By Rich Lowry
Friday, February 19, 2021
Well, it’s on.
Donald Trump ended his post-presidency silence not with a
blast at President Joe Biden, or at the Left, or at the House impeachment
managers, but at the true enemy — Mitch McConnell.
The Trump forces aren’t forming a third party, but they
do want to take over or — more accurately — maintain their current grip on the
GOP, and McConnell is an obstacle.
The Senate minority leader declared his independence from
Trump in his lacerating speech at the end of the Senate impeachment trial.
McConnell’s speech is as close to catharsis as he comes
in public, after years of what must have been pent-up frustration dealing with
Trump, especially after the former president’s outsize contribution to the loss
of Republican control of the Senate in the Georgia special elections.
The Trump–McConnell fight isn’t exactly over the soul of
the Republican Party, but it is over whether there will be significant space in
the party for figures other than Trump to have notable influence over its
direction.
At the outset, this contest isn’t a fair fight.
McConnell, aka “Cocaine Mitch,” has acquired considerable new street cred on
the right over the years with his hard-nosed work on judges.
Nonetheless, there are very few rank-and-file Republicans
interested in storming any hills for Mitch McConnell, while many of them would
scale K2 for Donald Trump.
Trump has the passion and the numbers on his side. That
he lost a presidential election, lost the Senate, lost all his election
challenges, lost access to social media, and still has such a hold on the party
is truly astounding.
If Trump and McConnell ran in a primary against each
other, Trump would win in a romp. If Trump and McConnell had competing rallies
in Louisville, Trump would exponentially outdraw him.
McConnell’s task, though, isn’t to rely on his emotive
power to create a loyal mass army of McConnellists around the country, steeped
in Senate procedure and ready to go to the mat for the Byrd rule. No, it is
simply to work to block electorally poisonous, or at least risky, Trumpists
from winning Senate primaries.
Here, McConnell has cards. He can raise a lot of money.
He has a practiced and effective political team. And he has an ability to focus
on long-term goals that the easily distracted Trump, driven by personal
animosities, does not.
At the moment, Republican voters are highly focused on
prosecuting the party’s civil war, but, eventually, more of the attention has
to shift to Joe Biden and stopping his agenda, which will require sending more
Republicans to Washington rather than fewer.
McConnell doesn’t need this to happen next week or next
month, but by 2022.
The Kentucky Republican’s judgment on electability is
hardly infallible — he’s made his share of bad calls in primaries over the
years and is prone, not surprisingly, to be overly conventional.
Still, the gravamen of Trump’s anti-McConnell statement,
making the case that the Kentucky Republican is a political disaster compared
with the masterly Trump, is risible.
Trump blamed McConnell for the losses in Georgia. Surely,
the most decisive factor in the Georgia outcome was Trump going out of his way
in the most incendiary fashion possible to divide the state party against
itself.
Trump claimed in his statement to have delivered a dozen
Senate races for the Republicans over the past two election cycles. He
certainly buoyed several Senate Republicans in tough fights in red states last
year, but the contention about twelve Senate races, like most Trump numbers, is
a wild exaggeration at best.
Finally, Trump attributed McConnell’s win in Kentucky to
the power of his endorsement, when the Republican was comfortably ahead in
every credible poll and somehow had been winning Senate races in Kentucky
without Trump’s assistance since 1984.
Republicans still strongly identify with Trump, but it’d be a mistake to let him dictate the party’s potential future leaders or its ultimate direction.
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