Former president Donald Trump recently called Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) a “broken-down hack.” As a Cocaine Mitch-appreciator, this jab rankles — after all, Mitch McConnell carried the Trump presidency to every significant win. If Mitch is a broken hack, it’s because he placed on his back the millstone of Trump; a prodigious bulk resulting from decades of maddening contradictions and a vacuum of self-control.
Not to traffic in hyperbole, but Mitch’s service to Trump was the equivalent of Sisyphus shouldering Atlas’s globe for a bit while continuing to roll his boulder uphill.
As Jonathan S. Tobin wrote for NRO in 2018:
A president who had a deep knowledge of how Congress works or who was willing to put in the effort to learn how make deals with senators in the fashion of a Lyndon Johnson might have been able to hold his own against McConnell, or even overrule or bypass him. But Trump is not that sort of president. The longer he is in office, the more it’s clear how much he needs McConnell.
As McConnell shepherds another conservative onto the Supreme Court, even Trump’s populist base can’t complain about his record. McConnell has also had the satisfaction of seeing his Democratic counterpart, Senator Chuck Schumer, get the same treatment from his base as he himself suffered while Obama was president. Liberals enraged by Trump’s ability to govern, despite the #Resistance and Democrats’ desire to obstruct him, blame Schumer for Trump — much as some Tea Partiers blamed McConnell for not blowing up the Capitol in order to stop Obama.
The truth is, McConnell was always a thorn in the side of the Democrats. But plenty of Tea Partiers, who were just as frustrated about Obama’s ability to use executive authority as the Left is now about Trump, never acknowledged it. McConnell was obviously impatient with Senator Ted Cruz and other firebrands who favored apocalyptic showdowns when Democrats were in control of the upper body, and that didn’t endear him to the party base.
It’s true that McConnell deserves his share of the blame, from the base and the GOP as a whole, for the failures of Trump’s first year, especially on Obamacare repeal, which GOP lawmakers had campaigned on and fundraised on for years. (The president’s inability to lead on this issue was also a significant factor.)
But whatever his shortcomings, McConnell has proved to be a master manipulator of the Senate as he passed a tax bill and pushed through Trump’s judicial nominees at what has been, by D.C. standards, a rapid pace.
While seemingly incapable of appreciating those who made his success, Trump would do well to at least send some Trump Steaks to McConnell in a show of gratitude to the masterful swamp turtle who served up win after win to the former president and his administration.