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groups, including the Senate Leadership
Fund, One Nation, American Cross-
roads, and Crossroads GPS, which have
collectively given millions of dollars to
the Senate campaigns of McConnell and
other Republicans.
A spokesman for Chao says that the
department levied many more fines on
coal mines during her tenure, and that
“she was always concerned about coal
miners’ jobs as well as their health and
safety.” But Spadaro told me he has no
doubt that McConnell “made sure the
report was essentially suppressed.” He
noted, “Massey gave a lot of money to
McConnell over the years. McConnell’s
very bright. He took the money and, in
return, protected the coal industry. He’s
truly the most corrupt politician in the
U.S.” Records show that, between 1990
and 2010, McConnell was the recipient
of the second-largest amount of federal
campaign donations from people and
PACs associated with Massey. And when
McConnell ran the National Republi-
can Senatorial Committee it took in five
hundred and eighty-four thousand dol-
lars from the coal industry.
Nina McCoy, a retired teacher who
lives in Martin County, told me, “Our
own senator’s wife basically shut down
the investigation. Our community from
then on knew all those people protected
the coal companies instead of us.”
According to the Lexington Herald-
Leader, in 2002, Bob Murray, the C.E.O.
of another coal company, Murray Energy,
shouted down a Mine Safety and Health
Administration inspector in a meeting
by observing, “Mitch McConnell calls
me one of the five finest men in Amer-
ica, and the last I checked he was sleep-
ing with your boss.” Both Murray and
McConnell disputed the report, which
was based on interviews and notes from
the meeting. Records showed that Mur-
ray and his company’s PAC had donated
repeatedly to McConnell’s campaigns.
Two decades since the Massey slurry-
pond disaster, the coal industry has col-
lapsed, barely employing five thousand
people statewide, but the region’s water
remains tainted. McConnell takes credit
for recently delivering several million
dollars in federal funds to the area for
water-infrastructure improvements, but
William Brandon Halcomb, a property
manager who lives there, told me that
the situation is still “horrible.” Shortly
before we spoke, there had been no water
for three weeks. He keeps a bucket tied
to a bridge, which he lowers into the
creek below when he needs water to flush
a toilet. He must drive to another county
to buy clean water. “You get a gallon,
heat it on the stove, and take a trucker’s
bath,” he said. “A wash-off is all you can
do.” As COVID-19 spreads, the health
hazards posed to Americans who can’t
reliably wash their hands are obvious.
Martin County is over-
whelmingly Republican and
pro-Trump, and many resi-
dents see no connection be-
tween their problems and
Washington. Gary Ball, the
editor of the Mountain Citi-
zen, a local newspaper, told
me, “It’s not McConnell’s
fault that our water is in bad
shape.” Ball, a former coal
miner who strongly backs
Trump, blames local Democratic officials
for “years of mismanagement.” Cara Stew-
art, the chief of staff for the Kentucky
House Democrats, unsurprisingly sees it
differently. “Why does Kentucky not have
clean, reliable water?” she said. “McCon-
nell could help, but he’s in bed with the
companies that are causing the problems.”A
s a backbench senator, McConnell
used his fund-raising talents to rise
in the Party’s leadership—a path laid
out by Lyndon Johnson. Robert A. Caro,
the author of a magisterial four-volume
biography of Johnson, told me that, “in
a stroke of genius,” Johnson, as a Dem-
ocratic junior congressman, “realizes he
has no power, but he has something no
other congressman has—the oilmen and
big contractors in Texas who need fa-
vors in Washington.” By establishing
control over the distribution of the do-
nors’ money, Johnson acquired immense
power over his peers. McConnell was
no fan of L.B.J., however. He has de-
scribed his Presidential vote for John-
son as the one he regrets most, because
he so deplored Johnson’s expansion of
government to fight the war on pov-
erty—an effort launched in Martin
County. In his memoir, McConnell ar-
gues that “poverty won,” proving “Wash-
ington’s overconfidence in its own abil-
ity to systematically solve complex social
problems.” (Having just passed the larg-
est public-spending program in Americanhistory, McConnell and other Republi-
cans are scrambling to justify the about-
face, with some calling the new pro-
grams “restitution” rather than welfare.)
According to Keith Runyon, McCon-
nell was focussed on his political survival
from the moment he arrived in Wash-
ington. He recalls that, the morning after
McConnell was first sworn in to the
Senate, McConnell told him that he
would be moving to the right from then
on, to keep getting reëlected.
McConnell has denied say-
ing so, but Runyon told me,
“He is a flat-out liar.” An-
other acquaintance who has
known McConnell for years
said that, “to the extent that
he’s conversational, he wore
his ambition to become Ma-
jority Leader on his sleeve.”
McConnell envied better-
known colleagues who were
chased down the corridors by news report-
ers. He wanted to be like them, he later
told Carl Hulse, a Times correspondent,
who interviewed McConnell for his book
“Confirmation Bias,” about fights over
Supreme Court nominees. The way Mc-
Connell ended up making his name was
decidedly unglamorous: blocking cam-
paign-finance reform. Even he derided
the subject as rivalling “static cling as an
issue most Americans care about.” Dull
as campaign financing was, it was vitally
important to his peers, and to democracy.
Few members wanted to risk appearing
corrupt, and so they were grateful to Mc-
Connell for fighting one reform after the
next—while claiming that it was purely
about defending the First Amendment.
According to MacGillis, behind closed
doors McConnell admitted to his Sen-
ate colleagues that undoing the reforms
was “in the best interest of Republicans.”
Armed with funding from such billion-
aire conservatives as the DeVos family,
McConnell helped take the quest to kill
restraints on spending all the way to the
Supreme Court. In 2010, his side won:
the Citizens United decision opened the
way for corporations, big donors, and se-
cretive nonprofits to pour unlimited and
often untraceable cash into elections.
“McConnell loves money, and ab-
hors any controls on it,” Fred Wert-
heimer, the president of Democracy 21,
a group that supports campaign-finance
reform, said. “Money is the central theme