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infringement of his ability to pay for po-
litical communication, and thus a viola-
tion of his right to free speech.
The case, Buckley v. Valeo, went to
the Supreme Court, and Buckley won.
It marked the beginning of a forty-year,
largely right-wing assault on efforts to
keep private interests from corrupting
American politics. Charles Koch, the
arch-conservative billionaire oil refiner
from Kansas, who was intent on using
his fortune to seize control of American
politics, was an early champion of the
cause. McConnell adopted the “Money
is speech” idea as his own, and eventu-
ally became the country’s most relent-
less proponent of more money in poli-
tics. John Cheves, a reporter for the
Lexington Herald-Leader, has described
a class that McConnell taught in the
seventies, at the University of Louisville.
On a blackboard, he wrote down the
three things he felt were necessary for
success in politics: Money. Money. Money.
In 1977, McConnell ran for the posi-
tion of Jefferson County judge/execu-
tive, the official overseeing the county
that encompasses Louisville. A contem-
porary news account documents that,
after announcing his candidacy, he prom-
ised to limit his campaign spending. But
Mike Ward, who had elicited the pledge
as the chair of Common Cause Kentucky,
told me, “He snookered me.” Ward says
that he thought McConnell meant to
limit spending throughout the campaign,
but McConnell’s promise
applied only to the primary,
in which he had no serious
opponent. In the general
election, he spent a record
amount—and won.
Ward, a Democrat who
was later elected to Con-
gress, suggests that McCon-
nell’s first campaign was
misleading in other ways.
Unlike much of Kentucky,
Louisville is a Democratic stronghold.
“We’re a moderate community, so to get
elected he masqueraded as a progressive,”
Ward said. To win the endorsement of
labor unions, McConnell pledged to sup-
port collective bargaining for public em-
ployees, an issue he dropped after tak-
ing office. Years later, he admitted to
Dyche that he’d been “pandering.” Abor-
tion-rights groups believed that McCon-
nell was on their side, but he claims that
they were mistaken. Ever since then, he
has called himself “pro-life,” and has
packed the courts with judges who op-
pose Roe v. Wade. According to two peo-
ple who have been close to McConnell,
he attends church but isn’t especially re-
ligious, nor does he care about abortion;
but, as one of the sources put it, he “will
never take any position that could lose
him an election.”
The race for county judge/executive
got ugly. McConnell’s Democratic op-
ponent, Todd Hollenbach, was then in
the midst of a divorce, and Hollenbach
told me that McConnell “made an issue
of my family life.” McConnell’s spokes-
man denies this, but Dyche’s biography
describes McConnell “calling attention to
his opponent’s domestic life” with an ad
describing himself as “a lucky guy” with
“a great wife and two kids.” Once Mc-
Connell was elected, according to two
sources, he made a sexual advance toward
one of his female employees. Although his
spokesman says that this didn’t happen,
one of the sources told me, “It’s the God’s
honest truth.” Yet McConnell’s first press
secretary, Meme Runyon, praised him
for hiring a number of young women,
including her, and giving them career-
making professional opportunities.
Three years after defeating Hollen-
bach, though, McConnell, amid accu-
sations of infidelity, got divorced him-
self. He soon began searching for a new
spouse. Keith Runyon, Meme’s husband
and a former editorial-page
editor of the liberal Louis-
ville Courier-Journal, vividly
recalls him showing up at
their house for dinner badly
sunburned after a day of
campaigning at a fish fry.
McConnell, who has lim-
ited patience for such glad-
handing, confided a plan.
Runyon recalls him saying,
“One of the things I’ve got
to do is to marry a rich woman, like
John Sherman Cooper did.” Runyon
added, “Boy, did he ever.”
McConnell’s spokesman disputes
Runyon’s account, but, in 1993, McCon-
nell married Elaine Chao, an heiress,
who is currently serving as Trump’s Sec-
retary of Transportation. McConnell
devotes a chapter of his autobiography
to “Love,” describing how he and Chao,
who emigrated from Taiwan as a child,are “kindred spirits.” He explains, “We
both knew the feeling of not fitting in,
and had worked long and hard in order
to prove ourselves.” Chao graduated
from Harvard Business School, ran the
Peace Corps, served as President George
W. Bush’s Labor Secretary, and has been
a director on such influential boards as
those of Bloomberg Philanthropies and
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. She also
brought a sizable fortune into McCon-
nell’s life. Her father, James Chao, is the
founder and chairman of the Foremost
Group, a family-owned maritime ship-
ping company, based in New York, which
reportedly sends seventy per cent of its
freight to China.
When McConnell presided over
Trump’s impeachment trial, in which
the President was accused of trying to
extort Ukrainian officials into helping
him smear his political rival Joe Biden,
he allowed Republican senators to keep
insisting that the “real” Ukraine scandal
was the Biden family’s enrichment from
their connections with the country’s rul-
ers. Yet McConnell must have known
that virtually any criticism one could
make about the Biden family could be
made as well about the Chao family. In
fact, such criticisms had been made in
the book “Secret Empires,” by the con-
servative writer Peter Schweizer. Repub-
licans who promoted the book’s accusa-
tions against the Biden family evidently
skipped the adjoining chapter on Mc-
Connell and the Chao family.
As the Times has documented, Mc-
Connell and his in-laws have benefitted
from unusual connections in Beijing.
One of James Chao’s schoolmates was
Jiang Zemin, who later became China’s
President. According to the paper, James
took a stake in a state-run company
closely associated with Jiang. James and
his daughter Angela, the chairman and
C.E.O. of the family business, have also
been on the boards of directors of some
of China’s most powerful state-run busi-
nesses, including the Bank of China.
Moreover, both Angela and her father
have been on the board of a holding
company that oversees China State Ship-
building, which builds warships for the
Chinese military. Angela Chao told the
Times, “I’m an American,” and suggested
that nobody would question the busi-
ness “if I didn’t have a Chinese face.”
McConnell’s marriage also made him