Charles Homans has a feature piece on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in the New York Times, and he has a nice way of expressing how McConnell has fared during President Trump’s first two years in office.
When I first spoke with him, this past November, [McConnell] talked of the preceding two years with a faint air of mystified amusement at his own fortune: as if a minor meteor had streaked through the window of the majority leader’s office, narrowly missing his head before exploding against the two-century-old marble fireplace, and then also turned out to be filled with candy and hundred-dollar bills.
The record is fairly clear that McConnell did not want Donald Trump to be the Republican Party’s presidential nominee. And it’s also obvious that he doesn’t like the president.
When I asked Elaine Chao, who is Trump’s secretary of transportation and McConnell’s wife of 26 years, if Trump and McConnell liked each other, she was silent for a full four seconds before replying, “You’ll have to ask the president that, and you’ll have to ask the leader that.” When I did ask McConnell, all he said was, “Yeah, we get along fine.”
If you look at McConnell’s actions carefully since the partial government shutdown began before Christmas, it’s also easy to see that he has no personal investment in Trump’s strategy. He has more than once absented himself from what would normally be united press appearances by the president and Republican congressional leaders. When he does attend negotiating sessions, he has almost nothing to contribute.
“He’s been very quiet,” Dick Durbin, the Democratic minority whip, who was in recent shutdown-negotiation meetings with McConnell and the Democratic Senate leadership, told me that afternoon, “and has said repeatedly that he’s not going to call any bill that the president doesn’t approve of. And that has basically been the sum and substance of his contribution.”
Insofar as he’s willing to articulate a position at all, it’s basically that the shutdown mess is not his problem to fix.
“I’ve been in the meetings,” McConnell, dressed in a pinstripe suit and a banker collar, said. “It’s just that I don’t have the votes that can consummate the deal.” Those votes could come only at the behest of Trump or the new House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, he insisted — and, McConnell continued, “it seems to me the principals, the only people who can make this deal, as of the moment we’re having this discussion, seem to both think they have a winning hand.”
McConnell is not known for his truthful portrayals of reality, but he seems not too far off the mark here. Both Trump and Pelosi do both seem to think they’re playing a winning hand. It’s probably fair to say, though, that Trump has expressed more doubt about his position. As for McConnell, he doesn’t seem to have ever believed that the president’s intransigence would break the Democrats. He’s willing to give Trump a chance, but he’s really waiting for him to buckle.
Most reporting on McConnell’s thinking portrays him as worried primarily about himself. He’s up for election again in 2020 and he’s very unpopular in his home state of Kentucky. Over the last several years, he has usually ranked as the least popular senator in the country with his own constituents. In the latest Morning Consult poll, only Jeff Flake and Claire McCaskill had higher disapproval numbers, and neither of them survived the last election cycle. The thinking goes, then, that McConnell simply cannot afford to buck the president.
There’s definitely some truth to that, but it’s also important to think about McConnell’s concern for the Republican Party’s majority in the Senate. He does not want hurt the reelection prospects of his colleagues because it could send him back into the minority. So, he has very little interest in passing a bill that Trump will criticize and veto. He suffered that fate once already before Christmas, and he’s not keen to experience a repeat. It’s also key to McConnell’s current thinking that Trump had signed off on the deal last December before suddenly reversing himself once he received criticism from people like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter. He doesn’t have any reason to take Trump’s word that he’ll stick with any deal that is negotiated.
The best way of looking at this is that McConnell is angry with the president. He was double-crossed. He wasn’t consulted. He doesn’t believe in the wall. He doesn’t believe that Trump’s strategy will work. He doesn’t want to take ownership of a deal that the president will characterize as insufficient or weak. He doesn’t even want to appear with the president in front of the cameras.
I’d say his strategy is basically to let Trump keep banging his head against his wall until he breaks. And when Trump admits he can’t get what he wants, only then will McConnell jump into the fray to help him limit the damage.
By taking the position that he won’t take up a bill the president won’t sign, McConnell is giving Trump a chance to break Nancy Pelosi’s will and ability to keep her caucus united, and that’s as much as he’s willing to give the president at this time.
