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Mitch McConnell's legacy of destruction
He may have found Trump distasteful, but no one did more to protect him.
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As of this writing, Mitch McConnell is still among the living.
It’s been a month since the 84-year-old senator from Kentucky was taken from his Washington home in an ambulance, and he was finally heard from on Sunday, releasing a statement and photograph that left most questions about his health unanswered.
At this point, it wouldn’t be surprising if McConnell doesn’t return to the Senate before his term ends in January; unlike the rest of us, members of Congress enjoy unlimited paid medical leave to take at their leisure. But even if he recovers, this is a good time to take stock of the legacy McConnell leaves behind as one of the most influential congressional leaders of the modern era.
McConnell was an extremely shrewd and effective backroom operator, especially when he was in the opposition and deployed his considerable skills and creativity to the project of obstruction. In fact, almost everything about how the contemporary Republican Party operates in Congress — its aversion to solving problems, its destruction of the norms that used to allow the institution to operate, its embrace of chaos and dysfunction — can be at least partly attributed to McConnell.
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To be generous, there were moments when he displayed glimmers of morality, especially when offering criticisms of Donald Trump’s worst abuses. It’s to his credit that Trump never liked him. But again and again, those moments proved fleeting, and McConnell became Trump’s most important enabler.
Unlike the backbench MAGA cheerleaders whose enthusiasm never waned, McConnell actually had the power to determine whether Trump’s corruption and attack on American democracy would continue — and he always made the wrong choice.
A one-man assault on the system
Political scientists often describe how the last few decades have been characterized by asymmetric polarization: While both parties have moved away from the center ideologically, Republicans have moved farther and faster. But alongside the evolution of its ideas about policy, the GOP underwent a striking shift in its beliefs about how policy should be made.
Mitch McConnell was the architect of that change.