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accommodating Trump and his base,
McConnell and other Republicans went
along as Party leaders dismantled the
country’s safety net and ignored experts
of all kinds, including scientists. “Mitch
is kidding himself if he thinks he’ll be
remembered for anything other than
Trump,” he said. “He will be remem-
bered as the Trump facilitator.”
The President is vindictive toward
Republicans who challenge him, as Mitt
Romney can attest. Yet Stevens believes
that the conservatives who have acceded
to Trump will pay a more lasting price.
“Trump was the moral test, and the Re-
publican Party failed,” Stevens said. “It’s
an utter disaster for the long-term fate
of the Party. The Party has become an
obsession with power without purpose.”
Bill Kristol, a formerly stalwart con-
servative who has become a leading
Trump critic, describes McConnell as “a
pretty conventional Republican who just
decided to go along and get what he
could out of Trump.” Under McConnell’s
leadership, the Senate, far from provid-
ing a check on the executive branch, has
acted as an accelerant. “Demagogues like
Trump, if they can get elected, can’t really
govern unless they have people like Mc-
Connell,” Kristol said. McConnell has
stayed largely silent about the President’s
lies and inflammatory public remarks,
and has propped up the Administration
with legislative and judicial victories. Mc-
Connell has also brought along the Par-
ty’s financial backers. “There’s been too
much focus on the base, and not enough
on business leaders, big donors, and the
Wall Street Journal editorial page,” Kris-
tol said, adding, “The Trump base would
be there anyway, but the élites might
have rebelled if not for McConnell. He
could have fundamentally disrupted
Trump’s control, but instead McConnell
has kept the trains running.”
McConnell and the President are not
a natural pair. A former Trump Admin-
istration official, who has also worked in
the Senate, observed, “It would be hard
to find two people less alike in temper-
ament in the political arena. With Trump,
there’s rarely an unspoken thought. Mc-
Connell is the opposite—he’s constantly
thinking but says as little as possible.”
The former Administration official went
on, “Trump is about winning the day, or
even the hour. McConnell plays the long
game. He’s sensitive to the political re-
alities. His North Star is continuing as
Majority Leader—it’s really the only
thing for him. He’s patient, sly, and will
obfuscate to make less apparent the ways
he’s moving toward a goal.” The two men
also have different political orientations:
“Trump is a populist—he’s not just anti-
élitist, he’s anti-institutionalist.” As for
McConnell, “no one with a straight face
would ever call him a populist—Trump
came to drain the swamp, and now he’s
working with the biggest swamp crea-
ture of them all.”
When Trump ran for President, he
frequently derided “the corrupt political
establishment,” saying that Wall Street
titans were “getting away with murder”
by paying no taxes. In a furious campaign
ad, images of the New York Stock Ex-
change and the C.E.O. of Goldman Sachs
flashed onscreen as he promised an end
to the élites who had “bled our country
dry.” In interviews, he denounced his op-
ponents for begging wealthy donors for
campaign contributions, arguing that, if
“somebody gives them money,” then “just
psychologically, when they go to that per-
son they’re going to do it—they owe him.”
McConnell, by contrast, is the mas-
ter of the Washington money machine.
Nobody has done more than he has to
engineer the current campaign-finance
system, in which billionaires and corpo-
rations have virtually no spending lim-
its, and self-dealing and influence-ped-
dling are commonplace. Rick Wilson, a
Never Trumper Republican and a for-
mer political consultant who once worked
on races with McConnell’s team, said,
“McConnell’s an astounding behind-the-
scenes operator who’s got control of the
most successful fund-raising operation
in history.” Former McConnell staffers
run an array of ostensibly independent
spending groups, many of which take
tens of millions of dollars from undisclosed
donors. Wilson considers McConnell,
who has been Majority Leader since 2015,
a realist who does whatever is necessary
to preserve both his own political sur-
vival and the Republicans’ edge in the
Senate, which now stands at 53–47. “He
feels no shame about it,” he said. “Mc-
Connell has been the most powerful force
normalizing Trump in Washington.”
Al Cross, a columnist and a journal-
ism professor at the University of Ken-
tucky, who is considered the dean of the
state’s political press corps, believes thatMcConnell’s partnership with Trump
“is the most important political relation-
ship in the country.” He had hoped that
McConnell would push back against
Trump. After all, past Republicans have
crossed party lines to defend democ-
racy—from censuring Joe McCarthy to
forcing the resignation of President Rich-
ard Nixon. “But Trump and McConnell
have come to understand each other,”
Cross said. “The President needs him to
govern. McConnell knows that if their
relationship fell apart it would be a di-
saster for the Republican majority in the
Senate. They’re very different in many
ways, but fundamentally they’re about
the same thing—winning.”I
n a forthcoming book, “Let Them Eat
Tweets,” the political scientists Jacob S.
Hacker and Paul Pierson challenge the
notion that the Republican Party is riven
between global corporate élites and down-
scale white social conservatives. Rather,
they argue, an “expedient pact” lies at the
heart of today’s Party—and McConnell
and Trump embody it. Polls show that
there is little voter support for wealthy
donors’ agenda of tax cuts for themselves
at the expense of social-safety-net cuts
for others. The Republicans’ 2017 tax bill
was a case in point: it rewarded the Par-
ty’s biggest donors by bestowing more
than eighty per cent of its largesse on the
wealthiest one per cent, by cutting cor-
porate tax rates, and by preserving the
carried-interest loophole, which is ex-
ploited by private-equity firms and hedge
funds. The legislation was unpopular with
Democratic and Republican voters alike.
In order to win elections, Hacker and
Pierson explain, the Republican Party
has had to form a coalition between cor-
poratists and white cultural conservatives
who are galvanized by Trump’s anti-élitist
and racist rhetoric. The authors call this
hybrid strategy Plutocratic Populism.
Hacker told me that the relationship be-
tween McConnell and Trump offers “a
clear illustration of how the Party has
evolved,” adding, “They may detest each
other, but they need each other.”
Although the two men almost always
support each other in public, several mem-
bers of McConnell’s innermost circle told
me that in private things are quite differ-
ent. They say that behind Trump’s back
McConnell has called the President
“nuts,” and made clear that he considers