I think we’ve established by now that Mitch McConnell, who for the past several years has reigned as Washington’s most unpopular politician, is a relic of a bygone political age.
It’s been a good while since McConnell’s only relevance has come from the amount of damage, or at least irritation, that he’s caused to his own party’s voters. And there is a mountain of that.
It’s telling that McConnell’s defenders keep coming back to what is an exceptionally meager accomplishment — namely, that at the end of the Obama administration, upon the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and the then-president’s nomination of Merrick Garland as Scalia’s replacement, McConnell held open that confirmation until Donald Trump could win the presidential election in 2016.
This is seen as a stroke of brilliance by those remaining members of Team McConnell. It’s more like a stroke of competence. Or would you expect any different from Harry Reid or Chuck Schumer in the same circumstances?
That McConnell had a fit of effectiveness essentially one time in the 17 years he’s led the Senate GOP caucus is hardly redemptive. He’s been a terrible drag on Republican electoral fortunes in Senate races, both intentionally and unintentionally, and he’s generally done everything he could to limit any real change Republican voters have begged our senators for since taking control of the party’s caucus.
He’s a malign influence whose ties to China are more than simply suspicious. Mitch McConnell is exceedingly unpopular for damn good reasons.
And he’s long past his sell-by date. That is made clear every time he freezes while speaking in public, which is a common occurrence these days, or when he falls and hurts himself, as he did — again — a few days ago.
McConnell is worse off than Joe Biden. He represents a geriatric remnant of American politicians who are now embarrassments rather than elder statesmen.
Somehow, despite the fact he can no longer be the face of his own initiatives, McConnell has the influence to engage in large projects through others. Like he did two years ago in sending Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford to be his personal dupe in fronting the “bipartisan” Senate immigration bill that no conservative could possibly endorse, which had the effect of giving Biden and the Democrats a talking point and some limited immunity from responsibility for abandoning the southern border to the drug cartels.
Or more recently, sending Iowa senator Joni Ernst as his personal dupe to push Old Game smears of Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth, a project that was aimed at knocking Hegseth out of contention for that job without having to challenge him on the substance of his nomination. That, of course, being the raft of crucial reforms to the Pentagon Hegseth promises. McConnell is too cowardly, at least so far, even to meet with Hegseth.
And in the aftermath of everything McConnell has shown us, he’s now reduced to something akin to honest politics. For this he deserves praise.
Very faint and fleeting praise, that is.
Mitch McConnell is now directly calling on Donald Trump to repudiate the foreign policy stance that got him elected. This is to be credited in one sense, in that it’s probably the most honest that McConnell has been since he was elected to the Senate in 1984. It’s also to be rejected outright:
A notable critic of President-elect Donald Trump appears to be gearing up to oppose key parts of the incoming administration’s foreign policy agenda, despite the electoral mandate of Trump’s “America First” slogan.
Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., is going on offense against Trump’s foreign policy worldview, calling on him Monday in a published essay to reject America First’s “flirtation with isolation and decline.”
McConnell, the longtime Senate Republican leader, is also urging the incoming second Trump administration to embrace many foreign policy positions that Trump notably rejected during the campaign, including support for additional foreign aid and free trade agreements, solidarity with NATO, and more weapons transfers to Ukraine.
“The [Trump] administration will face calls from within the Republican Party to give up on American primacy,” McConnell wrote in the essay for Foreign Affairs. “It must reject them. To pretend that the United States can focus on just one threat at a time, that its credibility is divisible, or that it can afford to shrug off faraway chaos as irrelevant is to ignore its global interests and its adversaries’ global designs. America will not be made great again by those who simply want to manage its decline.”
“The response to four years of weakness must not be four years of isolation,” McConnell added.
Should we chalk this up to senility, or base shilling for the military-industrial complex?
The idea that negotiating an end to the Ukraine war, with its hundreds of thousands of casualties and increasing risk of devolving into a third world war, represents “isolation and decline” is so utterly ludicrous that it’s difficult to believe a U.S. Senator is actually suggesting it.
Our primacy in global politics is not at risk from making peace in Ukraine. And if anybody is managing American decline on the world stage, it’s Mitch McConnell and his uniparty cabal driving us into not just unsustainable, but even unserviceable levels of debt with hundreds of billions of dollars poured into a losing war while his pals in China grow ever stronger.
Were we to get into a hot war with McConnell’s Chinese pals, our munitions stockpiles would empty in almost no time flat thanks to what we’ve given to Ukraine, and our soldiers would be fighting off hypersonic missile attacks with small arms. And it would be Mitch McConnell’s fault to a large extent.
He’s spent the last two years shilling for more military aid to Ukraine in the theory that munitions supplied to the Ukrainians were good for our defense contractors and therefore our economy, an absurd argument that falls apart the minute you realize that those contractors lost the ability to keep up with demand almost immediately. It will likely take years at full production and global harmony to replenish our stockpiles, which is something Mitch McConnell has little to say by way of explanation.
But at least the old man has come out of the closet far enough to declare his agenda so that it can be forthrightly rejected. The usual modus operandi is to obfuscate through petty personal scandals and other distractions — as we’ve seen with the failed effort to smear Hegseth.
Breccan F. Thies at the Federalist had this correct:
Funding the war in Ukraine runs contrary to what many Americans want and what most Americans voted for in delivering Trump a legislative and electoral mandate. It also ignores domestic crises — particularly ones that ravage his home state of Kentucky, which continues to see the scourge of fentanyl kill its people. This issue is exacerbated by the border crisis, which consistently lands atop the list of concerns for Americans.
An honorable man in McConnell’s position would resign. He doesn’t belong in the Senate anymore. Physically he’s obsolete, and his ideas are obsolete. It’s only a matter of time before his physical deficiencies render him incapable of showing up and whatever dignity he has left will thus leave him.
Give it up, Mitch. Let Kentucky’s voters pick someone else to carry on in your job so that the country can move on from nearly two decades of failure.
MORE from Scott McKay:
The Spectacle Ep. 176: What Makes the Left a Criminal Enterprise
The Spectacle Ep. 175: What Trump’s Return Means For The World
The Spectacle Ep. 174: The Administrative State Won’t Stop Trump’s Cabinet Picks