In four years, Donald Trump cost Republicans control of the House, the White House, and the Senate—so goes the celebratory refrain among liberals on Twitter. But the person who truly made the electoral demise of the Republican Party possible was the man who Washington reporters have praised for a decade as the GOP's master tactician—the puppeteer supposedly pulling strings behind the scenes while everyone else simply served as marionettes on his stage.
That man, erstwhile Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, will almost surely be ordering new letterhead once all the votes are counted. In the two crucial Georgia Senate runoffs, Democrat Raphael Warnock has been declared the victor and the other Democrat, Jon Ossoff, felt confident enough about his growing lead to declare victory Wednesday morning. Sure, it was Trump's buffoonish domination of the spotlight over the past four years made the glare of the GOP's moral bankruptcy burn too bright for many moderate-to-conservative voters to ignore. But Trump was simply the outward manifestation of McConnell's inner decay.
In his relentless pursuit of power and securing a lasting legacy in the courts, McConnell happily abandoned his oath of office and any inkling of patriotism to play footsie with Trump throughout his grotesque tenure as de facto head of the GOP. In fact, McConnell helped clear the way for Trump's corrupt elevation to office when he refused to sign on to a bipartisan statement revealing Russian interference in the 2016 election. When Trump declared neo-Nazis "very fine people" in 2017, McConnell led Republicans in declining to condemn the comments. And after a mountain of evidence showed Trump had extorted the leader of Ukraine in his bid to smear a political rival and win reelection, McConnell lined up the Republican votes to acquit Trump of impeachment charges without hearing from a single witness in the Senate.
So when it came time for McConnell to shoot down Trump's effort to overturn the 2020 election results before it blossomed into a full-blown coup attempt, it came as no surprise that McConnell spent more than five weeks diddling around before finally acknowledging Joe Biden as the country's rightful president-elect.
But now, suddenly, as McConnell faces a return to the Senate minority, he and his allies apparently think it's time to wipe away that Trump stench and start anew.
"Emotions running high among McConnell-aligned Republicans early Wednesday am — after reality of what transpired in Georgia settled in," National Journal columnist Josh Kraushaar tweeted early Wednesday morning. "May be the heat of the moment, but mood is for declaring war on Team Trump. Want to marginalize Trump as they marginalized Steve Bannon in 2017."
Wow—now that Trump simultaneously alienated suburban voters while failing to turn out enough of his cultists to deliver wins in Georgia, McConnell and his cronies are going to take a stand. Bold.
Sorry, fellas, that ship has sailed. McConnell & Co. aided and abetted Trump for four solid years, presiding over the destruction of America's institutions and democratic norms and leaving the country in tatters. But now that the GOP's electoral future is in peril and the party is descending into a bitter civil war, McConnell and his allies think they can just brush Trump off their shoulders like a pesky bout of dandruff.
Go ahead, declare war on Trump. History will remember. And in the meantime, McConnell and the Republican Party will now reap what they sowed—total fucking chaos with no end in sight.