Mitch McConnell’s Desperate Bid for an Honorable Political Legacy
Lately McConnell has been a rare GOP vote against Trump’s worst cabinet nominees. But he’s the main reason Trump is back in power.
US Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) gives a thumbs up while arriving at the nomination of Tulsi Gabbard as President Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence at the Senate Chambers on February 12, 2025, in Washington, DC.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Getty Images)It’s hard to say mean things about a fragile politician in a wheelchair, in the twilight of his political career and his life, too, who is finally trying to do something decent. Approaching 83, suffering multiple health issues, having ceded leadership and probably not running again, former GOP Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell is suddenly mustering the integrity to vote against some of Donald Trump’s worst cabinet nominees, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and, on Thursday, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. On Gabbard and Kennedy, he was the lone Republican “no” vote.
It’s hard not to see this as a belated attempt to salvage his political legacy, after a 40-year Senate career, to make clear he wasn’t behind the very worst of Trumpism, now that Trump is empowering fascists and would-be quislings, not to mention people utterly unqualified for their positions (and that includes acting president Elon Musk). I’m a pretty forgiving person, more willing to welcome Republicans into the popular front against Trump—even Liz Cheney—than many of my colleagues on the left. The McConnell spectacle is tragic. But I can’t muster the charity to praise the Kentucky senator for his belated and useless valor. When he had tight control of Senate Republicans, he didn’t use his power against Trump. Now that he’s powerless, he’s making quixotic feints at integrity and independence. It’s not convincing.
That’s because Mitch McConnell is single-handedly the Republican most responsible for Trump’s takeover of his party. It began when he empowered the worst (at the time) elements of the GOP just as Barack Obama got elected president. Just before the 2010 midterms, he declared, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” He refused to push back on Trump’s racist claim that Obama wasn’t born here and was thus an illegitimate president, meekly saying he accepted Obama’s “word,” which tacitly ignored that there was proof that Trump was lying.
And while McConnell couldn’t deny Obama a second term, he effectively cut it by a full year, when he brazenly blocked the president’s appointment of Merrick Garland to succeed über-conservative Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court the January before Obama left office. He would abandon his 2016 argument by pushing through conservative Christian lawyer Amy Coney Barrett to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg, not a year but a month before the 2020 election, which Joe Biden won.
If Obama got the appointment he had a right to, and Biden got to replace Ginsburg when he assumed office in 2021, Democrats would have a 5–4 Supreme Court majority.
McConnell’s judicial coup ensured that Trump got three Supreme Court picks in his first term, and that 6–3 conservative majority not only overthrew Roe v. Wade’s constitutional abortion protections but also found last year that Trump enjoyed broad immunity from criminal prosecution for “official” actions he undertook as president—including fomenting the violent sacking of the Capitol and attempted coup on January 6, 2021. That pulled the rug out from under special counsel Jack Smith, whose meticulous case prosecution could essentially go nowhere as Trump ran out the clock and won reelection.
Equally bad, however, after McConnell blamed Trump personally for the insurrection, calling him “practically and morally responsible,” and suggested he might even join an impeachment push, he refused to vote to convict Trump after the House impeached him. He also refused to whip his mostly obedient GOP Senate members. Seven Senate Republicans voted to convict Trump nonetheless, adding up to 57 senators in support, but the law requires two-thirds. McConnell suggested that the right outcome might be the criminal prosecution of the president; the conservative court majority he installed made that impossible.
I’m not even delving into McConnell’s other political misdeeds—chief among them the Citizens United decision overturning bipartisan campaign finance reform and enabling the noxious flood of dark money into American politics. He did many bad things, but the way he empowered Trump and expanded his control in so many ways will always be the worst.
A few respectable votes won’t change that, Mitch. But I’m sure you have folks around you who will tell you otherwise.
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Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editor and Publisher, The Nation
