The lyrics to Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler” are branded onto my brain. In the summer of 1979, I was a 20-year-old so eager to break into journalism I took a job at a tiny paper in Peoria, Ill., and lived there with my grandparents. “You know that ol’ ‘Gambler’?” was probably the first thing my grandfather, A.B. Bunch, said to me in his hillbilly drawl when I walked off the plane. The 45-rpm single was maybe the first record he’d bought in 20 years, and so he blared it from his large prehistoric stereo five or six times a day.
“You gotta know when to hold ‘em/Know when to fold ‘em/Know when to walk away/Know when to run.”
You gotta hand it to Mitch McConnell, the GOP’s 82-year-old Senate minority leader who arguably has done more to bend, staple and mutilate America in the 21st century than anyone else. He did so with zero charm or charisma, in the slow, ageless and ultimately inscrutable manner of the giant Galapagos turtle he so weirdly resembles.
But last Wednesday, the ancient gambler of the Senate looked carefully at his final hand. He knew when to run.
In announcing that he’ll step down as the chamber’s Republican leader after November’s presidential election, McConnell did his best impersonation of a statesman, proclaiming: “One of life’s most underappreciated talents is to know when it’s time to move on to life’s next chapter.” But the real McConnell burned through as he tried to have it every which way — seemingly attacking today’s MAGA-mesmerized GOP without saying exactly what the problem is or using his power to do anything about it, while pretending he had nothing to do with it.
“Believe me, I know the politics within my party at this particular moment in time,” McConnell said, in a seeming verbal subtweet of his fellow Republicans who are delighting Russian dictator Vladimir Putin with their failure to fund Ukraine aid. “I have many faults. Misunderstanding politics is not one of them.”
Here’s what McConnell understood but wouldn’t say out loud: America’s political arsonist, having managed in his record-setting 17-year run as Senate GOP leader to light multiple matches under all three branches of U.S. government, could see the wildfire he started finally lapping at the Capitol. This November, he will make us all truly believe that turtles can run.
The echoes from McConnell’s farewell had barely died in the Senate chamber when the Supreme Court that the senator has shaped and molded like a lump of Kentucky clay did exactly what many of us feared and put its clumsy thumb of injustice firmly on the life-or-death scales of November’s presidential election. The high court’s handling of Donald Trump’s ridiculous claims of presidential immunity from all crimes has been guided by three principles — delay, delay, and delay — that are pushing Trump’s 2020 election interference trial past Election Day. It’s a realpolitik move in the image of the court’s creator, McConnell, but Mitch doesn’t want to be around for the consequences.
This is my first column back after a two-week staycation, and I watched with alarm from my couch as the flames of the McConnell Fire jumped from place to place, fanned by the gale-force winds of autocracy and intolerance. In almost every soul-crushing story, I could practically smell the senator’s presence amid the rubble and ashes. Remember that MAGA stunt a couple years ago when gas prices were so high and they put those stickers of a laughing President Joe Biden on the pumps, saying “I did that!”? When they sift through the smoldering ashes of the American Experiment in a couple of decades, the “I did that!” stickers on the burned-out stumps will instead picture McConnell.
Look at the news. Last week’s Supreme Court shocker was all but guaranteed the moment in 2016 when McConnell ended any debate over whether or not SCOTUS is a political animal — smashing through the guardrails of democracy to block even a hearing for the nominee of the first Black president, to hold the seat open for a Trump-flavored conservative. The court’s stall tactic around Trump’s federal Jan. 6 trial is an echo of McConnell’s stall tactics that gave them their right-wing supermajority. Mitch did that!
It was also the McConnell Court, of course, that by that one-vote margin he carved out finally overturned Roe vs. Wade in 2022 and reversed nearly a half-century of women’s reproductive rights in America. That Dobbs decision has sparked a red-state revival of the patriarchy that is making The Handmaid’s Tale seem like a documentary. That Alabama Supreme Court’s God-citing decision blocking desperate would-be parents from in-vitro fertilization (IVF) — so extreme it even had the state’s right-wing Republicans backpedaling? Mitch did that!
And don’t forget that McConnell’s reshaping of the judiciary didn’t begin and end with the Supreme Court. The GOP Senate leader slowed Barack Obama’s nominees at the end of his presidency and then flipped the switch when Trump arrived in January 2017, ultimately pushing through 230 new federal judges, including one-third of the appellate seats. Some had minimal qualifications except for their ties to the right-wing Federalist Society. Exhibit A might be U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon of Florida, whom Trump plucked from legal obscurity in 2020 and seems hell-bent on returning the favor by slow walking the ex-president’s classified documents trial. Mitch did that!
» READ MORE: Mitch McConnell gets his own chapter in the story of America's dying democracy. And it's devastating | Will Bunch
Some Democrats seem willing to give McConnell a pass because they find themselves allies on the urgent issue of funding Ukraine’s war effort to block Putin’s aggression. But the reality is more complicated. It always is with Mitch. In 2016, McConnell could have worked to expose the Russian political interference that seems to have poisoned the brains of Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson. Instead, he refused that fall to sign a bipartisan statement that would have warned voters about Putin’s crusade. Stopping Russian meddling? Mitch didn’t do that!
Of course, it’s fair to ask why Putin’s preferred candidate — the man who summoned a violent coup attempt on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 202, — is even allowed to run for another term. Once again, the cowardly machinations of McConnell played the decisive role. Weeks after the insurrection, Sen. Watch-What-I-Do-Not-What-I-Say issued a stinging verbal condemnation of Trump’s actions, then voted to acquit his fellow Republican at his impeachment trial. Even worse, he didn’t use his sizable clout as leader to convince his GOP colleagues to convict Trump, which would have barred him from running this year. America’s political arsonist seemed to really believe the blaze would burn out and die of its own accord. Instead, the wildfires are engulfing everything — including McConnell’s legacy.
Like everything with McConnell, it’s hard to say exactly why he’s surrendering his leadership post now. His almost ghostly countenance last week clearly suggested his declining health was a factor. But he also must have taken a long look at the political cards he was holding. The Democrats could hold onto their narrow Senate majority in 2025, but I have to think McConnell realized the likelihood of returning as majority leader was even worse. A GOP leader under Trump 47 would have to actually enact the end game for democracy that McConnell has teed up over the decades. Having to whip 51 votes for authoritarian Trumpists — just imagine Homeland Security Secretary Stephen Miller — or for mass detention camps along the border would expose McConnell as the firebug he’s been all along.
Why’d he do it? It’s not even clear McConnell knew what he was doing, on a lifelong political power trip that spiraled out of control. His epitaph was written by the friend who — as the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer struggled to understand what made McConnell tick in writing a 2020 profile — told her: “Give up. You can look and look for something more in him, but it isn’t there. I wish I could tell you there is some secret thing he believes in, but he doesn’t.”
We are currently consumed, as we should be, with Trump’s autocratic march on Washington. But it was McConnell’s rank amorality, in a wetlands where everything and everybody — even justices of the Supreme Court — is up for sale, that caused the utter devastation that burned the pathway for a narcissistic dictator. When McConnell tells you that he doesn’t misunderstand politics, he is telling you he’s smart enough to know he doesn’t want to be seen wandering lost among the smoldering wreckage he created. Somewhere in the darkness, this gambler did not break even. It’s time to run.