There may come a time before too long that McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy need to seriously consider a veto override. The precipitating event may be that something really critical breaks due to lack of funding, like airport security or the courts. It could be that public opinion turns very sharply against them and constituent pressure becomes unbearable. It could be that something breaks in the Russia investigation, either coming from Mueller or from the congressional hearings that are about to gear up in the House. If Trump’s credibility drops suddenly and drastically, the congressional Republicans may conclude that they can’t allow a shutdown to continue on top of everything else.
McConnell wants to avoid that outcome, but he can’t continue his wait-and-see strategy forever if nothing changes. He might want Pelosi and the Democrats to break, but I bet he’d be just as satisfied to see the president capitulate. To him, Trump is like a child who won’t listen to adult advice and can only learn from the personal and painful experience of predictable failure.
Anyone waiting on Mitch McConnell to take a leadership role to end the shutdown is likely to be disappointed. He’s got his candy and his hundred-dollar bills, and he’s just going to wait this one out as long as he can.
Something will break, though. And I don’t think it will be Nancy Pelosi.
If he’s waiting for Trump to learn, this may take awhile.
The only thing Trump has learned for quite some time is what Kompromat is and who might hold some.
McConnell is a cold blooded cynic and giant hypocrite as we all know. Judging by his actions, since he rarely gives substantive interviews, his only long-term goal is to drive the nation back into the 19th century, if he can.
This is not a popular goal with the majority of Americans. This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem for McConnell if Trump was even marginally competent and knowledgeable but he isn’t, of course. He’s just a lifelong mafia-style criminal and so hostage-taking is a natural to him. And if it works once, he’ll keep doing it all the time. But McConnell will never call him out on it because if it keeps degrading the government, that’s a good thing for him.
So I expect the pointless destruction will go on for quite a while, unfortunately.
. . . Yertle actually want or believe in? What (if any) principles does he actually hold? If he were the King of the World, tell me what he’d do.” (h/t Hoyt)
I mean, I presume the standard Banana Republican menu: small (or at least dysfunctional) gov’t, gutted environmental protections and other regulations, and low taxes on corporations and the rich.
But the impression I get is that that’s all very small potatoes to him relative to the the raw exercise of power, which is what really gets his rocks off.
What Der Trumper is “learning” is that he can impose his will (however ridiculous and in howevermuch bad faith) on his complicit party and that they will enable his tyranny with no questions asked. He has “learned” only that they fear him (and his National Trumpalist base) more than he fears them and their putative “establishment”.
One historian of the Holocaust has already designated McConnell the “Gravedigger of Democracy” in a recent NY Review of Books essay, noting the parallels between the catastrophic enabling of Chancellor Hitler by the Weimar “conservative” establishment and the attitude of our own “conservatives” to today’s National Trumpalist movement (to the extent the two can really be distinguished). The Weimar “conservatives” and corporatists acted to paralyze and discredit democracy as a political system, and we can look back and see where (and what) that got them.
McConnell has been quite consistent and inexorable in his wrecking of American democracy (in countless ways) since the election of Obama in 2008. His craven behind-the-scenes complicity in the criminal shutdown of 2018-19 is just one more nail in democracy’s coffin. If he is “amused”, it is merely at how thoroughly he has succeeded in permanently wrecking the country and how easy it was to talk his corrupt party into doing it for their long-term political gain.
Party Over Country, Always. That will be McConnell’s historical epitaph, whatever piously false one his doting family (and Neo-Confederate State majority) may place upon his grave…
This article is interesting to me because I tried (although not nearly as well) to make a similar point over at Kos and I’d characterize the reaction I got as “shrieking.” (It seems people can’t just disagree there.) I would never ascribe human characteristics to McConnell but I think he feels burned and is in some way looking to teach Trump a lesson about the legislative process.
A more cynical take over at Balloon Juice:
https:/www.balloon-juice.com/2019/01/22/the-senate-majority-leader-and-the-president-lied-about-the
-contents-of-their-immigration-and-border-security-compromise-bill
and:
Much more at the link, of course.
