The following in an excerpt from the forthcoming book, “This Will Not Pass,”, by Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns. Let’s take a hard look at it.

One person unbowed by the experience of impeachment, humbled not even slightly by the scolding he endured on the floor of the House and Senate, was Donald Trump.

In an interview the authors conducted with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in the spring of 2021, the former president expressed utter confidence in his control of the Republican Party and waved away the criticism he had drawn from both the party’s legislative leaders.

McConnell, he said matter-of-factly, “is bad news.” “Had Mitch stuck with many members of the party who knew the election was rigged, I think we wouldn’t be at Mar-a-Lago,” Trump said, clinging to the fantasy of a stolen election. “We would be at the White House having this conversation.”

Trump made this statement about a year ago. He said that his coup would have succeeded if Mitch McConnell had been willing to help. Whether that’s true or not is hard to say, but a “successful” coup would have also come with a civil war, since 81 million people voted for Joe Biden, and a decent percentage of them would have fought violently against his illegitimate and illegal denial of office.

Of course, the reason Trump wasn’t convicted is because Mitch McConnell discovered that there weren’t enough Republican senators in his caucus willing to convict him and he wasn’t going to stick his neck out in an effort to change their minds.

“I didn’t get to be leader by voting with five people in the conference,” Mr. McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, told a friend.

As a result, he decided to hide behind the theory that a president cannot be impeached if he’s already left office. It was a cowardly decision, especially when you consider how he really felt.

Late on the night of Jan. 6, Mr. McConnell predicted to associates that his party would soon break sharply with Mr. Trump and his acolytes; the Republican leader even asked a reporter in the Capitol for information about whether the cabinet might really pursue the 25th Amendment.

When that did not materialize, Mr. McConnell’s thoughts turned to impeachment.

On Monday, Jan. 11, Mr. McConnell met over lunch in Kentucky with two longtime advisers, Terry Carmack and Scott Jennings. Feasting on Chick-fil-A in Mr. Jennings’s Louisville office, the Senate Republican leader predicted Mr. Trump’s imminent political demise.

“The Democrats are going to take care of the son of a bitch for us,” Mr. McConnell said, referring to the imminent impeachment vote in the House.

McConnell changed his tune and even recently said he would “absolutely” vote for Trump in 2024 if he is the Republican nominee. But Trump could have easily been made ineligible to be the nominee if the Senate had convicted him. McConnell’s reward for giving Trump a pass is that he is blamed for not helping create a civil war based on lies (this counts against him in Republican politics), and he has to pledge to support Trump in a bid for another term if the “son of a bitch” is successful in the primaries.

In an alternative universe where McConnell went to the mat to hold Trump accountable, he still might have failed. Yet, he’d at least have something to show for it, like his integrity and reputation in posterity. Instead, all he got was the worst of all worlds.