I was asked to write Mitch McConnell’s obit. I’d rather tell him now how he’s failed his party. | Opinion

A national media organization asked me recently if I had any interest in writing “a piece on Mitch McConnell, to be published on the occasion of his death.”

They continued, “The piece would obviously be retrospective on his significance to his moment in history, how he shaped and was shaped by it, to serve as an early entry in reflections on how history will remember him.”

It concluded, “We want to offer something honest and incisive, without striking any note that’s unduly hagiographic or tap-dancing on his grave.”

Many may think I have already written something unduly hagiographic, my 2009 political biography of McConnell, “Republican Leader,” before breaking with him in 2016 over Donald Trump.

And in a recent column in The Kentucky Lantern, I apologized for having supported Republicans like McConnell who abandoned their previously professed conservative principles to support or collaborate with Trump, the antithesis of true conservatism.

I passed on penning an advance obituary. Fairness and good taste dictate that if I am going to say anything about McConnell for publication, I should say it while he is alive. Hence this piece.

I like Sen. McConnell personally and have profound respect for his once brilliant, if always Machiavellian, political mind and skills.

Many will ardently and understandably dispute it, but over his lengthy and extremely controversial career he has done much good, especially for Kentucky.

However, since Trump’s rise and takeover of the Republican Party, McConnell’s vaunted political acumen has failed him at critical times.

Despite the warning represented by the “Tea Party” faction, McConnell, like many others including me, misunderstood and underestimated Trump and what soon metastasized into the MAGA movement.

McConnell thought Trump would lose to Hillary Clinton. When Trump won, McConnell hoped he could both manipulate and use Trump. He was right to some extent, but dangerously wrong to a much more significant one.

For example, McConnell used Trump and ruthless partisan political maneuvering to take over the Supreme Court and launch a “conservative” judicial revolution.

His cynical gambit fulfilled his burning ambition to be senator of “consequence” since he would be central to any Supreme Court history of the era.

However, the price of this ideological and personal victory is long-term damage to the credibility and public perception of the Supreme Court as a judicial, rather than political, body that is so critically important to the country, especially in times of constitutional crises.

McConnell’s role as an amoral, purely transactional collaborator in the normalization of Trump’s cruel, proto-fascist, venal, and vulgar demagoguery will have even worse and longer lasting destructive consequences for our constitutional democracy.

Despite Trump’s by then indisputable derangement and unfitness, McConnell campaigned for reelection in 2020 as his partner. McConnell intimate Scott Jennings accurately, but sickeningly, described him as the “principal enabler of the Trump agenda.”

Reelected and ready to reign as the most powerful congressional Republican, McConnell did not need Trump anymore. Unlike his fellow Kentucky congressional greybeard, Hal Rogers, he abjured Trump’s Big Lie about a stolen election.

Then came the insurrection (or, since some dispute that characterization, let’s call it the deadly, violent, armed mob attack on the Capitol and Congress to block the constitutional transfer of power and, if you believe threats made by a pathological liar’s cult followers, kill the Vice President).

Underestimating Trump again, McConnell believed this previously unthinkable assault on the American seat of government by domestic terrorists spelled Trump’s political end.

Thus mistaken, McConnell neither pushed for Trump’s immediate impeachment nor voted to convict him after the later trial.

McConnell voted to acquit, evidently fearing he could not remain Senate Republican leader otherwise. But he made a big speech!

Trump’s actions were, McConnell said, “a disgraceful dereliction of duty.” He said Trump was “practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day.” Right he was.

But upon realizing he had again misread the national and congressional Republican mood, McConnell soon declared he would “absolutely” support Trump if he became the 2024 nominee, as seems certain.

Disgracefully, this remains McConnell’s public position, even after Trump hurled racist slurs at McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao.

Recent reports say McConnell told Senate Republicans the politics of making a good deal with Democrats on border security and Ukraine aid changed because Trump coveted immigration as a campaign issue. “We don’t want to do anything to undermine him,” McConnell, an advocate of arming Ukraine, reportedly said.

There is evidently no principle for which McConnell will risk his personal, partisan power and position. Those are his sacred priorities, more important than preserving and protecting the Constitution or promoting the national interest.

McConnell has failed our country at its moment of maximum peril.

When we needed him to courageously be a Republican leader, he instead fixed his legendary focus on merely retaining the title. He has not even pretended to be a truly national leader.

When the time for a McConnell obituary comes, that will be his legacy.

John David Dyche

John David Dyche is a Louisville attorney and author of “Republican Leader,” a political biography of Mitch McConnell.