54 THENEWYORKER,APRIL20, 2020
AREPORTERAT LARGE
ENABLER-IN- CHIEF
Mitch McConnell ’s refusal to rein in Trump is looking riskier than ever.
BY JANE MAYER
O
n Thursday, March 12th, Mitch
McConnell, the Senate Majority
Leader, could have insisted that
he and his colleagues work through the
weekend to hammer out an emergency
aid package addressing the coronavirus
pandemic. Instead, he recessed the Senate
for a long weekend, and returned home
to Louisville, Kentucky. McConnell, a
seventy-eight-year-old Republican who
is about to complete his sixth term as a
senator, planned to attend a celebration
for a protégé, Justin Walker, a federal
judge who was once his Senate intern.
McConnell has helped install nearly two
hundred conservatives as judges; stocking
the judiciary has been his legacy project.
Soon after he left the Capitol, Dem-
ocrats in the House of Representatives
settled on a preliminary rescue package,
working out the details with the Trea-
sury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin. The
Senate was urgently needed for the next
steps in the process. McConnell, though,
was onstage in a Louisville auditorium,
joking that his opponents “occasionally
compare me to Darth Vader.”
The gathering had the feel of a re-
union. Don McGahn, Donald Trump’s
former White House counsel, whom Mc-
Connell has referred to as his “buddy and
co-collaborator” in confirming conserva-
tive judges, flew down for the occasion.
So did Supreme Court Justice Brett Ka-
vanaugh, whose Senate confirmation Mc-
Connell had fought fiercely to secure.
Walker, the event’s honoree, had clerked
for Kavanaugh, and became one of his
lead defenders after Kavanaugh was ac-
cused of sexual assault. McConnell is now
championing Walker for an opening on
the powerful D.C. Court of Appeals, even
though Walker has received a “not qual-
ified” rating from the American Bar As-
sociation, in part because, at the age of
thirty-eight, he has never tried a case.
Another former Senate aide of Mc-
Connell’s, a U.S. district judge for the
Eastern District of Kentucky, Gregory
Van Tatenhove, also attended the Lou-
isville event. His wife, Christine, is a
former undergraduate scholar at the
McConnell Center—an academic pro-
gram at the University of Louisville
which, among other things, hosts an ex-
hibit honoring the Senator’s career. Re-
cently, she donated a quarter of a mil-
lion dollars to the center.
McConnell, a voracious reader of
history, has been cultivating his place in
it for many years. But, in leaving Wash-
ington for the long weekend, he had
misjudged the moment. The hashtag
#WheresMitch? was trending on Twit-
ter. President Trump had declared a na-
tional emergency; the stock market had
ended one of its worst weeks since the
Great Recession. Nearly two thousand
cases of COVID-19 had already been
confirmed in America.
Eleven days later, the Senate still had
not come up with a bill. The Times ran
a scorching editorial titled “The Coro-
navirus Bailout Stalled. And It’s Mitch
McConnell’s Fault.” The Majority Leader
had tried to jam through a bailout pack-
age that heavily favored big business. But
by then five Republicans were absent in
self-quarantine, and the Democrats forced
McConnell to accept a $2.1-trillion com-
promise bill that reduced corporate give-
aways and expanded aid to health-care
providers and to hard-hit workers.
McConnell, who is known as one of
the wiliest politicians in Washington,
soon reframed the narrative as a personal
success story. In Kentucky, where he is
running for reëlection, he launched a
campaign ad about the bill’s passage,
boasting, “One leader brought our di-
vided country together.” At the same
time, he attacked the Democrats, telling
a radio host that the impeachment of
Trump had “diverted the attention of the
government” when the epidemic was in
its early stages. In fact, several senators—
including Tom Cotton, a Republican
from Arkansas, and Chris Murphy, a
Democrat from Connecticut—had raised
alarms about the virus nearly two months
before the Administration acted, whereas
Trump had told reporters around the
same time that he was “not concerned
at all.” And on February 27th, some three
weeks after the impeachment trial ended,
McConnell had defended the Admin-
istration’s response, accusing Democrats
of “performative outrage” when they de-
manded more emergency funding.
Many have regarded McConnell’s sup-
port for Trump as a stroke of cynical po-
litical genius. McConnell has seemed to
be both protecting his caucus and cov-
ering his flank in Kentucky—a deep-red
state where, perhaps not coincidentally,
Trump is far more popular than he is.
When the pandemic took hold, the Pres-
ident’s standing initially rose in national
polls, and McConnell and Trump will
surely both take credit for the aid package
in the coming months. Yet, as COVID-19
decimates the economy and kills Amer-
icans across the nation, McConnell’s al-
liance with Trump is looking riskier. In-
deed, some critics argue that McConnell
bears a singular responsibility for the
country’s predicament. They say that he
knew from the start that Trump was un-
equipped to lead in a crisis, but, because
the President was beloved by the Repub-
lican base, McConnell protected him. He
even went so far as to prohibit witnesses
at the impeachment trial, thus guaran-
teeing that the President would remain
in office. David Hawpe, the former edi-
tor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, said
of McConnell, “There are a lot of peo-
ple disappointed in him. He could have
mobilized the Senate. But the Republi-
can Party changed underneath him, and
he wanted to remain in power.”
Stuart Stevens, a longtime Republi-
can political consultant, agrees that Mc-
Connell’s party deserves a considerable
share of the blame for America’s COVID-
19 disaster. In a forthcoming book, “It
Was All a Lie,” Stevens writes that, in