Yup. If Pelosi was seen by Mitch as so critical, why wasn’t she invited to the meeting? If one is seeking an actual compromise and not more political gamesmanship, why the tactic of public “negotiating”? Cuz a real “deal-maker” knows exactly where that gets the parties.
If one looks up “bad faith”, there’s a picture of McConnell.
Trump is a battering ram. People use him to knock down things. They don’t particularly care if he gets broken in the process. That makes him way more useful, unfortunately.
We keep wondering if the entire Republican Party isn’t in hock to dirty money, some from overseas somewhere to the east.
If that’s true, one wonders if there are any alternatives other than putting your head between your legs and kissing your ass goodbye.
Not the entire party, or close to it, that would be impractical.
Just a few key figures, enough to set the direction. In Republican interest groups as well, see Butina, Mariiya.
Do you really think that “dirty money” only comes from “overseas”!!!???
Or that only Republicans are the recipients?
Really?
The entire system is owned by “dirty money.”
Corporate money.
Anti-human money.
Permanent worker bees money.
Bet on it.
AG
Nancy has already said that she won’t allow the oval office to have this kind of temper tantrum every time the Dems don’t agree with him. If they did break, they’d find themselves right back here a month from now. That’s not going to happen. DT doesn’t negotiate in good faith, so at least two of things you suggest will have to happen for the Russians to decide to override a veto: something breaks and constituent pressure would be my guess. Once those folks in the deep red states (ahem, the good folks of Kentucky) don’t get their SNAP benefits in March, they’ll change their tune.
Waiting for DT to learn? Yeah, no; that’s never going to happen. This will require a veto override. A narcissist never backs down. Ever.
Actually, SNAP benefits could end at the end of this week since the licensing on the EBT cards that are used to purchase SNAP benefits expires on Friday and there aren’t any employees to re-up them.
McConnell isn’t waiting to learn.
Think of what he did to Obama long before Trump was elected. He’s complicit and as much or more part of the dysfunctional and exceptionally polarized government than Trump. He long ago abandoned any pretense at ethical leadership of the Senate.
You’re a sociopathic narcissist shitwit. What new information would lead you to back down on this?
Maybe a massive stock market catastrophe? What else?
Air Traffic Controllers.
.
It can take about four years to train and fully certify new ones, and many are starting to look for other work now.
Stock market along with a recession or fears of one like from the shut down. But problems with air traffic controllers or TSA could do it.
Nothing. Nothing will make such a person back down.
Only force – something out of his control.
It’s the Senate that has to bend.
I see what looks like disagreement here, and I confess to not understanding. Mitch is protecting his and his Senate GOP colleagues arses. He wants Trump to fold. There’s nothing high minded about it, and I fail to see why some of you think that is where Booman is headed.
He might like Trump to fold, but his prospects for that are – not good.
As I believe in irony, I’m more in line with the theory that Trump is the Frankenstein monster that McConnell and his ilk created. He can try, but he never will be able to run away from it. Sooner or later, the monster is going to catch up with the too-clever by half Senate majority leader and destroy him.
The problem with the “teaching Trump a lesson” theory is that the monster has a very limited capacity to learn, and what he tends to learn is what works best on faux news. What he is really good at, is destroying stuff- the norms of our democracy, all of our non-Russian foreign relations, common decency, Chris Christie, etc… Now don’t get me wrong- Miss McConnell’s goal all along has been to destroy democracy as we know it, but the problem with the monster is you can’t really steer it and the next thing you know it’s crashing through your own front door.
I’m all with Charlie Pierce- Mitch McConnell is a loathsome creature. More than likely he keeps sitting on his thumbs watching things burn.
Like you say, I don’t think they are trying to teach Mr Trump a lesson – he’s ineducable. Humiliate him, maybe, & cause him to do more narc raging & commit more impeachable offenses for later use, perhaps. Risky.
McConnell & the senate republicans – that’s the group that’s in school. Whether the lesson will take, or whether these guys can figure out a way to turn the tables is the question.
I don’t know how this is going to play out. In the long run I think the house members are more susceptible to pressure than senators or Mr Trump.
Please tell me your use of “Miss McConnell” is a typo or auto-correct.