Mr Viral
In 2016, when he was still the Republican Senate majority leader and one of the most powerful politicians in the world, Mitch McConnell published a memoir called The Long Game. Taking stock of his own life—a prolonged and arduous recovery and rehabilitation from the effects of childhood polio; a disciplined, “slow and steady” approach to politics that eventually made him master of the Senate—McConnell revealed in the book his essential worldview: In politics, the real pros are the ones who prepare relentlessly, ignore the daily dramas, and keep their eyes on the big goal. “The story of a nation’s success,” he wrote at the book’s conclusion, “and the success of each one of us, is a slow awakening to the timeless values of the long game.”
Nearly nine years later, McConnell is no longer his party’s Senate leader, and his long game is nearing its end. Its rewards hardly seem inspiring. Donald Trump, a man who hates McConnell and whom McConnell hates, is back in the White House. Trump, who refers to McConnell’s Chinese American wife, Elaine Chao, as “Coco Chow,” has a hold over the Republican Party as powerful as that of any GOP president in history.
Elon Musk, in every sense the opposite of “slow and steady,” has seized control over large swaths of the federal government. As Trump and Musk’s power grab threatens the foundations of our constitutional order, the Senate Republican caucus—filled with men and women whom McConnell has presumably mentored—is largely supine and silent.
McConnell, still Kentucky’s senior senator, has been showing curious signs of rebellion—voting against the confirmation of Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and providing the only Republican vote against Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination as director of national intelligence. (Another no vote, on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination to be secretary of health and human services, may be yet to come.) But above the talk of a liberated McConnell in his YOLO phase hangs a bitter irony: For a few weeks in January and February 2021, McConnell held a unique power to stop Trump, once and for all.
That was the brief time when McConnell seriously considered voting to convict Trump on an impeachment charge relating to his role in the January 6 insurrection. Had he done so, and had he used his peerless vote-whipping prowess to scrounge up the nine additional Republicans necessary to convict the then disgraced ex-president, Trump could have been constitutionally barred from ever again holding “any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States.” His vengeful quest to return to power could have died in its infancy.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) spoke on the fourth day of President Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial at the U.S. Capitol on February 12, 2021 in Washington, DC.Getty Images.
McConnell ultimately decided against convicting, at least in part because he believed that in the long run, others—the courts, the voters, Trump himself—would probably take care of America’s Trump problem. It was a terrible miscalculation. Indeed, if Trump succeeds in his present assault on the constitutional order, McConnell’s choice may turn out to have been one of the most fateful missed chances in the history of the republic.
To McConnell’s critics on the left, none of this is surprising. To them, he has always been a kind of Republican Voldemort, untethered from morality and interested only in amassing power. How much did he care about norms, they ask, when he was keeping Merrick Garland off the Supreme Court?
But McConnell has always been a figure more complex and contradictory than his liberal caricature—his bland politesse sits beside his ruthless instinct, his rabid partisanship beside his passionate institutionalism. At his core, he is a creature of Washington, where the Serious People are always playing the long game. Think of Dean Acheson, the essential establishment wise man of the 20th century, who counseled against reflexive overreaction: “Don’t just do something. Stand there!”
That was always McConnell’s strategy for dealing with Trump. In his excellent biography of McConnell, The Price of Power, Michael Tackett described how, after the October 2016 release of the Access Hollywood tape, Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan was ready to pull his support for Trump’s presidential campaign, but McConnell counseled against it. “He basically said don’t unendorse, it will fracture us,” Ryan later told Tackett. “He’s going to lose, but don’t take down all of us in Congress.”
Trump, of course, did not lose, and McConnell continued to accommodate him as president—despite an intense personal distaste. In January 2020, Democratic House managers made their case to the Senate in Trump’s first impeachment trial on charges that he’d improperly pressured Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy to investigate the Biden family and had obstructed an inquiry into the matter. “They nailed him,” McConnell reportedly said afterward in a private conversation with Mitt Romney, the only Senate Republican who would ultimately vote to convict Trump on one of the charges.
“Well, the defense will say that Trump was just investigating corruption by the Bidens,” Romney replied. In his book Romney: A Reckoning, the journalist McKay Coppins reports McConnell’s response: “If you believe that, I’ve got a bridge I can sell you.” Nevertheless, in public, McConnell helped lead the successful GOP effort to discredit the impeachment as a partisan witch hunt.
For a time, it seemed that the case of January 6 would be different. The Kentucky senator was profoundly shaken and outraged by the attack on the Capitol, which he blamed squarely on Trump. In his book, Tackett quotes an oral history interview McConnell provided a week after the attack. “I’m not at all conflicted about whether what the president did is an impeachable offense,” McConnell said. “Urging an insurrection and people attacking the Capitol as a direct result…is about as close to an impeachable offense as you can imagine.” When the House moved to impeach Trump, McConnell sent signals that he supported the effort.
But in the days that followed, as polls showed Republican-base voters sticking by Trump, it became increasingly clear that an all-out effort to secure the 17 Republican votes required for conviction would divide the party and potentially even cost McConnell his leadership position. Unwilling to take the risk, he ultimately joined 42 other Republican senators in voting to acquit Trump.
In a speech on the Senate floor, McConnell explained that he did not believe the Senate had the legal authority to convict and remove a president who was already out of office. Nevertheless, much of the speech condemned Trump with words so harsh they might have been written by Romney or Liz Cheney. Trump, McConnell said, was “practically and morally responsible” for the insurrection. “We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being [held] accountable by either one.”
McConnell made the same error that so many of our politicians, media figures, and business leaders continue to make: believing that Trump can be helped in the short term because, in time, his danger will be contained.
There is a well-known story told about Franz von Papen, the scheming conservative politician who brokered Adolf Hitler’s ascent to the German chancellorship in January of 1933. When some objected to Hitler—who had already vowed to end German democracy—because they believed he was too dangerous to entrust with power, von Papen countered that the Nazis would be easily manipulated because they only controlled two of the cabinet positions under Hitler in the new government. “What do you want?” von Papen famously said to the doubters. “In two months, we’ll have pushed Hitler so far into the corner that he’ll squeal.”
In our sensitive country, it is still considered improper to compare anyone to a Nazi, even those who echo their actions and words. So the lesson from von Papen’s faulty prediction must remain general and hypothetical: If, by chance, you find yourself in a position of authority in a country where authoritarians are ascendant, the time to take decisive action is now. There is no such thing as the long game.
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