How Mitch McConnell Blew America’s Best Chance to Stop Trump

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.”