Inside Mitch McConnell’s Season of Losses

When Mitch McConnell stepped out of his Senate office in the Capitol at 12:30 on Wednesday to announce that he would conclude his tenure as the longest-serving Senate leader in American history at the end of this Congress, I asked him why now.

McConnell grinned, said, “I’m going to cover that,” and then walked into the Senate chamber he’s wanted to serve in since being an intern here 60 summers ago.

His decision was no surprise. Having just turned 82 and facing health challenges since suffering a fall last year, the Kentuckian has learned the hard way that, as he put it in his remarks on the Senate floor, “father time is undefeated.” Nobody in the Senate or his inner circle had expected him to run again for leader after this election.

Yet McConnell’s political thunderbolt less than three months into the year was hardly just the decision of an old man recognizing it was time to go.

As has been the case through his storied career, there is only so much he will say in public. So I can’t say I was surprised when McConnell didn’t exactly live up to his answer to my question when he spoke on the floor. He invoked Ecclesiastes on the seasons of life, cited “the clarity and peace” he had reached on his decision and nearly lost his composure when he said “there may be more distinguished members of this body throughout our history but I doubt there were any with any more admiration for the Senate.”

As much as he is a man of the Senate, though, McConnell is a party man. And suddenly announcing now what had been expected months in the future was a decision brimming with politics, personal and partisan alike.

These have not been happy days for McConnell.

There was the tragic loss of his sister-in-law, which he alluded to in his speech, and his own infirmities. Yet just as torturous for McConnell has been this season of his political misfortunes.

Donald Trump, a person he despises and wrongly concluded was finished after the January 6 riot, is about to reclaim the nomination of the party McConnell loves for the third straight election; that same party is flirting with an isolationism that appalls a man who spends his free hours reading history books that are cautionary tales about the dangers of withdrawing from the world; and, perhaps most cruel of all, the only power McConnell sought when so many of his colleagues eyed the presidency has been ebbing in plain view as some GOP senators make clear they see him as their leader in name only.

In private this year, McConnell has said this is the worst Congress he’s ever served in, according to Republicans who’ve heard the lament. And while always professing to care little about his critics — he made a show of hanging negative editorial cartoons in his Senate personal office — the historian manque cares deeply about his legacy.

In this moment, he knows it will be shaped by the twin pillars of his opposition. As McConnell has put it to friends, “Democrats hate me because of the court, and Republicans hate me because of Trump.”

It’s an irony of history, of course, that he’s conjoined with a figure he loathes precisely because of why it is that Democrats despise him. The most substantial policy heirloom McConnell leaves will not be any legislation but rather a Supreme Court he remade in his right-of-center image, by holding a seat for nearly a year and then rushing another in weeks. Just as ironic, the McConnell Court, by ending legal abortion, may have also ensured that the senator spent his final term as leader in the minority thanks to the galvanizing effect of the decision in 2022.

There’s a reason, though, why McConnell called his tell-little memoir — the only one he insists he will write — “The Long Game.” He knows the full history is yet to be written, and he acted now to shape it one more time.

That’s why he announced his decision on his terms Wednesday to a largely empty Senate chamber. There were only a few colleagues there when he began speaking because they hadn’t heard the news: McConnell didn’t want it to leak.

He embargoed the speech with the AP’s Michael Tackett, a veteran political writer who is also writing the senator’s biography. (McConnell has ensured it will at least be a tell-some by granting Tackett access to his papers, including his yearly oral histories, at the University of Louisville’s McConnell Center.)

There was no speculation in the lead-up to the reveal. McConnell’s battalion of current and former aides showed up to stand in the back of the Senate and sit in the gallery, many wiping tears away, but the news was his to make and he did.

And McConnell made it without having suffered another freeze-up — there was no third and final health episode that forced his hand. No rebellion of GOP lawmakers forced him to give up his post. McConnell announced his decision on his terms, not those of doctors or Ron Johnson.

Which is not to say this is a triumphant exit. It’s just better than what the alternative could have been later in the year, and McConnell knew as much.

It’s also his own way of denying Trump the honor of, again, demanding his defenestration. McConnell will surely endorse the former president this year but will do so as a lame duck leader. How can Trump demand McConnell be fired when he already quit?

If that sounds sad or even pathetic for such a consequential figure — every bit the Master of the Senate Robert Caro described LBJ being in another era — well it’s also McConnell’s way of looking after his party.

McConnell can’t be described as undermining Republican unity when he’s endorsed the nominee and invited détente in their cold war by ceding his position. Trump and the conflict-hungry press will be denied the feud each craves and McConnell, ever the NRSC chair, can focus on helping Senate Republicans win and leaving his successor a majority.

