"Your day of reckoning is coming!" former White House aide Steve Bannon warned the Republican establishment during an election-eve rally for insurgent GOP senate candidate Roy Moore.
Bannon railed against Senate Leader Mitch McConnell Monday night for dumping tens of millions of dollars in attack ads on the Alabama race in order to prop up his chosen candidate, Luther Strange, who ultimately suffered a 9-point shellacking from Moore.
"Mitch McConnell and the permanent political class is the most corrupt and incompetent group of individuals in this country," Bannon told the crowd. They had thrown money at the race hand over fist, Bannon said, "cuz they think you're a pack of morons, they think you're nothing but rubes."
Heading into the race, McConnell did seem to be under the impression that his double-standard dealings as Senate Leader could be wallpapered over at the ballot box with some lavish advertising.
"Roy Moore is just in it for himself," charged one attack ad sponsored by McConnell's super PAC, the Senate Leadership Fund. The ad accused of Moore of "getting over a million dollars from a charity he ran" and concluded, "You can't trust Roy Moore."
But on Election Day, Alabama voters responded to the charges with a collective, Who gives a f#ck? After all, McConnell spent two years looking the other way as Donald Trump—a man who plundered his own charity for personal gain—won the Republican nomination and then became president. All the while, McConnell, much like his counterpart in the House, Paul Ryan, never took a decisive stand against Trump's moral depravity.
Why McConnell ever thought he stood a chance of taming the beast Trump has unleashed after decades of grooming the GOP base to feast on raw emotion over facts is a mystery. No one has exemplified the motto that rules are for other people better than McConnell, who for a solid year blocked President Obama from fulfilling his Constitutional duty to appoint a Supreme Court justice then changed the Senate rules to pave the way for Trump nominee Neil Gorsuch.
Perhaps McConnell had gotten too used to blithely pointing the finger at Democrats and claiming they were to blame. He's fond of labeling the Democrats' push back against Trump as "unprecedented," for instance, after breaking with 200-plus years of Senate tradition himself to deny Obama's Supreme Court pick from getting so much as a hearing. It was a fool proof routine—whatever Republicans said, the GOP faithful would just fall in line without applying an ounce of critical thinking.
But now that Trump has redefined the outlines of "the enemy," as it were, and McConnell is in the crosshairs, he suddenly wanted Republican voters to have discerning tastes. I mean, c'mon, people. Roy Moore is downright offensive and will arguably be the most extreme person ever elected to the U.S. Senate if he wins the general election. Moore once said homosexuality should be criminalized, calling it “an inherent evil against which children must be protected.” He advocated for blocking an elected official from taking the Congressional oath of office because he's Muslim. And just weeks ago, Moore falsely claimed parts of America are living under Sharia Law. As Alabama's chief judge, sworn to uphold the Constitution, he defied the rulings of federal courts twice because he believed they violated the Christian ideals that should serve as the foundation of our legal system.
What a fitting twist of fate that McConnell, in spite of all his access to money and power, couldn't deconstruct the monster he helped build. Now his own base, starved for years of actual facts and any sense of a moral code beyond an us-versus-them mentality, has set its sights on McConnell.
Not only did they reject his candidate at the polls, they did so despite the fact that McConnell convinced their standard bearer, Donald Trump, to endorse and campaign for Strange. Trump, it seems, is beside the point. They are base voters precisely because they are driven by base needs. Trump is simply a vessel for their anger but given a showier, more abrasive vessel, they jumped ship.
Roy Moore is the putrid new face of Trump voters, if not the entire GOP base. As Howard Dean observed Wednesday on MSNBC: “Populism is based on a lot of very complex but deeply emotional feelings—and it is very hard to get to people's emotions when they have an investment in not knowing what the facts are.”
This bears in out in poll after poll of the some 35 percenters who won't abandon Trump no matter what he does, how ineffectual he is, or how thoroughly he annihilates the pledges he made to them. A PPP survey this week found that 79 percent of Trump voters don't think he should resign even if evidence proves "conclusively" that Team Trump colluded with Russia to win the election. Meanwhile, McConnell's approval rating among Trump voters sits at an anemic 17 percent—a mere seven points better than McConnell’s 10 percent approval rating from Hillary Clinton voters.
Naturally, Trump enthusiastically joined the Mitch-bashing fest while stumping for Strange, observing that "Mitch is not, polling-wise, the most popular guy in this country," during a segment with an Alabama-based radio show. He even painted Strange and McConnell as enemies—likely to both boost Strange's chances and to cover his own butt for endorsing the establishment guy. If Strange were elected, Trump promised, “He'll be fighting Mitch."
But McConnell's woes took and even weirder turn when Paul Ryan jumped on the bandwagon during a Sean Hannity segment on Fox News that was apparently a set up. After Hannity observed that "the House has accomplished a lot more than the Senate," Ryan jumped in:
“So the point is we’re on schedule in the House,” Ryan responded. “We passed the health care bill back in May. We passed the repeal and replace of Dodd-Frank. We did Kate’s Law. We did sanctuary cities. We did the military. We did veterans. We did career and technical education reforms. We did school choice for D.C. We did pro-life legislation. We’ve done all these things.”
Ryan then held up a chart showing how his House has passed 337 bills, noting that was more than the previous four presidencies at this time during their tenures. He then showed another chart showing that 274 bills are still waiting in the Senate.
“Is that frustrating for the House? You bet it’s frustrating for the House,” Ryan continued.
Just to be clear, only Paul Ryan would define success as a measure of how many useless, base-stroking bills his caucus can pass that don't have a chance in hell of making it through the Senate. The goal isn’t to rack up bills that can only clear one chamber, it's to enact impactful legislation into law. But for the purposes of Fox viewers, Ryan's measure worked just fine, with Hannity remarking, "The House is tainted by the Senate.” Ryan may as well have held up a picture of McConnell with a target on him instead of the chart he prepared for a question he knew was coming.
Go ahead, Ryan, stoke the GOP base, whip Trump voters into a frothy mess—the mob mentality only serves to weaken McConnell's hand in the Senate. Not only might the elevation of Moore and others like him make safe Republican seats competitive for Democrats, even if Moore prevails, he'll be a perpetual thorn in the side of the guy who pulled out all the stops to defeat him. Moore, promised former RNC chair Michael Steele, will fundamentally alter the Republican caucus in the senate.
"The principles that we adhere to, the values that we supposedly purport, the things we said matter, stick a fork in it," Steele said on MSNBC Thursday. "Because when Roy gets to the senate, the whole game changes."
Congratulations, Mitch, your legacy has arrived.