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“He’s always, like, ‘Oh, really? I went to school in
Canis Major—well, not in Canis Major, but just outside Canis Major,’
and it’s, like, we get it, you went to Blarvard.”• •
was relentless. In 2010, the Senate Ma-
jority Leader famously said, when asked
about his goals, “The single most im-
portant thing we want to achieve is for
President Obama to be a one-term Pres-
ident.” Carroll, the Courier-Journal
reporter, was dumbstruck by McCon-
nell’s attitude when the Senator allowed
him to listen in one day as he took a
phone call from Obama, on the condi-
tion that Carroll not write about it. “Mc-
Connell said a couple of words, like ‘Yup,’
‘O.K.,’ and ‘Bye,’ but he never said, ‘Mr.
President,’” Carroll recalls. “There was
just a total lack of respect even for the
office.” McConnell preferred to deal with
Obama’s Vice-President, Joe Biden. (In
his autobiography, McConnell mocks
Biden’s “incessant chatter” but also says,
“We could talk to each other.”)
McConnell’s disrespect for Obama
mirrored the views of rich conservative
corporate donors like the Kochs, who
underwrote many of the campaigns that
enabled Republicans to capture the ma-
jority in the House of Representatives
in 2010, and in the Senate four years later.
In the 2014 midterm elections alone, the
Koch donor network, which has a few
hundred members, spent more than a
hundred million dollars. In 2014, shortly
before Republicans took the Senate, Mc-
Connell appeared as an honored guest
at one of the Kochs’ semi-annual fund-
raising summits. He thanked “Charles
and David,” adding, “I don’t know where
we would be without you.” Soon after
he was sworn in as the Senate Majority
Leader, he hired a former lobbyist for
Koch Industries as his policy chief. Mc-
Connell then took aim at the Kochs’
longtime foe the Environmental Protec-
tion Agency, urging governors to disobey
new restrictions on greenhouse gases.
Eager though McConnell was to see
the end of the Obama era, he wasn’t en-
thused about Trump’s candidacy. To the
extent that McConnell had any fixed
ideology, he was an old-fashioned deficit
hawk who favored big business, free trade,
and small government—the opposite of
Trump’s populist pitch.
Trump’s anti-Washington support-
ers weren’t enthused about McConnell,
either. They booed him when he briefly
appeared onstage at the Republican Na-
tional Convention. But McConnell—
having watched Senate colleagues from
the Republican establishment, includ-
ing Bob Bennett, of Utah, and Dick
Lugar, of Indiana, get toppled by Tea
Party insurgents—knew that it was dan-
gerous to cross his party’s base.
In the closing weeks of the campaign,McConnell gave more assistance to
Trump than many knew. In the sum-
mer of 2016, while the Senate was in re-
cess, Obama’s C.I.A. director, John Bren-
nan, tried to contact McConnell about
an urgent threat to national security. The
agency had strong evidence that Presi-
dent Vladimir Putin of Russia was try-
ing to interfere in the U.S. election, pos-
sibly to hinder Hillary Clinton and help
Trump. But, for “four or five weeks,” a
former White House national-security
official told me, McConnell deflected
Brennan’s requests to brief him. Susan
Rice, Obama’s former national-security
adviser, said, “It’s just crazy.” McConnell
had told Brennan that “he wouldn’t be
available until Labor Day.”
When the men finally spoke, McCon-
nell expressed skepticism about the in-
telligence. He later warned officials “not
to get involved” in elections, telling them
that “they were touching something very
dangerous,” the former national-security
official recounted. If Obama spoke out
publicly about Russia, McConnell threat-
ened, he would label it a partisan politi-
cal move, knowing that Obama was de-
termined to avoid that.
As the intelligence community grew
increasingly convinced that Russia had
engaged in cyber sabotage, Obama strug-
gled to get bipartisan support from the
top four congressional leaders: McCon-
nell; Paul Ryan, then the Republican
Speaker of the House; Nancy Pelosi, then
the ranking Democrat in the House; and
Harry Reid, then the Senate Minority
Leader. Finally, after Labor Day, Obama
convened an Oval Office meeting during
which he urged the four leaders to put
out a joint statement alerting election
officials across the country to the extraor-
dinary foreign threat. According to Denis
McDonough, Obama’s former chief of
staff, Ryan, Pelosi, and Reid agreed to
work together, but “McConnell said
nothing.” The former official said, “It
took weeks to get the letter.”
A previously unseen log of the pri-
vate correspondence among the four
leaders’ staffs shows that McConnell ed-
ited the draft, refusing to accept any of
the others’ proposed changes. He was
dead set against designating U.S. voting
systems as “critical infrastructure” or urg-
ing election officials to seek assistance
from the Department of Homeland Se-
curity. Instead, he insisted on leaving