THENEWYORKER,APRIL20, 2020 57
“If you don’t want me to sound like that when I imitate you,
then don’t sound like that when you talk to me.”• •
himself smarter than Trump, and that he
“can’t stand him.” (A spokesman for Mc-
Connell, who declined to be interviewed,
denies this.) According to one such ac-
quaintance, McConnell said that Trump
resembles a politician he loathes: Roy
Moore, the demagogic former chief jus-
tice of the Alabama Supreme Court,
whose 2017 campaign for an open U.S.
Senate seat was upended by allegations
that he’d preyed on teen-age girls. (Moore
denies them.) “They’re so much alike,”
McConnell told the acquaintance.
McConnell’s political fealty to Trump
has cost him the respect of some of the
people who have known him the lon-
gest. David Jones, the late co-founder of
the health-care giant Humana, backed
all McConnell’s Senate campaigns, start-
ing in 1984; Jones and his company’s
foundation collectively gave $4.6 million
to the McConnell Center. When Jones
died, last September, McConnell de-
scribed him as, “without exaggeration,
the single most influential friend and
mentor I’ve had in my entire career.” But,
three days before Jones’s death, Jones and
his two sons, David, Jr., and Matthew,
sent the second of two scorching letters
to McConnell, both of which were shared
with me. They called on him not to be
“a bystander” and to use his “constitu-
tional authority to protect the nation
from President Trump’s incoherent and
incomprehensible international actions.”
They argued that “the powers of the Sen-
ate to constrain an errant President are
prodigious, and it is your job to put them
to use.” McConnell had assured them,
in response to their first letter, that Trump
had “one of the finest national-security
teams with whom I have had the honor
of working.” But in the second letter the
Joneses replied that half of that team had
since gone, leaving the Department of
Defense “leaderless for months,” and the
office of the director of National Intel-
ligence with only an “‘acting’ caretaker.”
The Joneses noted that they had all served
the country: the father in the Navy, Mat-
thew in the Marine Corps, and David,
Jr., in the State Department, as a lawyer.
Imploring McConnell “to lead,” they
questioned the value of “having chosen
the judges for a republic while allowing
its constitutional structures to fail and
its strength and security to crumble.”
John David Dyche, a lawyer in Lou-
isville and until recently a conservative
columnist, enjoyed unmatched access to
McConnell and his papers, and pub-
lished an admiring biography of him in- In March, though, Dyche posted
a Twitter thread that caused a lot of talk
in the state’s political circles. He wrote
that McConnell “of course realizes that
Trump is a hideous human being & ut-
terly unfit to be president,” and that, in
standing by Trump anyway, he has shown
that he has “no ideology except his own
political power.” Dyche declined to com-
ment for this article, but, after the corona-
virus shut down most of America, he an-
nounced that he was contributing to
McConnell’s opponent, Amy McGrath,
and tweeted, “Those who stick with the
hideous, incompetent demagogue en-
danger the country & will be remem-
bered in history as shameful cowards.”
McConnell also appears to have lost
the political support of his three daugh-
ters. The youngest, Porter, is a progres-
sive activist who is the campaign direc-
tor for Take On Wall Street, a coalition
of labor unions and nonprofit groups
which advocates against the “predatory
economic power” of “ banks and billion-
aires.” One of its targets has been Ste-
phen Schwarzman, the chairman and
C.E.O. of the Blackstone Group, who,
according to the Center for Responsive
Politics, has, since 2016, donated nearly
thirty million dollars to campaigns and
super PACs aligned with McConnell. Last
year, Take On Wall Street condemned
Blackstone’s “detrimental behavior” and
argued that the company’s campaign do-
nations “cast a pall on candidates’ ethics.”
Porter McConnell has also publicly
criticized the Senate’s confirmation of
Justice Kavanaugh, which her father con-
siders one of his greatest achievements.
On Twitter, she accused Kavanaugh’s
supporters of misogyny, and retweeted
a post from StandWithBlaseyFord, a
Web site supporting Christine Blasey
Ford, one of Kavanaugh’s accusers. The
husband of McConnell’s middle daugh-
ter, Claire, has also criticized Kavanaugh
online, and McConnell’s eldest daugh-
ter, Eleanor, is a registered Democrat.
All three daughters declined to
comment, as did their mother, Sherrill