McConnell's Turnaround

I've been noting here that Trump is moving to take over the Republican apparatus in light of his status as presumptive nominee, which he's achieved much earlier than he did in 2016. Not as much has been said, though it should be, about his role in pushing Mitch McConnell to announce his retirement as Senate Republican leader. A month ago, I noted that McConnell had been forced to reverse his support for the Senate border "compromise", citing a source, "McConnell said the political mood in the country has changed since negotiations began months ago."

The change was Mike Johnson's election as Speaker and Trump's surge in the polls.

Two weeks ago, having made it plain to RNC chair Ronna McDaniel that her resignation was expected, he sent the same message to McConnell:

. . . I don’t know that I can work with him,” Trump said during a town hall on Fox News' "The Ingraham Angle" on Tuesday. “He gave away trillions of dollars that he didn’t have to, trillions of dollars. He made it very easy for the Democrats.”

This wasn't the language of Trump's first term -- he had no real choice but to work with McConnell at the time. All of a sudden, he's sending McConnell an unambiguous message that his time's about up. Something's happened.

[A]ny serious attempt to understand history’s longest-serving Senate leader needs to focus on the age in which he rose to power: those eight years of Republican rule in the early 2000s. . . . More than anything, Mitch McConnell was a Bush Republican.

. . . Few Americans of either party hold much nostalgia about the George W. Bush presidency, and former Rep. Liz Cheney’s headlong charge into obscurity doesn’t quite inspire imitators. Better to draw your authority from a deeper well.

. . . Mitch McConnell won leadership of the Senate GOP in 2006 — just off three years of controlling the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives, which they used to tinker on business-friendly reforms, while failing to achieve a lasting effect.

The defining issues of the day were bailouts for Wall Street, the president’s promised amnesty for illegal immigrants, and the increasingly unpopular Iraq War. McConnell supported all three.

. . . His legacy epitomizes the Republican Party of the 2000s: corporate tax cuts, unfettered spending on defense and liberal programs, and the abandonment of any serious legislative efforts on cultural issues, from abortion to marriage to immigration.

It’s fitting that after four decades in the Senate, he hopes funding the war in Ukraine will cement his legacy. It’s priorities like these — and men like him and other Bush Republicans — who opened the door for the new right’s rebellion within the ranks.

Nevertheless, McConnell appears willing to acknowledge circumstances:

Senate leader Mitch McConnell is the highest-ranking Republican in Congress who has yet to endorse Donald Trump's bid to return to the White House — having once called the defeated president "morally responsible" for the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol attack.

. . . McConnell's political team and Trump's campaign have been in talks over not only a possible endorsement of the former president but a strategy to unite Republicans up and down the party's ticket ahead of the November election, according to a person familiar with the situation and granted anonymity to discuss it.

. . . In the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, key Republicans, including McConnell, signaled unequivocally they were done with Trump.

In a scathing speech during the Senate impeachment trial on charges Trump incited the insurrection at the Capitol, McConnell decried Trump's intemperate language and the "entire manufactured atmosphere of looming catastrophe" and "wild myths" about a stolen election.

What's increasingly clear is that Trump now appears to be in a stronger political position, certainly within his own party, than he's ever been, especially during his first term. Exactly why this is needs to be examined, but the failure of consensus Bush-era policies, including neoconservative foreign policy and softness on illegal immigration, is certainly one factor. The controlling metaphor of the "stolen" election is another, which I'll take up again soon.