Overlooking ‘Disgraceful Dereliction of Duty’ and Insults of His Wife, McConnell Endorses Trump

There is a lot going on right now in the lives of Mitch McConnell and his wife of 30 years, Elaine Chao.

One of the most consequential figures in the storied history of the United States Senate, McConnell, who is 82, just announced that he is stepping down at year’s end from the GOP helm, which he has held since 2007, after a number of bad falls (one which kept him away from the Senate for six weeks) and concerns about his health became painfully public.

Chao, who is 70, is a historic figure in her own right: the first Asian-American woman to hold a cabinet post — she was labor secretary in the Bush 43 administration and transportation secretary in the Trump administration. She is now living with heartbreak: Last month, Chao’s younger sister Angela, 50, was found dead in her car after it was pulled from the pond in which it had been submerged in Johnson City, Texas (near Austin). Initial reports were that a tragic accident was the cause; this week, we learned the matter is the subject of a criminal investigation, though it appears no arrests are imminent, and police intimate that they may just be trying to rule out foul play.

That’s more in a short time than two people should have to bear. I can’t help but find it bizarre, though, that in the midst of all this, Senator McConnell chooses this moment to endorse former president Donald Trump. Sure, Trump has all but formally sewn up the 2024 Republican presidential nomination after yesterday’s Super Tuesday primary wins. And as the party establishment’s leader, McConnell perceives the need to back the party’s certain nominee. But to rationalize an endorsement, McConnell has to flush his bristling condemnation that portrayed Trump as unfit for the presidency, as well as Trump’s demeaning of McConnell’s wife.

Here is some of what McConnell had to say after the Senate voted lopsidedly in favor of convicting Trump in the 2021 impeachment trial — though not quite lopsidedly enough to satisfy the Constitution’s two-thirds’ supermajority requirement:

January 6th was a disgrace.

American citizens attacked their own government. They used terrorism to try to stop a specific piece of democratic business they did not like. Fellow Americans beat and bloodied our own police. They stormed the Senate floor. They tried to hunt down the Speaker of the House. They built a gallows and chanted about murdering the vice president.

They did this because they had been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth — because he was angry he’d lost an election.

Former President Trump’s actions preceding the riot were a disgraceful dereliction of duty. . . .

There is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day.

The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president.

And their having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories, and reckless hyperbole which the defeated president kept shouting into the largest megaphone on planet Earth.

Secretary Chao was the first cabinet official to honorably resign from Trump’s cabinet after the Capitol riot capped the appalling two-month “stop the steal” campaign. In the years since, Trump has taunted her as “Coco Chow” and McConnell’s “China-loving wife.” (This is the Donald Trump who coos that he and North Korea’s monstrous anti-American dictator, Kim Jong Un, “fell in love.”)

Politics is a very strange profession.