Both Sides Hated McConnell, and It Had Nothing to Do with Trump

In comments Mitch McConnell reportedly confided to his friends, the outgoing Republican Senate minority leader revealed that he is fully aware of the caricature his critics have made of him. “Democrats hate me because of the court,” McConnell is quoted in Politico reporter Jonathan Martin’s retelling, “and Republicans hate me because of Trump.”

By assigning the hostility toward him to events that actually occurred, McConnell has been, perhaps, too generous to his detractors. McConnell did wield all the tools at his disposal to confirm as many conservative justices to the federal bench as he possibly could. With rare and consequential exceptions, McConnell did refuse to bend the knee to Donald Trump’s personality cult. If we limit the evaluation of the grievances with McConnell’s leadership to the Trump era alone, his critics might come off as rational, if exceedingly partisan. But if we open the aperture to include the whole of McConnell’s career at the head of his conference, we discover that, not only was he hated well before the Trump years, but also the rationale for that hatred appears ridiculous in retrospect.