WASHINGTON — Mitch McConnell thought the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol would finally vanquish former President Donald Trump, initially predicting that at least 17 Republican senators would vote to convict him in his impeachment trial, barring the former president from running again.
He was wrong.
McConnell’s miscalculation is one of the new details reported in the latest book on the chaotic end of the Trump presidency, “This Will Not Pass” by New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns.
In the weekend following the riot in early January 2021, McConnell is described by the authors as “in a lather, using profanity to refer to Trump,” and outlining what he saw as his “imminent demise.”
“McConnell told his advisers there would be at least 17 Senate Republicans ready to affirm Trump’s impeachment, supplying the two-thirds vote needed to convict,” Martin and Burns write.
But just a month later when the unprecedented second impeachment trial of Trump unfolded with him out of office and kicked off of Twitter, just seven GOP senators voted for Trump’s conviction and McConnell wasn’t even one of them.
The head-snapping change in the Kentuckian’s mindset is a vivid illustration of how he ultimately chose the preservation of his own power over damning condemnation of the man he said was “practically and morally responsible” for the Capitol attack.
In the end, when McConnell saw most of his party falling into line with Trump, he wasn’t going to be out of step.
“I didn’t get to be leader by voting with five people in the conference,” McConnell is quoted in the book.
“It wasn’t going to happen – he wasn’t going to be a leader who stood with 15 percent of the caucus,” one of McConnell’s longtime advisers added.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, one of the seven Republicans who voted to convict Trump in February of 2021, said she didn’t understand McConnell’s calculus, but allowed, “I wish that it had been different.”
Ironically, it was Kentucky’s junior senator, Rand Paul, who constructed the argument that provided McConnell his rationale for acquittal: It was unconstitutional to impeach a former president as a private citizen, argued J. Michael Luttig, a longtime federal appeals court judge.
After Tom Cotton, the Republican senator from Arkansas, presented Luttig’s argument to McConnell, McConnell replied that he believed it was a “smart position for him to take and predicted many other Senate Republicans would follow suit,” the book reports. Trump was ultimately acquitted in February 2021.
Democrats believed that if McConnell decided to punish Trump he could have brought “a substantial bloc of other senior Republicans along with him.”
But the nation’s two top congressional Democrats are both quoted as having no reason to trust McConnell.
“Never trust Mitch McConnell to do the right thing,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in private, per “This Will Not Pass.”
“I don’t trust him, and I would not count on it, but you never know,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer told a group of progressives in January 2021 as the impeachment trial gained steam.
The reporters even note a moment when McConnell pulled one of them aside in the aftermath of the Capitol riot to fish for intelligence about whether his fellow Republicans would be willing to invoke the 25th Amendment against Trump to remove him from office. In the fog of the mob-fueled terror that filled the Capitol building, McConnell believed Trump had, “put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.”
“The anger I saw in his eyes,” Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia told the authors, “was unlike anything I have ever seen.”
In an interview with the authors, Trump not only continued to attack McConnell but went after his wife, former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, saying she was not “an innocent babe in the woods.”
A McConnell spokesperson said he had nothing to add to details in the book.
Another separate section of the book reveals the Republican Party’s courting of Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, the moderate who brought down President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better social spending plan.
When South Dakota Sen. John Thune suggested Manchin become an independent and caucus with Republicans, Manchin responded, “John, if you were the leader I would do it.”
The authors write, “It was not exactly a hard no, but Manchin was not about to put Mitch McConnell back in charge of the Senate.”
But the bulk of the 437-page tome focuses on how a significant portion of the traditional Republican power apparatus continues to struggle with how to handle Trump, who looks poised to run again in 2024.
After initially believing that Trump’s own actions would imperil him, McConnell has since settled on a strategy of disengagement. “He goes away only when he doesn’t have a following,” McConnell said.
It’s why McConnell repeatedly flat out refuses to answer reporters’ most pointed queries about the ex-president. He sees no political upside to it, only political divisiveness.
Whereas Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney lost her House leadership position for her repeated castigation of Trump’s actions, McConnell remains in power without a visible threat to his leadership.
“McConnell is: Ignore and hope he goes away. And that just doesn’t work,” Cheney says in the book. “McConnell is somebody who normally has really good political instincts. He’s one of the best, but I think he’s completely misjudged the danger of this moment. This is about the Constitution. There is clear right and wrong.”
Towards the end of the book, the authors write that while McConnell makes jokes about Trump’s insults during private social events, he has confessed to his colleagues that he had not expected Trump to continue to dominate the party so long after his time out of office.
“It’s fair to say that he also has been surprised by the hold, if you will, that the former president continues to have over so many in the Congress – his level of continued influence,” explained Murkowksi.
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