Sen. Mitch McConnell, after stepping down from his Senate leadership position, bucked President Trump and was one of only three Republicans to vote against the president’s nominee for defense secretary.
With confirmation hearings for Mr. Trump’s Cabinet nominees ongoing, people are wondering just what McConnell will do next. The 82-year-old said he feels free to be more outspoken about what he cares about than he has in the past, but it seems unlikely that he’ll be leading an opposition to the head of his party.
“I expect to support most of what this administration is trying to accomplish,” the long-serving Republican senator said. “So, what happened in the past is irrelevant to me.”
McConnell’s relationship with Trump
“What happened in the past” between McConnell and Mr. Trump includes insults and heated arguments. To his biographer Michael Tackett, who interviewed the senator over the last three years, and in his oral histories, McConnell vented about the president, saying Mr. Trump is “nasty,” “not very smart” and a “sleazeball.”
Meanwhile, Mr. Trump has called McConnell “sullen” and an “unsmiling political hack.”
“We do have to do something about Mitch McConnell. He’s, he’s a disaster. He’s a disaster,” Mr. Trump said during a March 2023 campaign rally in Davenport, Iowa.
The president has also used a racial slur against McConnell’s second wife, former U.S. Secretary of Labor and Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao, something McConnell said he never confronted Mr. Trump over.
McConnell says he and Mr. Trump haven’t spoken in a while. McConnell was very upset about what happened during the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot, during which he was evacuated from the Senate while rioters banged on his office door with his staff inside, barricading the door with furniture. McConnell said the Jan. 6 Capitol riot was evidence of Mr. Trump’s “complete unfitness for office.”
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“President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day,” McConnell later said from the Senate floor.
It’s still the way he feels about it four years later and McConnell still considers Jan. 6 an insurrection. He said he believes pardoning the people who were convicted in connection to the events that day was a mistake.
While McConnell’s been critical of the president, he has almost always wound up retracting his claws. McConnell voted against convicting Mr. Trump at the Senate trial that took place after the president had just left office. A conviction could have disqualified Mr. Trump from running for re-election.
McConnell thought that the criminal and civil justice system would be there to hold Trump accountable, biographer Tackett said.
“The court he created ended up being the court that helped to enable Donald Trump to not eventually face prosecution,” Tackett said. “It was the biggest miscalculation of his political career, and no doubt will be a stain on his legacy.”
McConnell and the Supreme Court
Tackett said the most contentious thing McConnell did as Senate leader was to singlehandedly block then-President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“One of my proudest moments was when I looked at Barack Obama in the eye and I said, ‘Mr. President, you will not fill this Supreme Court vacancy,'” McConnell said at a political event in 2016.
This was the first step in McConnell’s engineering of a conservative super majority on the Supreme Court.
“I feel fine about it. I knew that if the shoe was on the other foot…,” he said.
His biographer has called it a “brutish exercise of power.” McConnell doesn’t agree. The senator said he was focused on making sure people on the center-right have a voice.
“That was what I thought was the most important thing I could do,” he said.
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A recent poll found that 70% of the American people think the Supreme Court justices are more influenced by ideology than by being fair arbiters. McConnell pointed the blame at Democrats, saying the Supreme Court’s popularity is down because Democrats criticize them.
“Their job is not to seek public approval. It’s to follow the law,” he said of the Supreme Court.
McConnell’s actions shaping the Supreme Court are tied to the overturning of Roe v. Wade and affirmative action in college admissions, Tackett said.
“By changing the Court, changing the composition of the Court, he changed American life,” Tackett said.
McConnell’s legacy and future in the Senate
Though he’s now on the backbench after an 18-year tenure as the Senate Republican leader, McConnell could continue to play a role in shaping American life outside of the courts. He said that he feels free to be more outspoken about what he cares about than he has in the past, which may come up during a vote for Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who Mr. Trump picked to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
Kennedy has suggested that the polio vaccine killed more people than polio, but McConnell, who was diagnosed with polio as a child, believes that vaccines are critical.
“It’s no surprise that it’s a big deal with me,” he said.
McConnell said he also plans to speak out about the encroachment on the independence of the Senate.
Mr. Trump has issued an onslaught of executive orders since his second term began. The president is also imposing tariffs, which McConnell does not back.
“It will drive the cost of everything up. In other words, it will be paid for by American consumers,” McConnell said. “I mean, why would you want to get in a fight with your allies over this?”
He may have his disagreements with the president, but McConnell acknowledged that the people chose Mr. Trump.
“I’m a Republican. I don’t get to decide who gets to be president. The American people do,” McConnell said. “And you have to admit, they did. And he’s back.”
