some other progressive Congresspeople, AOC prefers to depend on small donors, and she likes that she can do more of what a Congressperson is supposed to do.

Needless to say, MMC's donors have gotten a lot back from him in favors.

 

[lpetrich]

MMC used his fundraising talent to rise up to the Senate leadership, something that LBJ had done. With a lot of money, one could get power by deciding who to dole it out to.

That's what Joe Crowley had done in his 20 years in the House. He was good at fundraising, and he became the 4th most powerful Democrat in the House and a possible future Speaker. But he ignored his district, and in 2018, he was primaried by a certain young bartender.

Someone claims that MMC stated after being sworn in the first time, that he would move politically rightward so that he can continue to get re-elected. If he had any big ambition, it was to become Majority Leader. He made a name for himself in blocking campaign-finance reform and undoing restrictions on it, while claiming that it was all about the First Amendment. His colleagues were grateful for him doing that dirty work so that they would not appear to be corrupt.

Money from the coal industry, tobacco companies, Big Pharma, Wall Street, the Chamber of Commerce, and many other interests flowed into Republican coffers while McConnell blocked federal actions that those interests opposed: climate-change legislation, affordable health care, gun control, and efforts to curb economic inequality.

With his money, he rewards and punishes, like rewarding cooperative politicians with pork. “Suddenly, Susan Collins gets a bridge in Maine. Lisa Murkowski suddenly gets a harbor. Oh, what a coincidence!” He helps finance their campaigns, and he lets them share the spotlight.

In private, McConnell can be bitingly funny, as well as sentimental—he has been known to tear up over an aide’s departure—but he is shrewdly guarded, reportedly subscribing to the maxim “You can’t get in trouble for what you don’t say.” He takes care to cover his tracks, putting private notes in his pocket rather than tossing them into Senate wastebaskets.

His "Team Mitch" boycotts any consultants who help anyone run against an incumbent Republican Senator, and insubordination can result in not being confirmed by the Senate for an Administration job.

Some Republicans have called him the most politically adept Majority Leader since LBJ. But while LBJ used his politicking to promote social justice, MMC blocks it.

 

[lpetrich]

Under MMC's leadership, the Senate has become much less active than in the past. Lots of House-passed bills have piled up without MMC doing anything about them, since it is up to MMC to decide what will be voted on.

Among them are bills mandating background checks on gun purchasers and lowering the cost of prescription drugs—ideas that are overwhelmingly popular with the public. But McConnell, currently the top recipient of Senate campaign contributions from the pharmaceutical industry, has denounced efforts to lower drug costs as “socialist price controls.”

Then his obstructing the confirmation of Merrick Garland. He claimed that it would be wrong to do that in an election year, but this election year, he's willing to confirm a successor to any Justice who dies or retires.

WATCH: Mitch McConnell Laughs Like a Bond Villain at Blocked Obama Judicial Appointments - like MG

He's proud of his successful obstruction of that confirmation. “The most important decision I’ve made in my political career was the decision not to do something.”

But McConnell’s predecessor as Majority Leader, the retired Democratic senator Harry Reid, of Nevada, accuses McConnell of destroying norms that fostered comity and consensus, such as the restrained use of filibusters. Although the two leaders had at first managed to be friendly, bonding over their shared support for Washington’s baseball team, the Nationals, they became bitter antagonists during the Obama Administration. “Mitch and the Republicans are doing all they can to make the Senate irrelevant,” Reid told me. “We’ve watched them stand mute no matter what Trump does. They have lost their souls. From a policy perspective, it’s awful. It’s hurt the Senate and damaged the country.”

 

[lpetrich]

MMC was relentlessly hostile to Barack Obama, and in a phone call, didn't even call him "Mr. President". This hostility involved hostility to Obama's efforts to be prepared for infectious diseases, something that barely survived. "McConnell’s disrespect for Obama mirrored the views of rich conservative corporate donors like the Kochs, who underwrote many of the campaigns that enabled Republicans to capture the majority in the House of Representatives in 2010, and in the Senate four years later."

Eager though McConnell was to see the end of the Obama era, he wasn’t enthused about Trump’s candidacy. To the extent that McConnell had any fixed ideology, he was an old-fashioned deficit hawk who favored big business, free trade, and small government—the opposite of Trump’s populist pitch.

Trump’s anti-Washington supporters weren’t enthused about McConnell, either. They booed him when he briefly appeared onstage at the Republican National Convention. But McConnell—having watched Senate colleagues from the Republican establishment, including Bob Bennett, of Utah, and Dick Lugar, of Indiana, get toppled by Tea Party insurgents—knew that it was dangerous to cross his party’s base.

During the 2016 Presidential campaign, MMC tried to suppress any mention of intelligence on Russian meddling in that election. After the election, he refused to do anything about election security until some people started calling him "Moscow Mitch", suspecting some connection. He denounced that comparison as "McCarthyism".

 

[lpetrich]

In McConnell’s reëlection race against McGrath, a former Marine fighter pilot, he has been trying to make Trump his virtual running mate. And now that McConnell has helped eliminate nearly all meaningful spending restraints, he can count on practically unlimited funds from billionaire donors. His campaign has already raised $25.6 million, although McGrath has raised even more.

....
Until recently, McConnell’s enabling of Trump has worked well for him, if not for the country. But it has now made him complicit in a crisis whose end is nowhere in sight. As the consequences of the Trump Presidency become lethally clear, his deal looks costlier every day.

If MMC gets re-elected, it will be his seventh - and likely last - Senate term. His health is going bad. "He’s had triple-bypass heart surgery, and acquaintances say that his hearing is poor; last summer, he fell and fractured his shoulder."

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

Real Clear Politics
Mitch McConnell

Favorable - 27.3%
Unfavorable - 45.7%

The Kentucky primary has been moved to June 23 due to covid-19. Three Democrats are competing to run against McConnell.

...

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2020/03/17/mitch-mcconnell-is-running-scared/

Polling for a potential race between McConnell and McGrath has been sparse because she will have to first win a primary that has been postponed to June 23rd. But the few that have been conducted so far show a tight race. Here is what might have McConnell worried.

A record number of Kentucky residents are registered to vote as of Jan. 31, Secretary of State Michael Adams (R) announced on Tuesday.
More than 3.4 million Kentuckians are now registered, marking a new high for the state…
According to the Kentucky Secretary of State’s Office, 48% of Kentucky voters are registered as Democrats, 43% are Republicans, and 9% are “listed under other affiliations.”

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