Speaking of helping the GOP in 2024, by stepping down now McConnell is joining the other towering congressional octogenarian, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in giving up leadership for the rank-and-file. That means McConnell is shining a light on the third prominent 80-something in Washington, the one he used to serve with who’s seeking another four year term as president as he approaches 82. (Of course, President Biden would be justified in pointing out that neither Pelosi or McConnell can fully walk away, either.)

This was also a bit of an oncologist diagnosing, and coming to terms with, his own cancer. Perhaps the most candid line McConnell offered in his speech was he referred to “the politics within my own party” and joked: “I have many faults, misunderstanding politics is not one of them.”

He knows the GOP is changing, has tried to keep the party away from its drift toward isolationism and protectionism but he is losing the fight at the moment. Just consider the first-term senators he took last year on his annual overseas trip for freshman — not one of them voted for final passage of the foreign aid bill that cleared the Senate earlier this month.

As Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) pointed out, the under-55 generation of GOP senators overwhelmingly opposed the bill.

In 2014, after consecutive elections in which McConnell’s incumbents faced costly primaries and in some cases lost their seats, he resolved to protect every GOP senator from a far-right challenge. And he did.

However, the mistake McConnell made was not realizing that the country’s polarization had all but ended competitive general elections in most states — and that his strategy had to be applied in open-seat races as well as with incumbents. If he had pursued this approach to all races, he would not have been left with as many of the very senators who have reshaped the party and weakened his grip on power.

McConnell doesn’t need to be reminded of how many of the senators elected in the last decade have pushed for his ouster and defied his calls to aid Ukraine.

But as with his conflict with Trump, that battle is effectively over now. McConnell, in no small accomplishment given the shift of grassroots sentiment and the former president’s tightening clutch, managed to deliver 22 GOP votes earlier this month for the bill funding aid to Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel.

I’m told by someone familiar with his thinking that McConnell decided in January he would relinquish his leadership post but wanted to get the legislation through the Senate before revealing his plans.

Now, as Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) told me, McConnell will be well positioned to spend his final capital as leader to push through whatever version of the legislation comes back from the House.

“The book I may never write is going to have a chapter called: ‘Every Time I Thought Mitch McConnell Was Wrong I Found Out I Was,’” Cramer joked.

I’m not sure even McConnell’s closest advisers realize it, though the senator certainly does, but his all-out push for the Ukraine funding will ensure that his career is bookended with brave stances on foreign policy in which he defied his party’s leader. In 1986, in his second year in office, McConnell voted to override Ronald Reagan’s veto of legislation sanctioning South Africa’s apartheid regime. And now, in the final years of his career, he brushed aside Donald Trump’s opposition to confronting the Kremlin.

What McConnell cannot do, and scarcely has tried to do, is block Trump’s comeback. The leader frittered away his best chance to do that by not even trying to gather the votes to convict Trump three years ago this month.

Now, McConnell isn’t trying to stand up to the man he does not think has any business being president – he’s trying to make the best of it for Republicans.

“As ever, he has his finger on the pulse of the conference and party and is willing to do what is best for both,” said Billy Piper, one of his many loyal former chiefs of staff. “His courage is unmatched and his ability to see the future and prepare for it will be missed.”

McConnell and his advisers, however, are thinking just as much about the past these days. A handful of his senior aides recently visited Milwaukee for a site visit of this summer’s GOP convention, a conclave they know will be his last as a senator and want to ensure includes a proper sendoff despite his contretemps with the man who will be nominated on the stage there.

Like many people his age, the senator himself is growing more nostalgic — and particularly about his first days in the capital, in what was Reagan’s Washington. That was on display in his remarks Wednesday, when he remembered that the then-president called him “Mitch O’Donnell” on the campaign trail in 1984, the year McConnell was first elected to the Senate.

One of his friends told me how often McConnell is talking about Reagan these days. The senator is the last living link among GOP leaders to the man Republicans once revered more than any modern president.

So it pains McConnell that Trump has, for some in the party, supplanted Reagan. And that may be why, as with Pelosi, the senator can’t leave Congress just yet. He’s likely to take a role on his old perch, the Senate Appropriations Committee (if you’re listening, Senator Collins.)

McConnell’s term doesn’t expire until January of 2027. When he revealed to his staff his decision today, the senator told them, regardless of the presidential results this year, he would use his time in the rank-and-file to focus on national security issues. The United States, he said, must maintain its central role in world affairs, and he’d try to see to that.

After, of course, he takes care of some politics.