US Politics: Mitch McConnell knows he has no place in Trump's party

There is no more room for two parts of the Republican Party. (Source: Bloomberg)

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell saw the writing on the wall. He has no place in this Republican Party. It belongs to Donald Trump.

Ronald Reagan’s wing of the party is moribund, crushed by MAGA. And so, McConnell, who got married on Reagan’s birthday, will step down from his leadership post in November, bowing to the reality of his own irrelevance.

He never mentioned this backdrop — the specter of a second Trump term — in his announcement speech on the Senate floor as Senator Susan Collins (another Reagan Republican) sat behind him. He didn’t have to. His speech, the wavering voice, the sadness, the talk of a new season and a new generation, said it all. The GOP resistance to Trump and Trumpism was always more of a hope than an actual movement. McConnell signaled its end.

McConnell, of course, is not blameless for this Trump takeover. His ruthless approach to the presidency of Barack Obama set the stage for Trump. While he fought to crush the proto-MAGA tea party, he also let their outlandish birtherism claims fester, never offering a strong rebuke to this otherisation of America’s first Black president. In denying Obama an opportunity to make a Supreme Court pick, McConnell treated Obama as if he was a different kind of president, one without the full privileges of the office. McConnell gladly afforded Trump the privilege of naming a justice to the court in the heat of an election.

With McConnell’s ouster, the Senate, supposedly the “cooling saucer” of Congress, will now look more like the hotheaded House.

It is true, McConnell has had health issues, and he is 82. Last year, he suffered a concussion from a fall and had to be hospitalised. He also suffered from two very public instances of freezing during press availabilities, which his doctors connected to his head injury. He is not a young man anymore.

But during his prime, his southern gentility masked a cutthroat, by any-means-necessary approach to winning. His legacy will be a stacked conservative Supreme Court that has limited abortion access for millions of women, dismantled affirmative action programs at colleges and universities and expanded gun rights. He had the option to at least try to convict Trump for attempting to overthrow the 2020 election, but he bowed to the growing MAGA mob.

For decades, Reagan was the standard bearer and the ideological giant of the GOP. McConnell was so enamoured of him that he held his wedding day on Reagan’s birthday. Now, the GOP has been remade in Trump’s image and there is no place for McConnell. Just as there is no place for Mitt Romney, and no place for Ronna Romney McDaniel, who tried desperately to toe the MAGA line.

Team Trump has been courting McConnell for his endorsement, eager to have the stamp of approval from the establishment wing of the party and presumably the money and momentum that comes with it. But Trump doesn’t need McConnell. He has made McConnell and his ilk irrelevant. Even as McConnell blamed Trump for the Jan. 6 insurrection, he said he would still back him for president. An endorsement would not be a surprise, even if it means McConnell is endorsing a man who referred to his wife, Elaine Chao, as Coco Chow.

To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven, McConnell said, quoting scriptures. McConnell may have come to politics with a Reaganesque purpose and ideology, but he will leave his post as a handmaiden to Trumpism, helping usher in a coarser, less free America.

Nia-Malika Henderson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. Views do not represent the stand of this publication. 

Credit: Bloomberg