I did not come today to praise the record of Mitch McConnell, I came to praise the memes of Mitch McConnell.
Mitch McConnell announced today that he would be stepping down as Senate Republican Minority Leader after November’s elections. (His term expires in 2026; the increasingly unherdable Senate caucus would be strengthened by his remaining until then, though one doubts he’ll have much appetite for it after relinquishing the gavel.) I have a high opinion of him, and in fact I can think of no more consequential Republican legislative — as opposed to executive — leader in American history, dating all the way back to the founding of the party.
But forget all that. For I did not come today to praise the record of Mitch McConnell, I came to praise the memes of Mitch McConnell. The memes that men do live after them, after all, and few Republican politicians seemed to have spawned a more consistent set of instantly memorable visual comic images in the modern era than that most stolid and least likely of candidates, Yertl the Majority Leader. Speaking of which, this shortlist should probably begin with . . .
5. The Tortoise with Some Hair
Every now and then someone thinks they’re the first person to discover that yes, Kentucky’s senior senator now resembles every cartoon turtle ever drawn, wearing a wig. But people have been noticing that for years, since the early Obama era at least. (Nobody is quite sure when the process truly began, though perhaps the man’s choice of glasses frames made it inevitable.) By 2015, Jon Stewart had officially taken notice and McConnell was fending off questions about it by reporters with his typical blunt indifference.
4. The B-Roll Footage
Mitch McConnell has been known over the years as a serious man, a seemingly mirthless figure who often forgets to smile, show visible warmth, or even alter his facial expression for seven straight minutes until being notified by aides. So in 2014, he helpfully posted a series of “B-roll” clips to YouTube — completely random context-free video footage of him standing with his wife, or sitting at his work desk, and then looking up with an unprompted — was it mysterious? — smile. The idea was to give PACs material with which to construct ads in support of him, and because of campaign-finance laws preventing direct coordination between official campaigns and supporting PACs, YouTube was the come-and-get-it transmission vector of choice. The memes were instantaneous, the clips circled around the internet for months, and to this day, you can still spot random gifs of Mitch McConnell turning to a strange camera and flashing a wildly inapposite rictus grin. When Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away in September 2020, and others were openly wondering whether the Senate would dare move a nominee to replace her so soon before the election, my friend on the Senate Judiciary Committee simply sent me the above image. And I knew it would be okay.
3. “COME AT ME BRO”
For slow and steady wins the race, after all, and Mitch McConnell knew how to win his races. It became a commonplace among polling observers and partisan operatives alike to joke about how much money was wasted in out-of-state donations to McConnell’s two completely hopeless Democratic opponents in 2014 and 2020, each of which was hyped as a potential giant slayer. (McConnell won by 16 percent in 2014, and a mere 19 percent in 2020.) McConnell and his team actively leaned into it as well, welcoming as much national money — money far better spent playing defense for Democrats elsewhere — into the race against him as possible, operating as buffer for all of his fellow Republican. Thus the birth of the “COME AT ME BRO” meme from 2014, the fratboy taunt running underneath a picture of Mitch on the stump so memorable the Washington Post once wrote a fine story about it.
2. “Cocaine Mitch”
Let’s face it, there’s an argument to be made that the nickname should go on his tombstone. Originally intended as an attack line on him by an enemy — and immediately adopted ironically by McConnell himself — the phrase “Cocaine Mitch” has been internet/online slang for so long that it’s easy to forget just how ridiculous its origin story was. When coal executive Don Blankenship ran for Senate in neighboring West Virginia as a Trump-like MAGA populist in 2018, he sought attention with a series of television ads in the primary going squarely after the real enemy, “Swamp Captain Mitch,” who when not working with “the Chinapeople” — his wife is former secretary of labor Elaine Chao — was also apparently involved in illegal drug smuggling. (Look, it’s complicated.) Hence Blankenship’s 100 percent sincere (and flatly drawled) moniker “Cocaine Mitch.” When Blankenship lost his primary handily, McConnell’s team tweeted out the above — with a tip of the cap to Narcos — as a way of saying vaya con Dios.
1. “Après moi, le déluge”
Finally, I leave you on this image — created years ago by someone I follow on Twitter and famous from the moment of its inception — as a reminder of what the future brings. It has long been great sport on certain quarters of the Right to use Mitch McConnell as a hate figure, a scapegoat upon which to heap blame for intentionally impossible demands remaining unmet. Those same people are cheering today.
Remember that tomorrow still comes. And the dam is cracking.