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election security entirely to non-federal
officials. The final statement was so mud-
dled that a Reid aide argued, “FWIW,
I’d rather do no letter at all.” Another
Reid aide replied, “Me, too. But we ap-
parently have no choice.” Finally, on Sep-
tember 28th, the others signed off on
the McConnell draft. Instead of iden-
tifying Russia, or a foreign threat, it
merely mentioned “malefactors” seeking
to “disrupt the administration of our
elections.” It was so indecipherable that
neither the public nor election officials
learned until well after the election that
Russia had targeted voting systems in
all fifty states. Reid told me, “The letter
was nothing like what Obama wanted.
It was very, very weak.”
“I don’t know for sure why he did it,”
Rice said. “But my guess, particularly
with the benefit of hindsight, is that he
thought” calling out Russia “would be
detrimental to Trump—so he delayed
and deflected. It’s disgraceful.” Rice noted
that after the election McConnell con-
tinued to resist numerous bipartisan calls
to safeguard election security. Only after
critics began mocking him as Moscow
Mitch did he finally agree, last Septem-
ber, to support major expenditures on it.
The nickname provoked the usually un-
flappable McConnell; he issued a re-
sponse denouncing it as “McCarthyism.”
McConnell has admitted that he was
as shocked as anyone the night that
Trump won. But he recovered quickly,
and made an unusual demand. Accord-
ing to one Trump transition adviser, he
“promoted” his wife for Transportation
Secretary, arguing that in previous Ad-
ministrations she had been the depart-
ment’s deputy secretary, as well as the
chair of the Federal Maritime Commis-
sion. “We thought she would want the
Labor Department,” the adviser said,
since she had run it during the Bush
years. “It was a surprise.” It also raised
conflict-of-interest questions, given her
family’s shipping business. “Why would
she want Transportation?” the adviser
said, sardonically. “She has no business
in transportation, right?” But, the ad-
viser said, the advantage of having Mc-
Connell literally in bed with the Trump
Administration was obvious to all.
Chao is among the more qualified
of Trump’s Cabinet officers, but she has
been accused of favoring her husband’s
interests—a charge that she has denied.
Politico reported that a former McCon-
nell campaign staffer working for Chao
gave extra help to Kentucky grant ap-
plicants, triggering an internal investi-
gation, which is ongoing. Unabashed,
McConnell turned the accusations into
a campaign ad, boasting of his ability
to bring transportation projects back to
Kentucky. John Hudak, a Brookings In-
stitution expert on government spend-
ing, and the author of “Presidential Pork,”
told me, “Maybe he’s taking his cues
from the President. If profiting from
the operations of government doesn’t
matter to the President, it likely won’t
matter to a Cabinet secretary or Ma-
jority Leader.”
For a brief time in 2017, McConnell
showed some independence from Trump,
and some conscience. He spoke out after
the white-supremacist riot in Char-
lottesville. Although Chao stood by
Trump’s lectern as he claimed that there
had been “fine people on both sides,”
McConnell issued a statement denounc-
ing the “KKK and neo-nazi groups,”
adding that “their messages of hate and
bigotry are not welcome in Kentucky,
and should not be welcome anywhere
in America.” Around the same time,
Trump disparaged McConnell on Twit-
ter for the Senate’s failure to overturn
Obamacare, to which McConnell dis-
missively replied that the President, given
his lack of political experience, perhaps
had “excessive expectations.”
But, as they feuded, Mc-
Connell’s popularity cratered
in Kentucky. Dave Contarino,
a Democratic operative in the
state who opposes McCon-
nell, was polling and doing
focus groups, and he told me
that the Senator’s approval
rating fell to seventeen per
cent. His poll numbers didn’t
recover until mid-2018, when
he defended Trump during the Kava-
naugh confirmation fight. “It rescued him
with conservatives, who said that finally
he was acting like a Republican and sup-
porting our President,” Contarino said.
McConnell’s defense of Trump during
the impeachment trial boosted him fur-
ther at home. Gary Ball, the Martin
County newspaper editor, told me, “Peo-
ple here love Trump. McConnell’s not so
popular. But we loved what McConnell
did for Trump during impeachment.”In McConnell’s reëlection race
against McGrath, a former Marine
fighter pilot, he has been trying to make
Trump his virtual running mate. And
now that McConnell has helped elim-
inate nearly all meaningful spending
restraints, he can count on practically
unlimited funds from billionaire do-
nors. His campaign has already raised
$25.6 million, although McGrath has
raised even more. Matt Jones, a popular
sports-radio host and the co-author of
“Mitch, Please!,” a scathing book about
McConnell, said, “The quickest way for
him to be beaten is to turn on Trump.”
Jones told me that he and his co-au-
thor had interviewed people in every
one of Kentucky’s hundred and twenty
counties, and had found only one, an
elderly farmer, who was a big McCon-
nell fan. “McConnell’s hated here,” he
told me. “And Trump is loved. He has
no choice but to kiss Trump’s ring.”
Until recently, McConnell’s enabling
of Trump has worked well for him, if
not for the country. But it has now made
him complicit in a crisis whose end is
nowhere in sight. As the consequences
of the Trump Presidency become le-
thally clear, his deal looks costlier every
day. The trusted Cook Political Report
recently downgraded the chances that
Republicans would hold their Senate
majority to a fifty-fifty tossup, after
conservative strategists reported wide-
spread alarm over Trump’s
handling of the pandemic.
Rick Wilson, the former
Republican consultant, holds
out faint hope that, if Mc-
Connell and Trump are both
reëlected, McConnell will
finally stand up to the Pres-
ident. McConnell would be
in his seventh, and likely last,
Senate term. He’s had triple-
bypass heart surgery, and ac-
quaintances say that his hearing is poor;
last summer, he fell and fractured his
shoulder. For the first time in his polit-
ical career, he might no longer feel he
has to act purely out of self-interest. “He
could lead the resistance, and blow up
the train tracks,” Wilson said.
Dick Durbin has no such illusions.
“I’ve seen how this movie ends too
many times,” he said, of McConnell
and Trump. “They need each other too
much.”